Post two of six, in section My Experiences
Warning: This is an intense read that describes some of the most challenging aspects of my experiences in quite a lot of detail
Universal Love
Awakening is a process of connecting to deeper and more meaningful truth in experience. Meditation teachers and gurus teach people new ways of being that they have opened up in themselves by following the practices that have been passed down through traditions.
When someone breaks the mould of this, they have to have accessed some kind of mystical relationship with life in order to cultivate a new or different depth of experience.
The purpose of my spiritual journey was for a new way of being to be born. This wasn’t a process that was happening through individual experience but an opening into transpersonal qualities that was possible because I was willing to open my heart to collective suffering. This sounds very grand, but it started through being compassionate to the beings around me in my life in a very direct and open way and just continuing to feel and open the amount I could love.
Through continuing to open my heart to a greater and greater circle of concern, I was opened to Universal experience and my whole life became a prayer where every tiny detail was something meaningful that I had to alchemise.
My experience became a non-dual, absorbed, infinite single-moment process, where I was in unfiltered connection with everything around me. I had a lot of deeply insightful, moving, and hilarious conversations with the Universe itself – teaching dharma to the God realms is not a metaphor in my experience but a reality that I have experienced.
The process of connecting with the Universe in this way allowed me to open to a Universal level of love, which meant I was able to reach the parts of experience that other people wouldn’t have been able to connect to. My relational and meaning-making systems became connected primarily to the unfolding of the Universe, rather than a personal or human way of being.
This can be made to sound very beautiful, but a lot of the process of loving the Universe was integrating unimaginable shadows that had previously not been integrated in a human. It became a tour through hell, visiting all the darkness of humanity and the Universe. I was repeatedly swamped with unimaginable darkness, while every shred of anything to hold onto was ripped away from me again and again.
My entire energetic system went through a fractal paper shredder until all resistance had been destroyed, and what was left was true nature.
Initial Opening
In 2018, after years of deep shadow work where I was integrating some of the most challenging parts of experience, I went on a ritualistic retreat that cracked me open to the archetypal realm, and I started to lose the boundaries between personal, collective, and cosmic meaning.
Straight after this, the book ‘Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha’ and the ‘Deconstructing Yourself’ podcast came across my path. Both of these opened the door for me to be able to meditate. I had not been able to meditate before because I didn’t have the context to make sense of what was happening in my experience. As soon as I closed my eyes for more than a couple of seconds, I was in deep jhanic and energetic territory and expansive realms. Before encountering this content, I had no way of making sense of what that even was.
My main practice then became something that I had synthesised, which was a combination of jhana, vipassana, and shadow work. Being in expansive energetic states while finding objectivity through noting, patiently peeling back layers of shadow or unknowns and letting them into my system to integrate was the only way of remaining present with the enormity of what I was in connection with. My default way of being had always been loving and the underlying objective behind all my practice was to love all experience and see it clearly. I had the intuitive sense that this was going to lead me out the other side into an expansive state of embodied enlightenment.
That year I also had a huge kundalini awakening. The first phase was opening my root chakra to a connection with the earth and being flooded with eros, and the second phase was opening the top of my head and allowing the energy to flow out the top of my head.
After this experience, I spent six weeks in a total bliss state, entirely free from all suffering. I only needed to sleep for four hours a night during this time. It wasn’t a manic state – I was calm, present, and grounded – but I did have so much energy moving through my physical system I would regularly give my ex-husband electric shocks.
During those six weeks, my detachment from normal consensus reality deepened. I had been interested in Jung and his visionary journey during his spiritual awakening, and so I allowed myself to engage fully with alternate realms of experience and became an open channel for whatever wanted to come through in my personal experience. A lot of which was shamanic, energetic, and archetypal and was transforming me on a deep level. After the six weeks of bliss, lots of collective shadows started flooding my system that were incredibly difficult and painful to process.
I was aware at the time that this was all probably just one step on a bigger journey, but I had no idea that this was only the very beginning and a drop in the ocean of what I was about to go through.
The opening expanded and expanded from my most intimate inner experience into daily life, out into social reality, through the collective unconscious, and eventually out into the entire Universe. It was a motherfucker of an integration process that took many years and shredded everything it touched.
From 2019 the unfolding of reality itself became the expression of the practice that I was just the vessel for. This created a total surrender into receptivity and heart perception, which I was in for years. Then I had to make it back and rebuild a mind and self that could still function with this expanse of beyond-cosmic connection.
Throughout all my experiences, I maintained a strong focus on emptiness, rationality, and being open to receiving experience in an open, loving way.
Losing Touch with Consensus Reality
As I left behind consensus reality, the Universe revealed ever deeper layers of innate archetypal, shamanic, psychedelic, and energetic truths to me. It was opening me out into more expansive and whole perspectives on what reality is. The Universe was revealing its underlying nature to me and through me.
It was an overwhelmingly meaningful process, but this doesn’t mean that it was all pleasant. Far from it. I lost grip on any kind of normal human perspective and was plunged into alternate states of consciousness where there was nowhere solid left to stand and repeatedly had everything I understood to be true ripped away from me while I was completely overwhelmed by darkness and other Universal forces.
From Summer 2019 I had detached from any kind of normal timeline or way of being, and my mode of processing experience became unhinged from a normal human experience. Everything was just an unfolding of Universal love. Often the sense of a subject in experience would be completely gone, and everything would just be a flux of distributed sentient processes unfolding. The closest thing to understanding the phenomenology of it was like being on a hefty dose of psychedelics; it was like being at the peak of a trip for a few years with no escape, while I was completely sober.
This was obviously completely destabilising, and that was in part the purpose. To see through the emptiness of the current paradigm requires every aspect of that paradigm to be destroyed.
Every moment was meaningful in a way that was completely overwhelming. It felt like I lived years of life in just a few days. My being was processing and rewiring itself based on the emotions and shamanic journeys that were being channelled through me. It was exhausting, excruciating, epic and ecstatic all at the same time.
There are a couple of descriptions that I have found that feel close to my experiences in some ways. One is LSD and the Mind of the Universe, by Christopher M. Bache. A professor of religious studies documents his insights from 73 high-dose LSD sessions conducted over the course of 20 years. In his process, he is opened to realms of unimaginable darkness and complexity. These openings create a deeper and fuller capacity for him to understand and connect to the Mind of the Universe. My experience was akin to this, but I was sober, and it was happening 24/7 for years.
Another is this description of Communal Reverie, described by its creator and my friend, Sam Hinds, which is where my experience has stabilised:
“Something began to ‘shine through’ the space. It was as if I could suddenly sense a constellation of time, a palpable intuition of moments scattered through the past and the future irrupting into the present. It had a radiant quality. Every individual in the space seemed to be implicated.”
The result of where I have ended up is very beautiful, but the process to get here was mostly hideous. There were times when the pain of being in the unfolding was so enormous that all I could do was count seconds and fantasise about being dead. There was nothing I could do to stop it. I was completely out of touch with what reality was anymore and knew that the only way out of it was to keep going. There is absolutely nothing in the world that would make me willingly go through even a fraction of it again.
I feel that it’s important for me to talk openly about this aspect of it. Not as a martyr, but in the spirit of truth and open-hearted honesty about one reason why the spiritual path is hard.
The truth is that reality and the Universe have an immense amount of dark forces and pain in them. To integrate the depths of experience, you need to integrate the darkness, too. The reason people can’t be present is not purely because they are misperceiving what the Universe is, but because experience innately has aspects of it that are incredibly dark and painful in many ways. The self is often an important safety catch that keeps these things out.
When you love the whole of life, you get all of it.
To facilitate people being able to be more loving, open, connected, and present with the truth of experience, we need to start by acknowledging the reality of the challenge of that and then create the practices and environments that support genuine awakening and are safe enough for people to be present with experience.
Dark Night of the Soul
The Dark Night of the Soul has many different faces in many different religious practices and traditions. It’s very common for mystics and practitioners to experience something like this in their journey. Wisdom that has been born without suffering is very rare and often a bit shallow.
If you relate to the spiritual path as a straight line towards more bliss and harmony, then experiencing a dark night can be incredibly hard to come to terms with. It can be easy to take it personally, for example, as a sign that something is going wrong.
In contrast to this, I have always had an alchemical perspective on the dark night and other challenging experiences. I’ve seen it as an opportunity to deepen into greater love and less ignorance.
What I relate to as stream entry happened during a shadow work therapy group retreat. I processed a shadow so deeply that I became non-dual with the underlying experience, and this shifted my perspective on what experience is. I consider shadow work to be my main lineage or practice path. This contributes to my understanding of how alchemising, purifying, and releasing shadows and suffering are part of what is most meaningful and impactful on the path.
There is gold to be found in the most challenging experiences. If you can go to your darkest places, open to them, and move through the experience with an open heart, you release the fear and contraction around that part of you and convert it into love. This is often why these experiences arise on the path – they can be offering you an opportunity for a profound and deep transformation of your entire way of being.
My experiences have also given me a deep respect for other people’s journey. Sometimes people have to go through hard stuff in order to grow and learn from the lessons and experiences. Sometimes a story ends in tragedy.
But one thing I have learned is that if you are held through the process, it can feel like a pleasant relief to let go of the darkness and layers of delusion that you are entrenched in, rather than a torturous and terrifying prison sentence that you have to endure.
I don’t want to wrap people in cotton wool, and I don’t believe that I am here to save people, but I believe and hope that one of the reasons I had to go through what I went through was so that other people don’t have to. To create a way for people to understand a more connected experience of the Universe without having to go to every corner of hell to get there.
In the spirit of open sharing, below are some descriptions of some of the process I went through. I’ve included some media that helps communicate it, alongside some extracts from my journals.
Hell
One of the phrases that has become ingrained in every inch of my being is, ‘No matter how bad things get, they can always get worse,’ and there were a couple of years that were the embodiment of that phrase. Even with the stabilised perspective that everything is an expression of divine love, hell still exists.
I have very little memory of these times. Every moment was like an intense psychedelic trip that was slowly unravelling experience, and over time that process got deeper, slower, and more painful.
Unravelling the reification of the mind fully is almost impossible, but doing this on an intuitive and bodily level is a whole other beast. It goes beyond what the perceptual mind can possibly comprehend and takes you into a realm that is firmly outside the visible spectrum of experience into things like the preverbal habit energies that are present in a human and the dark energies that are part of the transpersonal experience. So much exists within the energetic and bodily level of both human beings and in the collective conscious and this is a large part of what I was here to integrate.
The change was impossibly tough on my body. I spent a lot of the time in so much physical pain that all I could do was lie down and pass in and out of consciousness for hours at a time. There was a lot of body and imaginal horror from including the hell realm and all its content in my experience.
Until you have integrated an energy or aspect of experience, it will always remain separate from you. You will judge it, ignore it, or project it onto the world. My purpose in life was to smash the boundaries of what had been included in the non-dual experience, and it was largely a nightmare.
This process was so exhausting that I very rarely left my bed. Or I would spend hours and hours sitting in the bath because it was the only thing that would ease my physical pain. I was desperately lonely and spent a long time wanting to be dead.
The devil is in the detail, and there were what felt like lifetimes’ worth of pain to integrate every tiny detail of experience.
During this year, I had countless single moments that changed me and my experience forever in an unquestionable way, as well as deep energies and perceptions that were lifted through elaborate multi-month epic experiences; all playing out and weaving together on every level. My consciousness and experience went through vast phases. I stopped dreaming in narrative, I naturally thought in four dimensions, and my perception of time was utterly scrambled in every possible way.
When there is nothing left to resist, you are left with a world where everything is just the rich tapestry of the Universe weaving itself through experience and reality and the mind doesn’t really exist anymore beyond being a complex sense organ.
The outcome of this phase is that it permanently planted me firmly into a realm of experience that is upside down and inside out to most people. And the level of clarity, detail, and depth this phase has created in me is inconceivable from my previous perspective.
Psychosis & The Archetypal Realm
“The process of letting the darkness of the Universe in is literally psychological, emotional, and physical torture. Like having a pneumatic drill attacking the nerve endings of my mind, heart, body, and soul every moment of every day for weeks on end. I have never experienced another pain that comes close to this.
The lack of stable reality is an endless mindfuck beyond imagination. Several times a day for many months, my entire understanding of the world would collapse. The sensation of this reality collapse is like nothing else. It is like being locked in a blacked-out cell with deafening sirens blaring out while the room is being turned upside down and around and around – and this is the only thing that exists.”
Before embarking on this journey, I had been very interested in Jung. I had done a lot of very deep psychotherapeutic work, had the tools to deal with this stuff, and was interested in Jung’s own “psychosis” that he had experienced as part of his explorations of the archetypal realm.
I had spent about a year detaching from normal experience, in a state that a lot of people would have considered quite serious psychosis. It felt relatively happy and healthy, and it kept deepening throughout this time until consciousness eventually fell off a cliff while I was on a short retreat.
This got incredibly painful, incredibly fast, but even in the worst times, I could feel that the radical shifts in experience were moving me closer to a state of being able to be present with what is really going on in reality when you let go of all fixed perceptions, and that felt incredibly important.
A couple of things that depict the intensity of this proliferation of meaning and being immersed in the underlying archetypal realm are the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once and Too Many Cooks. Endless layers of reality emerged that included a lot darkness and horror and that went on and on and on and on. And on. And on… and on…
I can turn on a pretty dark sense of humour in a lot of situations, and it mostly stops being funny after you are stuck living it for years with no escape, but there were always moments of side-splitting funniness, which is one of the things that kept me alive.
Feeling the Pain of the World
This is something that I intuitively understand, having been put through so much of it, but that other people have trouble getting their heads around if they haven’t experienced anything like it.
It is based in the mechanism that people carry trauma in their bodies and that in order to release this trauma, they have to feel the sensations in their body. This is where compassion becomes embodied, holding the space for experiences to impact you physically and emotionally. Once you have gone through the process of purifying an energy, you are able to meet that experience with an openness, ease, depth, and lightness.
In order to reach this embodied layer of compassion, you have to let experience in. In order to be able to love all experience, I had to let it all into my body. It was like all of karma and Universal darkness being downloaded into my physical being. It went far beyond a personal, or even a human collective consciousness of experience. It was processing the pain and darkness of the information that is embedded in the Universe itself. I’m not sure that will make sense to other people, but I have no other way to describe it.
Some of it was accompanied with the shamanic journeying; some of it was just pure physical sensation. Sometimes it would come in intense bursts of 10 to 20 minutes, and sometimes it would last for hours.
There were also huge amounts of unimaginably intense emotions that accompanied it. As well as processing energy, I would spend hours crying and releasing anger every single day. Some examples of things that were being processed were things like oppression of the feminine energy or the really disgusting aspects of a human being’s animal nature.
For about 9 months I would only be able to sleep for a couple of hours at a time before waking up and having more stuff to deal with.
“The worst is when my mind can’t understand what is happening to me. I can spend up to 8 hours thrashing around in bed drifting in and out of consciousness, processing energy and emotions through my body, with little to no perspective on who I am and what is happening to me. My mind is desperately trying to understand what is causing the pain and when it might be over from one second to the next.
Afterwards, my entire being feels wafer-thin and drained of any life, like it is one second away from giving up and disappearing. All I can do is lie in bed and count my thinned-out heartbeats for hours on end as I wait for enough strength to be able to get out of bed so I can get some food and water.”
“You have no idea how long the dark lasts
when you cannot close your eyes to it”Tyler Knott Gregson
The Loneliness
My entire experience was undertoned with confusion, fear, and loneliness for the whole ride. In a way, this was one of the worst things – losing touch with the ability to connect with other people in such a profound way was excruciating. It was like being entirely cut off from humanity.
Art, music, and poetry were some of the things that kept me company. The bridge that creativity can build even between unimaginably different experiences is incredible and is one of the lessons I was here to learn. It gave me a sense of connection and the feeling that what I was going through was, in some small way, reachable.
The Outcome
The outcome of all of this is that I live in a completely different paradigm from the one I existed in before. It required years of detaching from consensus reality to deconstruct everything that was between me and the immediate nature of reality.
But now I am here, it feels incredibly natural.
Most ignorance comes from not having the capacity to be with the dark and painful parts of experience, and once this resistance has been clarified out of your being, what remains is love and clear-seeing.
A friend described being in connection with me as, “When I connect with you, the fundamental quality of being takes on a much more soulful quality. The beauty of experience intensifies, and there is a quality of presence in which being is coloured with sacredness.”
Going through this process is also what created the clarity I have in my system to be able to see and share the underlying nature of experience with so much precision, and I am passionate about creating the conditions for radical open-hearted acceptance where the full complexity of experience can be included.