Leaning In Is the Power Move

There’s a move that most spiritual people make once they taste peace.

They protect it.

They start curating their environment. Fewer difficult people. More retreats. Quieter mornings. Longer stretches of solitude. Less family. Less friction. Less of anything that could disturb the state they’ve worked so hard to access.

I know this move because I made it. For three and a half years.

[I wrote about the relational poverty of the digital nomad life a few weeks ago. This is the sequel. The part I wasn’t ready to say then.]

The Spiritual Bypass Nobody Talks About

Here’s the version of spiritual bypassing that doesn’t get called out:

You do genuine inner work. Real shifts happen. You access states of peace, clarity, equanimity that you’d never experienced before. This is not fake. This is not performative. This is actual transformation.

And then you quietly restructure your entire life to make sure nothing disturbs it.

You move to Bali. You go to Costa Rica. You find the community of people who vibrate at your frequency. You keep the triggering people at arm’s length — not dramatically, not with conflict. You just... drift. The calls get shorter. The visits get rarer. The holidays get skipped.

From the outside, it looks like evolution. From the inside, it often is.

But sometimes — and this is the part that’s hard to admit — it’s the most sophisticated avoidance strategy you’ve ever run.

The Cave Dweller’s Dilemma

Every contemplative tradition knows this trap.

The monk in the cave achieves extraordinary states of consciousness. Decades of practice. Genuine realization. And then he comes down from the mountain and someone cuts him off in traffic and he loses his mind.

The cave wasn’t testing him. The traffic was.

[A teacher I respect once said: “Enlightenment is easy when nobody’s around.” I laughed. Then I moved to a jungle in Central America and stopped laughing.]

The people who can still trigger you — your parents, your partner, your siblings, the friend who knows exactly where your buttons are — they’re not obstacles to your practice.

They ARE the practice.

They’re the only ones who can reach the parts of you that meditation can’t touch. The parts that are so deep, so early, so pre-verbal that no amount of sitting will surface them.

Those parts only come out in relationship. In the pressure of being seen by someone who isn’t going away.

What I Learned From 3.5 Years Away

I traveled for three and a half years. Ayahuasca with shamans. A year in Bali. Tantra training in India. Meditation retreats across Southeast Asia. By every external metric of spiritual seeking, I was doing the work.

And relationally, I was impoverished.

I had a thousand connections and no one who really knew me. Light friends for years — always available on WhatsApp, never actually present. Festival friends, retreat friends, travel friends. Soul recognition on day one, emoji reactions forever after.

None of them could challenge me. None of them saw me fail. None of them would tell me when I was running a pattern that was hurting me.

That’s not connection. That’s an audience.

[The hardest sentence I ever had to say to myself: “You’re not seeking. You’re hiding.”]

The Flight Fantasy

Here’s how the pattern shows up.

You’re doing well. Months of stability. The practices are landing. The relationships feel workable. Peace is present more than it’s absent.

Then something ruptures. A family blow-up. A partner hits a nerve. Someone says the thing that activates the oldest wiring you have.

And within hours, the fantasy appears: What if I moved? New city. More space. More sunshine. Better people. Different energy.

The fantasy feels like aspiration. Like evolution. Like your highest self calling you forward.

Sometimes it is.

But sometimes it’s just the comfort zone wearing spiritual clothes.

The question that separates the two: Am I moving toward something, or away from someone?

Moving toward a calling — even when it’s hard — feels expansive and grounded simultaneously.

Running from a trigger feels urgent. Contracted. Like relief is the primary motivation.

The body knows the difference even when the mind doesn’t.

Graduate-Level Practice

At some level, once you’ve tasted genuine peace, you discover something uncomfortable:

The people you care about are the only ones who can get you now.

Strangers can’t reach you. Colleagues can’t destabilize you. Random provocations slide off. You’ve built real capacity. The practice works.

But your mother says “it’s your duty” and decades of conditioning activate in an instant. Your partner hits a wound you didn’t know was still open. Your father needs something and your entire boundary architecture trembles.

That’s not failure. That’s the graduate exam.

The professional pendulums dissolved easily. The cultural and familial ones — the ones installed before you had language, before you had choice — those are the deep work.

And they can ONLY be worked in relationship. In the room. With the people.

The power move is to lean in, not lean out.

It’s uncomfortable. It’s slower than a retreat. It doesn’t produce Instagram-worthy insights on a predictable timeline.

But studies have shown — and my own experience confirms — that life is significantly more meaningful when you stay with the people who can still reach you.

The Nuance

I want to be precise here.

This isn’t about tolerating abuse. It’s not about keeping narcissists in your life because “they’re your teacher.” Some people need to be kept at a distance. Some relationships need to end. Discernment is non-negotiable.

The question is whether you’re applying that discernment selectively — or using it as a blanket policy to avoid everyone who creates friction.

There’s a difference between:

• Conscious boundary: “This person is unwilling to grow with me. I love them and I’m protecting my peace.”

• Spiritual bypass: “These people lower my vibration. I need to surround myself with higher-frequency humans.”

The first is wisdom. The second is the imposter wearing a mala.

[I’ve been both of these people. The second one felt way more spiritual.]

Life as Meditation Cushion

Here’s what shifted for me.

When I came home — when I chose roots over routes — I started treating every family dinner, every difficult conversation, every moment of friction as the practice itself.

Not preparation for practice. Not interruption of practice. The actual meditation.

The trigger IS the bell. The contraction IS the koan. The person who can still reach you IS the teacher you’ve been traveling the world to find.

Every trigger is an opportunity to practice waking up. Not in a quiet room. Not in a carefully curated environment. In the mess. In the noise. In the kitchen where someone is saying the thing that activates the oldest version of you.

That’s where the real liberation lives.

Not in the absence of challenge. In the presence of challenge — met with the awareness you built in all those quieter moments.

What Staying Looks Like

Staying doesn’t mean never traveling again. I’m writing this from Costa Rica.

But now leaving is expansion, not escape. There’s a home to return to. People who know me. Relationships that accumulate depth over months instead of combusting over weekends.

The power move isn’t choosing between depth and freedom.

It’s building a base deep enough that movement becomes genuine exploration instead of sophisticated avoidance.

[Someone I work with recently said: “I’m looking for growth, not contractions.” I think that’s exactly right. Growth requires staying close enough to be reached. Contraction is what happens when you mistake distance for peace.]

Your Turn

Where are you leaning out that you could lean in?

What relationship are you managing from a distance that might be your most important teacher?

And what would it look like to stop protecting your peace — and start testing it?

Keep bending light and hacking minds,

• Cian

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P.S. The companion to this is the relational poverty piece — what happens when freedom becomes its own trap. If this one stings, that one will too.

P.P.S. If you’re thinking “but I really DO need to leave” — you might be right. The liberation architecture framework can help you tell the difference between conscious departure and pendulum-driven escape.