NXIVM – A Different Story

I’m turning on.

I’ve been part of the NXIVM community since around 2007. I moved to Albany to be closer to the community and more involved in what was being taught. I participated fully and with all my heart for many years. I was a leader within the group, I was close with Keith Raniere and all the upper leadership. My closest friends were forged in NXIVM, and some remain today, many remain today not out of obligation or need but out of the experience of a common journey.

I don’t know how this is going to go, only that it’s important to me that it goes. So I’m going to start telling my story about NXIVM. My story is very different from “The Story” that you may have heard, or even followed. Maybe this will be the first and last post…who knows.

Why might this story be valuable to you? To the world?

1. Because what I learned in NXIVM is life changing, deeply human and offers a pathway into the true heart of what it means to be a human on earth.
2. Because there is so much unneccesary suffering on the earth today and the teachings in NXIVM can relieve much of that suffering, opening people up to their human joy that is the root of life.
3. Because we are living in a time a great deception. It’s great because many of us even know we are being decieved but for many reasons choose to ignore, which causes sadness, depression, anger, fear and all sorts of negative emotions.
4. Because we are living in a time of injustice. The example of NXIVM is one of many examples of this injustice.
5. Imagine a world where people were more joyful, needed less and were happier in their lives and in their experience of the world. What would that world look like? Would it look like the world we’re living in today?

I’ve been thinking about writing this for years, literally every day, for years. As I’ve watched the narrative around NXIVM be created, as I watched the things I loved torn to pieces and the people I respected and valued locked away without regard for fairness, truth or compassion. I watched friends turn into enemies, I watched lovers turn feral, I’ve seen families turn against eachother and many, many people in deep, deep pain. And I’ve thought…what can I do? What can I do? What I’m seeing and hearing does not match what I experienced and the consequences to one side perpetrated by the ultimate in violent authority were and are so wrong to me. And yet I stayed mostly quiet. I ate my angst and my anger and my fear. I buried it like a good boy does. I tried to forget, tried to move on. Found things that were meaningful to me and began, again to build.

But the procession of hatred is not particular to NXIVM. The process and mechanism of hate is alive in our world and flowing like blood through veins through the humans of our planet. I’m sure as it flows through me, it flows through you. And this hatred, this is the true danger to humanity and the true thing that NXIVM was in place to help transform, and this hatred has not stopped, will not stop and did not stop. It came for me as it came for others, muted for me in some sense but always ready to bore into me with full force should I invite it. And I did invite it and it came and I was “exposed”.

I was exposed for having a different opinion. For not rushing to judgement and for chastising those that did. I was “exposed” and in my fragile humaness part of me believed what was being said about me, part of me believed the implications, the assumptions. Part of me believed. And that was the worst.

And so I thought and suffered and hid and raged and cried and wrote and did it all again and again, seemingly endlessly. Today is no different. I have written this 100 times, the only difference will be in clicking “PUBLISH” and “SHARE”.

I have choices to make. I have my own internal world to contend with. I know myself and I have a value for life, love and justice and that value demands I do more. It demands that I do more. I can refuse. I have refused. But today I will not refuse.