Post two of three, in section My Experiences
Universal Love
Awakening is a process of connection to deeper and more meaningful truth. This comes from the capacity to connect sincerely with what is in your 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, they have to have accessed some kind of mystical relationship with life or experience in order to cultivate a new or different depth of experience. I was given an insanely intense dose of this mysticism.
My whole life became a prayer where every tiny detail was something meaningful that I had to alchemise. 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. Whether you can believe this or not, the results of the clarity and depth of experience that this has cultivated in me are staggering.
I never really resurfaced out the other side of this experience, I just went deeper and deeper into it until I was totally immersed in the meaning that is baked into every drop of the Universe. That is where I live my life now.
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.
This process has, however, opened up a new way of being in me that has some overwhelmingly positive aspects to it.
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 that were often chaotic and turbulent. Before encountering this content I had had no way of making sense of what that even was.
My main practice then became something that I had a synthesised, which was a combination of jhana, vipassana and shadow work.
Being in expansive energetic states while finding objectivity through noting and patiently peeling back layers of shadow or unknowns one at a time 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. This 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 utterly destroyed everything it touched. And then I had to make it back.
Throughout all my experiences I maintained a strong focus on emptiness, rationality and being open to receiving experience in an open, loving way.
In 2018 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 very 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 that six weeks my detachment from normal consensus reality deepened. I had been interested in Jung and his journey of psychosis 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.
I was aware at the time that this was probably just one step on the 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.
Madness
I sometimes describe my experiences as spiritual psychosis, because I imagine that that is how people in consensus reality would relate to them; but my experience was of the Universe revealing a deeper layer of innate archetypal, shamanic, psychedelic and energetic truth to me.
I always knew that it was part of an incredibly epic transformation and integration process that was for something bigger than just me and I remained open-hearted throughout the entire process. The Universe was revealing every aspect of its nature to me and through me.
It was a meaningful process, but this doesn’t mean that it was all pleasant. Far from it. I lost grip of 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 way 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 understand 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 channeled through me. It was exhausting and excruciating.
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 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 end result is very beautiful, but the process was hideous. There were times where the pain of being in the unfolding was so enormous that I would count seconds to stop myself committing suicide. 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.
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 has an immense amount of dark forces and pain in it. To integrate the depths of experience, you need to integrate the darkness, too.
Anything that paints reality or the present moment as some kind of perfect suffering-free zone is a lie. The reason people can’t be present is not because they are misperceiving what life is, but because life is genuinely hard and there is a lot of chaos that lies underneath the layers of control and fear.
If spiritual beliefs and practices are going to facilitate us to be more loving, open, connected and present with the truth of experience then firstly it needs to acknowledge how much challenge that includes and secondly facilitate the healing and environments that genuinely make it possible and worthwhile for people to be able to show up.
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.
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.
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 shapes my understanding of how alchemising, purifying and releasing shadows and suffering is a large part of what is meaningful and most 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 why these experiences arise on the path – they are offering you an opportunity for a profound and deep transformation of your entire way of being.
My experiences have 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 open up these parts of themselves and to a more connected experience of the Universe without having to go to every corner of hell.
A lot of my teaching is based on how to make this possible – achieve the positive outcomes of the aspects of experience that I have discovered through my experiences without having to go through the nightmarish process.
In the spirit of open sharing below are some descriptions of some of that 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 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 became on a much deeper, slower and more painful, level.
Unravelling the reification of the mind fully is one (almost impossibly difficult) thing, 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 and emotional pain that all I could do was lie down and pass in and out of consciousness. 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 sat in the bath because it was the only thing that would ease my physical pain.
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. The devil is in the detail and there were what felt like lifetimes’ worth of pain to integrate every tiny detail of experience. I was desperately lonely and spent a long time wanting to be dead.
My consciousness and experience went through vast phases; I forgot and had to relearn most words that I knew beyond the most basic language, I stopped dreaming in narrative, I naturally thought in four dimensions, my perception of time was utterly scrambled in every possible way.
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. 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 level of clarity, detail and depth this phase has created in me is inconceivable.
Psychosis & The Archetypal Realm
“It 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 even close to how awful this was.
The shamanic journeying can be horrific; I spent about 4 hours lying on the floor wretching, feeling like I had thousands of slugs coming up out of my stomach. There was a period of months where I would go through something like this weekly, if not daily.
The psychosis was the cruelest mind fuck I can possibly imagine and several times a day for many months my entire understanding of the world would collapse; the sensation of this reality collapse was like nothing else. It was like being locked in a blacked-out cell with deafening sirens blaring out while the room was being turned upside down and around and around – and this was the only thing that existed.”
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 spiritual awakening and 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.
It is worth saying that one of the things that kept me going is that 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 that felt incredibly important. But that wasn’t anywhere near enough to reassure me during the worst times. I spent a lot of time wanting to be dead.
The closest thing I have found to depicting this is this video. I confronted a lot of darkness and horror and I can also turn on a pretty dark sense of humour. It gets a lot less funny after you are stuck living it for years with no escape, but there were fortunately 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, an ease, a depth and a 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 conscious 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. I was in at least a background processing all day every day for over two years.
There was also huge amounts of unimaginably intense emotions that accompanied it and 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, which processed as hundreds of hours of rape visualisations and other violence, or the really disgusting aspects of 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 was when my mind couldn’t understand what was happening to me. I would 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 was and what was happening to me. My mind desperately trying to understand what was causing the pain and when it might be over from one second to the next.
Afterwards my entire being would feel wafer thin and drained of any life, like it was one second away from giving up and disappearing. All I could do was lie in bed and count my thinned out heart beats for hours on end as I waited for enough strength to be able to get out of bed so I could 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 under-toned with excruciating 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 was one 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 to the one I existed in before. It required years of what society would call psychosis to reach, in order to become one with the immediate nature of experience, time and space.
There are many different aspects to this way of being and a lot of them are overwhelmingly positive. Some of things that are most lovely are a deep sense of immediate presence, a free-flowing sense of creativity, a sense of purpose, being pretty much anxiety or dukkha free, an unhindered intimacy with the mystical nature of experience and a precision and clarity around understanding experience.
Most ignorance comes from trying to get away from the dark and painful parts of experience and once this has been clarified out of your being there is a huge amount of spaciousness and intimacy that remains.
I now teach and guide people through the experiences that will help them access the positive aspects of these states, while not having to go through hell to get there.
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.”
Ultimately, this whole thing is infinitely easier when you are held in a loving space and all of your being is welcomed. Teachers are only able to welcome in others what they have welcomed in themselves and this is one of the reasons I am able to facilitate incredibly deep change in people.