What Makes a Cult. What Makes a Community. And Why the Difference Matters More Than Ever.

Three years ago, I spent several weeks deeply embedded with a community called Earthwaking across multiple visits. I wasn't passing through as a guest. I was coaching their members, getting involved in the inner workings of the organization, trusted with access to the people and dynamics beneath the surface. I want to be clear before I go further: I am only speaking to what I witnessed during that period. A lot has shifted there since — including their leadership — and I have no window into what they are today. I share what I observed not to assess who they are now, but because what I witnessed from inside that organization taught me something important that I think belongs in the hands of anyone on a community journey, and anyone who feels called to lead these kinds of spaces.

What happened during that visit is difficult to put into words — not because the words don't exist, but because words were never built to carry this kind of weight.

I had experiences on the level of psychedelics without the use of psychedelics. Perspectives shifted. Realities rearranged themselves. If you've never experienced something like that, I can only tell you it's likely beyond what you can currently imagine — and I mean that without condescension. It was beyond what I could imagine, and it was happening to me.

But that's not really what this article is about.

What struck me most during that visit wasn't the intensity of the experience. It was recognition.

The Knowing That Came Before the Understanding

Over the years of building — or perhaps channeling — Nomadic Communities, there were things I simply knew needed to be true about the environment without being able to explain why. No framework. No precedent. No teacher pointing the way. Just a knowing.

When I walked into Earthwaking, I saw so many of those same values embedded in how they had structured their community. The relief of that was profound. It wasn't just me making things up. There was a reason. A rhyme. Something was moving through both of us toward similar conclusions.

But I also saw something else.

During my visit, Earthwaking was functioning extraordinarily well in many ways. It also had some glaring, serious faults. What became clear — only near the end of my time there — was that the channel I had been carrying for Nomadic Communities had already built in an answer to exactly what was causing those problems. Not because I was smarter. Because the knowing had known before I did.

I want to share what I observed. Not to criticize anyone — the people I encountered were doing genuinely important work with genuine hearts. But because understanding the line between community and cult matters enormously right now. More people are waking up to the fact that the isolated, individualized life is not working. People are seeking belonging. And where people seek belonging with urgency, both community and cult will show up to meet them.

Knowing the difference could change everything about what you walk into — and what you build.

All In — And What That Actually Means

The first distinction I want to draw is around commitment.

Without commitment, there is no community. Without a group of people you can genuinely rely on, there is no groundedness, no stability. Earthwaking understood this deeply and built their entire culture around it. "All in" was a central value — and in principle, they were right.

But their version of all in had a particular flavor: join the mission, dedicate yourself to it, and in many cases donate everything you have to it. The line between healthy commitment and something else got blurry fast.

I could see both the truth of what they were reaching for and exactly where it started to collapse. So I wrote something while I was there — channeled it, really. I didn't share it at the time. It didn't feel like the moment. But what I saw was this: all in is not one thing. It is at least three very different things, and confusing them is where communities begin to break.

The First Level: All In to the Experience

If you step into an intentional transformational experience — a retreat, a container, a specific held space designed for inner work — then all in means trying everything on. Every practice. Every invitation. Every experience that comes your way. You meet it fully, not from the outside.

This is not about adopting other people's perspectives. You don't have to believe what they believe. But you can try on the experience and let it do what it does. Because here is the truth about transformation: perception doesn't shift through thinking. It shifts through experience. The rational mind will never get you there. It can describe the door. It cannot walk through it. Only experience shifts the lens through which you see — and experience requires full entry.

When you're not all in to the experience, you remain outside of it. You stay a cynic, a critic, stuck in the mud of the perspective you already have while wondering why nothing is changing.

I drank the Kool-Aid at Earthwaking. Fully. Tried everything on. And even though I didn't walk away with their perspective, the experience shifted mine in ways that mattered. That only happened because I chose to enter. And that is the key word: chose. This is an individual decision, not a cultural expectation. The moment "try everything on" becomes something a community demands rather than something an individual freely chooses, you've crossed a line. More on that in a moment.

The Second Level: All In to the Mission

This is the level that makes teams trustworthy and organizations real.

If you want to run anything — a retreat center, a regenerative farm, a community space — your team needs to be all in to the mission. Not to each other. Not to you personally. To the shared intention. And that commitment needs a defined container: three years, five years, seven years. A real horizon.

When someone commits to a mission for a defined time, something shifts. They become countable. You can trust them with responsibility because they're not going to disappear the moment something hard comes up. Visions need grounding — and grounding is unglamorous. It's taxes and maintenance and legal filings and grocery runs. It's the weight of making the beautiful thing real. That weight needs shoulders that have agreed to carry it for a defined time.

In Nomadic Communities, this is what roots groups are built on. When you form a roots group, you want people committed to five to seven years — because for those years, the five or seven people around you are your co-creators in holding and grounding the vision into reality. The mission has a container. And a contained mission is fundamentally different from a marriage, because you can see the edges of it. You know what you signed up for. You know when you can honestly reassess.

The Third Level: All In to Each Other — and Why It Doesn't Work

This is the level Earthwaking was drifting toward, and the one that concerns me most.

The idea is that you gather a group of people, bond them deeply to one another, and then go on a mission together — even if you're not yet clear on what that mission is. Belonging first. Purpose later.

The problem is that this functions more like a marriage than a mission. And marriage is already fifty-fifty. Put seven people in that dynamic, trying to bond at a depth where the mission is secondary to the group itself, and the odds of it holding are very low. More than that — it may not actually be aligned with how humans are designed to operate. We bond deeply over shared purpose, shared struggle, shared direction. When the bond becomes the thing itself, with nothing larger to orient toward, you don't get depth. You get dependency.

And dependency, when it meets an unequal power structure, is exactly how cults eat people.

Why a Hundred Percent of Communes Fail

I want to say something plainly that most people building communities don't want to hear.

A hundred percent of communes fail over time.

Not most. All of them. When you look at communities where people are mixing their lives and their livelihoods into the same container — not the Amish model, where people maintain independent lives lived in proximity to one another, but true communes where the boundary between you and the mission and each other has fully dissolved — they all collapse. Every one. The only variable is the timeline.

The mechanism of failure is consistent. People arrive carrying wounds and family patterns. When you place them in close, undifferentiated proximity with mixed livelihoods and no exit, those wounds begin to replay. The community stops being a space for transformation and becomes a theater for recreating exactly the dynamics people were trying to escape. The social patterns that were already there reassert themselves. Dysfunction lands and calcifies.

Nomadic Communities is built with this in mind. It is not a commune. The nomadic arc — nine months in a space, three months away — is not a compromise on depth or commitment. It is a structural response to the known failure mode of communities that don't build in separation.

Those three months away are not vacation. They are integration. Perspective. The medicine of being a stranger again. You cannot hold space for transformation if you've forgotten what it feels like to be disoriented and new. And permanent anchoring — leadership that never leaves, that has been in one space for years without break — quietly transforms a communal container into someone's home. And once it becomes their home, attachments form. Preferences harden. Territorial energy develops, usually below the level of conscious awareness. The space that was supposed to belong to everyone now belongs, in subtle but real ways, to the people who never leave.

This is one of the first things that breaks a community's ability to welcome people. And welcoming is everything.

The Five Foundations — And Where Earthwaking Broke Down

In Rhythms That Root Us, I write about five foundations of solid community: communication, communal meals, daily practices, communal activities, and a welcoming environment.

Earthwaking was genuinely powerful in four of them. Their communication practices, communal meals, daily practices, and communal activities were among the strongest I've encountered anywhere. There was real brilliance in their culture. They had sayings like "put the fun in dysfunction" — an utterly brilliant frame that disarms shame and makes self-honesty feel human rather than humiliating.

But they didn't nail the welcoming environment. And the reason traces directly back to how they formed their core leadership group — the people they called the architects.

To become an architect, you had to go all in to Earthwaking. That all in process meant bringing your money, bringing your life, bringing everything you had and becoming functionally dependent on the operation. Many of them, perhaps swept up in the genuine heart-opening of the experience, went all in without fully understanding what they were agreeing to. Flash forward: the community grew. Eighty-person events. Thirty, forty, fifty people at a time, all searching for belonging. And the architecture of leadership was not built to hold that.

Here is what happens in these environments, consistently. New people arrive raw and hungry for belonging. They almost always are — that's often why they came. Leadership, especially senior members, become parental figures in the energetic field of the community. They are the ones who seem to dispense belonging. And a person seeking belonging is, understandably, somewhat clingy. And clinginess is, understandably, somewhat triggering.

At Earthwaking, an inverse accountability structure had formed. The newest members — the most raw, the most open, the most vulnerable — faced the highest scrutiny. The eldest members received the most leeway. This is a fraternity structure. And for someone who has just arrived and is sharing some of the most sensitive material of their lives, being placed under the brightest spotlight while the senior members watch and evaluate creates something specific and damaging.

The newcomer wants to belong. They feel a belonging they've never quite felt before. They begin to self-sacrifice — and then further, to self-erase. And the senior members, rather than owning their own triggered reactions to this energy, project. They reframe their triggers as the newcomer's inner work. The reason this is coming up is something in you. You need to change if you want things to get better. Which isn't always wrong — but when it becomes the primary response to any friction between established members and new arrivals, it closes a trap around the person who just got there.

Belonging dangled just out of reach. You can never quite earn your place. But you keep trying. And trying costs you more and more of yourself.

That is not transformation. That is the manufacturing of dependency — whether it's intended or not.

The Structures That Change Everything

What the channel that came through for Nomadic Communities built in, before I fully understood why, was a set of structural responses to exactly this failure pattern.

Leadership rotates. Nine months in the space, three months away. You can apply for an extension if you are genuinely in alignment, but the expectation is clear: you don't anchor permanently. This alone disrupts the formation of territorial energy before it calcifies. The space belongs to the mission, not to the people who've been there longest.

Accountability is inverted the right way. The most senior members are held to the highest scrutiny. Newest members receive the most grace. This isn't just fairness — it's the practice of what leadership actually means. If a senior leader's subtle energy is contracting the space, that is not the newcomer's problem to absorb. That is the leader's work to meet. In Nomadic's culture, the leadership layer is actively, consistently examining its own triggers, its own motivations, the subtle ways its wounds show up in the container. This is coveted — genuinely valued — not reluctantly endured.

The accountability mechanism is simple and non-negotiable: if light is shone on something in a leader, they do the process within a defined time. They look at it. And if they're unwilling to, they step down. No exceptions based on seniority. No leeway for the people with the most power.

The scope of commitment is defined, not open-ended. A route number — the person who holds financial and administrative responsibility for a space — commits five to seven years. Then they can renew. The mission has a container. Unlimited devotion is not devotion. It's dependency dressed as loyalty. Defining the scope is what makes the commitment trustworthy, because the person knows what they signed up for and can say yes to it honestly.

Everyone holds their own trajectory. This applies to leadership formation specifically — not to everyone who comes through the doors, but to those who choose the path of building and holding these spaces. The ask is to develop a personal five-year map: where am I financially, emotionally, physically, spiritually, and mentally? How do these acts of service and co-creation align my skills, my availability, my exposure to build toward the life I am genuinely trying to create?

This closes the door on the deepest cult mechanism at its root. Cults, intentionally or not, create environments where people quietly outsource their unmet needs to the group without naming it. They stop taking responsibility for their own security and start needing the community to provide it. Then the community has leverage over them — whether it wanted that leverage or not. When everyone arrives with their own map, the community cannot become a substitute for a life. It becomes something better: a place where real lives are built alongside each other.

What These Spaces Are Actually For

At the foundation of everything Nomadic Communities is built on is a framework called WAFLs: Water, Air, Food, Love, and Shelter. These are the only genuine human needs. Everything else — every other comfort, desire, ambition, acquisition — is a desire. And desires are self-generated. They are not owed by the community, and they are not obligations of the space. They emerge from individual inspiration.

This is not scarcity. This is clarity.

What a nomadic community space actually provides, when it is functioning as it should, is a radical and undervalued gift: time. When your genuine needs are met — when water, air, food, love, and shelter are handled inside a functioning community container — the noise of survival quiets. And in that quiet, something else becomes possible.

More reading. Deeper connection. Time in nature. Space to hear your own spirit. Room to build the ideas and relationships and collaborations that actually move the world toward what it needs to become.

Most people are running so hard trying to survive that they never get to create. The community container is not the destination. It is the necessary transition space between the world we are leaving and the world we are trying to build. It is where you do the interior work that makes the exterior work possible.

And here is the hard truth: anyone who skips this step will recreate what they're already a reflection of. Not because they're bad or wrong, but because that is how humans work. You build from where you are. If you haven't done the interior work — if you haven't moved through the transformation, aligned your intentions, met your own patterns with honesty — you will reproduce those patterns in whatever you build next. Even with the best intentions. Even with the most beautiful vision.

If a sustainable, conscious, connected world matters to you — and I believe it does, or you wouldn't have read this far — then this transitionary space is not optional. It is the work. It is where the version of you who can actually build that world comes from.

The Line Between Community and Cult

Let me bring it back to the question I opened with, because I think it's more urgent than it might seem.

Cults are not usually what the movies show us. They rarely begin with menace. They begin with belonging — real, felt, genuine belonging, often more powerful than anything the newcomer has ever experienced. They begin with practices that actually work and a community that is, at least in part, truly beautiful. What I witnessed at Earthwaking had all of that. It was not a cult. But it had cult-adjacent mechanics operating inside it, and those mechanics were not the result of bad intentions. They were the result of structural choices that had never been examined closely enough.

The line between community and cult comes down to one question: Is belonging a currency?

When a community dispenses belonging — earned through compliance, lost through questioning, contingent on self-erasure — you have a cult regardless of how beautiful the practices are. The mechanism doesn't require malice. It just requires a leadership layer that is enmeshed enough in the structure that it can no longer hold the door open cleanly for the people arriving.

Nomadic Communities is built to prevent belonging from becoming leverage. Every structural choice — the rotating arc, the inverted accountability, the scoped commitment, the personal trajectory — exists to keep belonging free. You belong because you are here. Not because you have proven something. Not because you have given enough. Not because you have erased enough of yourself to stop triggering the people who arrived before you.

You belong because belonging is the starting point, not the reward.

That is the difference. And right now, in this age of transition and identity shift, that difference is everything.

An Invitation

If you've read this far, something in you is probably already on this path.

Maybe you're on your own community journey — seeking a space where transformation is real and belonging is free. Maybe you've been in spaces that felt close but something was off. Maybe you're building something yourself and you want to make sure you build it right.

Or maybe you feel a deeper call. Maybe you want to be one of the people who holds these spaces. Who creates the container. Who serves the mission of a conscious, sustainable, connected world not just by passing through it but by building it.

If that's you, Nomadic Communities has a leadership development path. It begins with your own transformation — with coming into a space, trying things on, letting your perspective shift. It grows into contribution. And for those who are ready, it moves into full leadership formation: the five-year arc, the inverted accountability, the discipline of showing up for others from genuine capacity rather than unmet need.

The world needs people who know how to hold space without holding people hostage. People who can build belonging without making it a currency. People who are willing to do their own interior work first so that what they build next doesn't just recreate where they came from.

That path is here. And it starts with a single step.

Learn more at nomadiccommunities.com

Ticon Storay is the founder of Nomadic Communities, a faith-based ministry dedicated to intentional community living, spiritual formation, and leader development. He is the author of Rhythms That Root Us.