Like so many of us, I’ve had my highs and lows over the years, but I have mostly been able to maintain a positive outlook even when the tides turn. I expect the sun to shine the next day, even when it feels like it won’t. I expect optimism, not from a place of simple arrogance, but from a place of inner knowing.
I remind myself every day that there are those on the front lines in Israel, Palestine or Ukraine. There are also places we rarely read about, such as Sudan, Haiti and Yemen, which are experiencing a huge humanitarian crisis with so many displaced without access to basic services. I lived in South Africa under Apartheid and heard horrific stories you couldn’t believe a regime could inflict. I’ve known women who escaped the Taliban in Afghanistan and now live without fear.
Reporting on first-world and/or white populations always seems to take precedence in our world, so this is where our focus lies. Unless it affects us directly, humanity tends to turn a blind eye.
As Americans, we’ve assumed democratic rights are a given, and for most of us, our rights don’t feel threatened yet, unless, of course, you’re walking in a non-violent protest on the streets of Minneapolis. If you’re an empath, you may feel what so many call despair or disbelief. Could this be happening in my own democratic country? Things like that aren’t supposed to happen here.
Yes, it can. And it is.
As a first-world nation, we aren’t invincible, although many feel we are. Although pockets of Americans suffer from hunger and even more can’t afford basic services like medical insurance, we’ve become accustomed to free press. Free speech. It’s part of our Constitution. And for the most part, we’ve had peace. Most Americans don’t know what it’s like to face repression like an Afghan woman, nor do most know what it’s like to live in Gaza. (btw, I lived as a volunteer on a kibbutz on the border of Gaza, but during safer times). Those who have lost friends and family members weep from afar. Many gather in synagogues and mosques to pray for peace.
Here in the States, we may have lost someone during the 9/11 attack or had friends get hit by Hurricane Katrina, which was one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history. I have friends who lost their homes to the LA and Northern California fires. So, on some level, we’ve experienced snippets of inner turmoil, but it’s a far cry from what many populations around the world face daily.
This makes it easier for Americans to feel immune to the world’s crises, or even invincible.
The United States is far from perfect, and major issues need to be resolved, but making America “great” again can never include terrorizing from within, and everyone is feeling this affliction, even from their iPhone screens. The terror is starting to finally feel real. How some Americans can still believe this is a sane approach to strengthening a nation is beyond my comprehension, though I recently saw a close-up snapshot of it. Perhaps you had a similar dialogue with someone who is a die-hard Republican, still confusing the issues our country faces as partisan ones.
“Well, we can’t give the country over to the damn liberals or the country will go to hell.”
Does this sound familiar? This mentality is the result of deeply ingrained conditioning at its worst, where a train of thought and ideology has taken root for so long that it blinds a person to reality. It’s a form of mental entrainment where beliefs dictate perception. It’s not that different from the entrainment of someone who believes in killing others in the name of Allah, or because a political or religious leader says that this is the only way forward. In each case, the mind becomes a captive of its own programming, unable to pause, reflect, or recognize humanity in others. When we don’t realize that connection, the scapegoat becomes: Let’s purify our land so that the “other” doesn’t destroy it.
Terrorizing from Within
We can also turn to Europe and other parts of the world.
The Nazi Regime sought racial and social “purity” through the murder of six million Jews, alongside disabled people, political dissidents, and others. This was industrialized, bureaucratic genocide carried out as state policy. Meanwhile, Stalin’s purges under the former Soviet Union were also about “cleansing” society. The logic was similar: certain people were declared dangerous to political leadership and needed to be removed.
Under Maoist China, tens of millions died from famine, executions, and forced labor. Purification was ideological, eliminating impure thought and class enemies. The pattern continues: utopia through eradication. In Cambodia, the regime sought to purify society by eliminating intellectuals, professionals, ethnic minorities, and anyone associated with modernity. Also, during World War I, Armenians were framed as an internal threat to the empire, with a goal of ethnic and religious homogenization.
There was also “ethnic cleansing” in the Balkans with a goal of ethnic purification through violence and displacement. And in Rwanda, roughly 800,000 people were murdered. State propaganda framed Tutsi as parasites and enemies; killing was portrayed as a civic duty to purify the nation. BTW, I was traveling through Uganda and Rwanda at the time and heard firsthand accounts of the horrors from locals on the ground.
Does this form of framing sound anything like the current Administration and ICE? Recently, an American ICU nurse at a VA hospital was framed as a “would-be assassin” and “domestic terrorist.” Let that sink in. How can anyone with reason and logic truly believe this, despite what they’re being dished up from Fox News and Fake Social?
This shows how quickly purification ideology can metastasize when fear is weaponized.
A nation that believes it must purge immigrants to remain safe isn’t suffering from an external threat, but from an unintegrated fear.
The Real Illusion of Purity
The fantasy of cleansing is as old as empire itself, which arises when a collective identity mistakes its story for its soul. Purity is always a myth, or you could say, an illusion. No culture, people, or civilization has ever existed without blending, movement, and exchange. And for Godde’s sake, we are a nation of immigrants to begin with; everyone in the United States is an immigrant. It’s our strength as a nation, not a weakness.
When a nation obsesses over purity, it is spiritually ailing. Earlier this week, in my article titled “In Times of Fracture, Consciousness Becomes a Stabilizing Force,” I referred to this as a Spiritual Crisis.
When we aggressively and violently inflict pain and violence on another, this is not strength. I’d call it fragility masquerading as order, and might I add, under an outdated masculine paradigm that holds bigger, louder, and domineering is better. This is a far cry from the feminine way of collaboration, humility, connection and love.
Fear Disguised as Morality
When we see law and order, security, and preservation of culture as righteous, it is frequently fear wearing ceremonial robes. Think back to ancient Rome as one example. Fear that resources are scarce. Fear that identity is dissolving. Fear that one’s place in the world is no longer guaranteed. Dare I mention one real elephant in the room that few will say—that my “white male place” in the world is no longer guaranteed. We must not turn to fear nor blame those who don’t think and look like us.
Often, the immigrant becomes the vessel for everything a country refuses to confront within itself: economic injustice, historical violence, unresolved guilt, spiritual emptiness. In psychology and in mysticism, the “demon” refers to what has been disowned. Carl Jung called this the shadow: the parts of the psyche a person or society refuses to see, so instead, they show up as enemies from the outside.
A nation that hunts for demons at its borders has failed to look honestly at its own interior. You might even call it moral incoherence, losing one’s inner compass as a collective society. It’s also the unwillingness to take accountability, aka blaming the Democrats, or blaming the Republicans.
Dominance as Arrogance & Insecurity is Not Strength
Arrogance never comes from confidence. When power goes unexamined, it curdles and loses humility, and if you haven’t noticed, there isn’t a lot of humility in Washington lately. This kind of dominance forgets that today’s fortress was yesterday’s refuge.
Every empire that believed it was divinely entitled eventually
discovered that entitlement is not the same as true wisdom.
A society cannot make itself safe by declaring certain lives expendable. Safety built on exclusion is always temporary, because fear doesn’t disappear when it is obeyed—it grows. Each wall demands a higher wall, and Europe witnessed that at Davos recently. BTW, I wrote about the Davos humiliation in my last article, about how horrified and embarrassed I felt to be an American when the Canadian Prime Minister mocked American leadership and received applause.
Long-time allies can turn against you when you turn against them. It can happen in the blink of an eye, and it’s happening now.
From a spiritual perspective, these decisions aren’t evil. Rather, they come from an unhealed place. The wisdom Anthony and I receive from what we might call the imaginal or multidimensional field or dimension is that there is no evil. Ancient spiritual masters say the same thing, perhaps using different words depending on their lineage. There are ebbs and flows, and we are seeing a significant one within America’s borders right now. I see it as the cry of a collective ego that has forgotten its interdependence, its history of migration, its reliance on the labor, creativity, and resilience of those it now fears. We have lost connection and understanding of its importance.
The Feminine Way
A species truly matures when it realizes you cannot defeat darkness by banishing others into it, but by bringing light to a situation, which starts by turning inward—where the real work has always been.
It’s the Higher Self’s voice, the intuitive compass that has always been more natural for women. Remember those witch hunts? All the women who turned inward and toward nature for healing and sourcing a higher truth beyond the conditioning of the Patriarch.
The feminine knows something the anxious state forgets: Life doesn’t protect itself by hardening—it survives by adapting, interweaving, and nourishing. And by loving. In every spiritual tradition that honors the feminine—Sophia, Shekinah, Shakti, Gaia, the Great Mother—creation is sacred because it is plural. Rivers don’t ask where the rain came from, and the womb doesn’t reject life because it arrives unexpectedly.
When a nation begins to see newcomers as contamination rather than continuation, it has lost contact with the maternal intelligence that sustains civilizations. Dare I say another point that is emerging through me right now about control as a masculine shadow: the feminine doesn’t abolish boundaries; she humanizes them.
We have taught about the balance between masculine and feminine at expos and conferences, and there’s a place for both energies within each of us; we all carry them. The masculine principle provides strength through form and boundary, but when it operates without the balancing presence of the feminine—without empathy, intuition, and relational awareness—it mutates into domination, which is what we’re seeing right now. A nation that seeks safety through cruelty is operating from the wounded masculine alone, seeking control instead of coherence, force instead of belonging.
Spiritually speaking, what we exile is what we refuse to hold and take accountability for. The immigrant becomes the projection screen for everything unresolved: economic inequality, ancestral violence, ecological grief, cultural insecurity. Rather than tending to the wound, an unhealed nation looks for “the other” to blame, just as the unhealed individual looks for the “other” to blame.
You see, the true divine feminine measures success not only in profit or power, but in the balance of power and how decisions are felt in society. How might a decision negatively impact others, and how will that trauma be passed forward? For example, what happens to a society that numbs compassion? What do our children become when fear is normalized?
I purposely use the words true divine feminine, because this isn’t about sex: male or female, but about energy as consciousness. It’s about the balance of universal laws and principles, in which both need to be in balance for us to become whole. As Jean-Yves LeLoup so beautifully writes, “A human being can only be fulfilled by overcoming herself or himself, going beyond the conditioning of masculine or feminine, so as to become Anthropos—both anthropocosmos and theanthropos.”
When I first read those words, chills ran up and down my body, an affirmation of a universal truth.
The Feminine Virtue of Care for Others
How do you feel when someone holds out a hand, takes yours and says, “I’ll be there for you.” Or, when you’re sick, and someone says, “I’ll be there for you.” Care should be a basic human right. Starting this year, our monthly medical insurance premiums tripled. We’re better off than many Americans, yet we are struggling to pay the added costs each month, especially with a $500-a-month rent increase just because they can. We can’t afford to buy a house anywhere in the state, and grocery costs are rising, yet False Social will never take accountability for either. These are very real issues for Americans, not the Latino landscapers who tend our gardens, many of whom have become neighbors and friends.
True safety is relational. It arises when people trust that their dignity will be protected, their labor will be honored, and their lives will be valued. The Feminine understands cycles, inherently knowing that today’s migrant was yesterday’s ancestor. How many of you can resonate with this?
When we turn to the feminine virtue of connection and care, we can rebalance what is now broken. When we integrate this balance into our broken systems, including government, insurance, pharma, the environment, education and even our economy, we can begin to govern and lead with innate wisdom rather than impulse, fear and control. We can develop deep listening skills so we can more effectively attune to others. We can choose policies that reflect stewardship and connection over bullying and domination.
A nation doesn’t become safe by hardening its heart, but by learning how to belong to life again, and that means all of it: all colors, sizes, shapes, languages, cultures, religious beliefs and ideologies. This not only includes supporting the people who live within its borders but also its allies, whom we are sadly alienating. How fast will this alienation accelerate? It’s too soon to tell, but it’s certainly heartbreaking to watch.
The feminine is not weak and never has been. There’s a reason Mary Magdalene was left out of our proverbial history and holy books: her strength and divine feminine wisdom threatened the Pharisees’ old-fashioned, male-dominated ways, the Roman Patriarch in power, and later, the also patriarchal Catholic Church. Teaching alongside Yeshua (Jesus) was a demonstration to the world of the power of the two as one—this, my friends, becomes our source of divine power and innate wisdom. The connection to Source, God, the Goddess, Universal Consciousness, Gaia, the Void or the Cosmic Soup, whatever that Higher Power is for you.
If Yeshua were walking the planet today, I wonder what he would say about how many people have been slaughtered and demonized in his name or in the name of religion with its doctrines and laws, something he, as a spiritual rebel, hippie and ahead of his time leader, rejected. Yet, he accepted humanity’s flaws as divine in a way that only a true master can do.
We find inner peace and become whole when we embrace the Anthropos within each of us. The real power lies in truly knowing yourself as both masculine and feminine, and neither at the same time. The kingdom isn’t about gaining access to something “out there,” whether it’s Godde or control of another nation. Knowing this is true freedom, but it’s even more profound when you can feel it.
There’s no need to fear, only to love each other. Love and connection are not only the glue that keeps our hearts alive but also the glue that keeps our civilizations alive. Find that balance, don’t plug into fear and find what’s true (and humane) for you. From that place, my dear friends, focus on healing the world, starting with unleashing love from your field. When you commit to that path, watch serenity, love and beauty grow around you exponentially. It will affect everything and everyone in your wake.
Thanks for listening.
Renee Blodgett is the Founder and Managing Editor of We Blog the World, a global travel, culture and lifestyle publication exploring the world through the lens of meaningful experiences, human connection and cultural depth. Having lived in 10 countries and traveled to 95, Renee has spent much of her life immersed in the people, traditions, landscapes and ideas that shape how we experience the world.
Since launching We Blog the World in 2007, she has written and produced extensive editorial coverage spanning boutique and luxury travel, culinary experiences, arts and culture, wellness, adventure, technology, spiritual traditions and transformative travel. Her work is rooted in the belief that travel is about more than where we go—it is also about what a place, culture or encounter awakens within us.
Renee brings more than three decades of experience across journalism, photography, media, brand strategy, technology, wellness and global storytelling. She has worked with companies and organizations around the world on brand positioning, communications, product launches, media strategy, speaker positioning and storytelling. Through Blue Soul Media, she works with authors, entrepreneurs, thought leaders and purpose-driven brands to clarify their message and expand their impact, which includes speaker coaching/training for high-profile stages such as TED and bringing authors’ work to market while retaining authors rights.
She is also the co-founder of Blue Soul Earth, an educational platform exploring consciousness, ancient wisdom, spirituality, healing and the intersection between science and the nature of reality. Renee is the producer and host of the award-winning Blue Soul CHATS, a conversational series bringing together leading voices in science, technology, consciousness, wellness and spirituality.
Her growing body of work also includes Blue Soul Living, which extends her interest in consciousness and well-being into the spaces we inhabit, exploring how intentional design, energy and environment can support greater harmony and connection.
Renee is the award-winning co-author of the bestselling Magdalene’s Journey and founder of the Magdalene Collection, inspired by women’s voices, stories and wisdom across cultures and generations.
A longtime photographer and storyteller, Renee has documented people, places and cultures around the world and produced photographic collections focused on destinations including the Galápagos Islands, London, South Africa, Rome and Ecuador. She also co-founded Traveling Geeks, an international initiative that brought entrepreneurs, journalists, creators and technology leaders together with their counterparts in other countries to exchange ideas and explore innovation across cultures.
Renee’s work has been recognized by Forbes, the United Nations and others for her influence in media and social storytelling. Across her work in travel, media, consciousness and culture, a common thread remains: curiosity about the world, the stories that connect us and the ways meaningful experiences can change how we see ourselves and one another.
