Merging the Path of Awakening and the Realm of Souls and Spirits

I have often had conversations about the differences between “my” path, which involves exposure to karmic inheritance, ancestral and past life trauma, psychic intuition, energy medicine, and spirit teams, and the path of awakening to true consciousness beyond the ego. I have wrestled with these ideas and have been unsure how to resolve them as my own path took shape. The following is based on recent thoughts regarding these paths. If you have ever read the likes of Eckhart Tolle, Michael Singer, Byron Katie, or the numerous other spiritual teachers who identify with a path of Oneness and awakening, you have likely recognized themes in their teachings. The teachings identify a level of consciousness that recognizes the inherent illusion of the thinking mind as well as the emotional body, and emphasize a pure state of bliss radiating out at all times regardless of external circumstance once you let go of attachment. The teachings identify the ego, or attachment to personal identity, as the biggest illusion of our perceived reality and the crux of all suffering. Upon releasing attachment to the ego, spiritual teachers describe a profound process of “waking up” to your true nature and the true nature of reality - ultimately not separate - with you as the witness, the higher Self, and pure conscious awareness. Within this realm, all paradoxes and inner and outer conflicts are resolved by a deepest knowing of Truth. The awakening experiences come in all different shapes and sizes, some in a flash with no apparent preparatory work or seeking, and some after years of meditative study or search. I know this summation is severely lacking in the nuance of these deeply personal stories, but those are some highlights as I see them. I was introduced to these ideas at a young age by my father who still abides by these teachings and has shaped a worldview around them. We have often discussed how our paths intersect and where they bump up against one another. For years as a teen and later as a young adult, I was either explicitly attempting to follow this path or align with it somewhere in the back of my mind as a guiding philosophy for happiness. However, I simply could not find my way. There are many reasons for this beyond the linear or logical reasoning I identify with, but my primary reasoning was that my body was simply too traumatized and dysregulated to address the sickness in my thinking directly. I had no tools outside of sitting quietly to truly alter and expand my conscious awareness. On an intellectual level, I understood the ideas quite well. I knew from a very young age that I was not my thinking and I could even feel my awareness behind the thinking, and yet, it still plagued me to no end. Grasping the intellectual idea of who “I” was did not seem to end the onslaught of pain brought on by my thinking and, furthermore, by my conditioned beliefs and associated bodily emotions. I was stuck in a cycle of seeking and suffering which led me down several unhealthy rabbit holes of coping and escape. In the following paragraphs, I will acknowledge some of the reasons, beyond my “too traumatized” explanation, I believe I was meant to take the path that unfolded for me and why it may not yet look like the “traditional” form of waking up. I will also acknowledge how I see these paths intersecting as one collective mission.

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.

When my path led me to the world of clinical psychology, I was profoundly sick in the body and guided to mind body medicine as an answer to the “chronic illness” that was both diagnosed and heavily misunderstood by traditional western medicine. Through this path, along with exposure to classic psychoanalytic ideas in my training, I resonated with the notion of physical symptoms as a manifestation of unresolved emotional traumas in the body. With this burgeoning awareness of the mind-body connection, I began to awaken to these principles and address this connection with the tools available to me. I became familiar with like-minded practitioners, read books, and cleaned up certain behaviors that were keeping my mind and body riddled with pain. I eventually revisited long-term psychotherapy with the intention to integrate my trauma and heal this condition. I practiced modalities like somatic tracking and learned about breathwork and polyvagal theory, all body-focused mechanisms of accessing trauma and bringing safety to the nervous system. Contrary to sitting quietly with the thinking mind, I discovered another entry point - the body. I learned about how profoundly fearful I had been most of my life and how my body remained a frightened child, unable to see the light. The sadness and fear that pervaded my view started to lift and for the first time in my life I started to see the benefits of therapeutic work. However, at a certain point the work became incredibly effortful and my healing was dishearteningly slow. At the tail end of my clinical training and 10+ years into navigating this condition, my experience had shifted from where it started but was still manifesting in heavy sickness weekly. I knew it my heart it was time for a change. Thus began the most transformative period of my life. I left my traditional therapy and soon after, I left my traditional job. It became increasingly clear that fear was still the driving force behind my life, fueled by conditioned beliefs and the thinking mind, which required real world action steps and exposure to a new paradigm. While I had learned many things about the mind and body, including a deeper understanding of the nervous system and how emotions are stored in the body, in addition to exploring my early attachment relationships and practicing body-based modalities, I was still profoundly fearful and dragging my scared little child self through the world unprotected without a sense of the true power and possibility waiting for me.

At this point in the journey, I began to open up to healers with other ways of knowing, including self-described intuitive, clairvoyants, shamans, ancestral and past life readers, reiki masters, and energy healers. My body had always responded to these kinds of healings but I was never quite sure what to make of them, the doubting and clinically trained part of my brain reacted in protest and attempted to keep me from fully embracing these openings. I tried for awhile to keep these experiences separate from my “real” therapeutic work as a professional, but at a certain point, there was no denying that this work was a powerful force needing to be explored in my life. A turning point came when a healer was introduced to me who opened up space for me to heal the “illness” that was still plaguing my life so many years later. From these healings, I could feel my consciousness expanding and a deeper trust and conviction in my ability to heal. With all the work and study I had done, I still had very little trust in the possibilities for my health and often considered managing this “illness” for the remainder of my life. During my early twenties, I had spent many hours in meditation, including a 5-day silent retreat of walking and sitting meditation in the Vipasana tradition during one graduate school break. Though I had found solace in some of the spiritual practices of buddhist philosophy and western spiritual teachers, I had not come close to embodying peace in the way they spoke about in the books of my adolescence, such as The Power of Now and The Four Agreements. I am not saying I explored and experienced all there is in the world of spiritual seeking through such teachings, but I am saying that I gave it an honest try, and it was not until profound experiences of intuitive and energy medicine that I could literally feel my body lightening and a deeper knowing emerging, as if the truth of who I am was being called forth.

From these experiences, I began to develop my own spiritual practice, different from the more traditional styles of meditation I had learned previously. These practices involved cultivating intuition and actually questioning and listening to the body, as well as energetic practices of clearing out and channeling. I was able to recognize the debilitating fear and anxiety as an energy source fueling my brain, conditioned by not only early life experience but also ancestral and karmic inheritance. While the teachers I had read growing up had not gone into the depths of such astrological and karmic worlds, most acknowledged reincarnation as part of the soul’s journey, and these openings gave me an expanded view of my suffering rather than the more simplistic entry way of “you are not your thinking.” Again, these ideas are powerful but I had not been able to truly embody this practice and come back to a style of meditation that was successful for me until I learned how to visualize and channel energy in the body. The work of healers and teachers like Joe Dispenza and Donny Epstein were hugely influential on this alternate path to meditative and body healing practices. Even breathwork masters like Wim Hof provided new access to states of being I had not grasped through simply sitting quietly with painful thoughts. I needed more direction, more guidance, and more framework for my Western mind to comprehend the nature of “trauma,” which had become too big and too buzzy a word even for someone with years of clinical training. In the traditional psychological world, trauma is studied and talked about to death, but actual healing practices are few and far between. Essentially, all paths lead to some form of exposure, but the way to that exposure requires an entry point that works for you. For me, the intuitive realms got me there and invited me to see my own intuitive gifts in the process, which allowed me to further own my power and chart my own path, healing deep wounds of insecurity and unworthiness along the way. One one level, the primary communication of my body’s disease was that I was not aligned with my highest truth and needed to break through some limitations around what I came into this world to do.

As I sit here now reflecting on these paths, I do not see the energetic, intuitive, and astrological realms as separate from the path of awakening to Truth beyond the ego. Rather, I see it as one path to higher states of consciousness that eventually meets back in a pursuit of oneness and wholeness. The realms I have explored have ultimately given me the guidance and opening to address very basic hurts and pains I have held onto for a long time. Though the other literature and teachings addressed these very same concepts, it was not until the style of energetic practice and intuitive reading came into my life that I was able to integrate such wisdom and practically apply it to my life. I could see myself - body, mind, and spirit - begin to change before I my eyes. I began to let go of control of who I thought “I” was and became more of a mystery to myself as these changes took root. At times, it has been confusing, fearful, and challenging not only for me but for my loved ones as my ideas and identity began to expand so rapidly. However, my life has transformed more than I ever thought possible as a result, with less fear and more bliss than I have ever known. Some may not need these realms to get there, but for me these frameworks supported my journey and greatly influenced the way that I am able to serve others. The truth is, many people have psychic and intuitive experiences that are dismissed or considered pathological by more traditional fields of science and healing. Therefore, it is important to welcome in these experiences as further support for awakening beyond the conditioned source of knowing - the thinking brain - and into deeper sources of knowing in alignment with Spirit and ultimate consciousness. I believe my path syncs back up nicely with the profound truths of recognizing the thoughts are not you, all paths lead to loving kindness, and and you are the witness to Spirit’s divine plan. I just needed a different form of guidance to get there and to continue going there. I do not claim to have achieved anything beyond what my current experience dictates, only to share that all paths lead to one. The frameworks, the language, the tools, and the style of exploration may all look different, but the goals are the same. I will also add that astrological, intuitive, and energetic spiritualism can also function as an escape. The work provides a whole new playground to explore and to potentially get attached to and lost in. It is magical and enticing and you can easily get caught up in the identities of “psychic” and “clairvoyant” and this or that kind of healer. It seems to convey special Harry Potter or X-men like abilities that create a romantic vision of these capacities. You may see this work plastered all over social media with quips like “you can manifest the life of your dreams.” I do not dismiss or ignore the gifts of these individuals and I engage in some of it myself; however, there is no free lunch. There is no escaping the human experience no matter how intuitive you are. The answers come through witnessing experience. And for those who have appeared to simply “wake up” in this lifetime, it is my view that they have done lifetimes of work in lives past to get to this point. As souls, we all learn the same lessons and as spirits being human, we all must navigate the pains of being embodied no matter how connected or aligned we become to Spirit.

With that said, part of my journey into more energetic realms is knowing that the possibilities for health and healing are way beyond what traditional western medicine considers possible at this time and even what other forms of traditional buddhist teachings may acknowledge or address. I have personally witnessed healing beyond the realms of medical explanation and as a result am called to share this with the world through such powerful energetic and intuitive channels. Ultimately, it is important to recognize that the body is no more your identity than the mind; however, while we have to live in it we can use it as the powerful tool that it is to expand greatly into higher realms of understanding. As David Hawkins says, the only real death is ego death. Once the body dies, as dramatic and painful as it may be, the soul returns to a higher realm of consciousness until it once again merges with its ultimate Home, the place we all come from, inherently are, and will one day return.

So, this is my attempt at integrating seemingly disparate paths of healing, one that appears to emerge from a more disciplined, unflashy lineage of stillness and self-love, albeit moments of incredible awakening and bliss described by the teachers of our time, and another that appears to live in the realm of magic and mysticism, complete with angels, spirit guides, and psychic transmissions. In the end, I believe we all desire the same things: a deeper understanding and truth of our existence, relief from suffering, and access to eternal bliss. Find the entry point that lights you up and go toward it with reckless abandon. Practice trusting that there may be more possibilities to who you are, what you are capable of, and your experience in this life than you have given credit until now. Your path does not have to look like mine or the Buddha’s or the Zen masters or the psychic witches or anyone else’s. You are here to cultivate a brave, new vision that only you can discover. Your Truth is waiting for you.