How do people create (and survive) drastic changes?
How do they leave unhealthy relationships, groups, belief systems, or entire identities? And how do they leave when these things are essential parts of their lives, their careers, their place in their families … or all three?
These questions are crucial in a time when so many people have been drawn into belief systems and conspiracy theories that are tearing apart families, friendships, political parties, and the foundations of American governance itself.
But change and reclamation are possible at any time
Missing the Solstice is a true story about a psychic healer in the New Age (me) who realized with increasing horror that her belief system was not healthy or ethical, and that her continued support of ungrounded ideas was damaging people — even if she never meant to hurt anyone.
I was one of the teachers who brought the New Age concept of the empath into the national conversation in the 1990s.
From the age of 10 in the 1970s, when I entered the New Age, I was immersed in every part of the metaphysical community, from yoga to veganism to psychic healing to energy healing to alternative medicine to trance channeling and more.
I witnessed the many serious problems in these communities, and I had hoped to bring a grounded and ethical focus to what was (and still is) an unregulated wild west atmosphere that overwhelmingly appealed to sensitive and vulnerable people.
And I did it with books, teaching, audio learning programs, and an entire career.
But something changed for me in 2001, and over the next 2 years, I slowly realized that I could no longer support New Age ideas or continue with my career.
Missing the Solstice is a specific story of one person who left a community, a belief system, a thriving career, and an entire identity behind, but it’s also a story about what it means to leave any situation or identity that you’ve outgrown.
It’s never too late
This story is deeply relevant in a time when New Age conspiracy theories have gone mainstream (and families and friendships have been torn apart by them), and when the least grounded and most paranoid excesses of alternative medicine are being forced onto the American public.
Things feel bleak, but the time to make up your mind about people is never. Change can happen and people can turn on a dime and reclaim their good minds and their good souls.
I lost almost everything and missed the solstice in every sense of the word, but what I couldn’t have guessed was that there would be an entirely new life — and a better world — waiting for me on the other side.
Missing the Solstice is available on Kindle and in paperback now.
Order Missing the Solstice
Clark Walliser
karla, my wife and I just finished reading “Missing the Solstice ” together. and want to let you know how much we appreciate your honesty and awareness that it’s all a work in progress. We both are post evangelical christian people that really appreciate all that it did for us, and all it did to us. I got a masters degree in the stuff trying to make the pieces fit, but didn’t succeed. Yet I continued in that culture another 40 years before finally being honest with myself that I could not believe it with integrity. The elements in your story sounded very familiar to me, just change the names. Thank you for letting us know we aren’t alone in the adventure.
Karla McLaren
Thanks so much to you and your wife for your kind response. I appreciate it.
I think that often what is missing in these apostate tales is the reason people got in, why they stayed, and what they lost in leaving.
It’s important for people to know that changes like this are indeed possible, but also that they don’t have to be done in rage and recrimination. Grief and shame are also a perfectly acceptable emotional responses.
Thanks for being a fellow adventurer.