Announcing: The Connection Revolution

(Click here if you don’t see the video.)

Remember our faery tale from yesterday? Did you figure out who is who? Could you guess at where our heroesses might be heading?

We won’t make you wait any longer.

Pace (the princess) and I (the faery) have been on pins and needles for weeks now, and we’re finally able to tell you the big news: The Freak Revolution is no more.

In its place, the Connection Revolution is born.

But the really big news? The Freak Revolution was the Connection Revolution all along.

We weren’t ready. We were too small, too afraid, too timid to step into the big shoes demanded by the Connection Revolution. Who are we to start a revolution of connection? Who are we to call ourselves leaders of such a big, powerful movement?

Who are we not to?

We have lots of friends who are members of the Connection Revolution already. Lots of people in our circle are doing this work, bringing connection to the world in many ways. The Connection Revolution is our particular flavor of the big shift from the control paradigm to the connection paradigm – and who are we not to do that work, if that is what our hearts are called to do?

And I will tell you this – this is absolutely what our hearts are called to do.

There were three catalysts, three main things that pushed us over the edge into making this shift.

1) Our own internal shifts away from “freak”. Pace and I both have been feeling the shift, this pushing inside away from freak and toward spiritual idealist. We’re still freaky, it’s just not as urgent anymore.

When I first stepped out of Christianity and into my place as a Witch, I wore a pentacle for months. I wore it – not because it was the symbol of my faith – but because I didn’t want anyone to assume I was anything but Pagan. It meant the world to me for everyone to know that I wasn’t Christian anymore. But now that I’ve been a Witch for nigh on 20 years (oh, goodness), I don’t care to flaunt it anymore. It’s still part of me, it’s still Who I Am. Being a Witch is still very intrinsic and very important to me. But I no longer have to tell everyone I meet that I’m a Witch. I just am.

Freak is like that. I’m still a freak. I’m still proud to be freaky. I’m still non-mainstream. We still love freaky people and we still spend lots of time with freaky people. But it’s no longer something I have to announce when I walk in the room (although, my tattoos might do that for me, ha!). It’s just something I am.

2) Our survey. When we tallied the results, an astoundingly small percentage of our people self-identified as freak. Wait, what revolution are we leading?

By and large, the people we’re drawing to us are spiritual world-changer writers. That’s not by any means all of you, but it makes up a startlingly large percentage of you. You’re our people – we asked, you responded, and we heeded the call.

3) Our logo. The Freak Revolution logo caused a huge amount of dissonance in me. It’s gorgeous. It’s wonderful. It used to fill me with pride and motivation and oomph. But lately, week after week it’s filled me with angst and frustration and a sense of not rightness.

I’m such a visual person; when something I see sparks these feelings in me, I know something’s going on. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized the dissonance was caused because I don’t match the logo anymore – I’m not so hardcore now. I’m softer. Less us vs. the world, less exclusive. More spiritual.

More connection.

And the biggest signpost to mark us being on the right path? When we re-wrote the manifesto, we barely made any changes. When we read it aloud and replaced “freak” with “connection”, it made even more sense and was even more beautiful. Pace and I wept over it, our hearts filling to the brim with goodness and on-the-right-pathness.

This is a big change. It’s a huge change for us and a huge change for you. I want to reassure you, this change is for the good – for all of us! And, practically speaking, very little will actually be different. Most things will stay the same.

We’ll still post on the blog Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

We’ll still make awesome things to help you and your life be more awesome. In fact, we’ve got some incredibly exciting stuff in the works for the next couple of years! And not a single thing that we’ve done in the past year has been freak-specific (which was another of the signs that we’re on the Right Path).

We’ll still be on Facebook (Pace and Kyeli), we’ll still be on Twitter (@PaceSmith and @Kyeli). We’ll still be ourselves, sweet and friendly and easily accessible.

In fact, with the new blog layout, we’ll have threaded comments – which will prompt me to respond to you more often, so I’ll be even easier to talk to than before! (I’m also far more responsive on Twitter these days.)

So, what will change?

I won’t be coaching anymore. Pace says I’m like a sensitive painter, and I need to be sequestered away in a chilly zen garden with a brook and stones and birdsong, and she’ll answer the door and help the UPS guy while I paint and paint and paint. I say, yeah, I’m extremely sensitive and rather fragile, and I’m sorry if that means I’m not as good at most things as everyone else, but there you have it. What it boils down to is, coaching is very stressful for me, and it’s super fun for Pace, so I’m going to stop doing it.

The price of coaching increased to $500 per hour-long session; we want to spend more of our time on things that will help many people instead of one at a time, but Pace doesn’t want to stop coaching entirely because she loves it and it does help people – so we compromised and raised the price.

The Coffee House is closing. We’ve already closed applications, and the forum will be completely shut down on November 1st. I’ve written an entire post solely on this decision; I go into more detail on Monday.

A few of our policies will change: we won’t be doing much affiliate stuff anymore. We’ve noticed that we sometimes spend a lot of time telling you about stuff other people are selling, and you aren’t particularly interested, so we won’t waste any of our time anymore! We want to tell you about things you love, and avoid things you don’t. We won’t be randomly reviewing things unless we’ve tried them and love them and are sure you’ll love them, too. Also, Pace will probably still randomly review books that she’s read and loves. It’s so cute, I won’t stop her.

We will still tell you about our awesome friends from time to time, but we leave it entirely to you as to what you do with that information.

We will be more openly spiritual. Pace and I are both very spiritual creatures, me by nature and her by lots of lovingly effortful practice. I have, in fact, long heard the call to open up and be more publicly spiritual – it scares me stupid and I’ve been avoiding it for years. But now is the time. I’ve had sign after sign after sign that now is the time, and with the birth of the Connection Revolution, Pace and I both are taking a deep breath (several, in fact) and opening our hearts and our spirits again to let you ever further in.

So, with that, I’ll leave you with my final thought: The word revolution includes the word evolution. Without change, without movement, without growth and room to evolve, a revolution will stagnate and die and be forgotten.

And we won’t be having with that.

Welcome to the Connection Revolution.

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Have you read the Connection Manifesto? It tells the story of why there is so much hurt and sadness in the world, and how we can heal through connection.