Timeline of Events

A close friend was asking me some simple questions about the timeline of events of my awakening when I realised that I have never shared the full picture with anyone else. The mood of the paradigm-shattering immensity of the whole thing has been shared and received in my close friendships and through my content but I have realised that it has mostly been scattering shards of what feels like the wholeness of the thing.

Until fairly recently this had a very practical reason. Since as long as I can remember I have had the experience of taking care of the people around me – including my caregivers – and changing my experience to fit with what will best comfort and support them, rather than be able to share my authentic experience.

Truth is complex, nuanced and scary for people.

My experiences, beliefs and feelings are disruptive and hard to imagine or parse. They tend to hit up against people’s egos pretty quickly. Historically it has been safer, more productive and more meaningful to hide most of it away and only share what I think the other person can handle.

I’ve put a lot of effort into finding ways to push the boundary of this and also had the gift of meeting people who explicitly wanted to disrupt this pattern and welcome the whole of me.

It’s not been without its challenges and limitations; my experiences and perspectives are genuinely overwhelming and confusing for people and they’re often painful and confusing for me to unpack, I have spent a lot of time in the incredibly deep pain of my reality disconnecting from everyone around me and the terror of never being able to reconnect my experiences with society in a meaningful way.

For the moments when I have been accompanied by others on this journey, it’s been very rich to share and I’m very grateful to all the people who have been there for me.

There’s also the practical detail that there’s a lot of content. In 2019 I spent 5 days on one retreat before I was asked to leave, due to strange behaviour. The state of consciousness I was in at the time and the amount of material I was processing felt like I lived out as much content as every character in all eight series of Game of Thrones. I barely slept, every moment was somatic, synchronistic, psychedelic, immersive, magical, mystical, insightful, emotional, painful, ridiculous and the most important thing in the world, all at once.

After this retreat, I went on to spend months and then years in this state of consciousness. Sometimes I feel like I’m billions of years old.

Time is a funny thing. In one way it is undeniably what shapes our experience and in another way it can take many shapes and forms. Getting closer to the truth of experience requires a relaxation around how we understand things playing out.

It also feels like a huge gift and relief to be mostly back in the normal perception and flow of time and creating this timeline feels like a nod towards and a welcoming of this.

I have included a short summary of my earlier years in order to give some context of my life before going into the awakening experiences.

There is a level of detail and precision in my experience that emerges from simultaneously zooming in with a high-grade microscope on every possible aspect of life and zooming out to the most cosmic scale. Every word on this timeline could be a portal into an entire eco-system of stories, meaning and knowledge. For the sake of brevity and clarity, I have kept to the most headline level that I felt would still be meaningful.

“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”

Carl Jung

1. Early Experiences

October 1990 - 2005
Childhood
I was brought up as an atheist and strong scientific materialist but I had a philosophical urge in me for as long as I can remember; as a young child I would think about ethics and the world deeply, for example, how the Universe could be a brain that was designed to understand something or a system designed to experience itself.

My family system was a strange mix, where I took on a lot of emotional responsibility and was both deeply appreciated and neglected.

I had access to jhanic states, using fantasy as my concentration object. I was naturally very selfless, loving and giving with a strong tendency to dissolve my experience and perspectives into the collective, but would struggle to manage the boundaries of this and would suddenly get incredibly angry or overwhelmed from the weight of everything I was carrying.

I was born with a lot of the qualities and experiences that many people describe as awakening or enlightenment. I was highly sensitive and carried a lot of trauma in my body.
2005 - 2008
Teenager
I was very successful and well-liked at school and in sports. As I developed very close friendships with people it started to become apparent that I was experiencing the world in a different way to other people and some of my childhood and cosmic trauma started to come to the fore.

I didn’t have the understanding or words to connect with the large majority of my experience.

I took a lot of psychedelic drugs. I had some terrible mushroom trips into hell. I took MDMA and realised that it was pretty close to my normal experience. But the main drug I took was Salvia. Salvia is one of the strongest drugs there is, it can entirely scramble your understanding of what reality is. Most people take it once and never want to touch it again. I experienced many ego deaths and break-throughs in this time, but because of the social and cultural context that I was in I just related to them as interesting drug experiences.

My mum died when I was 17.
2008 - 2015
Early 20s
I got into a serious relationship and became very committed to developing a meaningful life – a rewarding career, deep friendships, healthiness and wholeness.

While I felt very called to do a ten day Vipassana retreat while travelling in Asia, I had a couple of incredibly overwhelming meditative experiences from one-off guidances. My sense of reality completely dissolved and dismantled and I was smashed with hours of intense grief afterwards with no context for what was happening, so I ultimately decided to steer clear of meditation.

I got very fit and refined my diet very carefully to help me overcome my lifelong chronic fatigue. I got therapy to help process some of my trauma.
Early 2015
Intense Spiritual Experiences
I got a bad concussion while snowboarding and it scrambled my brain and experience. I lost my capacity to hold myself together for the benefit of other people and realised how unhappy I’d been for a long time. Moments of suicidal depression rolled through, alongside feeling very lost.

I quit my job to do some travel and experienced a wide-range of intense spiritual experiences; energetic openings, non-dual experiences, spiritual meaning and purpose, incredible synchronicities.

The concussion was on the lower back of my head, which in spiritual contexts I have heard called the gateway between the body, heart and mind. On a metaphorical level it felt like the floodgates had opened and I could no longer ignore what my heart and body were feeling. But I was still very heavily entrenched in a rational culture and explained away most of my experiences.
June 2015
Stream Entry
Returning from travel, I went back to work but I was still struggling with feeling very lost and depressed.

I was recommended to try Shadow Work Therapy and immediately booked onto a group retreat. I experienced lots of shamanic, energetic and imaginal experiences during the group work and when it was my turn to do a process I went through what I relate to as Stream Entry.

I experienced compassion and space-holding beyond what I thought was possible, and unearthed a part of me that had been deeply buried beyond what the light could reach.

Connecting to this part created a non-dual experience with the darkness that created a cessation and I emerged out the other side with a meta-realisation that experience doesn’t belong to me in the way I thought and that it is ultimately a process of witnessing, purifying and loving the emotions and energies within us, no matter how dark, in order to create spaciousness and openness to experience.

At this moment I realised that I was going to dedicate my life to meeting all my experience in this way until it was done.

This was the birth of my combining of Buddhist emptiness and Jungian spirituality.
Late 2015 - 2018
Deepening
I started paying attention to all experience in this way – undoing resistances and habit energies. Bringing myself into the present moment with as much embodied compassion and awareness as possible.

Through both therapy and my own practice I dedicated myself to feeling and seeing the depths and breadth of whatever was present in my experience. My mantra was, ‘the way out is through’.

During this time my dad’s alcoholism, which he suffered from my whole life, got worse and he eventually died from alcohol poisoning.

2. Spiritual Awakening

May - October 2018
Deep Practice
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.

At almost exactly the same time, I discovered ‘Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha’ and the ‘Deconstructing Yourself’ podcast, which suddenly gave me a way of relating to and understanding my experiences during meditation and some tools for practicing.

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. My practice would be counting breaths and becoming incredibly concentrated and then focusing on the deepest resistance I could find in experience to try and melt it and welcome what was underneath. I would spend entire meditation sessions crying and would leave them feeling lighter or clearer.

Ultimately the practice was about becoming more and more present to everything to discover what was the truth or at the bottom of experience, with the belief that all experience was fundamentally good or luminous underneath.

I had a lot of shamanic or magical experiences. I would often feel connected with other people’s experience during meditation on an energetic level; I would be taken on imaginal journeys and afterwards they would report back experiences that had appeared in the journey I went on.
October - December 2018
Enlightenments
My practice deepened and I ended up in a deep state of equanimity for 6 weeks. It was almost as if I stopped responding to the world around me in the ways I had learned to do so.

While listening to a recorded dharma talk by Rob Burbea, I experienced a moment of total non-duality – it was perceiving how every single thing in the Universe that had happened and was going to happen, including my experiences, were happening all at once in that one moment. This broke my phase of equanimity and there was a clear difference in how I felt in the world before and after this moment. I felt permanently a lot freer in the expression of what was inside me and less separate to what was around me.

During a retreat shortly after this I had a huge kundalini awakening. The first phase was opening my root chakra to a connection with the earth and being flooded with erotic energy 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, I spent 6 weeks in a total bliss state, entirely free from all suffering. I only needed to sleep for four hours a night and had so much energy moving through my system I would regularly give my husband electric shocks.

It also deepened my detachment from normal consensus reality. 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.

I maintained a strong focus on emptiness, rationality and being open to receiving experience without judgement. There wasn’t anyone around me who I could share this with, so I kept it all inside.
January - June 2019
Non-Dual Life
I emerged from the bliss state and experienced quite a lot of deep pain in the energy and emotional body. I was processing stuff at a much deeper level and could feel the effect on my wellbeing.

I went on some retreats, during which I would spend the whole time in an experience that felt like a strong dose of psychedelics, as well as going through incredibly challenging stuff which included suicidal desires and physical pain at the limit of what I had experienced before.

I spent a lot of time unpicking and unpacking cause and effect. I was very tuned in to the magical and archetypal aspect of experience and it was important to me to understand what I was able to influence – this became a thread over the next couple of years that required unpacking much more deeply than I possibly could have imagined.

I came across the mantra, ‘God, show me things as they are’ and this became my North Star. I was willing to do and face anything that was required.

All aspects of my life and experience began weaving into this story as I unhinged further and further from consensus reality and it became the most important thing to me. I left my husband and my life in order to be able to follow the thing to the end.
June - September 2019
Only This Moment
During the retreat I mentioned in the introduction, I fell into a sustained state of consciousness where I was only in the present moment. I had no concept of time, the past, the present or that I was a person with a life.

My entire experience became a shamanic journey. When I was asked to leave the retreat for behaving strangely and told to contact the Crisis Mental Health team, I severed my outer experience from my inner experience. The outer version of me continued to function relatively normally while the inner version of my experience was like a continuous psychedelic trip where the whole world was a magical realm revealing itself to me. I was determined to integrate every aspect of experience, in what was unequivocally a cosmic mission for the benefit of all beings.

Every moment was a synchronistic and magical journey and I followed the stream and guidance of the thing to almost impossible places. I experienced rich, complex and deeply revealing inner journeys in my perceptions and imagination that expanded far beyond the usual realms and that felt as real as the experience of typing this for you right now.

The toll of all this on my body and mind was beyond what can be possibly imagined. The psychosis left me in a permanent state of confusion that was painful beyond belief. Without exaggerating or feeling sorry for myself, I can clearly say that I had the worst experiences of my life so far during this time, by a factor of many thousands.

I also experienced incredibly pleasurable states that resourced my body through a lot – I would spend hours in bliss and energetically orgasmic states. All the while, I was instilled with the deepest and clearest sense of purpose and meaning in every moment.

There was nowhere for experience to land as I was taken on a journey through purifying some of the darkest energies and being shown the emptiness of every perception it is possible to hold. There was no break.

Throughout this time I always believed that I was a day or two away from everything being resolved and this was the only thing that made it possible to bear being in this state of consciousness. I almost never slept for more than 2 hours at a time and it was like being in a hurricane of chaos 24/7.
October 2019 - September 2020
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 this year was the embodiment of that phrase.

I have very little memory of this time. Every moment was still like an intense psychedelic trip that was slowly unravelling experience but it 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. It is all the preverbal habit energies that we carry. So much exists within the energetic and bodily level of your being and this is a large part of what I was here to integrate.

The change was impossibly tough on the 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. If the usual spiritual move is to turn the devil away, mine was to love the devil.

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. 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 living on my own, in a part of the country where I didn’t know anyone, which left me the freedom to go through this on my own. I didn’t feel like it was safe to share this with anyone, because I knew that no-one would be able to handle the full weight of it and my social state was so fragile that I didn’t think I would survive being dropped.

I was desperately lonely and spent a long time wanting to be dead, but not having the mental capacity or physical energy to be able to find a way to do it.

In Spring 2020 I found some energy to write and started to create the content that makes up this website. This felt vitally important.

My consciousness and experience went through vast phases; I forgot and had to relearn every word 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 – 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.

3. Integration

2021
Integration & Recovery
Things slowed down a bit at the end of 2020 and after a short stay in Purgatory, I started 2021 with the deep realisation that I was not going to be magically rescued by the Universe and there was no easy way out. I was going to have to build the solution on my own, step-by-step, facing all the challenges that that incorporated along the way.

This started by recognising how different my inner reality and outer realities were. It was like being in two different Universes, which were so utterly irreconcilable that one created a complete blind spot of the other. Up until that point I hadn’t been able to see the chasm between them because they were so far apart that they couldn’t even be held in the same thought.

This is the space where Shared Imaginal Practice emerged from. Noticing how my experience was so fundamentally different and how much value lay in the world I had uncovered, I created a bridge that allowed people to come into the mystical world of meaning that I had discovered and experience it for themselves. This was deeply fun, impactful and reassuring.

Connecting my inner world back to the rational world – reconciling how my personal experiences made sense when talked about in the outer world – was both deeply healing and utterly terrifying. It was like the most precise, high-stakes and complicated nuclear waste removal project. Revisiting the different aspects of what I’d been through and sharing my direct experience more openly, one messy and soul-wrenching step at a time. This involved going through some aspects of the experiences I’d had again and connecting how they landed in the social context, including hell realms and other challenging experiences. I’m grateful for people’s support and interest through this.

In the middle of the year I went on personal retreat. My body and heart was in absolute tatters; I collapsed and slept pretty much solidly for two months. During this time my experience landed much more solidly in physical reality and I got my first experiences of real stability after this.

In the latter half of the year I deepened a sense of community and spent some time in person with people who knew me well. There was a sense of retrieving the parts of me that had been left behind in the hell realms and concentrating on building deep and meaningful relationships with people.

I got a lot of body work to help piece myself back together physically.

Part of the experience has always been understanding the importance of documenting and sharing the important parts of experience I embody. A deep faith in the Universes’ collective cosmic intelligence is at the centre of my experience and I continue to follow this thread.
January - May 2022
Emergence
From a place of health and wholeness, I started to vision more clearly what was needed for a truly thriving version of myself and what I wanted to bring into the world.

The thing I value most is human connection and collaboration and so I gathered together all the incredible beings that I had encountered so far to explore a project together – The Journey That Opens the World. I wanted to create the space for more connection and exploration for people who had been exploring adjacent themes or had been impacted by my work, as well as offer my support for others to thrive.

During this time I rested more, spent more time with people in person, continued to coach and guide others and delved more deeply into the ideas and expressions of what wanted to emerge from my experiences and in connection with others.

What Is It Like Going Mad?

Navigation

Timeline of Events

1. Early Experiences

October 1990 - 2005

2005 - 2008

2008 - 2015

Early 2015

June 2015

Late 2015 - 2018

2. Spiritual Awakening

May - October 2018

October - December 2018

January - June 2019

June - September 2019

October 2019 - September 2020

3. Integration

2021

January - May 2022

Navigation

Body

Heart

Mind

Soul

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