Aliveness Has Needs: Notes on Work, Integrity, and the Fragility of Living Otherwise

I’m feeling tender.

Not just emotionally—but somatically, spiritually, and collectively.

I’ve been reflecting on what it means to live—and work—in alignment with your purpose, especially when doing so doesn’t guarantee material stability.

Recently, I facilitated a powerful final session with The Alchemy of Now, a contemplative framework and community circle I created. The session was deep, raw, and illuminating. We remembered what it means to be whole. To feel. To belong.

I felt the sacred weight of creating spaces where people can bring their whole selves to the circle, where our grief becomes a source of wisdom, and our honesty a kind of prayer.

What emerged was not just personal insight—but a collective reckoning: these spaces matter.

Profoundly. They hold us while we hold the world. They remind us of what’s possible when care becomes a practice, not just an idea.

In our circle, one of the deepest inquiries that surfaced was this: How do we operationalize contemplation in the heart of pain and suffering? Not just as an idea, but as a practice. How do we hold space for students in distress, clients in crisis, colleagues in despair—and not lose ourselves? How do we stay in the work of justice, while staying with ourselves?

Not just in retreat or virtual circles— but in classrooms where students are hurting. In communities where despair is daily. In bodies that are tired but still committed to showing up.

We had just touched something beautiful. Something holy: A truth about how much we need these spaces, how essential they are amidst uncertainty, despair, and systemic violence. The kind of space where our humanity isn’t negotiated, but received.

And yet, I came out of that revelation straight into the ache of survival and material insecurity: mortgage payments, tuition, groceries, parenting.

There are moments when the universe feels like foundation, when I feel held by ancestors and possibility. But those moments are punctuated by the raw question: How am I going to do this? How do I keep doing this? How do I make soul-aligned, sacred work sustainable, when holding so much?

This is the tension I’m sitting with as someone who’s spent years navigating gig work, contract teaching, and the emotional toll of economic precarity. I’ve hustled, stretched, compromised. And even now, working toward a PhD in Philosophy and Women's Spirituality—something deeply soul-aligned—I still wonder: When does it get easier? Not just for me, but for us?

Because the pain we encounter in this work is not hypothetical. It's in the room. It's in our bodies. It’s in our communities. And it doesn’t vanish when the circle ends. When integrity costs you comfort, what then?

There are so many brilliant people I know—creatives, facilitators, scholars—who are trying to make ends meet. Not because we’re mismanaging, but because the system is misaligned.

I’m doing soul work. Transformation work. But soul work, too, requires a full stomach.

a home.

music.

warmth.

reciprocity.

Soul work is still work.

Aliveness has needs.

It requires time, energy, infrastructure, and care. And those of us doing this labor—especially Black, queer, and working-class folks—are often doing it while also contending with material insecurity. We are not separate from the suffering we seek to transform.

So I’m asking: What if our systems could nourish, rather than deplete, those offering the labor of healing and transformation?

This is not a resignation. It’s a reclamation. It’s an invocation

of truth, of tenderness, of time.

I’m looking for kin.

For those of us who are dreaming new ways of being, while still living within the old ones. For those who feel the sting of precarity, but refuse to abandon their purpose. For the seekers of new models of mutual support.

I’d love to hear from others navigating this. How are you sustaining integrity in your work, when the world is asking for compromise?

With you,

dru