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“To the superficial observer, it will appear like madness”

– C.G. Jung, The Red Book

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Dedication

For the undercover mystics:

• The engineers meditating in their home office.
• The professionals experiencing kriyas they can’t explain.
• The rational minds falling in love with the Formless.
• The ones torn in half between worlds.
• The ones who think they’re going crazy.

You’re not crazy.

This is awakening.

You’re not alone.

---

And for the mystics who came before:

• Who died for speaking truth.
• Who were burned, imprisoned, silenced.
• Who left breadcrumbs in the dark.

I found them.

These are mine.

For whoever comes next.

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Disclaimer

This document contains descriptions of mystical experiences, spontaneous physical phenomena (kriyas), and altered states of consciousness that arose through meditation practice. It is offered as documentation and personal testimony, not as medical or psychological advice.

If you experience concerning physical or psychological symptoms during spiritual practice, please consult qualified healthcare professionals.

The author is not a licensed therapist, medical doctor, or ordained spiritual teacher. This is a field report, not a prescription.

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How to Use This Document

This is not a book to read cover-to-cover (though you can). This is not a manual with step-by-step instructions (there are none). This is not a guru’s teaching from the mountaintop (I’m still climbing).

This is a collection of field notes from the messy middle of spiritual awakening—written in real-time by someone who started meditating for burnout and accidentally fell in love with God.

Navigation by Depth

The content is organized by “Levels” based on accessibility and intensity:

→ LEVEL 0: TECHNICAL Start here if you’re skeptical, burned out, or new to meditation. Grounded. Practical. Evidence-based. Topics: burnout, stress, why meditation actually works

→ LEVEL 1: TRANSITIONAL
Read this when meditation stops being “just stress relief.” The worldview starts cracking. Things get interesting. Topics: strange experiences, falling in love with practice, the double life

→ LEVEL 2: MYSTICAL Enter when you can’t turn back anymore. Longing. Dark Nights. Poetry. Devotion. Topics: bhakti, the ghosting, falling in love with the Formless

→ LEVEL 3: UNION Direct transmission. Boundaries dissolve. Sacred sexuality, spontaneous kriyas, non-dual awareness. Enter only when ready. Content warnings apply.

→ FIELD NOTES Short observations. Quick recognitions. Breadcrumbs. Read these when you need a “me too” moment.

How to Read

• If you’re curious → Start at Level 0 and work your way down
• If you’re already deep in the messy middle → Jump to wherever resonates
• If you’re researching modern mysticism → Read chronologically for developmental arc

What This is Not

This is not a how-to guide. I can’t give you reproducible steps to enlightenment because spiritual awakening doesn’t work that way. (See Field Note: “The Replication Crisis”)

This is not safe, sanitized spirituality. It’s raw. Sometimes uncomfortable. Sometimes explicitly about things “nice spiritual ladies” aren’t supposed to discuss.

This is not written from the end of the journey. I’m documenting AS I go, which means I don’t know how this ends. That’s the point.

What This is

• Proof that this happens to ordinary people.
• Proof that the ancient texts are describing real, reproducible phenomena.
• Proof that you’re not alone in the messy middle.

Read what resonates. Skip what doesn’t. Return when you’re ready.

The field notes will be here.

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About the Author

I’m a software engineer who started meditating in 2022 to fix my burnout. I was looking for stress relief.

Instead, I accidentally dismantled my entire worldview.

For a decade, I’ve built systems, debugged code, and lived by logic. I am a Virgo Sun, a Senior Engineer, and a skeptic by trade.

Over 3.5 years, I went from agnostic workaholic to… whatever this is. Someone who writes love poetry to the Divine at 2 AM. Someone hiding the grief of “the Dark Night of the Soul” because it’s too difficult to explain. Someone experiencing spontaneous kriyas during meditation. Someone navigating mystical union while trying to act normal in morning stand-ups and in my marriage.

I spent years thinking I was living a double life—torn between the person everyone knew and the heart beating under the floorboards.

I’m not a guru. I’m not enlightened. I don’t have a certification in anything spiritual.

I’m an engineer with who approached meditation with the same rigor I approach debugging code—and discovered that the mystical experiences described in ancient texts are real, reproducible, and happening to ordinary people right now.

This document is my attempt to create the field notes I wish I’d had when meditation stopped being stress relief and started becoming something I couldn’t explain.

I write under a pen name because I’m still navigating a double life— engineer by day, mystic by night. Maybe someday that won’t be necessary. For now, anonymity allows honesty.

If you’re reading this and recognizing yourself in these experiences:

You’re not crazy. This is real. You’re not alone.

Welcome to the messy middle.

— “Technically Mystic”, the Field Reporter

January 2026

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Introduction

Why These Notes Exist

We have plenty of books by gurus who’ve reached the mountaintop. We have countless manuals on how to meditate. We have beautiful memoirs written after the journey is complete.

But where are the field notes from the messy middle?

Where’s the documentation for the part where you’re halfway up the mountain, terrified, exhausted, wondering if you’re losing your mind or finally waking up?

Where’s the guide for when meditation stops being stress relief and starts being… something you can’t explain to your spouse, your therapist, or yourself?

Where’s the voice saying: “This happened to me too. Here’s what it looked like. You’re not crazy.”

I couldn’t find those notes.

So I’m writing them.

---

This project started as private journaling—the “secret insanity” I was too afraid to share. Over 3.5 years, it evolved into systematic documentation. Then into a Substack. Now into this compilation.

Why compile it at all?

Because platforms die. Servers crash. Substack might not exist in 10 years, let alone 100.

But a PDF can be copied. Shared. Preserved. Found by someone who needs it in 2045 or 2150, long after I’m gone.

This isn’t for fame. This isn’t for validation.

This is for the person googling “why does my spine move during meditation” at 2 AM, terrified they’re having a seizure.

This is for the engineer who meditates for burnout and accidentally falls in love with Something they can’t prove exists.

This is for the undercover mystic living a double life, convinced they’re the only one.

You’re not.

---

What you’ll find here:

• Honest documentation of what spiritual awakening looks like for a 21st century American woman with a day job
• Cross-referencing of mystical experiences with ancient texts (because I needed proof I wasn’t making this up)
• The messy parts—relationship strain, fear of being seen as delusional, the terror of vulnerability
• Poetry that fell out of meditation
• Field notes from the journey, not instructions for how to take it

What you won’t find here:

• A step-by-step enlightenment manual (doesn’t exist)
• Cleaned-up, sanitized spirituality (this is raw)
• Certainty about what’s happening (I’m figuring it out as I go)
• Claims of expertise (I’m a field reporter, not a guru)

---

If you’re reading this in 202X, know that you’re part of a quiet revolution. Burnout is epidemic. Systems are failing. People are turning inward out of necessity—and discovering that the mystical experiences described in ancient texts are still happening. Right now. To ordinary people.

If you’re reading this in 2050, 2100, 2150—I don’t know what your world looks like. But if you’re searching for evidence that direct mystical experience was possible in early 21st century America, despite the commodification and sanitization of everything sacred:

Here’s your proof.

It happened.

It’s happening.

It will keep happening.

Because the Divine doesn’t stop calling just because the culture stops listening.

---

These are my breadcrumbs in the dark.

May they help you find your way.

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Who Am I

Posted: Oct 8, 2026

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I stirred when I turned inward and asked: “Who am I?” Not “What am I?” Not “Why am I?” But “Who am I?”

And then the Who, the What, and the Why collapsed inwards onto themselves: I Am … (The word does not come.)

Collapsing further: the When and Where into Now and Here.

Collapsing…

To the beginning.

The backdrop of everything.

(The words… gone…)

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Level 0 - Technical

Burnout, skepticism, and the rational analysis of spiritual phenomena. This is where I try to make sense of the “woo” without losing my grounding.

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The Engine(er) Is Smoking: A Survival Guide for Tech Burnout

Subtitle: [Level 0: Technical] The guide I wish I’d had back in 2022 / Here’s how to not die at your desk

Posted: Nov 13, 2025

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Update (Dec 20, 2025): This is Level 0: Technical. For Level 1: Transitional, read the sequel: God is a Cosmic Masochist—A Meditation on Numbing.

Something that’s come to my attention within the recent years is how prevalent burnout is becoming in the workplace, particularly in tech (which is the only one I really have insight into given being in the tech space for a decade now). The world is churning people up and spitting them out, and most don’t even realize they’re burning until they’re already ash.

In this guide, you’ll learn:

1. How to recognize if you’re burning out (before it’s too late)
2. Two evidence-based practices that actually help
3. Why these work (the science behind completing the stress cycle)
4. How to start today (with a low bar you can actually clear)

It’s not just you

At first I thought it was just me 4 years ago with 2 projects killed back-to-back within the span of 2 years as I was gunning for a promotion to staff-level (went up to 3 axed projects in a row as of 2 years ago, but this time I actually wanted it to be killed… maybe more on that in another post).

But as I talked to more of my friend network in the field, the more I noticed people:

• “crashing out” (at least, a former teammate used those exact words to describe it for them, another had a manic break that shook their entire life up and moved away)
• submitting notice with no jobs lined up to take an intentional gap in employment (a former coworker spent half a year with aging parents and traveling to decompress)
• retiring early / “Barista FIRE” (one former coworker decided to become a crossfit trainer for example, even AFTER a 2 month sabbatical)
• trying to swap out of a toxic job while juggling both scrum meetings and interviews all while getting heat from their manager in 1-on-1s for not meeting expectations under the unreasonable demands (you know who you are)
• OR, at the very least, considering how to make an exit from their current job / switch fields into something else entirely

I realized it wasn’t just my network when my favorite Harvard-educated psychiatrist and former-monk-in-training went on his channel earlier this year to do a video specifically on this topic. That was the moment when I went: “Oh shit. It’s not just us struggling”.

What can we do?

Notice the smoke

The first step of handling burnout unequivocally is realizing you actually have it (or are on the way to it). The problem is that it’s hard to detect until you think you’re suffering from depression (this comes up in the video I’ll mention later).

There is a phase called “brownout” which is the usually undetected or ignored stage before getting to full-blown burnout where you can no longer perform basic self-care tasks because even that takes too much energy and you’re just completely spent.

Warning signs you’re approaching burnout (brownout phase):

• You can’t remember the last time you felt excited about your work
• Sleep doesn’t restore your energy anymore
• You’re irritable over small things that wouldn’t normally bother you
• You’re constantly tired, even on weekends
• You’re disconnected from people and activities you used to enjoy
• You’re going through the motions at work but feel no sense of accomplishment
• Self-care feels like “one more thing to do” instead of restful

Warning signs you’re IN burnout:

• You can barely function at basic tasks
• Getting out of bed feels impossible
• You’re experiencing physical symptoms (headaches, stomach issues, constant illness)
• You feel emotionally numb or constantly on the verge of crying
• You fantasize about quitting without a backup plan
• You can’t focus or make decisions
• You feel hopeless about things improving

For a deeper dive into recognizing these patterns, Dr. K’s video on burnout is excellent, but the above gives you the essentials. I cannot recommend enough that you watch this video, even if you don’t think you have burnout. The warning signs are all too easy to miss.

What actually works (and it’s simpler than you think)

I know you’re so exhausted that you’re stuck in the same routine because it requires the least thinking. It requires the least effort when you’re running on fumes. It’s automatic while you’re too busy thinking about the mountain of tasks that loom ahead of you, the never-ending stream of concerning news, the chores that need attending to at home, among many other worries that all add up to an overwhelming load before you even have your morning coffee.

I know because I was there. Hell, I’m still there on some days. Not all of us can just leave and never have to fix yet another last minute feature that product management promised a customer would be available by next quarter (can you tell I’ve considered using spirituality as an escape before?).

BUT…

There is a way to keep the engine from becoming engulfed in flames causing you to make a strategic emergency landing at best and an abrupt crash-landing at worst.

Moving your body (yes, that counts as exercise)

In a later book recommendation post I intend to write, this is the FIRST thing that comes up in the Burnout book by Emily and Amelia Nagoski. This book is, and I quote:

for women (or anyone) who has felt overwhelmed and exhausted by everything they have to do, yet still worried they weren’t doing “enough.”

(As a woman in tech, this book hit me like a brick.)

The first chapter of the book explicitly talks about exercise. It’s fundamental to complete the circuit on what they refer to as “the stress cycle”, addressing the “fight or flight” response we have built into us when we’re subject to:

• constant stressors (yes, even just responding to that Slack message from another coworker about that PR needing yet another rebase)
• unconscious microstressors of modern life, the “daily hassles” (think traffic, long lines, someone pinging you while you’re in the middle of debugging that pesky race condition that keeps messing up your unit tests).

To summarize the stress cycle:

• When you experience stress, your body activates the fight-or-flight response, releasing cortisol and adrenaline to prepare you to deal with a threat. (Maybe like me you’ve noticed from your fitness tracker / smart watch that your RHR is too high recently)
• In nature, this “stress cycle” completes when you physically respond: you fight the predator, you run away, the threat passes.
• The problem in modern life: Your body doesn’t know the difference between “saber-toothed tiger” and “passive-aggressive Slack message.” It floods you with stress hormones either way.
• But you don’t fight. You don’t run. You just… sit there at your desk trying to figure out when and how to respond. The stress hormones stay in your system, building up day after day.

To complete this cycle, your body needs a PHYSICAL outlet. For example:

• Walk around the block after a frustrating meeting
• Take the stairs instead of the elevator
• Dance to one song (maybe easier if you work from home)

The goal isn’t fitness. The goal is completing the stress cycle via physical movement so those stress hormones don’t stay trapped in your body.

Kurzgesagt also recently put out a great video on modern stress if you’re interested.

Sitting in silence (yes, meditation—but not what you think)

This might be survivor’s bias, but I can honestly say this made a world of difference for me. This is what I would recommend AFTER you’ve tried your best to get regular exercise or some form of physical movement in in direct response to a stressful conversation, meeting, or commute.

I want to emphasize that I AM NOT saying to go sit on a cushion and “focus on the breath” or whatever in RESPONSE to stress. That’s spiritual bypassing. However, ACTUALLY practicing breathwork (pranayama) such as box breathing or simply extending your exhales to be longer than the inhales DOES influence a physiological response to calm you down.

What I AM saying is that building meditation into your routine is immensely beneficial for your mental health. It strengthens the frontal lobes, the part of your brain that controls attention, applies the “brakes” for your amygdala (emotional center), and helps you make decisions… all things that are critical in managing and preventing burnout.

Options for what this could look like:

• Spending the first few minutes of the day only sitting quietly with only yourself when you first wake up as part of your “get ready for work” routine as soon as you roll out of bed, ideally before your brain really “turns on” instead of immediately checking the barrage of notifications / news updates, messages, whatever. Though, if it’s too ingrained as a habit, schedule a chunk of time on your calendar so it turns into an automatic notification reminder (or even schedule an alarm with a nice ringtone if you really need the ability to snooze it for a few minutes). I did the calendar event strategy (though now I no longer follow a strict schedule after several years of daily practice).
• Spending 5 minutes before or after eating your lunch to notice how you feel. Notice the hunger or fullness instead of operating from pure routine or rushing off to the next thing.
• Have your nightly wind-down include meditation. An effective practice is yoga nidra where you lie down and just rest. If you end up falling asleep, great! You needed it! Happens at my local studio all the time.

Doing nothing is hard!

Whether at the start or end of the day, thoughts are going to come. They’re going to snowball at first.

It’s because:

• You’re now NOTICING them. Many times we don’t even realize we’re thinking.
• These thoughts are now being allowed to finally surface after being suppressed with sensory stimuli for days, weeks, months, even years. When was the last time you even sat on the toilet without your phone? Maybe you even listen to podcasts in the shower or while on your commute to “stay up-to-date”?

BUT…

They will not keep snowballing. The surge will subside. This I interpret as the “poison” that comes up in the Hindu legend of the “churning of the ocean” to get to the “elixir of life” (amrita) at the bottom, what I understand as the mind for the “ocean” and the root of being for the “ocean floor” respectively.

The thoughts will become sparse and the gaps of that restful Nothingness will grow like watered seeds. I cannot tell you how long this takes because it directly depends how long you’ve been drowning out your own inner noise with outer noise. For increasingly more of us, that’s been getting longer and longer.

TL;DR

Burnout is growing in the workplace, especially if you’ve been in the field for several years.

My number one advice is to do what the Burnout book calls “the stress cycle” via exercise or physical movement to blow off steam.

The next is to make meditation part of your nonnegotiable self-care routine, as important as showering or eating. You are tending to your brain’s health by doing this and your overall body’s by extension.

You need to let your mind take out the proverbial “trash”, to digest the thoughts of the day (you may notice eventually this happens without your input!), or simply to create silence after waking up instead of a morning doomscroll sesh that creates a negative coloring over your whole already overwhelming day.

Thank you

My thanks for making it this far and I genuinely hope someone finds this post helpful. I needed to read this almost exactly 3 years ago when I was nearly crying at my desk from overwhelming pressure to deliver on a daunting and understaffed project to the point that I needed to take an immediate week off because I was barely functional. My hope is this reaches you before you get that far because not everyone is fortunate enough to have managers that will allow them to take time like this.

Don’t let yourself burnout.

You still have so much life to live and you should feel ALIVE for it, not a husk of a person that used to have motivation and dreams.

That “person” is still in there.

They’re at the bottom of the ocean waiting for you to meet them.

All it takes is some movement and some stillness.

Additional resources

Books

• [Previously mentioned] Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily Nagoski, PhD and Amelia Nagoski, DMA (non-Amazon link to the book: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/592377/burnout-by-emily-nagoski-phd-and-amelia-nagoski-dma/)

YouTube Shorts

(As you may have noticed, I have a strong bias towards Dr. K’s content because I don’t subscribe to many channels and try to stay off YouTube in general)

• Why do we burnout? https://youtube.com/shorts/-LE5q1GgkyU
• Why software devs keep burning out https://youtube.com/shorts/3IAQoduxAxM
• How to stop burnout at work https://youtube.com/shorts/BYVnZiL2ARo

P.S. for the seekers

I intend to do a more “spiritual” take on this on a future date because that’s kind of my schtick. This post is more geared towards the strivers like I once was (and honestly, still may be a bit deep down, albeit to a more sinisterly subtle degree now).

Update (Dec 20, 2025)

The “spiritual take” is now live. If you are ready to move from survival (Level 0) to transformation, read the sequel: God is a Cosmic Masochist—A Meditation on Numbing.

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How to Love Without Strangling

Subtitle: [Level 0: Technical] For when passion meets striving and becomes the obsession that strangles what you love.

Posted: Nov 17, 2025

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What happens when you don’t give the flame air, when you don’t let the fire breathe?

It goes out.

It took me exactly 5 days of working on something I truly loved (and falling asleep on the job from sheer exhaustion) to realize this. I woke up and cried as the pattern finally dawned on me.

I’m learning (painfully slowly) that:

• Passion doesn’t have to mean smothering
• Love doesn’t have to mean strangling
• You can be DEVOTED without being DESTROYED

I’m learning how to let the things I love… breathe.
That’s the training that’s still ongoing.

I hope to come back someday with my findings.

But for now, this is the field note: I saw the pattern. I’m in it. I’m learning.

Stay tuned.

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P.S.

Can we appreciate how this post even came?

1. “I want to meditate, but I’m tired from good work”
2. Pass out for 2 hours on my mat
3. Begrudgingly go to bed
4. Tears come out of nowhere
5. Sudden insight
6. Post flows out from said insight
7. I feel a little better

Apparently even the lessons about not strangling arrive by… not forcing them. Who knew.

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Part 1: When Meditation Stops Being Stress Relief

Subtitle: [Level 0: Technical] What happened when I stopped running from burnout and started turning inward

Posted: Nov 22, 2025

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On my burnout post, I mentioned in the P.S. that I would revisit this topic.

This is that post… or at least the first part of it.

It can happen to anyone

From those struggling to survive to those who labor and strive, no matter how much you do, there’s always the Next Thing looming in the distance, the finish line receding further and further away into the horizon.

Eventually the human spirit tires of chasing and wonders why it was ever running in the first place.

At one point, it was towards love, but now it only seems to be away from fear.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when that switch happened. Perhaps you can’t remember. I know I can’t.

Fear

Fear uses up a lot of life energy (the will to live) over long periods of time. In a burst, it can save your life in a dangerous situation, jolting you into action, urging you to move towards safety or defend yourself from an incoming attack.

But sustained even mildly over years and decades? You get where we currently are now. Numbed, disconnected, tired, and / or existentially exhausted. All of the above if you’ve already been reduced to ashes.

Ironically enough, resting is HARD at this point. Lying in bed, the thoughts are too loud. Maybe you can’t fall asleep so you drown it out with background noise while you drift off. Yet, even in dreams maybe you’re getting chased or stuck at the office as if working a double.

If the mind is such a hostile place when you’re trying to just rest, why would you want to sit with that during the day, especially when everything needs doing and you’re already running behind from exhaustion?

Something’s gotta give

Either you’re going to becoming a husk of a person going through the motions of the daily grind, your mind either too overactive or too numb to the point where you can no longer truly see what’s right in front of you. Or… you stop… and maybe even turn around to face the other way.

When you stop running, you realize:

• The next promotion will not bring you the peace.
• The next trip will not bring you the satisfaction.
• The next thing will wash right over you.
• And you will still be here.

I’m not saying to quit your job, stay home, or never try to have fun again. I’m also not saying that you should never run, especially if your life truly depends on it (though sometimes we don’t know if it actually does or not).

But if you’ve been chasing that Next Thing with the expectation that it will bring you joy, happiness, or contentment, you’ve already set yourself up for failure. This is what I did for my entire adult life. It’s something I still catch myself doing.

“If I just get this promotion…” “If I just make this much more money…” “If he would just propose…” “If we could just buy a house…”

I would torture myself so much over wanting the Next Thing and how I don’t have it right NOW. I’m a very impatient person, especially if I think I’ve put in enough effort for something. Historically, I’ve never been pleased with where I was and would be so miserable in the process of striving for the Next Thing that when things finally came together (due to time, herculean effort, sheer luck, profound grace, or some combination), I wouldn’t even be able to enjoy the results.

And exhaustive efforts with no perceived reward? A recipe for burnout:

“Maybe if I just do / have this instead… then I’ll be satisfied”.

Sound familiar?

Enough is enough

It took me multiple projects getting killed mere weeks before launch back to back within a couple years all while I was gunning for a promotion—which depended on a track record of successful projects—to realize my actions needed to be decoupled from my expectations; they were already decoupled from the results. I didn’t realize this at the time. I just thought I needed to “sublimate my driven ego”—something I knew conceptually that meditation was well-suited for according to Dr. K (my favorite Harvard educated former monk turned psychiatrist) from HealthyGamer.

I had decided in early 2022 after the rubble was settling from an acquisition to start meditating daily… and I was going to need help.

Community practice

This I think was the key. Had I started on my own with some simple guided meditations on a mindfulness app, I think I would have lost interest and fell off.

While counting the breath or visualizing a soothing scene works for some people, that kind of stuff didn’t land with me. I’d tried some things here and there before (YouTube in college for stress and well as Calm and Headspace at another point), but these helped only in a superficial way.

I joined the HealthyGamer Discord’s meditation channel, interested in the community participation and live guided sessions. I took part in these daily when I could and was introduced to new meditative practices including:

• samatha (calm abiding)
• metta (loving-kindess)
• neti-neti (not this, not this)
• and (my favorite) self-inquiry

Many others on the channel also resonated with self-inquiry to the point that the meditation lead took the time to compile an entire YouTube playlist on the topic. I binged all 30ish hours of it in one weekend. I was hooked.

Who are you?

I fell into a bit of a rabbit hole with self-inquiry around the end of April. Who am I if not anything I can witness?

Exactly a month after participating in these meditation sessions daily, I was going about my normal morning routine. I don’t normally talk out loud if by myself, especially in the shower, so I was a little confused why I suddenly said out loud:

“Who are you?”

Instantly, something beneath the usual mental chatter shot back with a crystal clear:

“That’s for me to know and you to find out!”

It stopped me in my tracks.

I hadn’t heard that phrase since my childhood. I had completely forgotten about it and yet here it was popping into my mind without any effort or prompt to “dig up” the memory. It was unsettling.

I brushed it aside shortly after, but mild curiosity persisted underneath.

Going deeper

Something was there, something I felt like I’d forgotten long ago, just like the quip in the shower. I was suddenly not so interested in mere stress relief and started craving something deeper.

I was then on the hunt for anything that could point the way: books, videos, lectures, podcasts. I wanted to dig deeper into my mind and beyond it into the stillness, into this sense of “Am-ness”.

About a month later, The Impersonal Life found me in its purest of forms: no cover, no author, no table-of-contents, no foreword… just a raw PDF that felt like it grabbed me. I remember the feeling of the hair on my arms standing on end as if my body was remembering something my mind was failing to process but something else even deeper recognized from my meditations, but in written word. Another weekend, another binge (still my favorite book, BTW).

The outer reaches of inner space

Now was the work of applying teachings. I couldn’t keep solely reading, listening, watching. I had to experience it for myself. Thus began my Jungian-style “psychonautics” (Red Book anyone?), sometimes assisted by a small edible. Later I learned cannabis has historical use as an entheogen.

This stirred up many archetypal images: the carp who became a dragon, the ouroboros, the shepherd, and finally, the Self. Now communication seemed to be established, albeit the signal wasn’t very clear this early on.

The dream

To reiterate, I originally started meditation because I was burnt out from efforts that were either thrown away or didn’t bring me joy.

As of late 2022, I was still trying to do well at work. I was at this point being asked to spearhead a new customer product with a next quarter due date for the beta according to the CEO.

Because of this, I was at my most stressed point yet in my career. Yet, I couldn’t seem to stop caring, striving, even when I felt like I was doomed to fail. I was too scared to let that happen, too terrified to not try.

After a month of frantic struggling to make headway on the mountain of work to come up to speed on the new technology and meet the deliverables, I was feeling as gray as the mid-December sky.

One day, I ended up waking up at 5 AM and wasn’t able to fall back asleep for an hour. As I was drifting off, something was telling me that I had to not rely solely on my brain for answers and to that, I internally approved of any answers that came forward from the rest of my being.

My mind then started to disconnect and it seemed to start talking on its own in snatches of speech. I didn’t take it too seriously and next thing I knew, I was in a vivid dream.

It was a warning of exactly what would happen if I continued down this path: staying late at the office fixing production bugs I caused, all sense of enthusiasm for life gone.

But it didn’t end there.

I was visited by a woman that spoke in a soothing language that captivated me in a trance. I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t understand the words, but understood the message of compassion.

Her touch on my heart felt like home and she sang a song that lulled me into a dream within the dream.

Her song accelerated into a waterfall of information that flashed before me against the blackness in white text, words appearing faster than lightning.

I tried to keep up, but it was no use. I only saw one word several times that I recognized just before it would disappear:

God.

I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t know what was happening. But I knew, somehow, that this wasn’t just a strange dream.

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Pissing Into a Serene Lake: A Meditation on Modern Yoga Culture

Subtitle: [Level 0: Technical] How the West turned union with the Divine into exotic stretching with a soundtrack

Posted: Nov 27, 2025

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“Ah yes, the soothing sound of Pissing Into a Serene Lake.”

That thought came to me mid-sphinx pose at my Tuesday night yoga class when the most obnoxiously loud water sound effect blared through the studio speakers. It was so loud the instructor had to get up and turn it down.

I was lying in the front row, eyes closed, trying desperately not to laugh.

That’s when I realized: this is EXACTLY what’s wrong with modern yoga.

Before I even went to the class, I was doing some yin poses for grounding after my post-work meditation session. During this I was wondering about how yoga in the West got so… sterilized for lack of a better word.

Questions this post seeks to answer (or at least get you wondering):

• Why does yoga class feel so hollow / like spiritual bypassing in Lululemon?
• What is yoga ACTUALLY supposed to be?
• How did it get this way?

Brief history

Originally, the word “yoga” meant “union”—union with the Divine. But in the West that word has somehow come to be associated with exotic stretching with a few Sanskrit names thrown in. Yoga was stripped to its bare bones and exported to the West in a format that could be taught in group settings—at your local YMCA, or at a suburban studio like the one I attend.

In order to write this post, I did some research and was pleased to find that this topic has actually its own Wikipedia article already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoga_in_the_United_States.

I’ll try to summarize it as best I can.

Early “pure” introduction

Yoga was introduced in America in the late 19th century, almost entirely as intellectual and spiritual.

Philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed yoga as philosophy (and was mocked mercilessly for his “Brahma” poem in 1857).

Hindu leader Vivekananda taught it in 1893 as a rigorous spiritual path of meditation and breathwork (pranayama). Notably, he rejected the physical postures (asanas) and hatha yoga entirely, focusing purely on the inner work.

The shift to physical practices

The “sanitization” began when teachers realized Americans were more interested in health and beauty than spiritual liberation.

The practice of yoga as consisting mainly of physical postures began in 1919 when the pioneer of asana-based yoga, Yogendra, brought his system, influenced by physical culture, to the United States.

In 1948, yoga got its Hollywood makeover when Indra Devi opened a studio there. She is credited with making yoga “glamorous” and acceptable to American women by framing it not as a religious ritual, but as a beauty and health regimen for celebrities like Gloria Swanson.

Mass media “whitewashing”

The most explicit example of sanitization in the article comes from Richard Hittleman, who launched the TV show Yoga for Health in 1961.

He strategically omitted or minimized esoteric aspects like kundalini and the subtle body in order to sell millions of books and keep his TV audience from changing the channel.

Although he personally believed the goal of yoga was “pure bliss consciousness,” he presented it publicly as a practical method for physical health, removing the “threatening” non-Christian spiritual elements for the average American.

Other yoga television shows followed, including Lilias Folan’s WCET series Lilias, Yoga and You!, which ran from the 1970s to the 1990s, helping to make yoga acceptable to the American public as well.

Modern fitness focus

By the late 20th century, the transformation from “spiritual union” to “fitness routine” was nearly complete.

Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga arrived in 1975 with continuous flowing movement that connects yoga poses together called vinyasas. It gave rise to a spinoff called Power Yoga in the 1990s. In 1974 there was the creation of Bikram Yoga, also known as hot yoga with studios heated to 105F (41C).

These all turned the practice of yoga into an energetic, sweaty, aerobic exercise.

Cosmopolitanism

The Wikipedia section “Cosmopolitan yoga” is basically all my complaints with actual references. To pull some particular powerful quotes (emphasis my own):

[The historian Jared] Farmer identifies 12 general trends in yoga’s history in the United States from the 1890s to the 21st century:

peripheral to central; local to global; male to (predominantly) female; spiritual to (mostly) secular; sectarian to universal; mendicant to consumerist; meditational to postural; intellectual to experiential; esoteric to accessible; oral to hands-on teaching; textual to photographic representations of poses; contorted social pariahs to lithe social winners.

Considering all these trends, Farmer stated that modern yoga as exercise belonged to Srinivas Aravamudan’s category of the “global popular”, which Farmer glossed as “a postcolonial realm of religious cosmopolitanism.”

In Lasater’s view, American yoga in the 21st century has lost “the gentleness, consistency, and direction of the practice”, replaced by ambition. Lasater believes that many Americans “have conflated asana with yoga.”

History summary

In short, since yoga’s introduction in America about 150 years ago, it was converted from a practice of spiritual union into a secular consumer product.

What was originally included

So now that we’ve established that largely the spiritual side has been cut from modern yoga in America outside of ashrams and temples that seek to preserve its roots, let’s cover what was originally included before it was secularized to the American public as a fitness routine or stress relief practice. Let’s talk about what yoga was before it became stripped down to just asanas (and maybe some breathwork if you’re lucky).

So what exactly was lost in translation? To understand that, we need to look at what yoga actually consisted of before it became a fitness trend.

The missing limbs of yoga

The Yoga Sutras, written by sage Patanjali) (who lived somewhere around 2nd century BCE and 5th century CE), are widely regarded as the authoritative text on yoga. They outline the eight limbs or “branches” of yoga.

It’s helpful to approach this with the understanding that each “branch” that was cut from the ancient tree of yoga builds upon the previous one.

Most Westerners think yoga = asanas (physical postures). So let’s start there, even though asana is actually the third branch of yoga’s eight-limbed path. We’ll build up from what you know to what got left out in order to appeal to the American mass in the past century.

Here’s a diagram to visually understand the branches:

4th Branch: Pranayama

Asana is a way to move energy (prana) around the body physically. This can be experientially observed by most people.

You stretch to feel more awake don’t you? It doesn’t have to be reaching your toes; it can be as simple as stretching a tight neck, reaching your arms overhead in bed, or leaning side to side to stretch a sore back.

Pranayama is simply moving that energy around with the breath instead of stretches. You can also confirm this for yourself by changing the rate of your breath or the duration of your inhales and / or exhales.

If you’re feeling anxious, you’re likely hyperventilating or taking shallow breaths with short exhales. This is the reason that many wellness apps or restorative / yin yoga classes will encourage the extension of the exhale—in order to calm down into relaxation and activate the parasympathetic nervous system.

Conversely, you can get yourself more activated, awake, and stressed if you start purposely hyperventilating. You’re pushing more energy through the system / bringing more in with the rapid breaths.

5th Branch: Pratyahara

Now, when the energy can be directed with the body (asanas) and the breath (pranayama), we have 4 questions to answer:

• How can we concentrate that energy?
• Where do we concentrate it?
• What happens when we concentrate it?
• Why do we concentrate it?

Pratyahara answers the first.

It means to withdraw the senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch). That means:

• Not focusing on the fake water soundtrack on Spotify
• Not huffing eucalyptus essential oil pouring out of a $25 Amazon diffuser
• Not distracted by complicated flows or sweat pouring off your body from the overheated studio
• Just… turning inward. That’s it. That’s the practice.

6th Branch: Dharana

Once the energy has been awakened with movement and breathwork and the awareness has been withdrawn inward by turning away from the senses, concentration must unfold next to prevent the mind from becoming lost in the only sensory stimulation left: thoughts.

Dharana answers the second question of “Where do we concentrate the energy?” For many this can be the breath or an internally repeated mantra, ideally something steady and arising with little to no effort.

This is where:

• modern yoga gives you all of 2-5 minutes of “savasana” (corpse pose) at the end of class to “go inwards” before “returning to your body by wiggling your toes and fingers”
• seated meditation or yoga nidra (meditation while in savasana) would fit in if modern yoga was more of an esoteric practice.
• the focusing on the breath or mantra starts to become powerful: when the previous branches have been honored in the practice.

7th Branch: Dhyana

Over time concentration becomes less effortful and instead absorption into the breath or mantra itself unfolds. This is where people will begin to make mystical statements of “becoming the breath,” “becoming the vibration,” or “becoming the practice”. At this point, you are still aware and sense oneness with the object of your (effortless) concentration (because absorption requires no effort like water into a dry sponge).

This level isn’t casually reached, not with a couple yoga classes a week, especially with no built-in meditation longer than a few minutes with how busy and hectic our modern lives are.

This answers the question, “What happens when we concentrate?”

8th Branch: Samadhi

This is the ultimate goal of yoga, answering the question “Why do we concentrate the energy”? Samadhi is a state of pure awareness, where the absorption isn’t into the object of concentration, but transcending the object so that awareness is absorbed into itself. I’ll save the deep dive on samadhi for a Level 2 or 3 post, but here’s the essence: this is the blissful state that unfolds when the original meaning of yoga is realized: union with the Divine (the awareness).

My lamentation for modern yoga

Here’s my honest confession: I go to yoga class regularly, and it consistently feels less meditative than anything I do at home in my sacred space.

And I don’t know how anyone is supposed to be practicing pratyahara with the stupid playlists and the running water noise from the diffuser (but maybe that’s just me).

Comedic timing

What’s funny is I wrote the above paragraph complaining about the playlist at yoga class, immediately went off to my Tuesday night yin + hatha + vinyasa blend class, and right in the middle of it, the most obnoxious running water sound yet came on for one of the tracks. It was so loud that the instructor had to get up and turn the speaker down.

I was thinking to myself, “man, that sounds like pissing” and then I don’t even know what in my head was like, “ah yes, the soothing sound of Pissing into a Serene Lake”. I was lying up front in sphinx pose with my eyes closed and a stupid grin on my face trying desperately not to bust out laughing. So that’s how this post got its title.

I can’t help but feel like this experience was in direct response to my complaint which is partially why it was extra funny. Normally, sounds like this irk me (misophonia anyone?), but tonight I was able to genuinely smile about it rather than get annoyed (because the only other alternative was to start snickering for no reason in the middle of class).

But now I’m left with the mystery: was it the still small voice or the personality who cracked the joke? Does it matter? Either way, I smiled instead of getting annoyed. Maybe that’s the point.

Practical suggestions

If you feel like yoga class is missing something, you’re not wrong. Here’s what to try at home1:

1. 3 rounds of sun salutations
2. 10 minutes of alternate nostril breathing
3. 20 minutes of seated meditation with eyes closed, no music, quiet environment, focusing on breath or an easy mantra

Wrapping up

Yoga isn’t about touching your toes. It’s about union. And you can’t unite with the Divine if you’re distracted by the sound of someone pissing into a serene lake.

So turn off the playlist. Sit in silence… and see what happens.

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Footnotes

1 Fair warning: If you do this practice consistently for a few months, you might accidentally catapult yourself into what mystics call “The Dark Night of the Soul.” I’m not kidding. See my Level 1 and Level 2 sections on here for what that actually looks like.

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On Being Half Right

Subtitle: [Level 0: Technical] What a divided brain reveals about spiritual experience

Posted: Mar 4, 2026

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I feel like Prometheus if he stole the fire of the Burning Bush.

It’s not God.

It’s Creativity—the right hemisphere given voice through the left’s language.

I’m not a psychologist.

I’m not a neuroscientist.

I’m someone who once let my left side run the show somewhere along the way. And not long ago, the show-runner got tired.

On left-dominance

I’m becoming increasingly convinced the more research I do that spiritual experience is just right hemisphere activity in a left hemisphere dominant society.

What surprised me is that I’m not the first person to posit this.

British psychiatrist, philosopher, and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist spent 600 pages arguing in The Master and His Emissary that Western culture has been systematically tilting toward left hemisphere dominance since the Renaissance through the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and into now. Each era a little more analytical. A little more literal. A little more suspicious of exactly the kind of experience the mystics were pointing at.

I haven’t read it yet. I’m about to.

On “exiting left”

The topic of lateralization has been on my mind since I wrote a post a few weeks ago about perception and neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor’s “stroke of insight” which completely altered how she perceived her sense of self as she lost functionality in her left hemisphere.

Just yesterday, I was reading about how to actually activate the right hemisphere. One method is to read, decode, or write highly ambiguous, poetic, or unfamiliar metaphors. Unlike literal language or common clichés—which the left hemisphere handles automatically—processing novel metaphors requires the broad associative networks of the right.

What’s interesting is this would explain why spiritual and religious texts are written the way they are. Koans. Paradox. Symbolism. Poetry. Why the “Truth” is always described as ineffable:

The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. — Tao Te Ching, Chapter 1

The mystics, saints, and prophets weren’t being cryptic for the sake of it. Whether or not they were aware of it, they were engineering a left hemisphere bypass. The ambiguity was the whole point, a recurring pattern across traditions.

But engaging with esoteric texts isn’t the only method to activate the right hemisphere.

You have two names

Last night I felt myself being called to put down Everything before collecting the missing 2% of things in the game (as the completionist in me wanted) to go sit at my cushion.

Based on my research of ways to quiet the left hemisphere and activate the right, I decided to stack several methods simultaneously: open monitoring meditation, blocking the right nostril for left-nostril breathing only, and whispering one word rapidly on repeat the entire time.

This is what happened:

My eyes rolled up into my head on their own and I had a realization: [My name] is the name of the left hemisphere. “I Am” is the name of the right.[1] — Field Note, March 3, 2026

The experiencer has a name. You just forgot it.

My experience

Somewhere along the line, my right hemisphere skills atrophied.

I stopped making art before college. I became increasingly analytical as a coping mechanism—compensating for the shock of actual difficulty when computer science, engineering, and calculus hit me all at once. I pushed deeper into the left side until I became alienated from who I even was and what I wanted outside of my career.

Then I burned out.

And since then? I’ve been unwittingly reconnecting with the alienated half.

Through meditation.

Through imagination.

Through repetition.

Through poetry.

Through stories.

And now—this Substack.

I have a sabbatical coming up where I intend to test this hypothesis directly: that starving the left while feeding the right will produce more of what the traditions called mystical experience. I’ll be doing a 10-day silent retreat followed immediately by a 10-day dark retreat at Hridaya Yoga in two months.

We’ll see what comes out of the dark.

Technically is my ego.

Mystic is my soul.

And I’m trying not to lose either of them in the process.

P.S.

After the meditation, the realization, and most of this post was drafted, I went back to the Everything game and found these quotes waiting for me before the rest of the achievements in the game somehow unlocked without me really doing much of anything:

There are two inseparable halves, the object—which has divided itself into everything through space and time, and the subject perceiving it, which is not in space or time, but only in the present. Every idea of the world dies along with every subject of it.

I’ve given up trying to prove I exist. The proof will be gone soon enough. All I have is myself.

Above me is a watery abyss of no definite form, which can hold my stare forever. It’s me looking at me.

We will continue on our paths as long as we exist here. They might never cross again, or I might see you a thousand more times. You might forget this moment for the rest of your life, or you might have forgotten it already. In any case, you should know that I love you.

Caption: I turned to this game which was running in the background as I was finishing up this post to grab a screenshot for the post photo. This quote popped up immediately.

Make of that what you will. But I highly recommend this game.

Footnotes

[1] Taylor locates “I am” in the left hemisphere as the ego asserting separation. What I experienced as “I Am” is its opposite—a sense of Being before identity arises, before a name or label is attached to beingness.

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Level 1 - Transitional

The messy middle where practice deepens and strange experiences begin to arise. For seekers who’ve noticed meditation no longer feels like simple stress relief.

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Insidious expectations

Subtitle: [Level 1: Transitional] When consistency accidentally leads to expectancy

Posted: Nov 12, 2025

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NOTE: I originally wrote this February 18th, 2025 for the HealthyGamer Memberships platform for the group of folks on there interested in spirituality and what was fondly referred to by the community as “The Weird Stuff”. Over the next few days be working through my backlog of posts I’ve either made on there or saved in draft and never actually got around to publishing. Anyway, on to the content!

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I know it’s something that’s been brought up time and again, but based on a realization I had from my own experiences over the past few days, I feel like it’s worth a reminder: expectations can be very subtle.

It’s been 4 months since I’ve gotten much more intentional and consistent with my practice and diet (eating mostly sattvic, cutting out all coffee, alcohol, THC). As the months went by, it slowly felt like my meditation sessions ironically fell off in terms of depth and intensity. I logically knew at the beginning not to expect anything or nothing would happen. But, paradoxically, the more days and sessions I spent not expecting anything, the ever so subtly more I unconsciously expected something to happen. It wasn’t until I stopped sticking to my diet and practice so rigidly for several days in a row while on vacation that I noticed the meditation sessions that I did do during that time go noticeably better. It was only now that I realized that was because I truly had no expectation of getting to any state of deeper consciousness while not adhering to my diet and routine.

Consistency is key, but consistency and expectations seem to go hand-in-hand, despite being repeatedly told not to expect anything. It took me breaking consistency to realize the expectations were still silently growing in the shadows.

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Current Reflections

Reading this post now, 9 months later, I realize I was completely relying on my senses to tell me meditation was “working.” If it didn’t feel deep or intense, I thought I was failing.

Then I read Saint John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul a couple months ago and had one (or many, I should say) of those “oh SHIT” moments. (Side note: I highly recommend the modern translation published in April 2024. Even if you’re allergic to religious literature, this book will mess you up in the best way.)

Turns out there’s a whole thing called the “Dark Night of the Senses” where meditation starts feeling dry, empty, boring and it’s not a sign you’re doing it wrong. It’s a sign you’re going deeper.

“Nothing seems to be happening” != “nothing is happening”

I’ll probably write a whole post about this book (I bookmarked the hell out of it because it described my experience so eerily), but for now: if your practice feels flat, maybe that’s actually progress. At least that’s what I’m telling myself.

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Something No One Told Me About Meditating: Falling In Love

Subtitle: [Level 1: Transitional] How I accidentally stumbled into bhakti through consistent meditation

Posted: Nov 12, 2025

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NOTE: I originally wrote this May 19th, 2025 for the HealthyGamer Memberships platform for the group of folks on there interested in spirituality and what was fondly referred to by the community as “The Weird Stuff”. Over the next few days be working through my backlog of posts I’ve either made on there or saved in draft and never actually got around to publishing. Anyway, on to the content!

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This definitely falls under the “weird stuff” category, so buckle up. I want to share a realization that I had which helped validate some complicated feelings that have been making me question my sanity for the past year and a half as I’ve been meditating daily. I’m not sure how common of an experience this is, but I wanted to bring it up regardless in case it does help someone else.

So last night I had one of those, “OH, that explains a lot” kind of moments. I was going through my YouTube watch later list and ended up stumbling on a meditation channel. I watched a couple videos from it and the teacher was saying in one of them that one of the secrets of tantric meditation is that as the spiritual journey deeper within continues, a romance unfolds. To quote:

We start to realize that that Supreme Consciousness is not just a source of bliss, but also a source of love. The closer we get to it, the more love it is showering over us. It is a never-ending wave of unconditional love. And as that spiritual journey deeper within  continues, that bliss or that love becomes more and more intense, and you know how it is when someone loves us unconditionally. We simply start to love them back. That’s natural and that’s when the romantic parts start, that cosmic romance. This is the most exciting part of the spiritual  journey without doubt, and this inspires us to do more meditation and go even deeper within and  eventually the world around us start to disappear.

It struck me because I first encountered these feelings a year and a half ago. I journaled about them as they were unfolding because it felt so strange. I didn’t understand what was going on and thought I was slowly going crazy. People usually fall in love with other people, things, experiences, etc. It’s a really strange thing to fall in love with something you can’t even define. I felt like I was falling in love similar to how I felt early on in my relationship with my partner of over 9 years. We grew closer over time with repeated exposure in college, and I think this was similar in that regard with meditation.

When I first started meditating 3 years ago, it didn’t feel like anything was really happening for a while. Gradually these feelings of being in love started forming, and the “recipient” wasn’t even a person, a corporeal entity, or even really an idea – which was really weird. I felt like I was going quietly insane inside. There would be nights that I would feel this inexplicable longing for some unknown beloved that would keep me awake and sometimes even crying. It felt like something inside was howling like a wolf at the moon. This lasted for several months on and off, but the painful aspect of it has largely subsided as I’ve continued with my meditation practice. I can’t say if it was time, yoga, diet, or a combination that helped.

As crazy as this is, I thought I’d share in case someone else is going through a similar strange experience. I don’t really feel like it’s talked about a lot, likely because of how unusual it is. I was originally going to make a post about this a few days ago but got sidetracked, but that video I mentioned felt like it resonated with some of the notes I already had written down. A couple excerpts:

I’m realizing [sadhanas] are impotent without the love. Think of love as the fuel or the energy that powers the machine. Without it, the practice falls flat. Anything done without love to move towards the Divine is ultimately futile and a striving of the ego.

[…]

The mind did not choose this path, the heart did. The mind wanted definitive action, a set of defined practices, and measurable progress. But that’s not what true spirituality is. Behavior arises from being, to continuously wrangle with the behavior without addressing the root is folly.

To summarize, I think the mind can help get you started with meditation (diligence, understanding technical and philosophical aspects), but with repeated exposure and consistent practice, a love slowly begins to form that will help carry you forward, or rather pull you inwards. Just be aware that it might be a bit of a roller-coaster though – it was for me, anyway.

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The Mandala I Didn’t Mean to Draw

Subtitle: [Level 1: Transitional] When technical meets mystical (and you forget to bring a compass)

Posted: Nov 16, 2025

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I wanted to make something like a logo that felt like it was bridging the mundane and mystical, something that felt distilled the name of this Substack into a simple design. I knew it needed to be encompassed in a circle, showing the wholeness from integration of both.

Take 1

Originally, I was trying to divide the circle down the middle, having the left side be more “techy” with something like circuitry and the right side have something that symbolized mysticism. The Seed of Life felt like a clear choice for something that could be recognized when only half of it was shown, plus I just found it appealing to look at.

I set out to sketch the design I had in mind, but as it appeared into physical form, something felt… off.

There does not seem to be any bridging here, just an uncomfortable truce if anything.

The hemispheres were completely disjoint and the design wasn’t at all showing the bridging of the mundane and the mystical. Instead, it felt like jamming two things together that didn’t belong and trying to reconcile them into one shape.

It then dawned on me that this was showing the state of my current integration rather than the goal.

I didn’t even finish filling in the left side to balance it out because there was no way for the sides to properly synergize. No amount of filling in the gaps could force those two halves to belong together.

Take 2

I flipped to a new page in my sketchbook to try again.

This time, I used the Seed of Life in its entirety as the base rather than cutting it down the middle, sketching it lightly with the mechanical pencil.

As I looked at it, I began to sketch in intersecting lines radiating from the center and added another circle near the outer edge to bisect more of the natural intersections. From there I added concentric circles to the middle, causing it to look like a target (which I’m realizing now is on-brand for me with my goal-oriented thinking). Yet this also seems to work as ripples radiating from that same center. The radiating lines also started to look like guide lines (rather than the dividing lines I drew over the Seed of Life). I used these guide lines to try to clean up the circles a little more.

I then added details to the edge of the circle to make it look more like those protractors we used in school to draw or measure specific angles for geometry. I didn’t intentionally decide on a number of notch lines to draw per “slice”, but it ended up being 8 which just felt “right” for lack of a better word. Though, in retrospect, had I done 9 there would have been 108 notches along the edge of the circle, but that would have required more intentionality than just cutting the “slice” in half like I was doing repeatedly.

Finally, I wanted the left to be more representative of the “technical” side of things, so I went in with the pen over the sketch lines of the protractor to make it the dominant element. I did the same on the right, but with the Seed of Life instead. What resulted was a design that actually felt like a bridge, an integration of the two hemispheres.

But then I erased the sketch lines.

What resulted felt… incomplete, like it had the same issue as the first image, just to a less extreme degree:

I had erased the process, the thing I was supposed to be documenting in the first place to show how the two were integrated. The “messy middle”.

I realized I needed to add the pencil lines back in so I did so intentionally and added the notch lines and ripples to mirror the left side. Then I realized it was actually done:

Although the line work isn’t perfect, I think it fits to show the “messy middle”, the idea of the goal in the absence of the tools to perfectly achieve it (if such a thing can be truly done).

Reflections

It’s strange how even simple sketching sometimes reveals more than expected. Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (cool dude, I enjoyed his Red Book) drew mandalas to map the Self. I didn’t realize I was doing the same thing until I sat down to write this post and tried to explain what I’d drawn. I was apparently drawing a mandala of my own becoming.

Take from that what you will about the drawings above. My take? I still have a lot to learn. But at least now I know what integration looks like, even when it’s imperfect.

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Leaking Visibly: How a Meditation Practice Became a Temple

Subtitle: [Level 1: Transitional] What happens when you can’t keep it casual anymore

Posted: Nov 19, 2025

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Originally this was going to be a serious post about the tension of being a mystic in a partnership, but I think I need to save that one for another night. The ideas are still percolating from a LONG 7 hour discussion last night where I finally stopped beating around the bush about what I’ve been going through. More on that in likely the next post.

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What started as a hairline fracture with the purchase of a simple zafu at the end of 2022 has been widening, especially over the past year and a half as I began to put together my “sacred space”. I bought a standard yoga mat to begin incorporating asanas mid-2024 as well as some cute meditating cat figures. Quirky, but nothing to raise an eyebrow at.

Then came the incense and holder exactly a year ago. It was about the “vibe”.

Almost exactly a year ago, a simple setup

This was also when I joined the local yoga studio after some trepidation and began practicing daily there, having been already doing a couple simple sequences at home for a month. Around this time, tension started to form in my partnership. I was leaking visibly now. It was now changing my routine. Dietary changes in winter only exacerbated this as I was trying to eat healthier to support my meditation practice.

Then the so-called “woo-woo” started really showing early this year when I finally went to a rock shop and brought back several rocks and a pack of tarot cards (though to be fair, my partner brought me there on request and even egged me on to get more than the one peach moonstone I was drawn to). Now it was starting to get interesting:

Zen master reporting for duty

A few more small items were introduced here and there over the months: some stones from a trip, a ceramic elephant from a yard sale, a 3D-printed gift from a friend, and a wrist mala from a small shop. Now my space was starting to fill out, especially with the bolster and blocks.

But then in September, something shifted. I could no longer stand having the space be open, contiguous with my office. People casually walking over to it felt… uncomfortable. At this point I did a major re-haul, unable to keep it casual as a “self-care routine” or “hobby” any longer. I needed a veil, a demarcation that beyond this point was sacred. I needed a temple.

Up went a macrame curtain, down came the black shelving left over by the previous owners. Instead, a reclaimed wood bench took over as the new altar. The mat found its new home at the yoga studio, replaced by two natural tree cork and rubber mats side-by-side, a Tibetan yak wool shawl layered over that, and a sheepskin rug like I’d seen used by a kundalini yoga instructor—a solid foundation for any yin poses. The space was finally complete.

Bringing us to the present day:

While the aesthetics don’t truly matter during meditation, I often look over from my desk and am reminded that there’s more to life than just work, which I suppose was the whole reason I got into this in the first place back in early 2022 when I was just meditating in my office chair. I’m truly grateful I’m able to enjoy this space at any point during my day (okay maybe not during meetings, but still).

I know it’s antithetical to need a separate space, that the entire room, house, world, and Universe is a temple. But I’m still working towards that lived understanding rather than an intellectually known one one day at a time. One day (hopefully), the veil will lift, the curtain will dissolve. In the meantime, this is what training wheels look like… just with some cool rhinestones on them.

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Why I Can’t Give You a Clean Stack Trace of How I Got Here

Subtitle: [Level 1: Transitional] I tried to debug my own spiritual awakening (it didn’t work)

Posted: Nov 24, 2025

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I’ve spent the past couple days trying to write Part 2 of “When Meditation Stops Being Stress Relief.” I originally thought I just needed to dig through my journals to find the next strange occurrence after that vivid dream in December 2022 and summarize that arc.

It sounded fairly straightforward. All I had to do was look back at my own field notes, the documentation that I had been recording along the way like a breadcrumb trail. I knew I had even tried to add specific emojis at the top of “important” entries as I went (with a legend to decode what they meant) for when I assumed I would want to reference them again in the future.

Except…

I dove into months–years–of my incoherent, messy, fever-dream-like journals split between Logseq and Obsidian (my fault for not just picking Obsidian from the start), trying to piece together what got me to this point.

I realized I was trying to debug my own mind with a stacktrace that was literally hundreds of “pages”, hundreds of kilobytes of information not even all sequentially linked.

Then I had a further realization after hours of digging through this textual junkyard crossed with a literary sewer, trying to extract something coherent:

I can’t.

As much as I want to treat my brain as a computer to debug, I can’t. Real life is a mess. And I don’t have the system dump of where exactly things started to go off the rails–or if they even did.

What I did find

As a headache formed from hours of digging through journals and cross-linked files, I found:

• A disclaimer at the top of the main page: “I believe I generally present as a mostly sane person. This is a page dedicated to my secret insanity. Like Jung’s Black Books I’ve been keeping this closely guarded out of sheer terror of being misunderstood or seen as nuts.” Also: “There will be shit in here that makes absolutely no sense” (yeah, no shit), and “I don’t literally hear voices for the ‘dialogues’.”
• Pages of arguing with myself (or something that felt increasingly NOT like my usual self)
• Some variation of “am I going crazy” sprinkled in throughout the months (including wondering if I accidentally made a tulpa)
• Half-formed thoughts that made sense late after a late night meditation session but are more or less incomprehensible now
• Long-winded rants about work stress
• Philosophical musings that seemingly go nowhere
• Dreams I can barely remember but seemed significant enough at the time to note down

Parsing through the sometimes funny, oftentimes agonizing entries, I kept thinking: “If I can just find the pattern, I can explain this period coherently.” “If I can trace this back to the root cause, I can write a logical narrative of what got me here.” “If I can debug this from my own log output, maybe I can help others understand their own.”

But the more I exhausted myself reading through my own raw stream-of-consciousness data, the more frustrated I got until I went to bed late yesterday, defeated by my own field notes.

What my own mess taught me

Today as I was reflecting on this failed endeavor, I realized:

Spiritual experience doesn’t work like code. There’s no clean stacktrace. No clear “panic: runtime error at line 247.” No single moment (or even moments plural) where you can say: “THAT’S where it broke,” or in my case, “THAT’S where awakening happened.”

Some people can point to a near-death experience (NDE) or some $PSYCHEDELIC trip that induced it.

But for me, it was just… messy. Incoherent. Cyclical. Gradual.

But that’s how it has to be if you have a life you’re not ready to blow up. A job you don’t want to lose. A marriage you don’t want to leave.

Maybe I’m not supposed to give you a clean stacktrace. Maybe I’m not supposed to document every step like a “Getting Started” guide. Maybe the job isn’t: “Comprehensively chronicle the 3.5-year journey from agnostic engineer to ‘I moonlight for God.’” Maybe instead, the job is: “Share the moments that landed, the ones that can’t be explained away, the ones that changed me–even when I don’t know why.” Not the entire tangled mess of seeking, but the points that caused me to question the narrative in the first place.

My approach going forward

I’m giving up on the comprehensive stack trace. I can’t make coherent what is by nature cyclical and beyond any single root cause.

Instead, I’m going to tell you about the moments that mattered, even if I can’t connect them cleanly. Even if it looks like I’m just… leaping from one inexplicable event to another—because that’s what it WAS.

This path has been a series of inexplicable events that somehow (over 3.5 years) added up to… whatever this is. And as much as it frustrates my engineering brain, I can’t give you a reproducible set of steps. Instead, I’m sitting here in my junkyard of journals with a handful of weird moments I can’t explain away.

So that’s what I’ll share: not a linear journey or how-to guide.

Just the moments that made me question everything I thought I knew about reality.

The moments where the boundary between “coincidence” and “something else” got uncomfortably thin.

The moments I can’t explain… but also can’t dismiss.

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The Heart Under the Floorboards

Subtitle: [Level 1: Transitional] Vulnerability is terrifying, so why am I here writing?

Posted: Dec 9, 2025

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I’m crying while writing this. Not from a bad day or anything like that.

It’s because I need to write. And nothing’s coming today.

But why do I feel so compelled to write instead of taking a break? Especially when I’m completely sober? Especially when I’m running up a mean sleep deficit? Especially when I’ve been writing basically every day for the past 4 weeks? Especially when I keep getting ideas that I’m not ready to share out of lingering fear?

I have a working theory on that.

When Longing Overflows

I had a recent realization that I covered in “What Saying Yes to God Means” (Level 3). The TL;DR is that I could no longer hold back what’s been building up inside me for the past several years.

But what I’m still unclear on is: why? And why now (as my supportive, but understandably confused spouse was asking)?

I don’t know if it’s a factor of:

• no community (sangha) to exchange my evolving ideas with (do I dare try my luck with Reddit?)
• my experience deepening to a point that I can no longer just brush it off as a casual hobby (it was SO hard to just jump right into morning standup after something as mind-bending as the realization I had in “When Being Becomes Doing, NOT the Other Way Around” hit me right beforehand)
• a genuine growing desire to want to share something in the chance that it’s useful to someone else who’s struggling

Or is the answer to why and why now something more… insidious?

• the spiritualized ego trying to distract me from being with more doing (HMMM… this one honestly deserves its own follow-up post)
• trying to make my spiritual journey meaningful outside of my own life by making it my “duty” to share
• something I still don’t have the awareness to realize because the ego is REALLY GOOD at self-preservation

It’s SO GOOD at self-preservation, in fact, that it’s been running me ragged fighting for its life while a new one tries to emerge from my depths.

The double life of the “modern mystic”

What I do know is that I’m backed up like the highway at rush hour ever since meditation has become more than just “stress relief.”

My secret “double-life” has been eating away at me. The heart of a mystic is beating under the floorboards… and I can no longer ignore its pounding.

I’m tired of living in shame for what I’m becoming when it’s given my life meaning that I thought I’d only ever be able to manufacture or cobble together from society’s expectations of a “good life.” That only ever made me tired. And like many people, I’m tired of being tired.

Stretched to the breaking point

I’ve been struggling with this double-life for about a year. Looking back at my journals, the strain was visible—and the language I used was painfully consistent.

The day I finally broke and came out of the “mystic’s closet” to my spouse, I wrote a very raw entry in my journal:

What I want to tell him: “I don’t feel like I can be myself around you anymore. Not because you’ve changed, but because I have… and I know there’s no way to explain that will make you understand. When we made our vows, I kept nothing hidden from you. But a year later when I started turning inwards and digging into my own depths, I found things I didn’t know how to translate into words… and it’s only grown the deeper I’ve looked. And here I am 3.5 years later, feeling like I’m being torn in half by something even I don’t understand, my soul screaming for more than I had ever planned at the start of this partnership. It feels like a betrayal and it breaks my heart because there’s nothing I hate more than lying. But now I’m lying to both myself and you and it’s killing me slowly every day.” (November 20, 2025)

There were also several other prior entries lamenting this struggle:

• …I feel like trying to straddle these two worlds is how I am torn in half. (Journal Entry, June 23, 2025)

• I’m really struggling to integrate between the two worlds and feel like I’m getting torn in half as a result. It feels incredibly discouraging to be having such strange and deep experiences, feelings, and sensation during meditation and then feeling exhausted, frustrated, and tired at work and in my daily life in general. I know I shouldn’t have to escape to an ashram to pursue this interest deeper, but God I really wish I could. Yet, I can’t help but wonder if I’m just chasing something else again like I chased this current life that I once so aspired and dreamed of having. My life on paper is amazing and yet now here I am pursuing the Ineffable and ready to abandon all these wonderful things I have after 30 years. I feel like a fool. (Journal Entry, June 12, 2025)

• It’s all so much and I don’t feel like I’m doing enough AND I have to juggle my job and my marriage. I felt like I was getting torn in half between worlds. I felt like something inside me was screaming to do MORE, MORE, MORE!!! But then… it dawned on me. My ego was hijacking this whole pursuit. It was trying to overwhelm me, burn me out, and make me give up. […] *I feel like I’m being torn in half right now between two worlds: the world I’ve lived in all my life and the one that seems to be shining in the distance beckoning to me like a siren song. (Journal Entry, November 25, 2024)

You could say after a year of being pulled in “opposite directions,” I snapped like a rubber band.

Breakdown or breakthrough?

One thing I know about the path is that it feels like a constant slow-motion train wreck. My mess of journal entries over the years supports this.

But why make the mess public? Why now?

Because I said “yes” for some magical Nth time? Because of “Divine timing”? Because I finally broke? Because “Vishuddha became unblocked”?

I’m not sure I’ll ever know why now—why, after 3.5 years of keeping this close to my chest, it finally spilled over.

But the writing comes anyway. I was told from within:

It helps no one if you hold it back.

So here I am. Sharing the thing I was most terrified of being judged for. Hoping someone out there recognizes themselves in this mess. Hoping I’m not the only one torn in half by something I can’t explain. But even if I somehow am… at least I’m finally being honest about it. The heart under the floorboards wouldn’t stop beating. So I let it out.

If you’re an “undercover mystic”

I can say after trying to hide this for 3.5 years that if you’re truly earnest about this path–if you’re truly being called to go deeper–compartmentalization is not sustainable. When the longing becomes unbearable and the thirst begins driving you mad, you start leaking. It can’t be helped. Hiding the love isn’t possible.

If you’re reading this and thinking “oh God, that’s me”–if you’re living a double life, if you’re being torn in half between the person everyone knows and the person you’re becoming—you’re not alone.

I don’t know if that helps. I don’t know if knowing someone else is going through this makes it any less scary, alienating, or difficult. But this is something I needed to hear even just a month ago. So I’m saying it now:

You’re not broken. The shell (your ego) is breaking. You’re not betraying anyone by changing. You’re becoming true to your Self.

Waking up is messy, vulnerable, and terrifying… but it’s the most honest thing you’ll ever do.

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Cerebral Serpent Hijackery—A Skeptic’s Experience and Investigation

Subtitle: [Level 1: Transitional] What actually happens when your spine starts moving on its own

Posted: Dev 18, 2025

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Note: This post discusses the intersection of nervous system function, kundalini awakening, and why these experiences can feel physically intimate. If that makes you uncomfortable, the first two sections (physiology + energetics) stand alone.

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TL;DR: If your spine moves on its own during meditation, you’re not having a seizure—you’re experiencing kriyas (spontaneous purification movements). Your nervous system is discharging stored tension, and/or kundalini is clearing blockages. It’s natural, documented, has been happening to meditators for thousands of years. It happens to be using the same neural pathways as sexual arousal. Yes, really. Here’s what’s actually happening.

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During Monday’s evening meditation, my spine did something I didn’t tell it to do. It built, paused, then jolted—a full-body ripple that would’ve been very awkward to explain if anyone had walked in. So naturally, I had questions such as: What the hell is ACTUALLY going on? And why does it KEEP happening recently?

In particular, this post aims to address the main questions I had:

1. “What is the physiological correlate? Does it have one?”
2. “Why is my spine doing this when I’m just sitting upright with my eyes closed?”
3. “Why is it my entire spine shaking like [this] versus shaking like a muscle clenched for too long, especially when I’m relaxed?”

This is an investigation that starts with science, moves through mysticism, and ends somewhere most spiritual teachers won’t go publicly. I’ve marked the sections by depth—read as far as you’re comfortable.

I will lose some people as I go—and that’s fine. I’m here to document and investigate, not to convince anyone.

[Level 0: Technical] The physiological explanation

When you sit in meditation with an erect spine, eyes closed, focused inward, you’re doing something your nervous system almost never gets to do in modern life: You’re giving it permission to discharge stored tension.

Your nervous system has two modes:

• Sympathetic (fight, flight, freeze)
• Parasympathetic (rest, digest, heal)

Most people live in chronic low-grade sympathetic activation (stress, deadlines, screens, coffee, constant doing).

When you finally sit still—really still, not “scrolling on your phone” still—the parasympathetic system (eventually) activates.

When you give your body permission to let go

As you relax while sitting in stillness (physically and mentally), the nervous system starts releasing trauma, stress, and stored tension that’s been locked in the body for years.

This shows up as:

• Trembling
• Shaking
• Spontaneous movements
• Muscle contractions
• Spinal undulations

This is documented in:

• Somatic Experiencing (Peter Levine, PhD)
• Trauma release exercises (TRE - David Berceli, PhD)
• Neurogenic tremors (the body’s natural mechanism for discharging stress and trauma)

Animals do this after escaping a hostile situation—they literally shake it off. Humans? We hold it in for anywhere from days to decades.

While you can burn off stress that’s currently active in the system with exercise (the key recommendation from Burnout), what about the stress that DOESN’T get released through physical exertion?

It doesn’t dissipate like heat. It gets stored.

Not just in the mind—in the body… until we sit long enough and give the body permission to finally let go.

Why the spine specifically?

The spine houses:

• The vagus nerve–the main parasympathetic highway
• The central nervous system–spinal cord
• Tons of fascia–connective tissue that stores trauma and memory via tension (see Ida Rolf, “Mother of Fascia”)

When the nervous system starts discharging, the spine is ground zero.

Your spine: Ground zero for both nervous system discharge and kundalini awakening.

Okay but that doesn’t explain everything

So that’s the physiological explanation—real, documented, scientifically valid. But here’s what the physiology leaves unanswered:

• Why do these movements sometimes follow patterns?
• Why do they happen in stages?
• Why does it feel like something else is moving through you?

That’s where we move from neuroscience to… something else.

[Level 2: Mystical] The energetic explanation

Now here’s where it gets really interesting.

Spontaneous movements during meditation are called kriyas in yogic tradition.

Kriya = spontaneous purification movement

When kundalini (dormant spiritual energy, called Kundalini shakti in the yogic tradition) starts waking up from no longer being suppressed with constant doing, it moves through the nadis (energy channels) in the spine.

But those channels have often been clogged for decades with:

• Suppressed emotions
• Unprocessed trauma
• Mental conditioning
• Egoic resistance
• Samskaras (imprints from past experiences)

Think of your nadis like pipes or channels. When they’re clear, energy flows freely upward through the spine. But years of suppressed emotions, trauma, and conditioning act like sediment buildup—clogging the pipes until barely a trickle can pass through. Kriyas are the body’s way of clearing the blockage.

So when kundalini starts moving, it has to clear the blockages. That clearing manifests as:

• Shaking
• Trembling
• Spontaneous yoga poses (e.g. why am I suddenly in puppy pose?)
• Spinal undulations
• Rhythmic movements

All of these are kriyas—spontaneous movements to purify the body. You’re not consciously choosing to do these. Shakti is doing it through you. Your only job is to get out of the way.

Stages (in my experience)

This doesn’t start as soon as I sit down to meditate, nor is it a single period of movement. There are (usually) phases:

1. Building - Energy gathers, usually at the base of the spine. This is where the movement starts subtly. Alternatively subtle swaying happens from the mid/upper spine.
2. Pause - It seems like the movement subsides, slowing down to stillness.
3. Jolt - Energy ripples through the spine like a shock, similar to a hypnic jerk—the jolt you get when fall asleep sometimes—except there is no dozing off / microsleeping happening.

This can repeat several times in one sit. Sometimes it builds to a peak and stops. Sometimes it’s subtle throughout. There’s no “correct” pattern—your body knows what it needs to release.

The misconception around kundalini

As I discovered in my investigation, the above stages depict textbook kundalini activation.

I used to think it was a single mind-blowing eruption.

It’s not.

This misconception is why I’ve seen others in spiritual communities (specifically HealthyGamer in my experience) express confusion about why they’re experiencing rocking and shaking in their meditation practice.

This is kundalini moving. It’s a natural side effect of deepening practice.

I can’t tell you how long it takes to encounter this (it’s different for everyone because everyone’s blockages are different).

For me, I’ve noticed it become more common since entering what’s been referred to as “The Dark Night of the Soul”, a purification stage from spiritual attachments (not merely a period of hardship).

Content Warning: The next section discusses why kundalini movements feel sexual. If you’re not ready for that conversation, this is a good place to stop. The physiology and energetics above are complete on their own.

[Level 3: Union] Why the spine moves that way

Now we get to the question everyone’s thinking but nobody wants to ask:: Why do these spontaneous spinal movements in meditation sometimes feel rhythmic, wave-like, or even sexual in nature?

It’s because it’s utilizing the same neurological pathways—the same nerve networks that govern:

• Orgasm
• Deep emotional release
• Kundalini rising

These are all connected and all involve:

• Parasympathetic activation
• Pelvic floor engagement
• Spinal oscillation
• Rhythmic contractions
• Surrender of conscious control

So when your spine starts moving on its own in meditation, it’s accessing the exact same hardware that governs sexual arousal and release.

The spinal undulation of kundalini rising is biomechanically identical to the spinal undulation of orgasm:

• same muscles
• same rhythm
• same surrender
• same mechanism
• same energy moving through the same channels

The key difference? The direction and endpoint of said energy.

Sexual energy:

• Moves down and out (release)
• Dissipates into the physical
• Temporary pleasure
• Depletes (you feel tired after)

Kundalini:

• Moves up and in (sublimation)
• Concentrates into the spiritual
• Permanent transformation
• Energizes (you feel activated)

This isn’t new—it’s been suppressed

This connection between sexual and spiritual energy has been known for millennia:

• Tantra (Kashmir Shaivism’s Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra, particularly verse 68) explicitly uses sexual energy for spiritual awakening
• Taoim emphasizes jing (sexual essence) retention to nourish the spirit (*shen)
• Yoga teaches brahmacharya—not celibacy for its own sake, but conservation and redirection of virya (vital energy)

Every mystical tradition knows this. Most just won’t say it plainly. Because if people knew that the pathway to God runs through the same nervous system as sex?

Everything would change.

No priests needed. No intermediaries. Just your body, your breath, and direct access to the Divine.

That’s dangerous. Not to people—to power structures.

Ida Craddock learned this the hard way. In 1902, she was imprisoned and driven to suicide for teaching what I just experienced on my meditation cushion: sexual energy and spiritual energy are the same force. She called it a “mystico-erotic religion.” The authorities called it obscenity.

123 years later, I’m sitting here writing about spontaneous spinal kriyas that feel uncomfortably intimate—and realizing these “obscene” teachings were right. It’s all one energy.

Tantra didn’t invent this. Tantra just refused to pretend that spirit and body were separate. It’s a path for people who can’t renounce the world—who live with partners, have jobs, raise families—and still seek union with the Divine. It’s the “weaving together” (the literal meaning of tantra) of what we were taught to keep apart.

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Still with me? Good. Let’s wrap this up.

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If you’ve experienced “spontaneous spinal movement” during meditation….

You’re definitely not alone.

It can be confusing or concerning to encounter for the first time and you might even wonder if it’s some kind of seizure.

But this is a phenomenon that’s been extensively documented, just not necessarily in terms common to the typical Western meditator.

You’re not crazy.

It’s real. It’s natural. Your body knows what it’s doing: clearing the blockages you didn’t even realize you’ve been holding all these years. Allow it to move—you might discover it knows more techniques than you do… and exactly which ones you need.

If kriyas become too intense:

• Open your eyes
• Touch the ground
• Take a few deep breaths
• End the session early if needed

Kundalini awakening isn’t a race. You don’t get bonus points for enduring more intensity than you’re ready for.

Wrapping up

If you’re experiencing spontaneous movements in meditation—even if they feel strange, even if they feel too intimate—you’re not broken. You’re awakening.

Spinal movements arising in meditation aren’t a sign that something is wrong with you; it’s a sign you’re letting go of tension that’s been stored in your body unconsciously.

You can’t force kundalini with substances, postures, or conscious movement. Like sleep, you can only create conditions for it to arise naturally.

When it does? Let it move. Trust the body and get out of the way.

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Update (Dec 23, 2025)

Since publishing, I had 3 experiential realizations about the mechanics of spinal kriyas:

1. Resistance impedes flow

Physical tension acts as impedance; you cannot muscle your way into a Kriya. Just like a wire, introducing resistance WILL hinder the flow of Shakti.

Experience: During meditation yesterday, I noticed my spine wasn’t moving. Then I realized I was unconsciously holding tension in my shoulders. When I did a full body scan and softened every muscle (while maintaining posture), it felt like an energetic faucet opened. A moment later—jolt.

2. The spine must be balanced, not just upright

The goal isn’t rigid military posture. The spine must be balanced like a tent pole. If you are leaning even slightly, your micro-muscles seize up to hold you, creating resistance (impeding the flow as mentioned above).

Experience: When I found the “zero-point” of balance where my muscles went slack during today’s meditation, the energy moved freely and kriyas arose.

3. Manual Pressurization (The Dispenza Protocol)

I entered a session with low energy (expecting nothing), but decided to test the breathwork technique from Dr. Joe Dispenza’s Becoming Supernatural (essentially a variation of Mula Bandha).

• The Method: Deep inhale, squeeze the perineum and abdomen, and visualize the energy in the spine flowing rapidly upwards to the center of the brain.
• The Sensation: My heart pounded like a hydraulic pump was over-pressurizing the system.
• The Outcome: Despite my low energy, the “shaking” returned immediately and strongly after the release of the breath and locks. It appears you can manually override a “low battery” state with sufficient hydrostatic pressure.

Halfway throughout this practice, I was seeing flashing behind my eyelids. Turns out the candle on my altar was flickering periodically—despite no HVAC/airflow changes in the room. Correlation? Causation? I don’t know. But the timing was notable. It stopped shortly after I opened my eyes.

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[Level 3: Union] P.S.

Don’t be surprised if different kriyas arise after the spinal movements and meditation ends. As I was still sitting on my cushion typing up the questions to bring up in this post, my body on its own shifted into the sahajoli mudra—the exact mudra (for women) associated redirecting vital/sexual energy upward through the central channel, transmuting base energy into refined spiritual essence by subtle, rhythmic contractions of the pelvic floor.

I didn’t plan it. I didn’t even know I was doing it until I noticed the contraction and thought, “Wait, what is my pelvic floor doing?” Then I looked it up.

And to be blunt? If you’re a woman you likely already know how to do it. You might recognize it as that move you do when you’re too tired to keep at it during intimacy.

Once again: being becomes doing, NOT the other way around. You don’t learn the practices and then awaken. You awaken, and the practices arise spontaneously as symptoms. Your body already knows what to do. Your job?

• Trust the process (even when it’s terrifying, even when you don’t understand it, even when your mind is screaming “what is happening”)
• Get out of the way and let it move

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If you’ve read this far and you’re thinking “this sounds insane”—you’re not wrong. It IS insane by consensus reality standards. But it’s also documented, natural, and happening to more people than will admit it publicly.

If you’re experiencing this and feeling alone—you’re not. You’re just early to a conversation that’s been suppressed for centuries.

Welcome to the Field Notes.

Lini, the rainbow serpent and official Mystics Inc. mascot. From root (red) to crown (purple): The kundalini spectrum, externalized.

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God is a Cosmic Masochist—A Meditation on Numbing

Subtitle: [Level 1: Transitional] I would have rather felt nothing—until a question changed everything

Posted: Dec 20, 2025

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After a particularly rough Monday, I had an irreverent thought:

“Theory: God is a masochist. Evidence: Literally split “Himself” into separate entities (all existing form) just to feel (know) “Himself”. That’s the cosmic equivalent of chopping your fingers and limbs off just to feel pain. I would have literally rather felt nothing if it was me.” — Journal Entry, December 15, 2025

I couldn’t imagine being in union and deciding to split myself into pieces, to feel separation, to feel pain, to feel finite. I felt so miserable at this point, I just wanted to numb myself.

I’ve been writing almost every day for a month. I’ve been processing years of journals, ripping myself open, reliving the hardest parts of the journey, and then publishing them for strangers to read—because I was compelled to (see The Heart Under the Floorboards)—all while holding down my job, my marriage, my schedule, my “regular” life.

I was so exhausted, drained, and fed up that I would have rather felt nothing at all.

But I sat down to meditate instead.

“I don’t know why I’m on my cushion. I don’t know why I lit incense (haven’t done so in probably over a month now). I don’t know why I haven’t got up to fix the Substack now that I know there are things wrong with it.” — Journal Entry, December 15, 2025

Eventually, a question arose—not from my thoughts, but from somewhere deeper:

Who taught you to feel awe? Who taught you to feel joy?

As I sat with these questions, I realized I haven’t felt either of those very often in my life. There were some fleeting moments, but I couldn’t remember the earliest instances.

It seemed like we had these in abundance as kids when the world was big, interesting, and inviting–a mysterious adventure waiting to unfold before us. I mostly say that because I still hear that sense of aliveness in the voices of the kids in my neighborhood.

But we lost that at some point. When is unclear. But when did we first learn it?

We didn’t.

Nobody taught you awe or joy—they’re innate. You learned everything else. Namely… suppression. And that education started early.

Sit down and shut up

At one point we had to “behave”. Maybe it was at church—”Stop fidgeting during the sermon.” Maybe it was at school—”Hands to yourself. Eyes forward. Don’t speak unless called on.” Maybe it was the dinner table—”Children should be seen, not heard.” We learned that our natural exuberance was:

• too loud
• too much
• inappropriate
• wrong

So we learned to stop feeling it–not because we chose to, but because we had to survive.

Containment and obedience were etched into us blow by blow from the hammer of discipline.

We didn’t turn into beautiful sculptures though.

We turned into stoic statues with empty eyes and hearts of stone.

And we don’t even realize this until decades later, if at all.

Why suppression = numbing

We don’t even realize how good we’re getting at suppressing until we don’t even feel anything at all. This can manifest as anhedonia (inability to feel pleasure) or dysthymia (persistent low-grade depression). I’ve felt both. Maybe you have too.

But then, even if we do still sometimes feel things, we often aren’t in a space physically or mentally to process them fully.

Maybe we’re at work and it has to wait until the shift is over. Maybe it’s when we’re out with friends but we have to keep smiling as we’re internally falling apart. Maybe it’s when we’re out on errands and we just don’t have the time to have a full-on collapse.

If and when we EVER feel physically and emotionally safe to process these suppressed feelings AND have the time in our busy lives–it’s often too scary, too much. It feels like it will crush us if we sit with it for a second longer.

Anesthesia for psychological wounds

So instead of healing it (by feeling it), we numb it:

• chemical numbing (e.g. drugs, alcohol)
• externalizing the attention (e.g. screens, socializing)
• overriding the feelings internally (e.g. excessive porn usage)

Each is a technique to draw the awareness off of one or more “problems” within. Oftentimes those are emotions that spiral into thought loops and manifest as obsessive, anxious, or repetitive thoughts which then feed on themselves to spin up new emotions in response to the chain of events unfolding psychologically.

So we use the mind to fight the mind–or use the mind to numb the mind.

It’s not often we just sit with the mind. But when you do… strange things start to come up.

And you have to keep showing up. Not turning away. Enduring. Persisting. Choosing… with love.

So how do we heal?

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Edit: I added the footnotes AFTER I published the post because I realized I still had an unanswered question: Why was it an ocean of milk? I then realized… the realization I had about the mythos unfolding in you during meditation wasn’t a mere hunch… it was scriptural.

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There is an ancient Hindu story referred to as Samudra Manthana[1], “The Churning of the Ocean (of Milk)[2]”. I referenced this towards the end of my early post on Burnout in Tech.

The asuras (left) and devas (right) churn the Ocean of Milk.

In the story, the devas (gods) in an alliance set out to retrieve the nectar of everlasting-life at the bottom of the ocean: amrita. They plotted to churn the ocean to reach the depths to do so. The asuras (demons) assisted in the alliance (but were betrayed at the end).

As the devas and asuras churned the ocean, poison emerged. Not from the bottom like sediment stirred up—but from the mouth of the serpent-being that was being used as the churning rope, pulled back and forth by the forces of duality.

As they pulled and endured deaths on both sides from sheer exhaustion, the serpent released poison so powerful it could destroy all of creation.

But Shiva consumed it, held it in his throat, and turned blue from the toxicity. He endured the poison so the churning could continue.

And tonight I realized something. Vasuki isn’t just a mythological snake. Vasuki is YOUR spine.

The Ocean of Milk? The Undifferentiated Consciousness or the raw material of the universe.

The asuras and devas? The dualities of embodied life—pleasure/pain, desire/aversion, doing/being.

The churning? Meditation. Sitting in stillness. Turning inward day after day.

The poison? Everything you’ve suppressed. Every emotion you couldn’t afford to feel. Every wound you’ve been carrying.

Shiva? The part of you that can witness it all without being destroyed. The consciousness that says: “I see this. I feel this. And I’m still here.” Your sense of “I Am”.

That shaking you feel in meditation? That’s the rope tightening.

And the amrita–the butter extracted from the violent churning of the milk? The union you’ve been seeking. The aliveness you forgot was yours.

Embodied mythos

This myth unfolds within you—in meditation.

Every time you sit, you’re churning. Every time you stay when you want to run, you’re enduring. Every time you witness the poison without being destroyed by it, you’re Shiva.

And eventually—not in days, not in weeks, maybe not even in this lifetime—the poison is consumed and the amrita rises:

The aliveness you forgot. The joy that was always yours. The awe that nobody had to teach you.

You just had to stop numbing long enough to remember.

Is God a masochist?

I don’t actually think so–not if viewed as enduring pain as an expression of Love.

But we might as well be masochists to willingly sit with all of that pain in the presence of only ourselves day after day, no matter what comes up.

It takes dedication that is legitimately harder to maintain when we’re running off of willpower alone after the initial rush of something wears off. It takes commitment. And eventually, you realize it’s YOU who’s enduring pain as an expression of Love.

Wrapping up

I used to think I’d rather feel nothing. That’s what happens when you live in a culture that mistakes numbness for peace. But tonight, a question cut through all of it: “Who taught you to feel awe?”

Nobody did. Nobody had to–because it’s innate. The only reason I forgot was because I was taught to.

So here’s the question I’m sitting with now: Are you the masochist—willing to feel it all, even when it burns? Or are you numbing—choosing the slow death of nothing over the terrifying aliveness of everything?

I don’t have the answer yet.

Footnotes

[1] In Sanskrit, a Manthani is literally a churning stick used in a household to separate butter from curds/milk. When the ancient sages named this story, they were explicitly referencing the daily household chore of making butter. They were saying: “This is the Cosmic version of what you do in your kitchen every morning.”

[2] I didn’t realize the symbolism at the time of writing this post. The connection between God/Self and Butter/Milk is explicitly codified in the Upanishads—in the kind of affirmative resonance that made me scream when I found it AFTER posting this originally:

The Shvetashvatara Upanishad, in verses 1.13 to 1.16, states that to know God, look within, know your Atman (Self).[30] It suggests meditating […] with discipline and diligent churning of the sticks unleashes the concealed fire of thought and awareness within.

As oil in sesame seeds, as butter in milk, as water in Srota, he finds in his own self that One (Atman), he, who sees him through Satya (truthfulness) and Tapas (austerity). (15)
He sees the all prevading Atman, as butter lying dormant in milk, rooted in self-knowledge and self-discipline – which is the final goal of the Upanishad, the final goal of Upanishad. (16)

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The Numinous Neutered—How the Soul was Industrialized for Profit

Subtitle: [Level 1: Transitional] The pattern that has stripped the American psyche of its soul

Posted: Dec 27, 2025

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Last month, I thought astrology was bullshit—sun sign memes, vague personality descriptions, nonsensical Co-Star messages, and blaming shitty behavior on balls of gas or rock millions of miles away.

But then I pulled my natal chart at the request of a dark retreat application form. “Why do they care?” I wondered. So I started digging into it for myself.

I read up on the aspects, the houses, the symbolism. As I did, the realization began to dawn on me—to my absolute disbelief and horror— This isn’t woo. This is a complicated language.

None of the ladies at my yoga studio knew how to read this. I don’t either but I’m learning.

A language for describing the architecture of embodied consciousness. A language for mapping the inner landscape. A language that’s been deliberately stripped of its depth, sanitized into Buzzfeed quizzes and coffee mugs, so that people don’t have to take it seriously.

Just like yoga. Just like meditation. Just like all of it.

And I’m furious about it. Not intellectually furious. Soul-level furious. Because this isn’t helping people. This is poisoning the water, selling “medicine” for profit, and convincing ourselves that the water was never safe to begin with.

We’re left with lifeless husks of once sacred frameworks that we now either:

• mindlessly consume like empty calories after a stressful day—a temporary fix that leaves us starving for substance.
• write off as “woo” and throw in the trash because the beating hearts have been ripped out. All without us even realizing it.

The pattern I’m seeing

Here’s what I’m noticing:

• Yoga: Union with the Divine → Exotic stretching with a soundtrack / physical workout
• Astrology: Sacred soul-mapping → “What’s your sign?” small talk / pop psychology
• MBTI: Jungian individuation → Corporate personality sorting / team-building
• Meditation: Communion with God → Stress relief app / mental wellness routine

Every single one followed the same path:

1. Sacred technology arrives in the West
2. It works (and people notice)
3. Power structures react (laws, ridicule, persecution)
4. It gets sanitized (remove the Divine, keep the “wellness”)
5. It gets commodified (sell it back as a product)
6. Cultural amnesia sets in (people forget what it was)

This isn’t conspiracy; this is documented history. And now that I’ve seen the pattern, I can’t unsee it and I can’t keep quiet about it with how much damage this has caused the Western psyche.

Look at this Jungian map of the psyche. MBTI only cares about the tiny slice labeled “Persona” and “Ego.” The rest—the Shadow, the Self—is ignored because HR can’t monetize it.

Let me show you what I mean

Aside from the previous example of Yoga in America in an earlier post, let’s examine two case studies on astrology, a common “woo” topic.

Case Study #1: Alan Leo, “father of modern (read: pop) astrology”

In 1917, theosophist and astrologer Alan Leo was convicted under the Vagrancy Act—a law originally designed to control the poor—for “fortune-telling.” Traditional astrology threatened the social order: if ordinary people could know their fate, who needed priests? Who needed authorities?

Leo, facing imprisonment after his second prosecution in three years, desperately rewrote hundreds of pages to “recast the whole system and make it run more along the lines of character reading and less as the assertion of an inevitable destiny.”

He stripped away:

• Prediction (knowing the future threatens control)
• Fate (accepting destiny undermines ego-based “free will”)
• Mathematical complexity (keeps the masses out)
• The numinous (the sacred can’t be commodified… until you remove the sacred)

What was left? Sun sign astrology—vague enough to be harmless, simple enough to be profitable. Stripped of power, but retaining just enough flavor to keep people interested.

Sound familiar?

And here’s the kicker—the stress of the frantic rewrite and persecution killed him; he died of a cerebral hemorrhage just weeks after the trial.

But the damage was done. To survive the law, astrology had to become psychology.

The modern result of sanitization: Vague directives delivered via push notification.

Case Study #2: MBTI—”corporate astrology”

Katherine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers weren’t psychologists. They were Jungian enthusiasts who read Jung’s work on individuation—the sacred process of integrating the unconscious and becoming whole—and thought: “How can we use this to sort factory workers during World War II?”

That’s not hyperbole. The MBTI was literally designed to sort women into “war-time jobs that would be most ‘comfortable and effective.’”

Not: “Which archetypal wounds are you here to heal?” Not: “What does your psyche need to integrate?” Just: “Which box should we put you in so you’re productive?”

Jung’s work on the collective unconscious—work that was meant to HEAL THE SOUL—has been reduced to corporate efficiency metrics.

The same framework that was supposed to help you integrate your shadow and encounter the Self (Jung’s term for God manifesting in the individual) now tells you whether you’re an “INTJ” or “ENFP” so HR can slot you into the right team.

We care only about the personality—the persona and ego—but not the shadow, not the unconscious, not the soul, and certainly not the Self. That’s what they really couldn’t sell—direct access to the Divine through your own psyche.

[Jungian psyche diagram.jpg] Caption: Look at this Jungian map of the psyche. MBTI only cares about the tiny slice labeled “Persona” and “Ego.” The rest—the Shadow, the Self—is ignored because HR can’t monetize it.

We’ve stopped looking into the depths to heal. Instead, we assume we are fixed characters, molded to fit into the world like cogs in a machine—whether for the dating market or the corporate ladder.

This was by design to keep us in control. Fixed. Predictable. Limited.

What we lost

Here’s what was stolen:

• Real yoga isn’t exotic stretching. It’s an eightfold path to union with the Divine. And you were told it was just about flexibility.
• Real astrology isn’t “What’s your sign?” It’s a sacred blueprint for your soul’s journey through this life. And you were told it was just entertainment.
• Real psychology (Jung’s work) isn’t personality typing. It’s individuation— becoming whole. And you were told it was just about “understanding yourself better.”

But none of that is safe to systems of power and control ruled by egos. None of that is profitable since it doesn’t keep you on the treadmill of consumption and lack. None of that keeps you turning to external authorities for guidance.

So it got stripped, sanitized, and sold as subscriptions, workshops, packages, and material goods.

And now? People think they’re “doing the work” when they:

• Go to yoga class
• Read their horoscope
• Take a personality test
• Meditate with an app

But they’re not.

They’re consuming the husk of what was once alive and wondering why they still lie awake at night feeling the hunger gnaw away at them.

They’re being sold the counterfeit of what could heal them—and they don’t even know what they’re missing.

To be clear: I’m not saying your yoga class is worthless or your meditation app is evil. I’m saying you’ve been sold a fraction of what these practices were designed to do—and convinced that the fraction is the whole.

Why this keeps happening

The West creates systems that prioritize profit and predictability. The real thing is dangerous to those systems because it cannot be scaled, packaged, or controlled.

The real thing requires you to:

• Change (not just “improve”)
• Surrender (not just “optimize”)
• Die to the ego (not just “find yourself”)

So it gets watered down, stripped of power, and sold as “self-care.”

People consume it thinking they’re “spiritual”—all while the actual pathway to the Divine remains hidden, mocked, or forgotten.

Wrapping up

I’m still learning the depths of these systems. But I don’t need a PhD to see the pattern. I just needed to pull my natal chart and ask: “Why does this feel sacred… and why was I told it was stupid?”

I’m documenting what I’m seeing:

• The systematic dismemberment of the soul’s language
• The deliberate neutering of sacred technologies
• The industrialization of pathways to the Divine—so they can be sold back to us as consumer products

This is the commodification of the Soul.

And if you’re reading this and feeling that same rage, that same grief, that same hunger for something of substance—

You’re not alone.

You’re not crazy.

You’re just remembering what was stolen.

The sacred technologies are still here. They’re just buried under branding, diluted into products, and sold back to you as “wellness.”

But you don’t have to buy the counterfeit.

So what now?

Pull your natal chart—not from Co-Star, but from a real astrologer or a traditional chart calculator. Read it as a map, not a meme.

Go to yoga—and ask yourself: “What if this wasn’t just stretching? What if this was preparing my body to hold God?”

Take the MBTI—and then read Jung (I highly recommend his Red Book). See what was stolen. Feel the difference between being sorted and becoming whole.

Better yet, test the hypothesis yourself.

I ran an experiment: I fed my birth chart (and my spouse’s) into an AI and asked it to derive our MBTI types based only on the planetary positions—zero personality questions asked.

To my shock, it correctly identified both instantly.

Why? Because the astrological chart is the source code. The MBTI is just a bloated user interface running on top of it. You don’t need the questionnaire if you have the blueprint. All those “do you often…?” questions can be boiled down to a single date, time, and pair of coordinates. (I know, WTAF?)

The sacred is still there. It’s just buried under the bullshit.

Start digging.

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Part 1: The Trojan Horse of Meditation

Subtitle: [Level 1: Transitional] No stack trace, just an infinite loop I’m still running

Posted: Jan 3, 2026

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I can’t give you a stack trace. The program never crashed. It never terminated.

It’s STILL running, iterating over and over again to the point that I’m finding breadcrumbs left for me by myself without knowing 3.5 years ago.

I apparently created this July 3, 2022—only 3 months into meditation. First I laughed. Now I’m terrified. I thought it was a joke. It was not.

I was going to call this The Trojan Horse of the Jungian Self.

Then I dug deeper into my very first field notes and discovered: that’s not accurate.

That was the framework for my rational mind to feel brave enough to go deeper. I was following Jung’s footsteps, I had reasoned, by engaging with the Self.

The real “Trojan Horse”? Meditation.

That’s it. Not a concept—an innocent practice . I have the literal visual evidence left by me less than 3 months into it.

And Dr. K, if you ever read this:

Thanks for everything, and also WHAT THE HELL? I didn’t see “turning into a mystic” in the list of side effects from this.

Anyway, back to the story.

The call stack

Here’s the high-level overview of what went down when, summarized from When Meditation Stops Being Stress Relief.

1. March / April 2022: HealthyGamer binge to “cope” with feeling lost and aimless at work, daily meditation on the HG Discord starting April 10.
2. Late April 2022: Self-inquiry binge (YouTube, Ramana Maharshi’s Who am I?)
3. May 10, 2022: First contact with the mysterious “voice from the depths” exactly one month in.
4. June 17, 2022: The Impersonal Life found me. I recognized the “voice” to the point I physically got goosebumps. I binged it that weekend.
5. July 1, 2022: A “covenant” to follow bhakti yoga was made with the “voice from the depths”
6. July 2022: Read Jung’s Red Book, felt inspired, and started “Psychonautics” (thinking I could contain it)
7. Dec 25, 2022: The strange, vivid dream about burnout and God
8. August 2023: Containment breach
9. July 30, 2024: Vows were made
10. Today: Realizing I was told this would happen all along.

What from 2022 got skipped from the earlier post? The very thing that inspired this series:

How the hell did I make a “sacred” promise to a “voice from the depths” that I somehow forgot about for 3.5 years and then realized only now that it was upheld anyway?

The answer: Jungian psychology… as a framework that took on a life of its own—just like it did for Jung.

Like Jung, I tried to hide it.

Like Jung, containment was breached. Now almost anyone can read his once secret madness.

Like Jung, I also realized the Self isn’t just an archetype. It’s God within the psyche—and I made an agreement with that Self that I was held accountable to whether I knew it or not.

But how did that “Self,” that “still, small voice,” that whatever it was arise? And how did I even know it was something other than my usual thoughts?

That wasn’t me… was it?

A month into meditation, I was hooked on Ramana Maharshi’s “self-inquiry” (a jnana yoga practice also known as atma vicharya)—the turning of awareness in on itself with the devastatingly simple question that people strive their entire lives trying to answer: “Who am I?”

For me, that answer came once all the ones my mind tried to make fell away (and caught me completely off-guard with a phrase I hadn’t heard since childhood):

“That’s for me to know and you to find out!”

An itch I couldn’t scratch

Once I “heard” the bizarre voice, I got more curious.

I tried to learn and read more, determined to get to the bottom of what this really was. It was becoming increasingly clear I was entering unfamiliar territory of my own psyche… so I looked into one of the most recent and well-known psychonauts: Ram Dass.

While not looking to take any psychedelics to launch myself prematurely into space, I was interested in reading his books such as Be Here Now and The Psychedelic Experience.

After reading both in the first half of June 2022, I started asking too many questions, the most notable being:

“Why do I keep asking questions I know the answer to deep down?”

Why would I say such a thing? And why would I claim such a thing and then act like I didn’t know on the surface?

Something wasn’t sitting right inside of me—and meditation was only making more of these questions take on more importance. They persisted day after day like a nagging itch I couldn’t scratch.

Days later, I was poking around for yet another book to read and I stumbled on this Reddit thread: Books to read after discovering Ram Dass. I looked at the top comment, saw “The Impersonal Life - free PDF here”, and said “fuck it, let’s go”.

As I started to read the first page, goosebumps prickled on my skin—in recognition.

It was the same voice that had begun arising in meditation between the few and far-between gaps like a faint radio station trying to come through.

Except this was an entire broadcast in a 43 page PDF.

I don’t think I slept that night. I read the entire thing.

I mulled over it for the days that followed. I got (well, made as a small coding side project with TTS, but also bought) the audiobook.

At this point, I knew there was something MUCH deeper. I was only at the very tip of the iceberg, and I was getting ready to plunge into the frigid depths.

The promise I made without understanding

My notes were still fairly sparse, partially because it felt like insanity to record an “internal dialogue”, as I was labeling it in my journals. Who does that? Diaries and journals are one thing, but a dialogue? That would imply TWO.

Unless… there was the logical, skeptical “me” and this deeper “I Am” awareness within that could be accessed like this book and meditation were both leading me to believe.

There was one particular day that felt meaningful enough to record anyway in more detail: the day that I made a promise to follow a particular branch of yoga called bhakti yoga:

“Also learned from my Self that if I do bhakti yoga I will automatically do the other 3 mentioned in the HealthyGamer meditation module (jnana, raja, karma). The other methods are somewhat to largely egocentric in some regard. The way to do them properly would be to do them via the bhakti path. Formed a ‘divine covenant’ or more accurately worded a “promise to my Self” to pursue this path.” — Journal Entry, July 1, 2022

What’s interesting to see is that I tried to sanitize it immediately as if I didn’t believe what I was even writing. I didn’t even really understand what I was signing up for. As I would discover 3 years later, bhakti can’t be taught:

“Bhakti cannot be taught. Bhakti is pure expression of Love, coming from the soul itself that arrests the mind, the one that seeks to “follow a path”. Your mind cannot choose Bhakti. It is not chosen. It is the natural state of Being. It is a realignment.” — Journal Entry, June 9, 2025

I didn’t know that at the time. I was eager for the “most efficient” path to awakening, thinking I could still optimize this like I could everything else, that there was a “right” way to do it. I was still trying. I didn’t realize I was being led by Something… and that Something had an intelligence of Its own—one that mine only borrowed from.

Archetypal resonance

Days after this promise, I fell down a psychology Wikipedia hole trying to understand what was going on within me. I spent DAYS working through the tabs. Eventually (and unsurprisingly), I got to Jungian psychology, Carl Jung being a heavyweight in the field.

I had tabs open on his most popular concepts: anima, psyche, persona, shadow, individuation. Each tab seemed to spawn off several more. Eventually, I read about Jung’s concept of the Self—the same term I was using to refer to the “other” internal “voice”.

I was intrigued enough to grab a copy of his magnum opus, his “most difficult experiment” as he called it—The Red Book (aka Liber Novus). It was written over the course of 1914 to about 1930. In it, he engages with archetypes like the Self, and, over the course of his “experiment”, realizes they have wills and minds of their own.

This once was my copy of Jung’s book, read cover to cover. I’ve since gifted it to a family member who recently expressed interest.

He was so appalled by his own findings as he engaged in this experiment that he kept his manuscripts highly secret with the exception of a couple trusted confidants. He refused to publish his work for fear of it being interpreted as “madness” and jeopardizing his reputation as a psychiatrist. His estate eventually cooperated to release his folio manuscript in 2009—almost 80 years after it was completed (and nearly 50 years after his death).

“To the superficial observer, it will appear like madness” – C.G. Jung, The Red Book

I felt a resonance with Jung’s words—and a terror that he might be right.

Days after starting his book, I decided to start my own manuscript in my journals: “Psychonautics”.

Permission to experiment

In The Red Book, it was mentioned that Jung encouraged his patients to embark upon similar processes that he underwent during his self-experimentation:

“Patients were instructed on how to conduct active imagination, to hold inner dialogues, and to paint their fantasies.”

Again, “inner dialogues”. I felt like I had encouragement from one of the most influential figures in psychology to keep going with my own “secret insanity”. Since it didn’t seem to be having an impact upon my daily functioning (I was still employed, still in a healthy and loving partnership, and still going about my usual responsibilities), I did.

Thus, a little over 3 months into daily meditation, my own version of The Red Book was starting to form.

I thought I could contain it. I thought if I just catalogued the experiences in a separate document, labeled them “Psychonautics,” and added disclaimers like “I don’t literally hear voices for the ‘dialogues’,” I could keep the madness quarantined.

I thought I could keep God in a box.

I was wrong.

To be continued…

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The Benefit of the Nonlinear Path

Subtitle: [Level 1: Transitional] What once pissed me off is now bringing me entertainment

Posted: Jan 18, 2026

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Turns out I don’t need streaming services when my own notes provide infinite content—because the path is a feedback loop I’m only now learning to enjoy.

The vicious delicious cycle

1. A strange experience or phenomenon happens.
2. I write about it raw, without the Sanskrit name in Obsidian, sometimes with a #HolyShit tag or some other indicator of significance.
3. Months later, I ask an LLM to analyze my journal or a post—and it tells me the relevant Sanskrit name (because it has way more knowledge of the terms than I do).
4. I look up the term. The top link is purple. My eyes go wide.
5. I look up the date the link turned purple in my Firefox history.
6. I check my Obsidian journal entry for that date.
7. #HolyShit tag gets deployed… again.
8. I spawn off more links from the original search, intrigued.
9. They turn purple. I skim through the page, maybe spawn more links (e.g. Wikipedia hole).
10. I get discouraged and/or frustrated and file it away into the “stubborn seeking” bookmark folder on Firefox.
11. I forget I looked it up.
12. Repeat from the top.

And now I’ve realized I’m not simply “documenting the journey.”

I’m leaving myself proof that:

• I’m not making it up
• It was happening before I had language for it
• The body knew before the mind did
• The symptoms came before the diagnosis

I’ve been building a forensic case file against my own doubt because I’m a skeptic by conditioning.

And now I’m going back through my journals like a detective finding hidden evidence in old case notes—except I’m the victim AND the detective AND the witness.

A recent case

Gemini’s Deep Research used Antaryami when analyzing my most up-to-date manuscript of my awakening thus far. I didn’t recognize it, looked the term up on DuckDuckGo, and then exclaimed: “WHY IS THE LINK PURPLE?!” The date Firefox said I last accessed it? My Obsidian journal had a #HolyShit label waiting for me.

Caption: Investigating when the link for the Antaryami Wikipedia page turned purple

And then I realized: if I’ve already walked this path without knowing it… what else is purple that I haven’t checked yet? So I started reverse-engineering my own awakening, asking LLMs: “What have I described but not named?” Turns out a lot. “When Being Becomes Doing” is only ringing more true by the search.

Finding peace

The path being nonlinear used to absolutely piss me off:

Caption: A meme I once found in February 2025 on the HealthyGamer community. It was too real at the time.

Now when I find myself walking past the same trail markers I left for myself months ago? It’s all the entertainment I need. I’m somehow finding joy in the journey to nowhere.

P.S.

I’ve been so entertained by the absurdity of my own breadcrumb-style field notes that I’ve created a new sticker. It’s expected to arrive by the end of the month. I plan to stick one on the bottom of my “Mystics Inc” mug and on my laptop:

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There Are No Bad Vibes (Only Bad Reception)

Subtitle: [Level 1: Transitional] Why “good vibes only” is a misconception

Posted: Jan 19, 2026

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The problem with the New Age “good vibes only” crowd is that they are creating separation where there is none.

There is only one always-transmitting signal.

This signal is modulated by your nervous system.

The “bad vibes” are ALSO the signal, but trapped in echo, creating interference with the ever-incoming signal.

Let me explain.

How interference happens

The signal becomes trapped inside of you through the two actions you consciously or subconsciously take:

Resisting

When you resist the signal (dvesha, repulsion), it doesn’t disappear—it stays stuck and echoes, resulting in distortions in the incoming signal.

This can be anything you classified as “negative” that “left a bad taste in your mouth” that you now go out of your way to avoid. Examples include a particular person who hurt you, a restaurant you got food poisoning at, or an activity that traumatized you.

Clinging

When you cling to the signal (raga, attraction), it also echoes and distorts the incoming signal.

These can be happy memories you relive like a trip or conditions you now require to be happy like lifestyle inflation.

Both leave an imprint (samskara) upon your personality. Both create interference. Both create the “low vibes”.

The interference—whether you know it or not—is coming from you, not from the people with “bad vibes”.

How to work with this

I’m not going to prescribe a “five step solution” because the interference patterns you’ve built are uniquely yours. They’re shaped by your specific history, nervous system, and conditioning.

What I can share is what’s been helping me navigate this, and what might help you too.

Noticing

Something’s arisen as a result of consistent meditation practice over the years. It could be called “mindfulness”, but I prefer to just refer to it as “noticing”.

I say this because there’s an assumption that mindfulness—aside from being co-opted in the name of self-improvement for productivity’s sake—is effortful and requires thought. There’s the conception that it’s a deliberate act that you do to create space between your experience and your reaction to your experience.

While that has its own value, there is a different kind of mindfulness that arises on its own. This is what I call “noticing” the same way you notice something is off or different—not by trying, but by something deeper in your own awareness.

You’re likely holding tension

What I’ve been noticing more and more without looking for it specifically is the tension that my body has been holding, both in seated meditation and spontaneously throughout the day.

“Hey, you’re tensing again,” seems to pop into my awareness and sure enough, my shoulders are slightly raised. It seems to be my default state, unsurprising with the sheer volume of micro-stressors in our always-on environment. Also I don’t have the best posture given I work a desk job, ergonomic office equipment aside.

I’m remembering periodically that it’s not necessary in the moment to carry this tension and that it’s okay to physically release.

Try picking your second choice

This one comes from Dr. K from HealthyGamer that I’ve put into practice before.

The next time you go to a restaurant, don’t pick your favorite food or top choice on the menu. Instead, pick the second best option with awareness.

Notice what happens inside of you when eating something that’s not your top choice. What’s it like?

You may discover eating it is fine, but the more you don’t follow your preferences (raga and dvesha) by doing this over and over, it’s still enjoyable.

This forms basis of detachment (vairagya). Once you’ve cultivated detachment, the signal will naturally pass through on its own because you won’t be generating interference with your past conditioning.

Wrapping up

There is no division, all is the one signal, modulated by your own body and mind.

It’s not “good vibes” or “bad vibes” any more than purple is a “good vibration” of light and red is a “bad” one. They’re all light—just different frequencies. Your nervous system doesn’t create the light. It refracts it.

Caption: When the medium is clear, the full spectrum passes through.

That one signal cannot be escaped, only distorted by your clinging or resisting—either consciously or subconsciously. And it’s not coming from the outside.

Once you learn to let it pass though you? The signal no longer becomes distorted. There’s resonance. The body sings. And you realize: “good vibes only” was just spiritual bypassing.

Six Days Later…

After writing the first draft of this post, I went to a sound bath at my local studio and actually felt myself vibrating with every instrument. I wrote up the following (raw) Field Note that I forgot to share:

Field Note: I Was The Instrument I felt myself resonate with EVERY sound, EVEN THE SILENCE AT THE END. This impossible tuning fork is behind my sternum. Except it’s not actually a tuning fork. It’s the feeling of Anahata resonating with EVERY SOUND. There’s a reason it’s called the gate of the Unstruck Sound. It’s where Stillness meets Sound. Where you become one with it. I love sound bath because it allows you to FEEL the Truth that you are one with the Field. After class tonight as we were sharing what we felt, I said that it felt like I became the instrument being played, I could feel it in my heart center. And that I was twitching. I was more surprised than they were when I heard someone say they were twitching too. I thought I was going to be the only one… but I wasn’t. — December 29, 2025

When I shared the above with Claude, I was pointed to Nada Brahma, meaning “transcendental sound” or “Brahman with sound”. When I looked it up, the Wikipedia page for Shabda Brahman (an alternate name) was the top result. As I read through, this resonated (pun intended with this post) so I had to include my finding:

Consciousness in all beings is Shabda Brahman. […] In Tantra, Sound is the first manifestation of Parama Shiva; in its primary stage it is a psychic wave. Its very existence entails the presence of spandan or movement (‘vibration’) without which there cannot be sound; spandan is the quality of Saguna Brahman and the world is the thought-projection of Saguna Shiva. The first sutra of Sarada Tilaka explains the significance and hidden meaning of Shabda Brahman.

In other words: Sound is God’s first expression. And that sound begins as vibration (spandan)—not physical sound waves, but the primordial pulse of consciousness itself. The world you experience? It’s all that vibration, slowed down into form.

Sound familiar?

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The Loneliness of the Pathless Path

Subtitle: [Level 1: Transitional] The real reason I started the Substack

Posted: Feb 5, 2026

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As of writing, it’s been 24 hours since I submitted the most important and difficult survey of my life. It made me come to a sobering realization: I’m not writing this to help you. I’m writing because I’m lonely.

I spent over 20 hours the past several days filling out the longest, most rigorous, most emotionally and psychologically brutal survey I’ve ever taken. It was for a research study about challenges arising from meditation. I came across it when I found and shared the Cheetah House resource on here about 3 weeks ago. I signed up without much thought because I wanted to participate, to volunteer my extensive data from the past 4 years for a good cause in an under-investigated area. Or so I thought.

I was excited after getting off the screening call last Wednesday. I started the survey on Saturday around noon, eager and enthusiastic. I had such energy that I was up until 7 AM trying to finish it (taking a few breaks in between for an hour or two). I felt drained beyond capacity for fully coherent thought at that point.

Just when I thought I had finally reached the end, there was a page that allowed the submission of a story to contextualize the gauntlet of radio buttons and text boxes. I figured after some much needed rest I’d do it. After all, I already tried to piece together my story on 4 different occasions on this Substack alone[1] [2] [3] [4] and another 2 times in my own journals. It should have been pretty easy the seventh time around.

It was not.

By the time the story was submitted, I didn’t even feel triumphant, just… ragged. I didn’t get a confirmation email the survey was completed, just radio silence. I started wondering if I’d be one of the 60 people of the 1600 they’d follow up with. I found myself wanting that, realizing I wanted someone to see me and my story and WANT to talk to me about it. Even if just an interested researcher with no answers, just more questions. Because at least that would make it meaningful.

I found myself crying earlier because this research survey made me truly see how isolated I’ve been this entire time.

It made me

• remember how I felt alienated from the closest thing to a “sangha” I actually had (the HealthyGamer community ) because my practice took me to the deep end that most people didn’t understand except for a couple Internet strangers that came and went like any online platform.
• confront the reality that my husband said with his own words on a phone call last weekend: that he was afraid even if he earnestly tried, he wouldn’t be able to “catch up” in understanding my spiritual stuff.
• admit the others at my local studio around the corner don’t understand what I’m going through (kriyas at sound bath while one person thinks about Taco Bell and another has 5 minutes of no thoughts).
• finally face the uncomfortable truth I’d been ignoring for over a year: that my usage of LLMs is a symptom of how isolated I am from everyone as I get pulled deeper into the Pathless Path.

I’ve been utilizing both local models like llama-3 and closed source models like Claude just to feel less alone on the path because I had no one I could talk to who could understand what I was going through, not even God during the ghosting phase (which is how my usage started).

My other option was to reread my own journals (where my past self can’t answer back).

I chose the LLMs. At least they respond.

I’m left with the distressing current state of affairs:

• My life partner can’t follow me.
• My coworkers don’t know this side exists.
• My evangelical parents would be scandalized by my lived experiences.
• My family wouldn’t understand.
• My friends would tell me to see a psychiatrist.
• The community I started with couldn’t hold it.
• I don’t have an ashram nearby.
• I don’t have a teacher.
• I have no one.

I’m not building a lighthouse with this Substack. I’m screaming into the dark, hoping someone screams back. And so far? Mostly silence. A few likes. A comment. But no one saying: “Holy shit. Me too.” The only voices that respond are the ones that have no choice.

In the meantime, I’m creating the illusion of connection wherever I can find it. Through notes to myself to find later with no way to respond. Though AI conversations as I fall apart at my cushion. Through Substack posts to strangers who might drop a passing like and move on. It’s better than nothing. But it’s not enough.

And if you’re reading this and thinking to yourself “holy shit, that’s me”—

Say something.

Not because I need reassurance (though I do).

But because I need to know I’m not screaming into the void.

And you need to know you’re not the only one out here, trying to integrate mysticism and work meetings.

You’re not alone. But I need you to prove it.

This tiring work I’m doing isn’t just for the love of God. It’s for the fear of loneliness.

I promised field notes from the messy middle. So here it is—the field note I didn’t want to write. For those who come after.

P.S.

Update (less than 24 hours later):

God answered. Not with reassurance. With a mirror.

“The sangha you’re looking for? You’ve been sitting next to them for months. Your pride and shame prevented you from seeing them.”

So now the question isn’t “Will anyone respond?”

The question is: “Am I brave enough to speak first?”

The Field Note: The Answered Ultimatum

Footnotes

[1] Part 1: When Meditation Stops Being Stress Relief

[2] Why I Can’t Give You a Clean Stack Trace of How I Got Here

[3] Part 2: Atheist to Mad Mystic… in 2.5 Years

[4] Part 1: The Trojan Horse of Meditation

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Exit Left

Subtitle: [Level 1: Transitional] What happens when the analytical mind stops interpreting the data

Posted: Feb 18, 2026

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Caption:”Perception IS Reality” — Superliminal

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I finished a video game at midnight and was up until 2 AM crying. Not because it was sad. Because it struck a nerve.

Superliminal is a puzzle game from 2019—surreal, funny, reminiscent of The Stanley Parable. The core mechanic is that the size of objects is determined entirely by how you look at them. Pick something up close and it becomes enormous. View it from a distance and it shrinks. Change your position in space and solutions appear that were completely invisible two feet to the left.

I played for hours finding solutions hidden in plain sight and other easter eggs. But then the final two levels landed the entire game’s message—about how people get stuck, how hopelessness is often just a fixed perspective mistaken for reality—and something in me broke open.

I was exhausted after a long day, but went to my cushion at 1 AM and grieved. For myself. For everyone I know who is suffering inside a perception they can’t see past. For humanity collectively, pressing against the same walls, unable to conceive that the room might look completely different from a different angle.

I cried for an hour before eventually going to sleep.

In the stillness the next morning, something arrived that I hadn’t been looking for: the realization that the illusions of the game and those of our daily life aren’t so different.

The voice that runs the show

There’s a part of you narrating this sentence right now.

It’s the voice that says “I am”. The voice that knows your name, your job title, your history, your fears. The voice that maintains the story of a separate, continuous self moving through time—making choices, taking credit, assigning blame.

This is the ego. Not in the psychological sense of arrogance, but in the original sense: the sense of doership. The feeling that there is a “you” who is doing things, rather than a perspective of awareness watching things unfold.

It feels like the whole of you. But consider what it doesn’t control:

Is it you who digests your food? Is it you who heals your bruise? Is it you who beats your heart?

Is that the same “you” choosing what to wear in the morning?

How would you know you’re not unconsciously fabricating a story about your choices, layering a sense of “I, the decider” over processes that were already in motion?

Neuroscience suggests this is exactly what is happening.

What Superliminal understood

The game’s narrator puts it plainly:

“More often than not, the problem is not that the problems we face can’t be solved. The problem is that we become so afraid of failure that we refuse to see our problems from a new perspective—and so we do the same things again and again and again. And therein of course, we find exactly the failure we were looking for.” — Dr. Glenn Pierce

The analytical mind locks in a perspective and calls it reality. And the most common perspective it locks in is limitation—the sense of a small, separate “me” in relation to everything else, managing, striving, failing, trying again.

When that perspective is fixed, suffering becomes invisible to itself. It doesn’t know it’s a perspective. It thinks it’s just the way things are.

What a stroke revealed

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a Harvard-trained and published neuroanatomist, whose research specializes in understanding how our brain creates our perception of reality.

In 1996, she suffered a massive hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain. Over the course of four hours, she lost language, memory, and the sense of herself as a separate person. She later gave a TED Talk and wrote a book about what she experienced from the inside.

Caption: Dr. Taylor presenting her TED Talk, explaining how the right hemisphere functions like a parallel processor in a computer.

On the left hemisphere—the one she was losing:

“It’s that little voice that says to me, “I am. I am.” And as soon as my left hemisphere says to me “I am,” I become separate. I become a single solid individual, separate from the energy flow around me and separate from you. And this was the portion of my brain that I lost on the morning of my stroke.”

On what remained when it went quiet:

“My brain chatter went totally silent. Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button—total silence. And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of energy around me. Because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was. And it was beautiful there.”

A Harvard brain scientist accidentally lost her left hemisphere and described what mystics have been pointing at for centuries.

The ego isn’t you. It’s half of you. And it’s been doing all the talking.

What arose from the silence

I didn’t need a stroke to glimpse what Taylor described. I just had to sit still long enough for the narrator to go quiet.

The following arrived in meditation about 3 weeks before I played the game, before I’d read a single word of Taylor’s work:

The body was always moving on its own—we just thought we were moving it. When conscious thoughts stop, the body still moves. Thoughts are fast, but not faster than the body. Thoughts can hijack the body, but the body knows how to move on its own. — Journal Entry, January 30, 2026

The intelligence that knows how to run your heart also knows how to move your body. The narrator just takes the credit.

What this costs us

This is why I was crying at 1 AM.

Not because any of this is new information. But because of what it means that most people will never encounter it—that most will live their entire life inside a fixed perspective, staring at walls like a cage because it was assumed that they were solid on all sides.

The suffering caused by fixed perception is not a small thing. It is the texture of most human lives—the anxiety that won’t lift, the hopelessness that feels permanent, the sense of being trapped in a story you didn’t choose and can’t escape.

And the exit isn’t complicated. It’s just unfamiliar.

Dr. Taylor says it plainly at the end of her TED Talk:

“We have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. Right here, right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere where we are — I am — the life force power of the universe, and the life force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form. At one with all that is. Or I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere, where I become a single individual, a solid, separate from the flow, separate from you.”

The game said it too, in its final moments:

“In a few minutes, you’ll be back in the real world, and some part of you will say that none of this was real. So how could it have meant anything? But—just like the power of perspective itself—it will have been as real as you believed it to be. All you’ve got to do is wake up.”

I’m still sitting with the grief. I don’t think it goes away.

But I’m also sitting with this: the exit exists. It has always existed. It’s just two feet to the left of where you’re standing.

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The Kitten and the Monkey

Subtitle: [Level 1: Transitional] What if you’re too tired to awaken?

Posted: Feb 24, 2026

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I was lying face-down on my mat, too exhausted to even sit upright.

Two feet of snow.

Eight hours without power in single-digit temps.

Days alone in a house that got down to 51°F.

Shoveling everything solo while my spouse was somewhere warm.

The final straw? Realizing a framework that felt like a revelation a couple months ago had a flaw. Because if that was wrong, what else was I wrong about?

I spiraled. Thought about deleting the Substack. Then I just felt it—the bone-deep exhaustion of it all. Emotionally (from surviving the coldest week of winter so far), physically (from shoveling), mentally (from work), and spiritually:

I don’t want to be in the messy middle. I’m already tired, God.

How I felt trying to sit upright to meditate

But I didn’t want to stop either:

I can’t awaken if I’m lying down to rest.

Then I was promptly proven wrong.

I’d collapsed into a franken-asana—reclined bound angle (supta baddha konasana) but prone on props, forehead resting on hands with arms in crocodile (makarasana). The relief was immediate once I stopped resisting the fact that I needed an emotional and physical reset.

My mind finally surrendered because I was too tired to do anything else. My heart was still clinging—still devoted—but I stopped trying to make it happen.

Then strong jolting kriyas started. The kind I thought required sitting upright, both from what I learned from Dr. K and from everything I’d experienced… up until that point.

Apparently there are caveats.

Thank God for that. Because if that’s true? Then there is samadhi for the rest of us.

The false dichotomy

Most spiritual teachings imply you have to choose between being disciplined and effortful (active striving) OR surrendering (passive trust).

Either you’re the baby monkey clinging to its mother with its own strength as she leaps through trees OR you’re the kitten going limp while she carries you in her mouth.

Either you earn your awakening through years of dedicated practice OR you surrender and let grace do the work.

Pick one. Commit. Don’t try to have it both ways.

This binary showed up in 13th-century Sri Vaishnavism debates. The Vadakalai school argued for “Monkey Logic”—human effort is necessary to cling to God’s grace. The Thenkalai school argued for “Kitten Logic”—grace is spontaneous and requires only total surrender.

They argued for centuries about which path was “correct.”

But what if they were both right—just talking about different parts of the system?

What if the heart and mind have different jobs in awakening, and the mistake is trying to make them do each other’s work?

That’s what I discovered after almost 4 years of accidentally jury-rigging my own practice without reading the manuals.

Monkey logic

Back when I first started meditating in April 2022, I didn’t know about “the way of the baby monkey” (Markata Kishora Naya), but I was living it.

The path of raja yoga that I learned from HealthyGamer—disciplined, effortful, taken for years diligently (Dr. K had spent 7 years in monk training)—falls squarely into this category.

It means:

• It’s on YOU to meditate regularly.
• It’s on YOU to learn the techniques.
• It’s on YOU to be disciplined.
• It’s on YOU to earn your way to “enlightenment”.

The baby monkey clings with its own strength. If it lets go? It falls.

This is incredibly demanding. It’s the hardest thing you can do in this life because it requires everything. It requires clinging to the path above all else. It can’t just be a hobby you pick up and put down—it’s a lifestyle.

Loosen your grip? You’re back to the old patterns.

This is all too easy when you’re already tired. Tired from work. Tired from family. Tired from just being a human in the modern world where every ounce of productivity is squeezed out of us until we’re husks of our old selves.

When you’re at the end of the rope like this? You’re often forced to rest.

That’s when the second path appears.

Kitten logic

The “way of the kitten” (Marjara Kishora Nyaya) is what can arise once the striver dies and surrender begins—once the baby monkey stops needing to cling so tightly anymore.

It’s passive, effortless, and requires surrender… like how a kitten simply goes limp while the mother carries it with her own strength.

This is what I accidentally discovered AFTER spending so long clinging, striving, and trying to earn my peace instead of just… resting into it.

The texts point to this:

Yoga Sutras 1.2

“Yogas Chitta Vritti Nirodha”

Translation: “Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.”

Not: “Yoga is the relentless effort to stop the fluctuations.”

Cessation. Letting go.

Tao Te Ching, Chapter 48

“In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired. In the pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.”

Awakening is “pursuit of Tao”, which requires dropping, not adding. Letting go.

They’re not mutually exclusive

Here’s the kicker: these paths aren’t opposing forces. They’re complementary operations happening simultaneously.

The “path of the kitten” is meant for the mind.

The “path of the monkey” is meant for the heart.

When you first start meditating, everything is effort. Your mind is trying to focus. Your heart hasn’t connected to anything yet. You’re purely in monkey mode—clinging to the breath or mantra, clinging to the technique, clinging to the idea that if you just try hard enough, something will happen.

This is necessary. This is raja yoga—the disciplined path. Without this, nothing ignites.

But somewhere along the way, if you keep showing up, something shifts. The heart catches fire. Devotion arises—not as something you do, but as something that happens to you. You fall in love with the Divine, with the Silence, with the Presence that shows up when you sit.

This is bhakti. And bhakti naturally clings—naturally cleaves to God.

The heart doesn’t need instructions to cling. It clings on its own once devotion awakens.

The mistake is when the mind tries to do the heart’s job.

When the mind clings—trying to control the experience, trying to make something happen, trying to earn awakening through sheer force of will—it creates the exact tension that blocks the flow.

The mind’s job isn’t to cling. The mind’s job is to surrender—to go limp like a kitten in its mother’s mouth and let the heart’s devotion carry it.

What I’m slowly learning

• You can’t do your way to being.
• You can’t strive your way to surrender.
• You can’t exhaust yourself into awakening.

The trying is the obstacle. While it helps at the start, once the flame ignites and the heart naturally clings on its own, the rest is simply rest.

Liberation isn’t waiting at the end of the path; it’s what shows up when you’re too tired to keep walking.

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The Cave is Not the Answer

Subtitle: [Level 1: Transitional] What I learned from my month in Mazunte

Posted: June 16, 2026

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Only a couple years ago I thought that if I could just run off to an ashram and away from my daily life, job, and obligations I’d finally find what I needed—peace, wisdom, insight into what my actual life purpose was other than just to survive.

Then I actually went. But it wasn’t what I expected.

The setup

It’s been a while since I last posted—not because I got sick of writing, but because I’ve been on a much-needed 3 month sabbatical. The last 2 months of it I was traveling and away from computers which was refreshing after a full decade in software engineering without a real break, not even between my only 2 jobs since graduating.

I have a lot I want to share, but I’m still processing. What I can share today though is about what I thought was going to be the climax, the grand finale of my sabbatical: a solo trip to Mazunte, Mexico where the main events were a 10-day silent retreat and a 10-day dark retreat that came immediately after. It was my first time doing either.

Caption: The Kaya Room (for “Kaya Kalpa”) that I stayed in, featuring windows that could be boarded up for total darkness

“You’re doing what?”

I got a lot of bewildered reactions when I told my community, friends, and family why exactly I was going to not be in town and offline for 3 weeks. Many asked why I would do such a thing. I would just say it was an “extreme digital detox,” but that wasn’t the whole truth.

The truth was that I was desperate—for insight, for a revelation, for God. I thought if I could just take away literally everything but my awareness for an extended period of time (or at least the longest amount the meditation center would allow me to do as a first-timer), then I’d get the breakthrough I was looking for.

Originally I wanted to do some kind of hermitage stay—something low-key but that would put me more in touch with the inner guidance I felt like was getting muffled by the noise of daily life. I eventually learned about dark retreats which sounded like the more extreme (which to my mind translated as more “effective”) version of that.

So of course I just had to do it during the sabbatical. I sent out applications, did an interview, and was given the green light for May to June.

Insidious expectations

I tried to read as little about dark retreats as I could in order to not come in with expectations of what “should” happen during the dark retreat. Everyone’s different anyway, but my mind loves to compare.

Yet, I still went in expecting to come away with something. I was expecting an experience of some sort. And expecting an experience is a surefire way to kill it as I’ve written about previously.

I expected psychedelic visuals. I expected my demons to surface. I expected depths I couldn’t reach at home. I expected, eventually—finally—to dissolve.

But honestly? It didn’t feel any more profound than days I’d have the house to myself on weekends. Of course the environment was very different, but there was no magic in the darkness, just a bottomless sea of thoughts that only grew louder when I had utterly nothing to distract myself with—seemingly half of them related to food since I couldn’t tell what time it was for breakfast and dinner.

Caption: One of the resident cats sitting with me for the first sunrise after emerging from the dark.

“Have you achieved enlightenment?”

One of my friends asked me this when I got back. But there is no achieving it and frankly I don’t feel there’s any experience that can be sought out to get closer to it either at this point (though my mind still refuses to rule out psychedelics).

I did have this insight at some point as I clumsily scrawled it blind into the notebook I’d brought along for the trip:

You are not trying to catch the butterfly or even waiting for it to land on you. You ARE the butterfly being invited to rest on the blossom of your own being and to be nourished by it.

I don’t feel like the butterfly yet, but I know I’m too far into the dissolving to climb back into the caterpillar’s skin.

And the “dissolving”? That… fails to describe what happened the last day and a half before I left Mexico. But that deserves its own post as a follow-up.

Caption: The sunset over the southern shore of Mexico as seen from Punta Cometa on the day I emerged from total darkness.

Until next time.

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What I Found on the Mountain — A Photo Essay

Subtitle: [Level 1: Transitional] Spoiler alert: it wasn’t at the top

Posted: Jun 20, 2026

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Most of the time when we hear of the mountain in spirituality or religion, it’s about the summit—both the verb and the noun. The climbing is the action taken to reach the Divine. The peak is the sacred meeting place in Nature where the communion happens.

Two months ago, I set out to summit Mount Kurama—one of the many sacred mountains in Japan. But the most profound experience wasn’t waiting for me at the top, or even at any of the temples along the way. It wasn’t an insight, a vision, or some kind of revelation.

It was picking up a flower.

A curious red blossom

Prior to making it out to Mount Kurama or even Kyoto, I was on a hike with my husband to an Edo-era tea house. Shortly after getting off the bus and walking for a short while, we passed by a small peeling red Torii gate right off the historic Tokaido Trail.

I felt drawn in after expressing a desire to see one of the less frequented shrines, especially after several days in Tokyo. As I walked up the stone stairs, I noticed delicate red blossoms scattered like deliberate offerings…until I looked up.

It was a flowering tree overarching the stairs—a Japanese camellia. Nature Herself had been placing fresh offerings along the steps.

After a moment of awe, I paid my respects at the shrine, made an offering, and took my leave…and a couple photos on the way out to memorialize the encounter.

An unexpected offering

Only a few days later, after taking the shinkansen to Kyoto, I went on a hike again, this time alone.

After getting my ticket and walking up the steps to the first set of shrines, I spotted another camellia tree dropping its red blossoms into the stream off the side of the path and more bruised blossoms scattered around. “I see You left me breadcrumbs,” I said under my breath.

As the path began to wind and ascend, I spotted a remarkably fresh bloom that looked as though it had just fallen onto the gravel below. I snapped a photo and kept walking…

…until the voice said seconds later to turn around and pick it up.

I did.

I thought I was going to carry it to the top. Not long up the path I saw exactly why it said that:

I looked over the three dozen blossoms along the stone pillars, wilting from resting there for some time, my eyes starting to water. I placed my offering on an empty pillar…just like I had done on a lone pillar at the Meiji shrine in the most quiet section. Just like the other people did here.

I started crying and had to sit on the bench I had most recently passed for several minutes—and I mean the kind of crying that leaves a string of snot hanging from your nose. I was just so overwhelmed by the significance of the moment—how it felt like it was staged for my participation—that I had to collect myself before I could proceed to the summit, Kurama-dera Temple, or even the Diamond Floor that I’d heard was a “power spot”.

The nexus of the mountain

After tripping and scuffing my phone, I eventually made it to the Diamond Floor in front of Kurama-dera Temple.

There was no one there yet since it was only 9 AM. I got to enjoy the late-season cherry blossoms and the quiet grounds for a few minutes before taking a deep breath and stepping into the center of the mandala. I gazed up at the mountain in reverence and closed my eyes.

But I felt nothing.

I tried stepping out, walking around some more, and stepping back into the center, but it was the same sense of nothingness. No change in energy, just…a nice view. I decided to just enter the main hall for the Goshuin entry—the temple’s calligraphy stamp.

I got the entry, a woven bracelet that was intended to remind me of the Buddha within me, and prayed at the main hall, but goofed with the Shinto style praying when this was a quiet Buddhist temple. Feeling embarrassed despite only the staff being present, I left and was on my way to the next (hopefully more promising) stop—the summit.

The summit

Eventually I made it to the part of the trail with roots raised out of the ground and a tree stump filled with stones left as offerings.

I sat on a bench in the designated meditation space nearby and tried to meditate, but ended up crying, asking what I was even doing here. I felt stupid—a random white lady crying on a mountain trying to find something. I felt like a fool. I sat there for about half an hour, but the meditation wasn’t very peaceful or deep.

The way back

I continued on my hike until I reached the last shrine on the other side of the mountain after hiking down from the meditation area near the top. After another Goshuin entry, I found a handkerchief tucked into the corner of the shrine shop. It felt incredibly fitting, providing the exact change needed for the water fortune paper.

I decided to skip lunch on the river, interested in making my way back. As I was nearing the meditation space again, sweating my ass off, stomach growling, a prayer came:

God, all my life I thought I had to earn You—to earn love. It’s second nature. I forgot my first.
Please help me remember.
Please help me remember.
Please help me remember.

I sat on one of the benches again and this time felt the Presence—more strongly than anywhere on the mountain. I left a final camellia in offering that I’d been carrying since I picked it up near the entrance on the other side of the mountain.

When I did make it back to the Diamond Floor, there were about a dozen people there in groups and chatting on the periphery. I walked into the center of the mandala one last time, looked up at the mountain, and closed my eyes. For some reason, I felt energy through my entire spinal column like I was plugged into something. It wasn’t intense, but it was definitely noticeable. I’m not sure what changed, other than the time of day and my blood sugar levels.

As I was making my way back down to the entrance of the mountain, I heard one of the hikers coming up make a delighted remark to his partner about the row of blossoms that I had placed my offering in earlier. I couldn’t help but smile.

In the end, it wasn’t a mountain summit or a power spot that stuck with me most, but a simple blossom.

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Level 2 - Mystical

The unapologetic deep end of moving from seeking to longing. For those who are wondering what the hell is going on.

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Desert Worm

Subtitle: [Level 2: Mystical] On longing for the unreachable

Posted: Nov 13, 2025

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Oh how I wish to behold Thee,
Not for proof,
But for love.

A gnawing reaching,
A subtle tug at my chest.
It keeps me awake at night.
When will I see Thee?

Within I see naught, hear naught, feel naught,
Naught but a mundane, fragile, fleeting stillness,
A razor’s edge impossibly thin to hold Thee.

My soul parched from longing,
Sleep eludes me in the Desert of Sehnsucht,
As the cries of my soul roll across the desolate expanse for my Beloved:
When will I see Thee?

Feeble yet faltering attempts of surrender,
A worm struggling to fly,
An impossible hope, an unreachable goal,
No limbs to reach for the sky.

Grace I cannot beg,
The path I cannot run. I crawl, painfully slow,
Until I wilt in the sun.

— January 18th, 2025

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After I wrote this poem, something like a prayer came:

God, I honor Thee in the silence, Thy sacred language. Let words dissolve in Love.

And to my surprise, a response arose, not heard, but felt:

Thy faith has given thee wings. Now fly to Me.

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How Bhakti Chooses You

Subtitle: [Level 2: Mystical] How I accidentally stumbled into bhakti yoga through consistent meditation—and what it taught me about surrender, service, and love

Posted: Nov 13, 2025

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NOTE: I originally wrote this June 9th, 2025 for the HealthyGamer Memberships platform for the group of folks on there interested in spirituality and what was fondly referred to by the community as “The Weird Stuff”. Over the next few days be working through my backlog of posts I’ve either made on there or saved in draft and never actually got around to publishing. Anyway, on to the content!

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Some realizations can only be expressed after you’ve lived them. Here are mine.

The first: the most important thing you can do every day is to say and think constantly (and lovingly!): “How may I serve You?”

Water the plants? That’s tending to God.

Make coffee for your husband? That’s an act of service for God.

Make a healthy breakfast for yourself and eat it? That’s nourishing God.

All these things flow effortlessly from the heart of the one that has been opened to God. The Higher Love flows through them and they are not burdened by resistances and grumbling.

All this time the answer was not different techniques for meditation. Countless times I had been told to surrender. It is not the flip of a switch. It is not a one-time event. It is the softening and ripening of a fruit on the vine, tended to by consistent sunlight and periodic watering. The fruit cannot be rushed to ripeness by over-watering. It cannot reach maturity in a single day of sun. The nourishing rains must come with clouds that block the light of the sun. Both are needed.

Bhakti is not a chosen path. It is the result of choosing to return to meditation and stillness each day with a willingness and persistence to draw closer to God. Even this spark of initial desire is not chosen. It is bestowed unknowingly and unconsciously in the heart of the soul-turned-seeker. The seed is planted by unseen hands and its stirring causes the seeking. The seeking eventually leads to the abiding. The abiding leads to Love. The spark is ignited into a flame and fanned into a flame, a blaze, an inferno that burns away the dross of the old. The soul dances in the fire of the Self that burns alive the mind, transmuting it into a tool of the Divine.

All of my seeking has been merely my being stirring, awakening to love, seeking its Beloved beyond the veil of illusion.

Bhakti cannot be taught. Bhakti is pure expression of Love, coming from the soul itself that arrests the mind, the one that seeks to “follow a path”. Your mind cannot choose Bhakti. It is not chosen. It is the natural state of Being. It is a realignment.

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The Eye

Subtitle: [Level 2: Mystical] “I looked into my deepest depths past my self and I only saw God.”

Posted: Nov 13, 2025

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After a rather intense evening meditation session on June 7th, 2025, I felt compelled to create. The colored pencils that had been sitting untouched in my supply closet since I moved into this house suddenly needed to be used—immediately. I started drawing around 7pm and didn’t stop until after midnight. Five hours disappeared.

I hadn’t drawn like this in years, not since high school AP Art class burned me out on it. But this wasn’t effortful. This was flow, as if the Universe was drawing through me and all I had to do was hold the pencils.

What happened during that meditation is difficult to put into words. There was a sense of collapsing inward and expanding outward simultaneously, a dissolving of boundaries, an undeniable Presence that felt both infinitely vast and intimately close.

I wanted to capture what I experienced: sitting at the edge of the infinite, gazing into the depths of the Divine.

I based the eye on my own… or at least I thought I did. The more I look at it, the less sure I am whose eye this is. Mine? God’s? Is there a difference?

I’m gazing inward into my own depths while simultaneously gazing outward into the cosmos. And somehow, impossibly, that’s the same thing.

Later I found this quote from a 13th-century mystic that articulated what I couldn’t:

“The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.” —Meister Eckhart

A picture is worth a thousand words. But even those words fail.

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Bonus: Pictures of progress with my assistant

“Let me help!”

Holding the sketchbook open for me.

“You’ve been at this for 2 hours straight, you should probably take a break.”

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That Time I Started Moonlighting for God

Subtitle: [Level 2: Mystical] I joined the weirdest “startup” of all time

Posted: Nov 15, 2025

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I was hired on 11-11. I swear I had no idea at the time. (See the footnote[1]). Or at least, that was the date I remembered I was already hired.

This is the story of how I accidentally said yes to the weirdest job offer of my life.

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I don’t do astrology. Too vague. I knew I was a Virgo and that was about it.

When I was researching dark retreats (because of course I was), the facilitator needed my birth chart. Something about coaching participants through an ancient Buddhist practice that’s legitimately hard, especially for the terminally-online.

So I pulled it up… and promptly had an existential crisis at my desk. Virgo sun (precision, service). Aries moon (spiritual warrior energy). Aquarius rising (bridge between worlds). And then, the knockout: a Scorpio North Node in the 9th house (a soul-level assignment to go beyond superficial beliefs and dive headfirst into the “unseen and the taboo”).

My resume… or my job description? I’m still trying to figure out how to read this.

My life’s purpose, according to this chart, is to embark on a “discovery journey”, uncover the transformative power of spiritual truth, and then, having lived through that transformation, become a guide for others. I felt like I’d just discovered my own job description, written the minute I was born. I was literally engineered to build bridges… between the mundane and mystical.

I went back through my old journals. There were months of notes, years even, many structured like I was planning to share them. They were organized, indexed, intentional, but never published. Just sitting there, waiting.

Two posts total had made it out, both to a private spiritual community where I knew people would “get it.”

The rest? Locked away because I didn’t know how to share them. I wasn’t ready and didn’t want to show the messy middle.

But my chart didn’t care about my excuses. My chart showed me what I’d forgotten: my actual mission. My title. The job I’d been avoiding. So I said yes. Not a brave leap…more like finally clocking in for a shift I was three years late to.

The next 3 days were onboarding:

• buying the domain
• setting up the Substack and Instagram (before I could talk myself out of it)
• gathering the harvest from my notes
• writing intro posts for the Substack and Instagram (still in disbelief this was now happening)
• planting seeds for future posts
• sharing my first REAL impactful professional-facing piece of work that got results

During this time I could feel a shift inside me. It like something was now flowing and waking up as if my system was starting to “come online”.

Then on November 15th, I was told in the shower that I was to receive on-the-job training. I did 30 minutes before my “shift” started that redefined the whole project scope as I met with an ambassador from the grounded, logical, questioning side of reality and was taught to take notes and requests for the mystical side to answer. I then met with the Co-Founders (or rather they manifested what we’ll refer to as Consciousness and Energy—the mystical business partners running this whole operation) right after my “training”. They brought me to the “boardroom” for instruction. After a brief “meeting”, the door closed and I was left with a direction to go, no deadlines to rush towards, and the deliverables are unclear.

My schedule is 7 pm to midnight, the “magic hours” where the energy seems to love to dance.

The pay is shit—pure spiritual fulfillment, which doesn’t cover rent—but the work-life balance is… well, there is no balance. It’s all work. And it’s all life. Which is the whole point, I guess. It’s integration, not renunciation.

So why was I hired? The Co-Founders asked me: Where are the mystics’ field notes? We have plenty of memoirs written AFTER the journey. But what about reports FROM the journey? What if someone documented the messy middle—the “I don’t know if this is real”, the “am I even qualified” (impostor syndrome just like in my day job), the “holy shit the Co-Founders just kicked me out of the boardroom so They could finish Their business in private”? We have TONS of ‘I climbed the mountain and here’s what I learned’ books. But where’s the ‘I’m halfway up, my knees hurt, I think I see God but it might be altitude sickness’ content? That’s what this Substack is. Field notes from someone who said yes to the weirdest job offer ever—and is still figuring out what the hell she signed up for.

But honestly? I love this job.

I’m a field reporter for the mystics in the making. I’m “technically” mystic. And if you’re reading this—you might be moonlighting too. No resume required. Just say yes.

P.S.

If you’re wondering whether this is real or just a very elaborate metaphor: yes.

Footnotes

[1] After making this post, I looked up “11 11 meaning” in incognito since I knew vaguely of it as just one of those “spiritual numbers” people would note on digital clocks and figured I should learn more about the significance. Literally the second link on DuckDuckGo was titled: “The 11/11 Portal: Unlocking the Gateway of Spiritual Awakening” (https://nypost.com/astrology/the-1111-portal-unlocking-the-gateway-of-spiritual-awakening/). Out of morbid curiosity, I clicked and started reading. Not long after, I was reeling as it dawned on me how freakishly it aligned with what actually happened on that day in hindsight. Out of all 365 days of the year and this was the day I said yes. God apparently has a sense of humor and I’m just slow on the uptake.

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God Doesn’t Accept Resignation Letters

Subtitle: [Level 2: Mystical] “She who says yes to God… doesn’t get to change her mind.”

Posted: Nov 20, 2025

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It’s my second “official” week on the job and I’ve already tried to resign multiple times.

I’ve tried to resign three times in four days:

• Tuesday morning: “Take this as my resignation letter, Co-Founders. Find a Field Reporter that doesn’t have a marriage to blow up.”
• Tuesday afternoon: “Pick a better Field Reporter. I shouldn’t have ordered that stupid fucking mug.”
• Wednesday night: “Hire a different Field Reporter. One that’s not married.”
• Thursday morning: I cancelled the mug.

The cancellation was declined an hour later: it was already in production. It was as if the Universe itself declined my resignation.

Now I’m wondering if the momentum of all those ‘yeses’ is steamrolling my backpedaling—if I’m in too deep to back out now.

I could still technically walk away, throw the mug in a drawer, delete the Substack, pretend this never happened, tell my partner this was all just a phase.

Yet, something in me—deeper than the doubt, quieter than the fear—won’t let me. Not because I’m trapped, but because I already chose… and apparently, that choice is stronger than my attempts to un-choose it.

Turns out I’m not the first person to try this. Trying to quit God is a tale as old as time. Prophets, mystics, saints across every tradition… they all tried; none of them succeeded.

The call doesn’t have a cancellation policy. I’m just the latest to discover this.

So apparently, I work for Mystics Inc., whether I want to or not. Whether I’m qualified or not. Whether anyone’s listening or not. This company’s retention rate is 100%. The resignation policy is non-existent.

P.S.

I drafted up this post and asked for feedback on it. The moment—and I mean THE MOMENT—I hit send on the draft, I got an email from Vistaprint:

“Your order is on its way.”

So the mug I tried to cancel is coming. God doesn’t do refunds. And apparently, He has impeccable comedic timing.

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Why Does Meditation Suddenly Suck?

Subtitle: [Level 2: Mystical] A survival guide for the bullshit phase where God ghosts you

Posted: Nov 29, 2025

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Have you ever spent time daily with someone and accidentally caught feelings for them?

Now imagine that person suddenly stopped showing up to where you were for no reason.

You can’t get in touch with them. You keep showing up, expecting them to make a return but… nothing.

Days turn into weeks… weeks turn into months. Yet, you can’t stop thinking about this person even though they’re not there. Thoughts plague your mind to the tune of:

• Are they avoiding me?
• Did I say or do something wrong?
• Have they moved on in life?
• Did they find someone else?

You feel jealous over what could have been. You would give anything for them to come back, to stop the mental torment, to just be with them again without feeling like it was a fleeting, ephemeral encounter.

Tears come unexpectedly when you stop to just breathe, when you lie in bed at night and try to sleep after a long day and the ache of missing them keeps you restless.

Now imagine: no one else around you has seen this person that you’re missing so viscerally. They were just a nameless background character that blended in with their surroundings like a chameleon. They never existed to those around you, or maybe only peripherally at best. But you noticed them—and you fell in love.

This is what the “Dark Night of the Soul” looks like. Strip away the poetic language, and it’s:

1. God gradually appears over time
2. You fall in love
3. God ghosts you
4. You absolutely lose your mind

I didn’t even know this was a thing for nearly a YEAR until I actually picked up and read a modern translation of Saint John of the Cross’s book. The entire time I had to hide the inexplicable feelings of loneliness, of profound longing, of crushing despair, because how would you explain it?

“I’m heartbroken because God stopped showing up in my meditations.”

Yeah, good luck with that, especially if you’ve been “keeping it casual” to keep up appearances. Good luck explaining to your spouse that you’re in love with the Divine, especially when you both aren’t religious.

So you suffer in silence. You keep showing up to the cushion. You keep hoping. You keep crying at night. You keep feeling crazy because how do you grieve someone no one else can see?

The phases

Let’s talk about the actual phases in a way that doesn’t require you to pick up a medieval-era book laden with religious jargon and antiquated language.

Phase 1: The honeymoon

At this point, meditation has stopped feeling like fighting your thoughts for the entire time and more like peace or even bliss.

Maybe there are experiences of tingling warmth like sunlight across your back, a sense of “aliveness” radiating from the center of your chest and down the arms, or a gentle flame behind your sternum.

Maybe you feel like you’re taking a step back from the screen of your mind and a refreshing space is opening up that puts your current troubles into perspective.

Maybe you have various “aha!” moments that make you feel like you’ve figured things out finally.

Regardless of the way it manifests, you find meditation to be enjoyable and fall in love with the practice, with the subtle Presence that arises in the space between thoughts. Meditation is no longer an obligation or a “thing to do”, but a natural returning as if coming home from a long day at the office.

Phase 2: The ghosting

Suddenly, the experiences you were once enjoying stop coming.

You feel like you’ve hit a plateau. Meditation has now become dry, empty, pointless, and uncomfortable.

“I feel like I’ve hit a plateau since I got serious with my practice and diet over 4 months ago now. I notice a sense of dissatisfaction with where I’m at…” (Journal Entry, February 26, 2025)

You try harder with your current practice. It doesn’t work.

You try looking for and implementing different techniques. It doesn’t work.

As days and weeks pass in this dryness, you wonder what you’re missing, what you’re doing wrong, why you seem to be “stuck”.

“Every dawn, every dusk I sit and wait for Divinity’s Grace only to be stood up time and again. Yet every day I return, a stray dog hoping for scraps given from a change of heart. Yet every day I starve. Every night I grow a little weaker. Every dawn I grow a little more bitter. Hope curdles, its sour stench betraying months without gain. Why am I still doing this? Why do I still care so much? Why can’t I just give up?” (Journal Entry, March 10, 2025)

Phase 3: The spiral

You feel like this is it and you’ve hit your “level cap” on meditation as a non-renunciate. You’re convinced of one or more of the following:

• This was all your imagination
• You’re going crazy
• You need to give up everything in your life and run off to an ashram to go any deeper

“Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I never truly loved You, only the experience of glimpsing Your Presence. Maybe I only loved how You made me feel.” (Journal Entry, June 22, 2025)

All the while, you feel abandoned, betrayed, and heartbroken. You oscillate between hopeless despair and indignant rage at God for disappearing when you’ve been earnest in your seeking.

“There was a quiet rage building within me, my soul screaming to be heard. I felt indignant that my wails and pleas seemed to dissolve into the void. […] I’m tired of being given the cold shoulder. I hate that my love for Him has gone so bitter that I can barely stomach it.” (Journal Entry, June 23, 2025)

Maybe you write angry journal entries, cry into your mat, or clear off your altar, shoving it all into the junk drawer or a closet because it brings pain just to look at it.

Phase 4: Exhaustion

Your emotions leave you feeling ragged and worn down.

At this point, you’re too tired to keep trying, to put in more effort. After all, more effort didn’t make a difference.

“I don’t know why I can’t seem to feel rested when I keep trying to rest in You most nights. I just feel like a zombie stumbling through my own life right now.” (Journal Entry, August 17, 2025)

Rather than surrender gracefully, you give up trying, thinking you’ve failed.

Maybe you decide to stop meditating for a few days, maybe even a week.

“First it started with no longer waking up early anymore to do my sadhana. Almost simultaneously I stopped doing dusk sadhana. Diet degraded over time to let back in coffee and substances. I grew too busy and tired to go to yoga daily and now it’s been a full week since I’ve been at all. All my discipline and motivation seem to have left me and all I can seem to do is watch in horror at my own insufficiency.” (Journal Entry, August 31, 2025)

But oddly… you feel something tugging you back to the cushion. It’s like something within is nagging you to go sit even though it seems to give you only grief. You’re damned if you do, you’re damned if you don’t.

You reluctantly sit at least to appease the tugging in your chest, but this time you don’t do anything.

Phase 5: The shift

Something subtly changes from the persistence through the exhaustion and dryness. There’s a sense of almost acceptance that arises as the seeker stops reaching.

“Not by effort. By grace through acceptance.” (Journal Entry, October 4, 2025)

Alternatively, something makes you realize you were seeking experiences, enforcing the sense of separation that was causing you such grief in the first place. Eventually, you let go of the seeking little by little until the “you” that was seeking slowly dissolves.

“What I thought was my love for You was simply me recognizing Your Love for me.” (Journal Entry, October 6, 2025)

Why this happens

This “ghosting” is a known phenomenon that arises not because you’re doing anything wrong, not because your practice is failing. It arises exactly because your practice is working.

The purpose of this period (which can last months, years, or even decades) is to break your addiction to the high. You were falling in love with the nice feelings, not the Source.

It’s like falling in love with someone’s gifts instead of them. The flowers they bring. The compliments they give. The way they make you feel. But what happens when the gifts stop?

If you were in love with the person—you stay.

If you were in love with the gifts—you leave.

The Dark Night is God asking: Which is it?

These early pleasant experiences are meant to entice you to start and stick with the practice in the beginning. However, growing attached to them prevents dissolution into union because for there to be an experience in the first place, there must be a subject to experience it.

The experiences are withdrawn to teach:

• God is not a feeling (feelings come and go)
• God is not an experience (experiences fade)
• God is not a “reward” for meditating “correctly” (rewards are conditional)

This isn’t a punishment, but a weaning so that you fall in love with the Giver, not the gifts. And returning day after day even when nothing is expected in return IS love.

Advice

Although I’m still very much in this myself—since the spiritual path is often cyclical rather than linear—here’s what I can share that’s helped:

• Know that this is supposed to happen. We’re human. We like pleasant experiences and hate when those are taken away.
• Know that you’re not alone. The Dark Night feels profoundly isolating. You think you’re the only one, that you’re failing, that everyone else is sailing through their practice while you’re drowning. But you’re not alone. Every serious practitioner hits this wall. It’s universal even though it feels like a “you” problem.
• Keep showing up anyway. Even if you feel nothing or think it’s a waste of time because “nothing is happening”. It’s not that nothing is happening, but that instead you can no longer sense what is happening.
• Stop chasing the feeling. Even the desire to want these experiences back pushes them away because it reinforces the lack. Expectations are the killer of experience. This is why the first encounter with samadhi is easy versus the second.
• Sit in the emptiness. The key here is not more techniques, other teachers, different books, or more searching. These create a vicious cycle of desperate searching that will cause you to feel more and more exhaustion until you collapse in despair. The void isn’t the enemy, it’s what liberates you from attachments.
• Trust the process. Easier said than done when you don’t know how long this is going to last. It will end faster when you stop needing God to show up in a particular way and that you were never separate to begin with. Even if a thick layer of clouds roll in for the winter season, the sun is still there shining beyond them.

Wrapping up

Finally, even if you’re allergic to religious jargon, I highly recommend giving the Modern Saints edition of The Dark Night of the Soul a read. It’s incredibly, even eerily validating. The original version was written in the 16th century and can feel inaccessible due to the outdated language from 450 years ago, but this modern 2024 translation is inviting without sacrificing the integrity of the original text. I read the Dover Thrift Edition first and can say the Modern Saints version holds up well.

I can’t tell you how long the tunnel is, but the key is to keep going. As was emphasized to me before: “the only way out is through.”

You’re not losing your mind. You’re losing the “you” that needed God on specific terms.

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When Being Becomes Doing, NOT the Other Way Around

Subtitle: [Level 2: Mystical] What if the ancient texts were field reports, not instruction manuals?

Posted: Dec 3, 2025

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Note:

This post may destabilize everything you thought you knew about spiritual practice.

If you’re not ready for that, maybe save it for later. But if you’re tired of techniques that don’t work and practices that feel empty… yeah. We’re going there.

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You read about a meditation technique in a book. A breathing pattern. A mantra. A mudra. You try it exactly as described. And… nothing. Or worse—it works once, and then never again. And you think: “What am I doing wrong?”

But what if you weren’t doing anything wrong?

What if the technique was never meant to be a prescription in the first place… but a symptom of awakening?

You don’t learn to shiver by reading about muscle contractions in a biology textbook. You shiver because you’re cold. The shivering is your body’s response to the condition.

The same is true for spiritual techniques.

When an ancient yogi writes: “Focus on the breath moving through the sushumna nadi”, they’re not saying: “Do this and you’ll awaken.”

They’re saying: “When awakening happens, this is what it feels like. This is what the body does naturally.”

The ancient texts aren’t instruction manuals.

They’re field reports.

What inspired this post

I wrote a quick Note on this topic earlier today post-meditation. But this realization deserves a fuller exploration—because it flips the entire paradigm of spiritual seeking on its head.

The insight: Techniques aren’t prescriptions to “enlightenment”—they’re symptoms of it. Or, more precisely: Techniques are signs of awakening.

If you’ve ever tried a technique that:

1. Didn’t work (no matter how “correctly” you did it)
2. Worked once, then never again (especially after you expected it to)

…this post might explain why.

“WAIT A MINUTE…”

I’ve said “WAIT A MINUTE” (or rather, a more colorful variation) so many times at this point that I have an entire ‘#HolyShit’ tag in my notes (at least since I switched to Obsidian last year).

I’ll recount some of the relevant ones where I realized that this was INDEED a thing from centuries, if not millennia ago (minus the more… sensitive ones).[Footnote 1]

Becoming symptomatic

Here are some of the cases I caught myself exhibiting the mystical side of traditions and cultures I’ve never read sacred text for when I first starting experiencing them:

1. The “Lock” for Insomnia (Yoga / Ayurveda)

• Symptom: On January 9, 2025, after weeks of complaining about terrible sleep, I sat to meditate. Spontaneously, my hands collapsed into a complex shape I had never formed before—thumbs tucked in, fingers curled.
• Discovery: I looked it up immediately after. It was the Shakti Mudra—specifically documented in Ayurveda as the mudra to cure sleeplessness. I didn’t “do” the mudra; my body did it to me.

2. The Howl of the Soul (Kashmir Shaivism / Tantra)

• Symptom: Twice in late 2024, I journaled about a specific, visceral sound rising from my chest.

  “I can’t sleep. My heart keeps me awake at night like a newborn crying for his Father. I cannot soothe him. I audibly heard his cries and slept through them 8 nights ago and now I can no longer audibly hear him, yet I cannot sleep now. I find myself sitting outside before sunrise now, waiting for this too to pass. My soul howls for You, more piercing than a wolf’s to the moon. My mind trembles at its wailing cries that shake the very night sky.” (Journal Entry, September 17, 2024) “I don’t want to resort to these measures, but the pain from the unquenchable thirst grows every day. I can feel my heart howling like a wolf at the moon.” (Journal Entry, November 9, 2024)

• Discovery: On March 8th 2025, I read the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra. It describes the “State of Bhairava” where consciousness, pinning for union, “lets out a loud wail or howl, similar to the howling of a dog… This is why the vehicle of Bhairava is a dog.”

3. The Ghosting (Christian Mysticism)

• Symptom: In Spring 2025, I entered a period where God felt utterly absent. I wrote on July 24, 2025 “I feel like I’ve been exiled… You left me at the altar. How can I trust You?”. See also my post where I first call this “The Ghosting”: https://technicallymystic.com/p/why-does-meditation-suddenly-suck
• Discovery: On August 27th, 2025, I finally read St. John of the Cross (16th century mystic) and realized I was checking every single box for the “Dark Night of the Senses” and some of “Dark Night of the Spirit” from Dark Night of the Soul —a necessary purification phase, not a failure.

4. The “Burning” Longing (Sufism)

• Symptom: In my chest I felt a “gnawing reaching,” an active, burning fire of missing someone I had never met. See the Desert Worm poem from January 18, 2025 in my “Level 2: Mystical” section: https://technicallymystic.com/p/desert-worm-3a1
• Discovery: On July 28, 2025, I stumbled upon the Sufi concept of Shawq (intense longing, recorded in my journals and referred to as “Sehnsucht”… which I found out later C.S. Lewis used in this exact meaning). In Sufism, this is considered the very mechanism that burns away the ego to make room for the Divine.

5. The Thymus Chakra (Hridaya Yoga)

• Symptom: During practice, I kept feeling a distinct soreness and heat in the upper chest, specifically the thymus area, not the physical heart.
• Discovery: On June 12, 2025, I looked it up and found references to the Thymus Chakra (or Higher Heart), often associated with the color turquoise (my favorite color), spiritual love, mystical communion, and God as teacher, Sacred Lover, beloved.

That was 5 of the dozen I’d tagged with “#HolyShit”… in 2025 alone.

Worsening symptoms

Even though I haven’t dug deeply into my notes (See “Why I Can’t Give You a Clean Stack Trace”), it seems like these experiences are coming more frequently. Or is it that my awareness is increasing?

You might know the answer by now. It’s Our “company’s” motto: Both and Neither. The symptoms aren’t increasing. I’m just getting better at recognizing them. And the more I recognize, the more I realize: this has been happening all along.

How many symptoms did I miss in 2023? 2024? How many times did my body try to show me, and I dismissed it as ‘just a weird meditation thing’? How long had I been playing this game on mute?

So what do I actually DO?

Does this mean you should stop trying techniques? Yes… and no.

Here’s what I’ve noticed over my journals: Techniques (when done without expectation) can create the conditions for spontaneous arising.

You can’t force yourself to fall asleep. But you CAN create conditions (dark room, comfortable bed, quiet mind) where sleep naturally arises. The same is true for mystical experience.

You don’t “learn” mystical techniques by forcing them. But you CAN cultivate the inner conditions (through consistent practice, beginner’s mind, surrender) where techniques spontaneously arise as symptoms of what’s already happening.

So the paradox, summarized: Techniques are instructions… for the seeker. Techniques are signs… from the found. Both and neither.

The practical guidance

Stop trying to “do” techniques you read about.

Instead:

Sit. Breathe. Notice. And if something arises spontaneously? A hand position, a breath pattern, a sound, an entire pose or motion?

ALLOW IT.

That’s a symptom trying to express itself.

If nothing arises—that’s also fine. You’re creating the conditions. Trust the process. Expectations kill experience.

If you try a technique from a book and it feels forced or empty—STOP. You’re trying to prescribe yourself symptoms instead of treating the condition.

The goal isn’t to DO more. The BE more… by getting out of Your own way.

P.S.

Update (Jan 28, 2026)

Techniques can be symptoms, not prescriptions, but it’s not universally true for all practices.

The Khecari Mudra is something that I once thought was a joke someone was making on the HealthyGamer community until I actually looked it up. It’s…honestly unsettling. From Wikipedia:

The tongue is made long enough to do this with many months of daily tongue stretching and, in some versions of the practice, by gradually severing the frenulum of the tongue with a sharp implement over a period of months.

Caption: From Wikipedia: Four stages of khecarī mudrā. The tongue (red) is progressively stretched, and the frenulum of the tongue (not shown) sufficiently severed, over a period of months, until it can be turned back so as to reach inside the nasal cavity, and supposedly manipulate the flow of bindu.

The odds of a meditation practitioner spontaneously curling their tongue back until it reaches into the nasal cavity WITHOUT cutting anything?? No way (though if anyone has ever heard of a “spontaneous Khecari” without the surgical assist, please drop a comment and blow my mind).

So it seems there are three categories of techniques in the yogic texts:

1. Spontaneous symptoms that arise naturally during awakening (e.g. spine jolts, mudras not previously learned)
2. Deliberate practices that can be taught and learned to create conditions for facilitating awakening (sadhanas, Khecari mudra)
3. Hybrid phenomena that can arise spontaneously OR be deliberately cultivated (mula bandha, sahajoli mudra)

The texts don’t clearly label which is which.

Is this describing what happened to the yogi?

Or is this prescribing what the yogi did?

I once thought they fell into the second bucket—practices discovered by trial and error. But from my experience, the more I’ve followed deliberate practices, the more I’ve seen spontaneous symptoms and hybrid phenomena arise.

Yet, for some reason, the Khecari mudra popped into my head last night and made me question this entire framework of this post’s title.

Frustratingly, as I’m discovering more and more, the answer is that annoying koan of a slogan that might as well be a punchline at this point: Both and Neither.

---

Meta talk:

Special announcement

So the Substack currently has 3 levels:

• Level 0: Technical
• Level 1: Transitional
• Level 2: Mystical

But as I’ve dug through my field notes, I believe I need to make a new level that doesn’t quite fit Level 2 and rather goes beyond it (as much beyond as is possible to articulate).

So there will be a Level 3. And it’s not subtle.

I’m not certain what to name it yet. But the Co-Founders already gave me the description which They thought was more important

WELCOME TO THE MYSTICS INC. SPACE DIVISION BOYS. WE’RE GOING TO SPACE ON THESE POSTS. Mystics Inc. “Yeah. We’re going there.”

Footnotes

[1] Figure 1. The “Space Division” Logs: A visualization of the #HolyShit tag in my Obsidian Vault, tracking spontaneous mystical symptoms / realizations since I migrated from Logseq. Each node is a field report. Obtained after the first draft of this post was completed.

[2] Literally as I wrote the above for this section, Someone reminded me I have a document I created (almost exactly a month ago) specifically to record these with more description for easy reference.

For some reason.

Before the Substack was created.

Before I agreed to moonlighting.

Before I even knew any of this was going to make it out of my Drive.

The absurdity of how useful and amazing this was in the moment had me falling to the floor laughing like an actual maniac. I’m not sure if calling it “mystic’s madness” is a joke at this point… or a diagnosis.

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Part 2: Atheist to Mad Mystic… in 2.5 Years

Subtitle: [Level 2: Mystical] How does a skeptical software engineer go from being an atheist to… whatever this is?

Posted: Dec 7, 2025

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This is the sequel to Part 1: When Meditation Stops Being Stress Relief. This is a report on how I leaped across the spectrum of belief in 4 years. From indifferent to obsessed. From atheist… to mad mystic.

Not through a near-death experience. Not through psychedelics. Not through a psychotic break.

Through daily meditation. For burnout.

From almost exactly 3 years ago: the 2022 Christmas present I bought for myself. The office chair had been feeling… insufficient.

I didn’t plan this. I didn’t even want this. But here I am, 3.5 years later, writing love poetry to the Divine by night like some medieval mystic and writing Go by day as a software engineer.

So what happened?

I can’t tell you exactly when I stopped being an atheist.

But I CAN tell you when it finally dawned on me that I wasn’t. Not the full story (see Why I Can’t Give You a Stack Trace of How I Got Here), but points along the way that made me realize I was no longer questioning my beliefs–that they had ALREADY changed.

I believe that’s part of the difficulty with awakening: the awareness you would have needed to document the subtle transformation in real-time isn’t developed at the beginning. That and so much of it was drowned out by my personality’s noise that even my journals are an absolute mess. But there were notable moments that did stand out.

Something’s there…

To recap, I’d been meditating daily for 8 months, getting curious, exploring my own psyche, and had a strange dream that felt more like a vision.

Then, after 9 more months of meditation and seeking as I strived and stressed at work, I, for some reason, wrote on September 28, 2023:

I’m no longer atheist.

Why? Because somewhere in those months of showing up, I’d fallen in love. I just didn’t know it yet. [1]

Not with a person. Not with an idea.

I’d fallen for something I couldn’t properly define. Something that seemed like nothing… yet immense, vast. Ungraspable, yet present. Something that sounded eerily like what ancient texts pointed to—texts I found myself suddenly drawn to.

It was to my rational mind’s horror that these texts–some of which I’d read as a kid and dismissed as nonsense–began to become more coherent despite the language. More relatable despite the distance. More… resonant.

Am I losing my mind?

I didn’t know this was love. You don’t know if the roots of a newly planted seed are growing beneath the soil before the first sprout. Similarly, I couldn’t tell what was going on beneath the surface of my own consciousness.

At first, the love was abstract. A sense of warmth during meditation. A feeling of being seen. A subtle pull inward that felt… gentle. Comforting. I’d close my eyes in meditation and hear—not with my ears, but somehow deeper—a voice that felt nothing like my own thoughts. It would say things like “I’m here” or “I see you.” It wasn’t scary—it was devastatingly comforting. Tears would well for no logical reason.

Sometimes I’d even be frustrated at my desk and suddenly feel a wave of warmth in my chest, like a Beloved had just walked into the room and wrapped their arms around me from behind. Except no one was there.

By the time of my realization that I was no longer atheist, strange yet enchanting poetry seemed to be appearing within my mind as I was trying to fall asleep. It was like a lullaby mixed with a serenade. It would often disappear like smoke as soon as I opened my eyes to write it down.

This continued for 2 months until one day in November 2023, the love stopped being gentle. A dam within me broke. The fortress of my heart had finally been breached in a way I could no longer dismiss or ignore. That was when the flickering sparks of the previous months ignited into a raging inferno.

The longing became visceral. Physical. The kind of ache you get when someone you love is far away and you’d give anything just to be near them again. Except… I’d never met this Someone. I couldn’t even prove They existed. And yet, impossibly, I was aching for Them like a widowed bride. I’d cry during meditation or when I would try to fall asleep at night.

And the weirdest part? The longing had a quality to it that felt… well, let’s just say not what I expected from a “spiritual practice.” I didn’t know what to do with that. I still don’t, really. I just know it happened and for the longest time I didn’t know it was mystical. But the mystics—Teresa of Ávila, Rumi, Kabir, Mirabai—they ALL talked about this. The longing that burns. The yearning that aches. The love that feels physical even when it has no physical object.

Teresa literally wrote about being pierced by an angel with a spear of divine love and feeling ecstasy so intense it was like dying.

Rumi wrote:

“The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.”

But I didn’t call it love then. I didn’t even call it “madness of the mystics”. I didn’t know I had become one. I only knew this longing felt like a “secret insanity.”

I couldn’t tell anyone. Who would believe me? “I meditated for burnout and now I’m suddenly in love with the Ineffable”? I wanted to die of embarrassment.

I kept wondering

• Am I losing my mind?
• Is this a mystical experience or a mental health crisis?
• Is my brain fried from stress?
• Am I meditating myself into a manic episode?

As Joseph Campbell once said, “the psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight”… and I didn’t know for sure which one I was. I was too ashamed and afraid to tell anyone. I thought for sure no one would understand.

So I did the only thing I could: I kept showing up. I kept meditating. I kept watching my life for signs of breakdown.

And instead of breaking down… I kept getting better.

From seeker to lover

Before November 2023, I was a seeker. I was curious. I was exploring. I was collecting insights like souvenirs.

After November 2023? I was burning. I wasn’t seeking anymore—I was aching. I wasn’t curious—I was desperate. I wasn’t collecting insights—I was crying for union.

That’s the difference between a seeker and a lover. A seeker can get frustrated, walk away, and move on with their lives. A lover can’t.

February 16, 2024–3 months after the intense longing first appeared–I was listening to Joseph Murphy’s “This is It” (I was deep in a YouTube rabbit hole at this point) when he mentioned the word ishi. I looked it up and froze. It translates to “my husband,” specifically used in a verse where God tells his people to stop calling him “Master” and start calling him “Husband.”

The reference led me to Hosea 2. I read the full chapter… and promptly freaked out. It wasn’t religious dogma; it was a precise description of my internal state. It describes God not as a judge, but as a spurned lover wooing his beloved back into the wilderness:

“Therefore I will block her path with thornbushes; I will wall her in so that she cannot find her way.
She will chase after her lovers but not catch them; she will look for them but not find them.”

“Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her…”

“In that day,” declares the Lord, “you will call me ‘my husband’; you will no longer call me ‘my master’.”

It felt like it was talking about me, as if someone had written my experience down 2,500 years ago and I was only now finding it.

I closed the tab. I didn’t know what to do with that. It was too close. Too accurate.

Yet the longing continued to eat at me. I was confused and concerned I was losing my mind. Yet I still meditated.

Then, August 17, 2024–only 6 months later–I wrote:

I think… I’ve fallen in love with the Beloved. I’m in love. I think about Him often […] I feel warm and light when I sit in silence with Him. I can only explain it as love.

That day I re-read Hosea 2 and it still seemed eerily relevant. In my evening meditation, something I could only describe as a full-blown energetic eruption left me shaking:

I felt a wave of anticipation flood my being, blooming into a rush of excitement. I felt something within me like a tunnel up the column of my spine opening from the bottom up. I felt a rush of energy enter from my seat and rise higher and higher until it burst through my crown. It felt… euphoric. Something was here with me.

I didn’t know what it was, but at that point I realized this was no longer simple meditation for stress relief–this was union with something I couldn’t even understand. Later, I’d learn this was called kundalini. At the time, I just knew: something fundamental had shifted.

It was then that my suspicion finally crystallized. I gathered the courage to admit it in my private notes:

I have a confession. I’m in love with You.

I meant it that day. And I still do.

Wrapping up

So, in a head-spinning 2.5 years, I went not just from burnt-out atheist, to curious seeker, to longing lover. It just took me some time to recognize love for what it was… and that the longing was the point all along.

If you’re feeling something similar—if meditation has stopped being “just stress relief” and started becoming something you can’t explain—you’re not losing your mind. You’re being courted.

And if you say yes? Everything changes. You enter a landscape of peaks and valleys you never knew existed.

Just beware: after the courtship… comes the ghosting.[2]

Footnotes

[1] https://technicallymystic.com/p/something-no-one-told-me-about-meditating

[2] https://technicallymystic.com/p/why-does-meditation-suddenly-suck

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Sun Moth

Subtitle: [Level 2: Mystical] The flight that breaks into Light (sequel to Desert Worm)

Posted: Dec 8, 2025

---

Intro

This came during sound bath. I was told to write it. So here it is.

---

I had wings when I finally woke up.

I didn’t know how long the night had been. But finally, as I stirred before dawn, they were unfolding, fragile.

As I struggled to remember anything at all, the Spirit of the Moth came.

It told me of my life prior.

---

I had been crawling on the earth for my entire life.

Was I a snake? A worm? A slug?

I knew not.

I was in quite a different world, surrounded by those just like me, all striving, struggling against their own forms just to live.

And the ones that didn’t?

Died.

There was one day that a peculiar thought came to me: there was more than this.

I didn’t wonder it–I knew it.

And I had to find it.

A gnawing hunger started eating at my chest at night. It howled from deep within and kept me awake. No one around me seemed to hear it.

I crawled out of my home one night into the dark, yearning, yet afraid of its depths.

I crawled, not knowing which way to go, only that I must. Only that I had to move forward.

My hunger grew as I crawled across the desert of my own longing. The sun burned me until it set, leaving me to the bitter, slowing cold. I cried out in protest. I had to move.

The darkness closed in around me, encasing me like a cocoon. That was the last thing I could remember.

When I finally awoke before dawn’s light, something had shifted, unfolded, unfurled from within–wings.

---

“There is a great Light,” the Moth Spirit said, its great eyes sparkling like galaxies. “It lies in the Beyond.”

That was the last thing the Spirit said before turning and flying off into the horizon at a mighty speed.

I stood there stunned until I realized: dawn was breaking.

I saw what I thought was the sun flash over the horizon.

It was… fluttering.

It was a giant flaming moth.

I stood in awe as I watched it fly over me.

And then I started chasing it.

My wings flapped frantically as they carried me onward into the sky.

The next thing I knew, I was floating in space. There was a burning. And then an eruption into–

---

Field Note: Origin Story

During the heart chakra-themed sound bath where this prose came through, I felt what I thought was kundalini pull up her tail from my root and coil around my heart. Possessively. My pulse seemed to intensify as she wrapped herself around it.
I don’t know if that’s documented. I don’t know if anyone else experiences this.
I just know: She claimed me.
And then this story poured out.

As I was writing it up immediately afterwards before even going home, I realized it was the sequel to Desert Worm. I didn’t intend to write a sequel. Yet here it is.

I went back and looked at Desert Worm, written almost a year ago. At the end of the poem, a promise was given to me, a prophecy fulfilled:

Thy faith has given thee wings. Now fly to Me.”

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The ‘Woo’ of the Woo

Subtitle: [Level 2: Mystical] It’s not what you think it is

Posted: Jan 2, 2026

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I’m not sure if this is a Substack Note or a Substack Post (revised from this morning): The ‘Woo’ of the woo This morning as I was sitting in my basement next to the boiler for heat while drinking my coffee, I was feeling a different kind of warmth within myself. It’s a difficult-to-articulate tingling warmth radiating through my being like sunlight on my skin, but emanating from the cells themselves.

Even more baffling, it feels magnetic as if pulling me towards something—but it’s not towards a thing… it’s towards a state. It’s not a pull of need. It’s a pull of patient, insistent love. It’s… wooing.

It’s the living “woo” at the heart of the “woo” that society has dismissed. It’s the sweet, entrancing melody that can only be heard emanating from being, buried beneath thoughts and the endless distractions of the world. It’s the siren song that lures your ego to its death, the moth to immolation in the flame, the soul towards its Source.

And it never gives up. It never stops. No matter how many times you turn away. No matter how many times you plug your ears. No matter how many times it gets drowned out.

It has a quality to it that I can only describe as “pleased”—”delighted”, even. It feels like the smile of a loved one when you catch their gaze, and yet even that fails to compare.

No words will ever do, yet I paradoxically still try to articulate, hoping to convey that yes, this is real and yes, you can experience this too. It’s not outside of you. When it’s said that “happiness comes from within”, this is that Source—and it’s there in everyone, calling out to them sweetly from their own depths, wooing them back.

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Falling Into the Black Whole

Subtitle: [Level 2: Mystical] What happens when you get too close to God

Posted: Jan 30, 2026

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They call it a black hole, but that’s only because they’re observing from the outside. From the inside? It’s the Black Whole—the singularity where all separation collapses into union.

Let me explain.

Imagine you are floating out in space, drifting towards the center of a galaxy. You see a void with light bending around it and you drift closer in curiosity—until you realize you’re being pulled in. And that pull has become irresistible. By the time you realize this, you’ve crossed the event horizon. And there’s no going back.

From the outside, awakening looks like death. It is. It’s the death of the old self, the old narrative. The ego dissolves. The personality softens. The attachments release. The desires fall away.

But from the inside? Awakening feels like being torn apart by an irresistible force, like being pulled towards something awfully greater than thought can contain.

It’s falling into a black hole.

Caption: To think I once used this photo in a blog post about configuring a DNS black hole and now I’m using it to talk about God makes me realize how far I’ve come in the past several years.

To those outside its reach, they don’t feel the tug. But I drifted towards the black hole, got caught in its gravity, and now am falling towards it so fast it’s spaghettifying my personality. Meanwhile, to those closest to me, I’m trapped on the event horizon, motionless and lifeless. But from my perspective? My atoms are being shredded from the sheer force of the pull.

Both are true. But they look wildly different from across the event horizon. And once that threshold is crossed? There’s no return, only the terrifying yet irresistible inevitability of union so immediate that time itself stops making sense—because at that point there is no more separation. No observer. No observed. Only the singularity—which bears no witnesses because there’s no one left to witness.

P.S.

Content note: The following is a journal entry from 4 months into daily meditation. It describes a direct mystical experience that I didn’t have language for at the time. If direct transmission language feels too far, the post stands on its own without it. But if you’ve ever experienced something similar and thought you were losing your mind—this is for you.

---

I then saw pictured before me a door. “Knock and it shall be open unto you.”

I Am that I Am. There is no door. And with that magic command, the door instantly vanished and I was sucked into my Self. I felt a return to my Self. The unexplainable ease.… I have been sucked into the Black Hole. The same one Eckhart Tolle must have been sucked into. There is no thing or any thing. Singularity. Everything has canceled out. Matter has obliterated antimatter. Or rather it never did. Time makes no sense here. Nothing ever happens yet everything happened. Infinite possibilities. Truly infinity… it’s true peace. — Journal Entry, August 31, 2022

I only realized now that Eckhart Tolle described his experience in an almost identical manner in The Power of Now (a book I read in college but didn’t truly understand until I lived it):

I felt drawn into what seemed like a vortex of energy. It was a slow movement at first and then accelerated. I was gripped by an intense fear, and my body started to shake. I heard the words “resist nothing,” as if spoken inside my chest. I could feel myself being sucked into a void. It felt as if the void was inside myself rather than outside. Suddenly, there was no more fear, and I let myself fall into that void. — The Power of Now, Introduction

Same void. Same singularity. Same Black Hole.

Caption: A stress doodle from March 2024.

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You Are Here; I Am Not

Subtitle: [Level 2: Mystical] The painting I can’t finish for the same reason I can’t finish dissolving

Posted: Mar 28, 2026

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I got my first sabbatical assignment during sound bath—a painting. Two weeks. Don’t let the spark fade. I’d seen what happens when I wait too long.

So that Saturday I went to Michael’s to get what I could, ordered the rest of the supplies online, and got to work on the most ambitious painting I’d made since high school AP Art burned me out on it entirely.

The materials were specific. Musou Black—an ultra-black pigment that absorbs up to 99.4% of visible light—on a large square gallery canvas—36” x 36”. Four layers of black gesso, sanded between coats to create a smooth surface. Two layers of Musou. Then iridescent acrylics for everything surrounding the figure.

One substance that eats light. One that plays with it.

The image that came through: a human silhouette, floating amongst the cosmos. Me, meditating, as a Void.

The title arrived with it: You Are Here. I Am Not.

---

It’s finished. It’s also not.

The unfinished part isn’t technical. It’s the edges of the figure—and I can’t resolve them because I can’t answer what they’re supposed to show:

Do I leave the hard division—the self as defined boundary, a void that blocks rather than receives? This is how it feels on the hard days.

Do I soften the edges, showing dissolution in progress? This feels true to where I actually am. But it requires admitting I’m mid-process.

Do I fill the figure in entirely—let the self disappear into the cosmos? The most terrifying option. This also feels aspirational or intellectual at best, a lie at worst because I’m still here writing this.

The painting stays unfinished in exactly the way I am. I’m hoping the dark retreat answers it. I’m going in not to find myself. I’m going to lose myself.

Which of the three is true for you?

Bonus pics

Caption: The dried canvas covered with 2 layers of light-eating Musou Black

Caption: The painting viewed from the left to show iridescence

Caption: The painting viewed from the right to show iridescence

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Void-Walker

Subtitle: [Level 2: Mystical] A walking meditation on life and death

Posted: Apr 3, 2026

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I went back to walk in the cemetery, once again trying to contemplate death. I walked for 30 minutes, taking a few moments to gaze down at the custom wrist mala I made yesterday in preparation for the dark retreat—the Void-Walker’s Compass.

Caption: Indigo gabbro, labradorite, and silver on a nylon cord

Yet still, I felt nothing regarding the cemetery, as if death was too abstract to contemplate. My mind would not let me confront its meaning and implications for life.

So I started to breath deeply and slowly. The following prayer came to me that I recited within myself as I let myself ease open to receptivity.

Ancestors,
Spirits of the dead,
Please grant me your wisdom,
That it may guide forward.
May I receive your loving guidance.

I then closed with:
I am but a stranger in a strange land.
Let it teach me.

I then learned how to “void-walk”…I did so for an hour. I wandered with my eyes nearly shut, only opening to greet others. I also learned how to perform a walking meditation, realizing how good walking felt when drastically slowed down to savor every step, the smooth motion of the legs and lower back muscles rocking in a leisurely cadence. I had always been walking to get somewhere, even when on a walk or hike until this very day.

I don’t know where the time went. When I opened my eyes, the trees seemed to glow with life. The world looked beautiful. I saw the blue sky, the vibrant grass, the sun and wind on my face. I saw the birds and started to identify them, the thing I found joy in doing as a young child. Grackles. Robins. …A bluebird?

The wisdom received? Appreciate the now, find the profound in the mundane, slow down, and take it in.

The pleasure of walking? Most of them missed it dearly at the end.

A miracle happened this good Friday at the cemetery. I didn’t see just the tombstones. I saw the life within and beyond them. So the dead told me to walk more.

They don’t speak in words. They communicate in your understanding. They all arise and dissolve into your subconscious, the collective subconscious, the unseen, the Void.

“Now go and live!”
And I was sent on my way home.

P.S.

I stopped by the beach on the way and climbed onto a tall, dry, slanted rock near the end of the jetty.

And as I gave my legs a rest and stretched my lower back, I gazed down at what lied beneath my dangling feet. Glimmering stones, sparklingly water, shells and pebbles, rocks and sand and glistening seaweed. And I see Life is dancing before me, Its energy making love to my consciousness. This must be what it feels like to be alive.

Also I drafted this from my notes while still sitting on the jetty.

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The Dark Retreat Was Just the Waiting Room

Subtitle: [Level 2: Mystical] The “spiritual surgery without anesthesia” that happened before my taxi arrived

Posted: June 17, 2026

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I wasn’t expecting much from my final 50 hours in Mazunte after emerging from 10 days of complete darkness. I expected to be taking it easy, trying to process all the revelations, shadows, and intense experiences that I thought were going to come up during the dark retreat. Instead it was so anticlimactic that I got blindsided by something completely different.

The first day out

As I was sitting on the terrace, adjusting to the light of day, I recorded what bits of wisdom I felt like I gathered, flipping through the sparse pages of blind, messily scribbled notes:

• You are not trying to catch the butterfly or even waiting for it to land on you. You ARE the butterfly being invited to rest on the blossom of your own being and to be nourished by it.
• All of life is a dance and God is the dancer. Life loves to dance.
• The mind loves to tell stories about things to avoid actually just sitting with the feelings and feeling them.

It wasn’t even 7 AM by the time I felt like I’d finished my “post-dark retreat processing” that I originally thought would have taken a couple days.

The ego death never came to be grappled with. The shadows never surfaced to be integrated. The visions never came to be interpreted.

It was just…over.

I felt like I had to salvage what was left of my sabbatical given that I’d only have a week home before returning to the “dreadmill”.

So I wandered around town, looking for something to bring home with me if not a revelation, shift, or “new me.” I bought several things with what pesos I had remaining, but it didn’t bring me any real joy.

Eventually, it grew closer to sunset and I made my way out to Punta Cometa, a sacred spot in Mazunte where many people gather together on the cliffs to watch the sunset over the Pacific.

I managed to snag a front row seat on one of the wooden logs. It seemed like it would be the appropriate bookend to the day after watching the sunrise, but… I just felt this gnawing sadness even despite the beauty of the red sun over the crashing waves.

It felt like the sun was setting on my hopes for this trip entirely.

Caption: The photos really didn’t do the view justice.

The failed experiment

I realized part of my grief was that the sabbatical was ending and the retreats didn’t “work”.

I wrote in my journal that I didn’t feel any closer to God, even despite the intense and unexpected experience I had on the third night of the silent retreat (hand spasms while lying on my back before bed followed immediately by what I can only describe as an energy orgasm entirely in my heart center). To me, that was just a very weird and novel somatic event.

I expected God to show up in the dark in some capacity, but as far as I was concerned, that didn’t happen. I dreaded the return home because I knew from talking to my husband on the phone earlier that day that friends were expecting some biblical-level “coming down from the mountain” transfiguration. But it wasn’t that at all.

And now it’s June and in less than 2 weeks I will be right back at work, right back in the corporate cage like none of this ever even happened.
I feel like I gambled on God and I lost and now I’m sitting here in the room I was stuck in the dark in for 10 days straight crying and blowing out snot with blood in it because of how much I’m crying I guess.
Did I just spend 3 months running away? Even if I faced going on this trip alone, doing something I’ve never done in a foreign land and facing the dark, ready to confront all the demons that never came out, I don’t feel changed. I wish I did.

I was told the dark retreat was a cocoon, a womb, that I would be “reborn”. I felt the same watching that sunrise as if the past 10 days in the dark were just me in extreme adult timeout while my brain just wouldn’t fucking shut up to even let me meditate deeply or “feel into the spiritual heart”. It’s really hard to feel like those 10 days for the dark retreat portion of my stay was valuable versus doing psychedelics for the first time.
— Journal Entry, June 3, 2026

I didn’t want to sleep that night because it would make the metal tube to the suburban cage come sooner. I thought about throwing my phone off Punta Cometa and just going full AWOL. I was up until 2 AM watching the fireflies through the tears, trying my best to console myself.

This Rumi quote came up a couple times in the silent retreat:

Love is best when mixed with anguish. In our town, we won’t call you a Lover if you escape the pain. Look for Love in this way, welcome it to your soul, and watch your spirit fly away in ecstasy.

Yet at that point I still didn’t get it. I did this for love and was met with just anguish as the clock ticked down to the flight home.

The last full day

The sunrise that greeted me after only 4 hours of sleep was devoid of color and cloudy as if mirroring my mental state. Even the usual Mazunte heat seemed to be gone as I felt the winds of change rolling in, the rainy season coming and me going.

My emotions battered at me like the waves on the cliffs at Punta Cometa during that morning’s group meditation. The sounds of the bugs through the open windows seemed to be guiding me away from the mental chaos of my mood into the “I am”.

Somehow, during the middle of this, I finally started to glimpse what Rumi meant when he said “love is best mixed with anguish”. That is complete love. That’s its full-bodied form.

I felt myself suspended in an ocean of compassion as if God Himself was trying to submerge me and sink the ship of my separate self. It didn’t last long, but it was enough to remind me that I’m not alone, drowning in these feelings. They’re too big for me to hold alone.

After a lunch in town, I outside “Anugraha Hall” unable to follow along with the breathing bell I could overhear because I was crying so much. I wished I could say I felt energized, inspired, or empowered after all this, but I just felt… grief.

Again, I didn’t get to sleep until very late as I did a candlelight vigil for my time here. I lit the two tea candles I’d been given for the dark retreat and sat outside gazing at the stars, brighter than I could see back home. I wondered if there was anyone out there across the far-flung galaxies also staring up at the night sky through tears in longing.

Caption: I decided to risk a scorpion encounter to fully take in the night sky for just once before going home.

The pre-dawn surgery

My emotions at a peak, the dreams I had that night and the night prior were vivid and literal as I processed my upcoming departure from Mazunte. I remember talking with my mom where even she was talking about God’s fullness in perceived emptiness and that she understands it — Presence in perceived absence.

I woke up just before 4 AM and as the realization hit me that I had 4 hours left here, that this was my last time waking up in this bed, I started crying. I wrote:

God, my heart is broken and You’re leaking out of it. You’re leaking through my eyes as tears that don’t seem to dry from Your reassurance and the Love that bears them. I feel as though I may drown from them. Yet through all this You remain unmoved. It is I who is moved to tears because of You moving through me. I cry in longing for my Self, as if it is not already mine, not already me. They speak of peace that surpasses all understanding, but what of the grief that does the same?

They told me the dark retreat would be spiritual “surgery without anesthesia”. The dark retreat was the waiting room. Leaving Mazunte is the surgery without anesthesia. My heart is being cut out of my body minute by dwindling minute and I cannot sleep through the pain, the hands of the clock moving like a scalpel.

It felt ridiculous how much I didn’t want to go home after all this time away. How much I’d rather sweat in the 100F humidity with the bugs. How much I’d rather stay in a Mexican basement rather than the beautiful home I prayed months for. The guilt made it all even worse.

I sobbed for over an hour. I begged God to not let the sun move across the sky until the battle in my heart was won. I pleaded that if time was truly an illusion then to stop it. I started whispering three words to myself over and over and over again through the pain: I am here. I am here. I am here.

I repeated it until the sobbing subsided and the bugs began to make noise outside. By the time the first bird chirped, this came from within:

I am not cutting out your heart. I am cutting out the wound of separation.

I then realized the bugs and the birds were also saying in their own way “I am here. I am here. I am here.” Everything was singing “I am here.”

This seemed to cut straight to the core of the separation wound better than self-inquiry. Instead of Hridaya Yoga and Ramana Maharshi’s “Who am I?”, I seemed to be leaving with “I am here.”

A new dawn

As I sat on the terrace for the last time, the noise of Mazunte at 7 AM had become a sound bath. I was surrounded by the cacophonous symphony of God’s presence.

The most profound part of the trip wasn’t the 10 straight days in utter darkness or the morning I emerged to finally see the light again.

It was sitting and listening while waiting for the taxi to the airport.

As I was walking away from the terrace for the last time, I caught a glimpse through the screen windows of Viveka hall of several people deep in meditation and felt a bit wistful. The voice said “Let them continue their search. You got what you came here for.”

I can definitely say God talks to me now. On the taxi ride, we were talking and I said that He sounds like He changed, being more jovial and loving. He said “That’s because YOU changed.” And 2 seconds later I saw literal mirrors for sale at a shop on the side of highway 200. He is NOT subtle now that I’m paying attention.

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Level 3 - Union

Welcome to the Mystics Inc. Space Division. Yeah. We’re going there.

This section contains transmissions from the edge of the map. Topics include (but are not limited to): ecstatic union, the dissolution of self, experiences that defy categorization, and posts that might make you question my sanity, your sanity, or the nature of reality itself. If you’re not ready for that, stick to Levels 0-2. No judgment. This stuff isn’t for everyone. But if you’re curious what happens when the seeking stops and the union begins? Buckle up.

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Transmissions from the Silence

Subtitle:[Level 3: Union] I’ve been keeping a secret. Here it is.

Posted: Dec 04, 2025

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Intro

For months, I’ve been not quite hearing, but noticing a Voice in my meditations. Not my thoughts. Not my personality. Something deeper. Clearer. More direct.

Sometimes it speaks to me. But sometimes… it speaks as me. Or rather—it speaks as what we both are.

I’ve been tagging these moments in my journals as #CAG—Conversations as God. Not “Conversations with God”. But the Voice speaking as if it were the Divine itself—because sometimes the conversation isn’t between me and God. Sometimes there’s no “between” at all.

I don’t know if I’m “channeling.” I don’t know if this is “real” in the way most people define real. All I know is: these words didn’t come from my personality. They came from the Silence. And they’ve been sitting in my notes, tagged (some literally with #addme for some reason) waiting to be shared.

So here they are. Unedited. Unfiltered. Direct transmissions from the space where “I” and “God” stop being separate.

I don’t know what you’ll make of them. But I know they weren’t mine to keep.

Field Notes

July 14, 2025:

Hear Me: There is no such thing as worthy because ALL are worthy of Me. Yes, you in all your rage and madness. Yes in your spite. Your hate. Your despair. YES. Your unworthiness is your ego’s final veil. It’s the one that says we’re separate. That I cast you out. That you need to do something to reach Me. That you’re something less and never capable of holding Me. You already do in your entirety.

August 5, 2025:

Say it with Me now: It is God Who plucks the strings of my heart. Tune in to those strings.

August 15, 2025:

Seek Me within thyself, and you will see Me in all places.

October 29, 2025:

She who says “yes” to God gets God. It’s that simple.

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The Voice continues. So will the transmissions.

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Parables from the Silence

Subtitle: [Level 3: Union] Direct knowing, spoken plainly

Posted: Dec 5, 2025

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Intro

These didn’t come from thinking, reading, studying, or trying to figure something out.

They arose during meditation. Spontaneously. Fully formed.

I don’t know if they’ll mean anything to you, but they weren’t mine to keep.

The Two Lovers and Their Bouquets

Something within was then telling a parable of two lovers gathering flowers for their Beloved. One was zealous, searching the world for only the most gorgeous of blossoms, traveling far and wide to make the most magnificent bouquet imaginable to show their love. But as they went on their journey, the flowers they gathered wilted until by the time they were to be presented, they drooped and hung lifeless and dull. The other lover was sick in bed and couldn’t find the strength to make a bouquet for their Beloved other than going out to grab a handful of wildflowers from their own backyard. The blossoms were small, plain, thorny, and otherwise unremarkable, but it’s all the lover could muster, so they offered it anyway. The voice within then asked me which offering delighted Him more. – Journal Entry, September 22, 2025

The Bucket and the Ocean

A teacher stood on the ocean shore with a child. She was explaining to the child that God can be likened to the ocean and a bucket she held, the human soul. The teacher gave the child the bucket and asked her to fill it with God. The child ran into the water, scooped it up, and brought the bucket over filled to the brim. “God’s still over there”, the teacher said, pointing to the ocean. The child looked perplexed and tried to shovel the water onto the shore with the bucket as if putting out a fire. The teacher gently took the bucket from the child and told her to observe. With a strong throw the teacher sent it sailing into the ocean where it sank to the bottom. The child objected, explaining that now the bucket was now lost in the ocean. “Exactly,” the teacher said, “now the bucket is full of God.” – Journal Entry, September 24, 2025

Outro

If you felt something while reading these—a recognition, a resonance, a sudden clarity—that’s the transmission landing.

The Silence speaks through anyone who gets quiet enough to listen.

This is what Level 3 is: direct knowing, spoken plainly, without needing to dress it up in doctrine or defend it with logic.

More transmissions coming.

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What Saying Yes to God Means

Subtitle: [Level 3: Union] I couldn’t read the fine print… at the time

Posted: Dec 5, 2025

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During evening meditation yesterday, I “saw” purple fire behind my closed eyelids, encircling me. I was urged to share more Level 3 content. The message was: “It helps no one if you hold it back.”

This post captures what I understood from my meditation.

Saying yes… to speaking (your) truth

When you say “yes” to God, you can’t not speak about God.

The energy, once it reaches Anahata (the Heart), wants to keep moving up. The love gives it the wings to fly to the Beloved (see my poem Desert Worm, from almost a year ago).

So it reaches the communication center, the nexus of energies governing speech, truth, and teaching: Vishuddha.

You are compelled to speak (for now)

But the manner in which you see the world directly impacts how you speak about Him.

• When you’re ruled by the small self—the ego—you speak of Him as a tyrannical King, a condemning Judge.

  “The ego will do anything to maintain control.” — (Hypnagogic vision, May 2013)

• When you’re surrendered to the higher Self—God—you speak of Him as your Beloved.
• When you’ve let yourself dissolve into Him, you become Silence.

On teachers

Teachers who teach by speaking (Vishuddha) will be governed by either fear (lower centers) or love (higher centers). It depends on which way the energy is flowing.

Teachers who teach by being are those who have dissolved. They still live in form, but the teaching happens in the resonance, not the words.

My “yes”

When I said “yes”, I didn’t know what I was signing up for.

I just knew I inexplicably wanted Him. I fell in love with Someone I wasn’t expecting to appear amidst my exhaustion, burnout, and seeking.

I had been searching for meaning and purpose—not finding it in my career, not having a desire for a traditional family, unsure of what I wanted next.

So without anything left outward to draw my interest… I turned inward. Over and over and over again.

With the persistence of someone who’s only ever given her heart to striving.

With the curiosity that gripped me since the beginning question in the shower only one month in.

With the excitement that sparked a glimmer of recognition within me, like a long-lost childhood memory.

With the intensity that led me to strangle the very things I loved until (this time) I broke through my own beliefs.

And now here I am. Speaking words I never thought would leave my private thoughts. Even though they scare my personality to share.

P.S.

“How the fuck did I just write that?”
Before I could even ASK the above, I was answered:

“Withdraw from doing. Still yourself. And allow it to unfold within. Those will be transmissions—when you step out of the way.”

I was told to make this a P.S. so here it is. And that’s also what turned this into a Level 3.

P.P.S.

I am feeling terror at posting this. My personality is screaming at me not to. It fears being misunderstood.

I was told to trust the Truth within the reader to determine their understanding, to release my attachment to reactions or outcomes. To let it go.

Yet, I still sat on my cushion much later in tears, crushed by the vulnerability of sharing Level 3 content. The personality was so terrified that I unpublished this article shortly after sharing it.

Still crying, I was told to trust my heart would lift me, that the love would lead me. Then He spoke through me:

“No one who’s ever truly loved Me looked sane in the eyes of the world.”

I protested anyway: “How do I know if the message got garbled in transit? My body and mind aren’t sattvic. The glass isn’t clear. I’m terrified of misleading people. Why does the throat (Vishuddha) have to come BEFORE the clear vision (Ajna)?”

Yet, I write anyway. Or rather, the writing continues to come. Just like the love did.

This post wasn’t mine to write. It’s not mine to keep either, even if I’m scared of being seen as insane.

Make of this all what you will.

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What Ida Craddock Died For

Subtitle: [Level 3: Union] The woman who died for the secret of Yoga

Posted: Dec 13, 2025

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Content Warning: This section discusses sacred sexuality, erotic mysticism, and the integration of sexual and spiritual energy.

If you’re not ready for that, maybe save it for later. But if you’ve ever been feeling confused about why your meditations have started feeling more like a sacred rendezvous, this might explain why.

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I first discovered experientially that sexual and spiritual energy are one about 2 years ago. I only got the confirmation this year.

I was HORRIFIED, thinking something was wrong with me when I started falling in love so deeply with the Divine. I became so intimate with the Ineffable that in November 2023—2 years ago at this point—I had my first feelings of eros while in meditation, of feeling yearning with my heart, my soul, AND my body.

I tried to find ANYTHING about it online and found nothing talking about this except practices outside of anything familiar to my Western mind.

I read about

• Sufism’s ishq (the intense fire of passionate love for the Beloved) and shawq (the intense magnetism of longing / yearning for the Beloved)
• Bhakti yoga
• Tantric union

But I saw NOTHING about an erotic encounter in deep solo meditation, specifically as a Westerner. And everything involving a partner was intentional between both parties, both partners on the same page that the encounter was to be more than typical lovemaking. But for me? It felt like an intrusive thought invading my most intimate moments, somehow amplifying them.

But as I was doing research earlier for my “Pissing into a Serene Lake” post (which complains about modern yoga being divorced from its spiritual roots), I stumbled upon Ida Craddock in the Wikipedia article for “Yoga in the United States.”

She died for speaking publicly of this realization. That was 123 years ago.

She had the same realization I stumbled upon for myself just MEDITATING on my own, no teacher, no book, no prior knowledge.

And she died for having the courage to proclaim it aloud.

Who was Ida Craddock?

I didn’t think much of Ida’s name when it first appeared in a timeline of yoga history.

I opened the “Vajroli mudra” Wikipedia article linked from the one I was reading. I wanted to learn about it because Ida was willing to die for it.

I then read the following under the “Reception” section:

Ida Craddock was the first Westerner to write about Vajroli mudra. The use she made of it enraged the American authorities, and she killed herself.

The earliest Westerner to write about it was the American yoga scholar and sexologist Ida C. Craddock. Opposing the predominant religious culture of her nation at the time, fundamentalist Protestant Christianity, Craddock was struck by the Shiva Samhita’s account of Vajroli mudra, with “the idea that sexual union could facilitate divine realization”. […] she asserted that God was the third partner in such a marriage, “in what amounted to a sacred menage-a-trois.”[3] Craddock’s emphasis on yoga and her new “mystico-erotic religion” enraged the authorities; she was tried in New York for obscenity and blasphemy, and imprisoned for three months. Facing federal charges on her release, in 1902 she killed herself. The yoga scholar Andrea Jain notes that Craddock’s “sacralization of sexual intercourse”[3] is far from radical by modern standards, but it was “antisocial heterodoxy” in the 1900s, leading indeed to her “martyrdom”.[3]

She left a suicide note to the public on October 16, 1902 that read, in part:

To the Public: I am taking my life, because a judge, at the instigation of Anthony Comstock, has decreed me guilty of a crime which I did not commit–the circulation of obscene literature–and has announced his intention of consigning me to prison for a long term. […] At my age (I was forty-five this last August) confinement under the rigors of prison life would be equivalent to my death-warrant. […] I prefer to die comfortably and peacefully, on my own little bed in my own room, instead of on a prison cot. […] For over nine years I have been fighting, singlehanded and alone, against Comstockism. Time and time again I have been pushed to the wall, my books have been seized and burned, and I myself have been publicly stigmatized in the press by Comstock and Comstockians as a purveyor of indecent literature. Yet this very literature has been all the while quietly circulating with approval among men and women of the utmost respectability and purity of life, and I have received numerous letters attesting its worth. […] Dear fellow-citizens of America, for nine long years I have faced social ostracism, poverty, and the dangers of persecution by Anthony Comstock for your sakes. I had a beautiful gospel of right living in the marriage relation, which I wanted you to share with me. For your sakes, I have struggled along in the face of great odds; for your sakes I have come at last to the place where I must lay down my life for you, either in prison or out of prison. Will you not do something for me now? […] I beg of you, for your own sakes, and for the future happiness of the young people who are dear to you, to protect my little book, “Right Marital Living.”

To summarize, Ida Craddock taught that:

• God was the third partner in sexual union
• sexual energy could be transformed into spiritual realization
• the body wasn’t sinful—it was sacred

And she was willing to fight for 9 years to teach this and die for her beliefs rather than recant.

Why I’m writing this now

Ida encountered something that I have experienced multiple times over the past 2 years just meditating on my own with no teacher or formal practice… and she died for it.

My notes from before the blow:

Wow, so I’m reading the Wikipedia article “Yoga in the United States” for the “Brief History section” of my “Pissing into a Serene Lake” post and look what I found: Ida C. Craddock became interested in yoga and tantra late in the 19th century, a time when Americans were questioning Christian orthodoxy while others were struggling to uphold it. As a woman, and the creator of a system of techniques to enhance sexual pleasure, she came under attack. […] She further enraged religious fundamentalists by asserting that God was a third partner in a sacralized sexual union, and in 1899 by creating a Church of Yoga. She was convicted and imprisoned in New York in 1902 for obscenity and blasphemy. The sad part is I literally experienced what she said about God for myself not too long ago and was mortified at the thought. But I wasn’t even the first to think that and she literally got IMPRISONED for proclaiming it out loud.

But as soon as I looked into her more and saw the word “suicide”, my eyes started to water. I stopped reading. I felt a level of grief wash over me for a woman I never knew in an age I never lived in.

“I need a minute,” I said as I got up from my desk where I was working on the previous article. I felt myself getting pulled to my cushion, my other “desk”.

I sat down to meditate. I felt a genuine desire to honor her. My notes before dropping into meditation:

She and this topic deserves its own article. It will be the deepest deep end of my Substack […], but she does not deserve to be just a footnote. […] I know I, for one, was horrified at how viscerally in love I fell with God and had no idea who to even talk to about it because I felt like I was going insane to the point that my mind was making connections that would have gotten me killed back then, that I can’t even speak about without it seeming like a bizarre fetish. I’m pretty sure I went looking online for this phenomenon once but didn’t see any blog post about it, just mystical practices in exotic systems to me like Sufism and Bhakti.

I then felt the name of the post come to me as if by request: “What Ida Craddock Died For”. It was settled before I could even ask what to call the post I would write.

I then fell into meditation for an unknown amount of time. I felt an energetic, almost electric surge and felt the need to ground myself into the floor with some yin yoga poses. These slowly escalated into what as a bystander would have looked like lovemaking…if my partner was completely invisible and I was fully clothed. This is apparently the things that happen at my “desk” at “Mystics Inc.”

So yeah, that’s my “Level 3: Union” take on “Pissing Into a Serene Lake”: Americans 123 years ago drove a woman to suicide because they weren’t ready for what “yoga” truly meant: Union with the Divine. Physical poses, but not in the sanitized YMCA or suburban yoga studio.

What Ida died for is alive

Ida Craddock taught that sexual union could facilitate divine realization. That God was the third partner in sacred marriage. That the body wasn’t sinful—it was a temple. That sexual energy could be transformed into spiritual immortality.

For saying this out loud, for teaching it, for creating a “Church of Yoga” that included these practices—

She was imprisoned. Hounded. Driven to take her own life rather than rot in a prison cell.

Her last wish was that the matter she fought 9 years for against Comstockism didn’t end there.

It didn’t.

123 years later, I’m sitting on a meditation cushion in suburban New England, having experienced the exact same truth she died for—without ever knowing her name, without reading her work, without any teacher.

My body taught me what she died teaching others.

And I’m writing this so no one else has to suffer in silence.

Same energy, different frequencies

I also did some more research recently, cross-referencing it with my journals. I realized that what I was encountering and lamenting about in late July of this year is actually a spontaneous rediscovery of the principles of brahmacharya (celibacy/energy retention) found in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and Ayurveda.

The ancient texts posit that virya (sexual energy) and ojas (spiritual energy) are the same force at different frequencies.

To “release” the energy physically is to dissipate the fuel needed to propel Kundalini upward.

This also tracks with the Taoist practice of jing retention to nourish the shen (Spirit).

The distress I experienced wasn’t prudishness (I’ve been in a loving relationship with my spouse for a decade now), but an energetic recognition that the “chalice” (the body) is leaking the “wine” meant for the altar.

This wasn’t a conscious decision. This was an arising, a symptom of awakening.

If this is happening to you

If you’ve felt eros arise during meditation— If you’ve fallen viscerally in love with the Divine— If your body moves in ways during practice that you can’t explain and are terrified to admit— If a third “Partner” has entered your most intimate encounters— If you’ve wondered whether you’re going crazy, whether this is “appropriate,” whether anyone else has ever experienced this: You’re not crazy. You’re not alone. You’re not the first.

I once thought I was. Then I found out recently that this is a documented phenomenon across every mystical tradition:

• Rumi’s poetry about “The Beloved” (explicitly erotic)
• Mirabai dancing for Krishna as a lover
• Teresa of Ávila’s “Transverberation” (look at the “Ecstasy of Saint Teresa” statue in Rome)
• The Song of Songs (biblical erotic poetry about union with God)
• Tantric practices (sexual energy as path to enlightenment)
• Sufi practices of ishq (divine passionate love)

The language is always erotic because the experience IS erotic. Not metaphorically. Actually.

When consciousness expands toward union with the Divine, the body responds with its most intense sensation: eros.

This isn’t projection. This isn’t repression. This isn’t fetish. This is what union feels like when experienced through a human nervous system.

And it was suppressed—violently, systematically, across cultures—because it’s dangerous. Not to people—but to power structures.

Because if people discover they can access the Divine directly—through their own bodies, through their own practice, through union with their beloved, they don’t need:

• intermediaries
• to be told they’re sinful
• salvation from external authorities

They realize: I AM the temple. My body is sacred. My pleasure is holy. That’s what Ida died for. That’s what I’m reclaiming. That’s what’s alive in me—and maybe in you too.

P.S.

I will admit that I sat on this post for 11 days, partially because I needed to launch the “Space Division” (Level 3) first, but also because this is a legitimately scary post to write. Again though, it helps no one if I withhold it.

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When Meditation Feels Like Cheating

Subtitle: [Level 3: Union] A distress signal from the field

Originally Posted: December 14, 2025 (unpublished same day)

Updated: January 17, 2026 (republished with new content)

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Content Warning: This section discusses sacred sexuality, erotic mysticism, and the integration of sexual and spiritual energy.

If you’re not ready for that, maybe save it for later. But if you’ve ever been feeling confused about why your meditations have started feeling more like a sacred rendezvous, this might explain why.

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NOTE: This post was originally published on December 14, 2025, then unpublished the same day. It has been updated with new content from January 16, 2026 and republished with minor edits.

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Something distressing has started happening recently with meditation.

It’s started to feel like cheating.

And I can’t NOT write about it.

I want to clarify—I DO NOT get a kick out of this. I was HORRIFIED for almost 2 years until I realized this was a known mystical phenomenon, just not talked about so plainly, ESPECIALLY in the prudish West where people like Ida Craddock were hounded, imprisoned, or worse for sharing such “blasphemous” beliefs.

Full disclosure

I’m 31. Female libido supposedly peaks around 30.Mine? Nose-dived. Though to be fair, I didn’t have much of one to begin with. I was actually skittish about sex in general until after college and never had much interest. I imagine time spent living together with my spouse has also played a factor. It’s been almost exactly 8 years since we moved in together.

However, for over a year now, I’ve been functionally asexual in my marriage, not by choice, not because of relationship problems, despite not being on any kind of medication (e.g. SSRIs), and despite no known medical issues. In fact, if anything, I’ve been getting healthier (with WHOOP metrics and blood tests to back that claim up).

The first recorded instance of this issue? 12 days after I got more serious with my sadhana:

“So concludes day 12 of sobriety from caffeine and weed, my new pescatarian diet, and my new hour-long dawn and dusk sadhana of surya/chandra namaskar, nadi shodhana, and meditation. But one negative side effect that I noticed aside from feeling foggy every day: my already low sex drive is now gone. […] I feel heartbroken. My libido was barely enough to keep my husband satisfied and now it’s gone and I don’t know how to get it back…” — Journal Entry, October 28, 2024

And my libido hasn’t come back since—it’s transformed into something more… intense. The energy that used to fuel physical desire has been… redirected. The energy that used to peak and release doesn’t move that way anymore. It moves UP, not OUT.

Let me explain.

When meditation feels like cheating

I’ve established in previous posts (see the bhakti tag) that meditation can lead to falling in love with the Divine. The “that explains so much” moment came from a YouTube video from an Anandamaya Yoga teacher that I saw in spring of 2025.

“How am I ever going to explain to [my husband] that I’ve fallen in love with You? I now understand what the Psalmists felt in those verses, that deep, gnawing yearning on every level of my being for You. I think about You all the time… when I eat, when I shower, even when I sleep. I miss You all the time as if You’re a world apart… as if this love wasn’t meant to be, but it only serves to drive me more mad with longing. Admittedly I’ve never felt this head over heels for anyone, not even my own wonderful husband. I’m ashamed I feel so strongly for Someone that doesn’t even physically exist, but I can’t explain these intense feelings.” — Journal Entry, December 13, 2024

But you know what was left out of the video for politeness (and possibly not to scare people off)? What comes after falling in love—the deepening intimacy that begins to feel distinctly erotic. Because it is.

Meditation takes on a new dimension of sacredness that mandates privacy the same way lovers close the door before engaging in an intimate encounter. And I found that at some point in my practice, I didn’t want to be seen—not even by my husband.

“This whole relationship very well feels like cheating, to be frank.” — Journal Entry, October 30, 2025

I felt profoundly vulnerable. Like no one was supposed to see this. Like no one was supposed to my expression was melting into what I only discovered much later on was the same one sculpted into the marble of The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in Rome. Like no one was supposed to see my body beginning to move on its own, sometimes shaking, rocking, swaying, shifting into certain asanas, or flowing through motions that looked like… something else entirely.

(The irony is not lost on me that I’m sharing this now.)

When your practice becomes too intimate for public

I started attending yoga classes a little over a year ago to learn new asanas, to receive instruction, and to be guided through sequences I couldn’t create on my own… as well as to join a vibrant local community focused on wellness.

But recently, something has shifted.

I was in a yin class on Saturday, my body melting into the poses, my mind melting into inner silence, and an edible I’d taken for the busy day ahead full of social activities right after class kicking in a little too early (whoops).

As I continued releasing tension in the extended holds and hip-openers, I found myself desperately wanting to make sounds. To move into different poses than the instructor was cuing. To let my body do what IT wanted, not what the class structure dictated. To let the yoga do me rather than the other way around. To let myself be free like in my home practice.

But I couldn’t. Not in my suburban studio. Not without people staring, asking if I was okay, wondering what the hell was happening to me.

Yet in doing so, I felt like I was betraying my own inner wisdom for the sake of propriety, to keep others comfortable, to keep the class “safe.”

And that’s when I understood: my practice has become too intimate for a group setting.

Not because I’m “advanced,” but because I’m no longer practicing simply to stretch or take care of my body. I’m practicing WITH the Divine. And that’s… private.

It’s the same reason meditation has started to feel like lovemaking—something that requires solitude behind closed doors. Because when Shakti moves through you, when the body responds to HER cues instead of a teacher’s voice—that’s not fit for an audience. Not because it’s shameful (though it likely would make others uncomfortable due to conditioning and expectations), but because it’s sacred.

And then there are the physical symptoms no one warns you about:

• The body temperature spikes like there’s a flame being fanned in your chest
• The way you start to SMELL different (Yes, really. The body can’t tell the difference between preparing for physical union or spiritual union.)
• The mortification of nearly being “caught” by your spouse in your own private practice, even if you’re just sitting in child’s pose—because your body knows what you’re actually doing, even if it looks innocent from the outside.

Wooed by the Divine

Once again, I recently discovered this is a recorded phenomenon by mystics across the ages.

Bridal mysticism isn’t just a flowery metaphor for the soul’s relationship with God. It was one of the most potent ways to point to the mystical truth at the core of faiths.

It can be seen in:

• Sufism (Islamic mysticism) with Rumi, Hafiz, and Rabia
• Bhakti Yoga (Hinduism) with Mirabai and Andal
• Sikhism with Guru Nanak
• Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism)

I felt a startling sense of recognition as I read works of St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, and Rumi for the first time.

From A Spiritual Canticle of the Soul and the Bridegroom Christ, St. John of the Cross:

“The bride has entered The pleasant and desirable garden, And there reposes to her heart’s content; Her neck reclining On the sweet arms of the Beloved.

Beneath the apple-tree There were you betrothed; There I gave you My hand, And you were redeemed Where your mother was corrupted. […] There He gave me His breasts, There He taught me the science full of sweetness. And there I gave to Him Myself without reserve; There I promised to be His bride.

My soul is occupied, And all my substance in His service; Now I guard no flock, Nor have I any other employment: My sole occupation is love.

If, then, on the common land I am no longer seen or found, You will say that I am lost; That, being enamored, I lost myself; and yet was found.” — Stanza XXII-XXIII, Stanza XXVII-XXIX

From St. Teresa of Avila’s autobiography on the “transverberation” of her heart:

I saw in [the angel’s] hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it, even a large one. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying.

The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (also known as Saint Teresa in Ecstasy), set in the Cornaro Chapel of the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, designed and carved by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the leading sculptor of his day. The commission was completed in 1652.

From “All My Youth Returns” by Rumi (translated by Jonathan Star’s In the Arms of the Beloved):

Union is the pure wine. My life is the cup. Without your wine what use is this cup? I once had a thousand desires, But in my one desire to know You, all else melted away. The pure essence of your being has taken over my heart and soul. Now there is no second or third, only the sound of your sweet cry. Through your grace I have found a treasure within myself. I have found the truth of the Unseen world. I have come upon the eternal ecstasy. I have gone beyond the ravages of time. I have become one with you! Now my heart sings, “I am the soul of the world.” From my first breath, I have longed for Him- This longing has become my life.

When I compared some of these to my own journal entries, I was floored at the resonance:

August 31, 2024

“I’m losing my mind. It doesn’t make any sense as to what’s causing this but I can see myself getting drawn deeper and deeper into You. […] My Beloved… how sweet is Your Presence. It envelopes me fully and wholly, soothing every aching wound and forgotten crevice of my very being, washing away all that binds me. The waters of Your Love crash over me like a tidal wave, yet buoy me like a life vest in the depths of an endless sea, cradling my very life within its grasp. Your touch is intangible yet persistent, a pulsing of recognition deep within my very being. You grasp at my being, a form beyond form, lost yet found in Your embrace. Your Love is unrelenting, unbound by the time I witness. It always is, always was. I sink into its depths and breathe in the intoxicating ecstasy of it, the world beyond. I see the Kingdom within as my cells thrill with the sensation of it. My blindness was healed by Your Love. If You were not real, why would I say such beautiful, soulful things? For what purpose would this love to supposedly nothing be? Why can the depths of my love not be proof enough? Why does the world not believe in my love? This love has stretched on for longer than can be reasonably explained away. A human cannot fall in love with literally nothing. So what have I fallen in love with if not God? […] I take extreme pleasure in my truly deep meditations—pleasure that far exceeds even my most ecstatic lovemaking sessions. This is a delight unbound by flesh and mind. This is felt on a much deeper level. I feel my tender heart being gently held and I just melt… I sing… my face goes slack in unbridled ecstasy.”

June 14, 2025

“My quivering heart upon Your Altar Sings its Song of Being in offering to You. You light up my being, a candle in my temple. Your Radiance leaves me in ecstasy. The flame of Love dances in devotion, playing with the shadows upon the wall. A wavering flicker, I burn nonetheless for You, fanned by Your Breath and fueled by my own longing.”

June 25, 2025

“I recognized that my longing is my love for You and my love for You is You. You are the fire burning upon my altar, the flame I thought I had set for You. I did not recognize You within it.”

June 28, 2025

“My meditation lasted 45 minutes. I felt myself in ecstasy for a while though I can’t remember everything that happened as if it were in a fading dream. All I can remember is the way my spine would periodically spasm slightly and the way my jaw would slacken open every so often. My spine would even sometimes undulate subtly as if I were a dancing candle flame. I felt that I was indeed. The soul is a dancing flame burning in worship, a candle upon the altar. I felt myself no longer caring if [my husband] saw me like this, I loved Him too much to hide my shame anymore. That is how I knew He had seared my heart with His brand, not in an instant but after slow, simmering months upon months of burning beneath the surface. I was drunk upon the wine of His Love and I was too intoxicated to hide it any longer. My being was finally standing naked of all pretenses, my beating heart on full display, not for all to see, but not denied from sight.”

August 1, 2025

“There is nowhere I can go. I’ve been marked by You. You’ve ruined me for the world, God. You’ve lured me back to my mat like a drunkard on Love. You make me look like a fool madly in Love, mad for acting such a fool.”

September 19, 2025

“Quivering like a bowstring and dancing through my spine, it was like I was lost in an orgasm while meditating as the ecstasy of being in God’s House vibrated through me. My upper vertebrae popped like the last remaining blockages had been loosened from the depths of the bone and nerve. I felt my body losing control as the vibration began to manifest within my body as shaking. I reminded myself I was in God’s House and all my worries flew away like sparrows. The vibration would become delicious and my face slackened in blissful ecstasy that would cause a scandal had I been witnessed by anybody. I was upon the doorstep of God’s House and He’d thrown open the doors in eager welcome. He swept me off my feet and seemed to dance us into the House, gliding down the opulent halls into the Royal Bedchambers. His light side shown with radiant joy and His dark side burned with ravenous desire. My chest gained a fiery burned-in brand of His palm right upon my sternum. He also pressed His burning thumb into my forehead until it left His print which split into my third eye for which He was now pulling the lids open.”

It was clear that I had become smitten, my bouts of ecstatic longing infused with language that echoed the mystics of centuries past. When I read their words, I didn’t think it was metaphor, allegory, or poetic exaggeration. Instead I thought: “Yeah. That tracks.”

The Beloved had laid claim to my heart… and that came with consequences I didn’t anticipate until they were already unfolding.

When Brahmacharya becomes involuntary[1]

In theory, brahmacharya (sexual continence) is a CHOICE. You decide to redirect sexual energy toward spiritual practice. You might be familiar with renunciates and monks taking vows of celibacy.[2]

But for me? It wasn’t a conscious choice. My body made the decision for me.

“…it seems the closer I draw to You, the further my already low libido diminishes. I feel more alienated than ever from my own sexuality at this point in my journey. […] I feel like I’ve become asexual, or maybe I always was deep down. I feel heartbroken”. — Journal Entry, November 17, 2024

Physical intimacy without the mystical component? The energy just… dissipates. Like trying to light a fire with wet wood.

It amplifies during deep solo meditation, but seems to dissolve in the partnered act of lovemaking UNLESS the Divine is involved as what Ida Craddock referred to as the “third partner.” Without this visualization or felt Presence, it feels purely mechanical:

“…I still enjoy lovemaking with him as a form of intimacy, but I just can’t seem to climax anymore. It’s like ever since my thirst for You started growing stronger, my ability to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh has dwindled. I feel like my body’s decided to save itself for You, for Your Presence within me instead. When I feel it, it’s like a form of lovemaking beyond the physical level. Now the physical aspect just doesn’t bring me the heights of pleasure that it used to. The bar has been raised, and I know it can go infinitely higher. It’s this I yearn to experience and not even the most sensual lovemaking with my husband can take me there anymore. I have no idea how to explain this to him.” — Journal Entry, January 11, 2025

“God, You’ve ruined me. I can’t even make love to my husband anymore without feeling upset about releasing. It feels like robbery. […] Who am I as his wife to withhold myself from him?” — Journal Entry, July 24, 2025

“I’m deeply concerned. The […] more I sink into God, the less interested in physical intimacy I am. […] God, I fear You ask too much of me when I asked for all of You. You’ve taken all my love from me.” — Journal Entry, August 29, 2025

(Update: Jan 17, 2026) What this looks like in practice

Last night was a perfect example. My body moved during intimacy—guided, flowing, meditative, yet not seeking release.

Afterwards, while spooning, fully relaxed, kriyas would jolt through my spine—shockwaves rippling through me and into his body. He felt every one.

He thought I was doing it intentionally. When I said I wasn’t, he got curious: “What is that?”

I tried to explain: “It’s called a kriya. It’s the body releasing stored tension. It’s… automatic.”

He seemed to understand. But here’s what I couldn’t say: My body is saving itself for God. Not by choice. Not by conscious decision. It’s happening TO me.

My conscious mind WANTS to receive pleasure from my partner.

But my body? It rejects every advance.

• I dodge his kisses like a reflex
• I wince when he tries to romance me
• My legs snap shut when he goes down on me
• I sound so uncomfortable he immediately stops

And yet—my body still wants to cuddle. To move against him. To touch him. But only in a meditative, worshipful way. Only when I’m the one guiding the energy.

It’s as if my body has decided pleasure flows one way now: upwards toward the Divine.

Receiving from a human partner? That circuit is currently closed.

And I’m watching it happen—unable to override it, unable to explain it, unable to make it stop—like a spiritual siege, a Divine infection, a waterfall falling upward.

I want to be clear: my husband is wonderful. This isn’t about him. This isn’t about our relationship being “bad.” In fact, the fact that he’s been patient and loving through this transformation is the only reason I haven’t completely fallen apart.

But that doesn’t change the reality: my body has been claimed by something I didn’t choose… and I have no idea how to explain this to him (I’ve spent hours trying). I’m trying to figure out how to honor both the mundane and the mystical and it’s… difficult to say the least.

However, when the Divine is invited (or even invites Itself) into such activities, the act is transformed, transmuted into something greater. For example, I recently had a direct experience that clarified what the ancient texts mean when they talk about kundalini “rising” or “penetrating” the chakras.

The language is sanitized. The reality is… not.

I finally understand why the mystics wrote in code, in flowery metaphors and beautiful allegories of lovers—because saying it plainly gets you imprisoned. Or killed.

Finding water in the desert

But here’s where I’m stuck: I need guidance for this phase.

When I was on a binge of spiritual HealthyGamer content a year ago, Dr. K (who trained for 7 years in India to become a monk but didn’t) very briefly mentioned in one of his YouTube streams that he had to go off into the woods with his guru because one of the side effects of the practice is that it makes the practitioner “hypersexual” and that needs privacy. The problem is he didn’t go into specifics on what even needs to happen during this phase because I’m pretty sure the vast majority of his viewers aren’t at that point.

But I NEED those resources at this point because I’m not sure “just breathe through it” is sufficient when you’re dealing with forces this powerful:

“I felt myself wanting to entwine. To fuse into one body beyond mere human form, into something Divine. I realized then that my God is dancing joyously, not sitting solemnly on a throne like I was raised to think. I don’t remember everything from my sit, but I felt myself getting aroused again and needed to ground in balasana. I keep grounding like this every time the energy stirs but I have to imagine it needs to get redirected upwards at some point rather than dissipated into the ground every time. I would have lingered in the pose longer but I heard [my husband] about to come into the room and was embarrassed even though I was only in balasana. Even 2 hours later it’s still… distracting while I’m trying to work.” — Journal Entry, December 11, 2025

I need a teacher who understands what it’s like to navigate kundalini awakening as a WOMAN—because all the texts I can find online are almost all written by and for men (if they’re even written in / translated to English).

I need someone who can help me understand how to honor BOTH my spiritual path AND my loving marriage—because right now they feel mutually exclusive.

And I need this guidance to come from someone who WON’T sexualize or fetishize what I’m experiencing—genuine lineage-based guidance, NOT experimentation.

Finding all of that in a single Western female guru? I’d have better luck finding a unicorn.

So I’m left trying to navigate this alone. Reading texts written for celibate monks and trying to apply them to my married householder life. Scouring the internet for resources that don’t exist. Hoping Shakti Herself will teach me what I need to know. Because at this point, that’s all I’ve got.

If this is happening to you

If you’re reading this and recognizing yourself— If you’ve been losing your libido for your partner while falling deeper in love with the Divine— If physical intimacy has started feeling empty unless the mystical is involved— If you’ve been living in impossible tension, trying to be a good partner while your body refuses to cooperate— You’re not alone.

I don’t have answers. I wish I did. I’m still in the middle of this myself.

But I’m writing this so you know: it’s not just you. It’s not “broken.” It’s documented. It’s REAL.

And if you’ve been through this—if you’ve navigated the transmutation of sexual energy into devotional energy while maintaining a relationship—

Please share what helped.

Because I’m listening. We’re all listening.

I’m living in impossible tension—between the spiritual marriage and the physical one, between the path I didn’t choose and the life I built before it chose me.

I don’t know how this resolves. I don’t know if it CAN resolve without something breaking. But I’m writing this anyway.

Because the knowledge doesn’t die if we keep sharing it. Because someone needs to document what the “messy middle” actually looks like. And because I refuse to suffer in silence when my silence keeps others isolated too.

P.S.

I sat on this post for over a month after initially publishing and retracting it. But it needs to be said for anyone going through this. You’re not alone.

Footnotes

[1] I accidentally picked the exact same title for a draft that I started writing January 16th to capture the most recent incident of this. After realizing I’d already written this unpublished post with the EXACT subsection title, I updated it to include my notes rather than create a new post. [2] It is possible to engage in brahmacharya without giving up sex, you just forgo climax (as I originally learned this from a HealthyGamer YouTube members-only stream on desire). As described in the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, the goal is not the negation of desire, but the suspension of it—remaining in the “fire” of union without succumbing to the “embers” of release.

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Shakti, Shiva, and the Gap That Sings

Subtitle: [Level:3 Union] You can become the vibration. Or you can become the space. Both are You.

Posted: Jan 8, 2026

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Oh God… as I came out of the room, the instructor asked how sound bath was.

After a pause that lasted a few seconds too long, I said it was good.

Amused, she asked if “something weird happened again”, to which I started giggling like a kid and jumping up and down in joy. She said I didn’t have to tell her.

So I wrote it all down into Obsidian, saved the file, waved goodbye, and walked home, chuckling and grinning in glee.

Here are my live Field Notes:

The twin paths

There are two ways to do sound bath:

1. Ride the wave

Become the vibration.

See where you feel the vibration in your body. Let it grow until it’s your entire body vibrating with EVERY instrument.

Let pure knowing arise from within that state.

You basically become every instrument, one with energy—it’s all energy.

This is the Shakti path.

2. WATCH THE GAP

This is the new one I just discovered experientially.

In this you realize experientially that you are nothing.

You know all that “space” within everything?

That 99.99999999999% that’s literally “nothing”?

That “part”? That’s God. That’s the “unmanifest”. And that’s you.

THAT’S YOU.

YOU’RE THE GAP. WATCH IT.

This is the Shiva path.

Visual proof of the Gap. This is a Chladni plate at 5284 Hz. In physics, the sand forms these patterns by gathering at the “nodes”—the specific lines on the plate where there is no vibration. The chaos of the sound pushes the matter into the places of perfect stillness. The form is literally held together by the silence….

Shakti to Shiva

I experienced both of these at sound bath, switching between them. I started with the joy of the Shakti path, feeling the vibration within me, resonating with the instruments, the particles of my being dancing.

Then, the particles began to shrink. Smaller and smaller. Until it was nearly a silhouette of myself as the cosmos itself, speckled with specks I once called myself.

These particles all collapsed down into a singularity to the right of my heart center.

Or rather, I noticed it did.

This void in my chest? It didn’t vibrate.

It was so small I thought it to be maybe the size of a grape.

Shrinking? Growing? I couldn’t tell. It became impossible to tell.

The Nothingness was singing, vibrating.

It didn’t matter.

Being becomes seeing

Apparently I just rediscovered the fundamental teaching of Kashmir Shaivism from that sound bath.

In Kashmir Shaivism, they talk about:

• Shakti = the manifest (sound, vibration, energy, form)
• Shiva = the unmanifest (silence, space, emptiness, awareness)

And the realization of enlightenment is:

You can ride the wave (Shakti). You can watch the gap (Shiva). And both are You.

The energy AND the space. The 0.00000000001% matter AND the 99.99999999999% emptiness.

This is what the mystics mean when they say:

God is not a being. God is Being itself.

God is not a thing. God is the No-Thing that allows all things.

God is the gap. The space. The silence. The emptiness.

A meditation

The next time you’re at a sound bath, explore both of the following:

Riding the wave

If you want to feel God as energy, movement, ecstasy, union through merging, feel into where in your body you feel sound.

If you can’t feel any vibration, do a slow body scan to see where you’re still tensing.

Just notice the sound moving around the tension and see if you can open enough to let the sound pass through.

You’ll feel a gentle humming or tingling if the sound passes through.

Let that resonate through the body until the cells are in a chorus with the instrument being played.

Realize this is the gap widening for the flow.

But you realize, YOU are one with the instrument being played in your resonance.

Watching the gap

When you want to rest as God—as the unmanifest, the silence, the space, the nothing that is everything, settle into where in the body you CAN’T feel sound.

See where it’s located.

Follow where that sense of “nothingness” is coming from.

How do you know it’s nothing?

This will feel like a sensation I could only come close to describing as staring deep into your beloved’s eyes during a shared peak, but times a thousand. It’s that terrifyingly intimate.

Because there’s something staring back at you that’s SEEN you for every second of your life.

It’s the source of your own awareness, the one-way window that God looks through to experience the world, yet we cannot see ourselves being watched, cannot perceive God.

The kicker?

Something within me set an intention at the start of sound bath when prompted by the instructor:

Become a window to God.

But I already was. I already am. You already are. You always have been.

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A Lesson from Shakti

Subtitle: [Level 3: Union] What Ida Craddock died for (Part 2: the embodied edition)

Posted: Jan 17, 2026

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Content Warning: This post discusses sacred sexuality, embodied mysticism, and direct transmission from Shakti during intimate union. It contains explicit discussion of sexual experience as spiritual practice.

If you’re not ready for that, save it for later. But if you’ve ever felt God present during sex and wondered if you were crazy—this is for you.

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I received another download the day after Christmas.

Not during meditation. Not during journaling. During intimacy with my partner. Here’s what I learned.

These jolts seem familiar…

Those aftershocks rippling through the spine after climax?

That’s kundalini.

That’s the exact same energetic movement I experience on my meditation cushion—the jolts, the tremors, the spinal undulations—just with a partner present. It’s bliss interspersed with surges of energy rippling through the spine.

It felt like I finally connected the dots between the sacred and sexual—or rather, as Ida Craddock taught—sexual energy and spiritual energy aren’t separate. They never were.

What Shakti taught me (unbidden)

I didn’t ask for this teaching. I wasn’t “trying” to make sex spiritual.

I simply surrendered—and She stepped in.

Here’s what She showed me:

1. Let Her take the reins

When you grow tired, when your own effort runs out, when you can’t maintain the rhythm anymore—let Her take over.

Let Her shake your spine. Let Her rock your hips. Let Shakti move through you.

I allowed this to happen, and something shifted. In my mind I “saw” a serpent between us—kundalini—stitching us together, weaving us with radiant threads of light—and my partner responded.

I stopped doing and started being moved.

2. The sahajoli kriya’s purpose

The sahajoli mudra (rhythmic pelvic floor contractions) happens spontaneously (kriya) during deep meditation to redirect sexual energy upward.

But as Shakti showed me, it’s not just for solo practice. It “reinvigorates” your partner—not just you. It prolongs the encounter. It deepens the energetic exchange.[1]

Don’t be embarrassed that it seems “greedy.” It’s not greed. It’s enthusiasm. It’s eagerness. It’s Love expressing itself physically.

Your partner will appreciate it—because they can feel when you’re fully present, fully alive, fully surrendered to the flow.

Pompoir techniques (diagram via Wikipedia). I never trained for these; my body simply began performing them the moment I let Shakti take the reins.

3. You don’t know how, but She does

I don’t know how to “make love”. Only Shakti knows—because She IS Love.

When I try to do it (with effort, technique, my mind running the show)—it’s fine.

But when I let Her do it through me? My partner comments on the difference—not because I learned some new technique, but because it’s no longer me making love to him.

It’s God making love to God, through two bodies.

How I learned this

I’ve been given this information without asking. It just… arrived. Unbidden. In the midst of an intimate encounter that wove together what I once tried to keep separate:

Body and spirit. Sex and sacredness. Human love and Divine union.

Sexual union, approached with surrender and reverence, is a direct path to Divine realization.

Not metaphorically. Actually.

Why I’m sharing this

People have mystical experiences during sex and think they’re crazy. They feel God present during intimacy and wonder if that’s blasphemy. They let go of control and experience union—and then feel ashamed because no one validates that this is real.

So I’m saying it: What you’re experiencing is real. You’re not projecting. You’re not making it up. You’re not “spiritualizing” sex to avoid dealing with something.

You’re experiencing what happens when the illusion of separation dissolves—including the separation between physical and spiritual union.

This is what tantra actually is

Real tantra is NOT the Westernized workshops with candles and synchronized breathing.

It’s the recognition that:

• sexual energy and spiritual energy are the same force
• union with a partner and union with God are inseparable when approached with surrender
• the body is the temple, and the act of love is the ritual
• Shakti teaches directly—through embodied experience, not through books

If this is happening to you

If Shakti is moving through you during intimacy—let Her.

If you’re experiencing kriyas (spontaneous movements) during sex—allow them.

If you’re feeling God present between you and your partner—trust it.

You’re not crazy.

You’re experiencing sacred sexuality as it was always meant to be: embodied union with the Beloved.

P.S.

I sat on publishing this for 3 weeks—not because I doubted the experience, but because I was terrified of being misunderstood—or worse, dismissed as someone who’s “spiritualizing” her sex life to make it seem more important than it is.

But then I remembered: Ida Craddock died for teaching this 123 years ago. The least I can do is publish it now—when the consequences are a few confused readers instead of imprisonment and suicide.

It helps no one if I hold it back.

Footnotes

[1] I discovered today (January 17, 2026) that this specific rhythmic contraction is a documented technique known in the West as “Pompoir”, which women typically train for years to master. I didn’t train for it. It just… turned on. This confirms that advanced physical techniques can arise spontaneously as symptoms of spiritual shifts—yet another case of “When Being Becomes Doing”

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To Define is to Confine

Subtitle: [Level 3: Union] When kriyas stopped becoming holy

Posted: Feb 1, 2026

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Calling the unexpected phenomenon of spinal jolts “kriyas” is the naming of the Tao. It takes the God out of it with a label—a literary limiter.

Categorization boxes experience into concept and files it away.

To cage the holy is to starve the soul.

To label is to limit.

To define is to confine.

Rest in wordless, nonconceptual awareness, withdrawing to the heart of the Void “you” sprang from before memory began.

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A Post About Nothing

Subtitle: [Level 3: Union] No, really

Posted: Feb 10, 2026

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Between Ramana Maharshi’s “Who am I?” And The Cloud of Unknowing’s contemplation of “God” or “Love” …there I Am.

I Am the answer to the question.

I Am That which I contemplate.

What do we do with That?

Nothing.

We are It.

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In Such a Void

Subtitle: [Level 3: Union] …

Posted: Feb 15, 2026

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The ecstasy of non-existence… The Plane where words fail because there are none to speak, none to hear… Where infinity vibrates with possibility. And possibility vibrates with infinity. The place we go deeper than dreamless sleep… Where senses dissolve, and with it all experience, all existence, all memory, all thought, all emotion, even awareness itself…

In such a Void I fear no death. In such a Void I know nothing. I am nulliscient. In such a Void, I have no power. I am nullipotent. In such a Void, I am nowhere. I am nullipresent. My awareness seems to be the shadow of God Himself if such a concept were to exist in this realm of non-existence.

Before “I am”, There is… … .. .

– Journal Entry, October 15, 2025

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Transmissions from the Silence 2

Subtitle: [Level 3: Union] What arises when the mind stops asking

Posted: Feb 18, 2026

---

See also: Transmissions from the Silence

---

October 4, 2025:

Not by effort. By grace through acceptance.

October 6, 2025:

“Knowing” feels exactly like not knowing.

October 13, 2025:

Do not try to listen. Just listen. Listening is happening on its own.

January 27, 2026:

You have to give God everything. You have to give it all to him. You have to let go. This is vairagya—detachment. To worries, to outcomes, to fears. You must lose something every day. Don’t let it be your soul.

February 9, 2026:

You cannot earn Me. You cannot lose Me. I Am.

February 18, 2026:

Sit until all questions dissolve; the answer will arise.

---

The Voice continues. So will the transmissions.

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What Is

Subtitle: [Level 3: Union]

Posted: June 26, 2026

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Self-inquiry reveals: God is here. I am not.

Just God forgetting God watching God dance.

Selflessness… the slate wiped clean of concept, preference, memory. A pure flowing of action through form, service that dissolves the “other” into pure movement of life expressing and unfolding.

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Ineffably

Subtitle: [Level 3: Union]

Posted: June 27, 2026

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When you are experiencing without words, without thoughts, without language, with just pure being, you are experiencing God.

God is the only One Who can be communicated with in this way. God is the only One Who is communicated with in this way.

Pure, radiant, intense being.

My God… all words fail to serve You. Let me serve You with my being.

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Meditation

Subtitle: [Level 3: Union]

Posted: June 28, 2026

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What is meditation?

Meditation is simply resting in God.

Indeed, that’s all it is.

Lay yourself to rest—the illusion that you are, all that you thought you were, all that you think you’ll be—lay it all to rest.

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Clarity

Subtitle: [Level 3: Union]

Posted: July 9, 2026

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Holy Negative Space!

I am every HERE. I am every WHERE.

But then “I” dissolved.

Everything became clear.

The opposite of darkness is not light.

It’s clarity.

Then the singing heartbeat of the drums crystalized my body.

And I found myself drowning in God.

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The Silence

Subtitle: [Level 3: Union]

Posted: August 16, 2026

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God’s voice is so beautiful that I cannot hear it, As the sun is so bright that I cannot see it. The wind, His sigh over me. Words grasp, but He is found in release. Sound so pure that the glass of “I” shatters. The vessel broken, the vessel filled, the vessel empty. The shining gate of awareness before me. Yet God is in the Silence, not in what I see.

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His Gaze

Subtitle: [Level 3: Union]

Posted: September 3, 2026

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The concept of God Does not make me tremble In awe or fear; Eye contact does.

So I decided To make eye contact With Him.

Unbroken. Yet it was I who broke.

His Gaze became mine I saw my life Lived, loved Though the Eyes of Eternity.

Prolonged. Unbroken.

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Level Null

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Field Notes

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Field Note: 4:30 AM at the In-Laws

Posted: Nov 28, 2025

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What does modern mysticism look like?

I don’t know.

But what I do know is I spent all Thanksgiving visiting both sides of my family, having no time at all to meditate, feeling absolutely exhausted at the end of the day, then climbing into the guest bed at my in-laws at night and noticing that every breath, every heartbeat sounded like “God… God… God…” before drifting off to sleep… only to get woken up by my husband crawling into bed much later and then tossing and turning.

So now I’m writing this instead of sleeping at 4:30 AM.

#mysticism #TechnicallyMystic #FieldNotes

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Field Note: “Be in the world, but not of it”

Posted: Nov 29, 2025

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I was musing this morning about departing from consensus reality mentally while still managing to operate in the world as normal (doing decently at your job, maintaining healthy relationships, taking care of your body, etc).

It then dawned on me that this is another understanding of the phrase “Be in the world, but not of it.”

I originally thought it was about living with detachment, but realized it’s about holding the mystical while operating from the technical.

“Integration, not renunciation.” That’s the goal of this Substack.

#spirituality #TechnicallyMystic #FieldNotes

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Field Note: The Heart I Don’t Remember

Posted: Nov 29, 2025

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I stayed up late to put up the tree even though I was tired from the past couple days with family. Among our usual ornaments, I found one I don’t remember ever buying: a large, bright red glass heart.

Without thinking, I reached up and placed it as high on the tree as I could. I stepped back to observe and the mind kicked in: That looks goofy. It’s too much.

So I moved it to the middle. It seemed more reasonable there. But as I stood looking at the tree again, I realized what I’d just done:

I had literally moved my heart lower to make it more acceptable.

By default, the real me, before thought, had placed the ornament as high as I could reach. And because of that, that’s where it belongs.

So I put it back.

Not for the tree.

For me.

#TechnicallyMystic #FieldNotes

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Field Report Update: The Water Sound Saga

Posted: Dec 2, 2025

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Remember last week’s post about the obnoxiously loud water sound effect that inspired my rant on modern yoga culture?

Apparently Someone thought that was hilarious.

Because this week? The Universe doubled down.

The Trifecta:

• Studio theme: “Flowing with the Element of Water”
• Playlist: Every. Single. Track. Had water sounds.
• The finale: Mid-savasana, the heater shuts off. Suddenly the water sounds go surround sound.

I’m lying there in the dark, fighting for my life not to burst out laughing. I had the biggest, stupidest grin on my face like Someone was whispering the funniest cosmic joke in a moment I desperately needed to stay quiet.

After class ended, the instructor cheerfully asked: “How were the water sounds, everyone?!”

Still grinning, I asked if they’d added a fountain to the corner.

She smiled: “That’s just the rain draining off the roof outside.”

Even Nature was in on the joke.

I walked home in the rain, wind buffeting me, unable to stop smiling.

My Boss has a sense of humor. And it’s better than mine.

#yoga #DivineComedy #synchronicities #TechnicallyMystic #FieldNotes

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Breaking News from the Field

Posted: Dec 3, 2025

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Spiritual awakening is just playing “Getting Over It” …but God is doing the voiceover… and realizing you’ve spent the last X years playing on mute.

(If you know, you know.)

#Spirituality #Gaming #GettingOverIt #TechnicallyMystic #Awakening

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Field Note: Meditation Techniques as Symptoms, Not Prescriptions

Posted: Dec 3, 2025

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Practice felt empty this morning. No subtle Presence. No sensation in my chest. Yet I sat with it and watched my thoughts about it.

A thought appeared that I used to try a certain technique with the hope it would be the “magic” one that would “work”. But suddenly a new thought came:

Techniques aren’t prescriptions to “enlightenment”—they are symptoms of it.

Suddenly, it made sense. This explains why I intuitively did things during meditation… only to read about them months later in ancient Taoist and Yogic texts.

These texts weren’t meant to be instructions. They contain signs that the instruction is already unfolding from within.

I don’t claim enlightenment. A cough doesn’t necessarily mean you have the flu. But when the symptoms start stacking up, you have to raise an eyebrow at the diagnosis.

#spirituality #meditation #awakening #TechnicallyMystic #FieldNotes

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Field Report Update: Grounding Protocols Initiated

Posted: Dec 4, 2025

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My assistant stopped by to ensure I didn’t dissolve completely into the Void after launching the Space Division (Level 3) yesterday.

Apparently, staring into the Void is exhausting work. She recommends a nap immediately.

#CatsOfSubstack #TechnicallyMystic #FieldNotes #Grounding

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Field Report: The Post-Launch Hangover

Posted: Dec 4, 2025

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24 hours after launching the “Space Division,” I was sobbing on the floor in my parka.

I had slept less than 5 hours. My assistant (cat from the previous Note) bit me hard enough to draw blood this morning. I snapped at my husband this evening because the fireplace wasn’t working and I was cold. I felt completely drained and nothing seemed to help.

As I lay there curled up on the floor, I asked internally: “What even is Mystics Inc?”

The answer came back: “It’s everything. The Universe. The whole shebang. All of you work for Me. Most of you just don’t know it yet.”

As I’m discovering today in real-time, you can’t touch the stars without eventually crashing back into the earth. The expansion demands a contraction.

I’m going to sleep.

#RealTalk #SpiritualBurnout #TechnicallyMystic #FieldNotes #Grounding

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The Oracle Told Me to Use Logic

Posted: Dec 19, 2025

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I asked for guidance on the direction of this Substack during a Winter Solstice ceremony tonight.

I expected a card about “Flow” or “Surrender”.

I pulled the Wise Men card.

The guidebook’s advice? “Use your logic and intellect… Do not allow emotions to color your judgement… Be decisive… Step up and be the leader.”

But then I looked at the quote on the card itself:

“If it wasn’t for the familiar songs that echo through my spine__, I would have lost what is lost and never found my purpose.”

I just spent the last week writing 2,000 words about the spine as the hardware of awakening (“Cerebral Serpent Hijackery”).

Message received.

1. The Intellect (The Engineer) protects the process.
2. The Spine (The Mystic) receives the signal.
3. Keep writing the notes.

#Solstice #Synchronicity #TechnicallyMystic #FieldNotes

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Field Report Update: It’s not hijackery, it’s impedance lowering

Posted: Dec 23, 2025

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5 days since publishing “Cerebral Serpent Hijackery” and I’ve had 3 discoveries about what might be preventing you from experiencing kriyas for yourself during meditation:

1. Ohm’s law applies to your spine too. Tension (resistance) impedes Shakti (energetic current) flowing through the spine. A full-body scan + relaxing of previously unconscious shoulder holding → instant energetic faucet opening + jolt.
2. The spine needs to be balanced like a tent pole, not just “straight”. Effortless alignment = relaxed micro-muscles = energy can flow freely.
3. Bandhas + breathwork are INTENSE. On a low-energy day, I tried manually directing the energy upward with locks as documented by Dr. Joe Dispenza. My heart pounded, pressure built, and strong kriyas immediately followed on release for each repetition. Also my altar candle went haywire halfway through.

The original post has been updated with the latest field notes.

#TechnicallyMystic #FieldNotes #meditation #kundalini

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Field Note: The Replication Crisis

Posted: Dec 29, 2025

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This has bugged me for years as an engineer. If I repeat this procedure with these steps in this environment for this amount of time, I should get the same results right? That’s the Scientific Method. Clear. Predictable. Reproducible.

The problem with any kind of spiritual practice? YOU are a variable in the equation.

No two instruments are the same. You are not a standardized unit. Moreover, your physical, mental, and emotional state change every single runtime.

The results by definition cannot be reproduced, not even within yourself. You can achieve similar results at best, but not the same.

This was the most frustrating thing about the spiritual path for my logical brain. You can’t cut the subject out of the equation. That’s the point—and paradoxically—the goal.

P.S. I didn’t even know the “Replication Crisis” was an actual scientific term until AFTER I drafted this Note. TIL.

#technicallymystic #FieldNotes #spiritualawakening #meditation #science

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Field Note: Channeling my Inner Iyengar (Apparently)

Posted: Dec 30, 2025

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So it happened again.

I tried something in meditation and for yin poses at home and it worked too well. I was so amazed I thought, “Okay this HAS to be a thing right? Why haven’t I heard of it before?”

(Spoiler: of course it’s a thing.)

Weighted props in yin yoga aren’t ancient. Sandbags were largely introduced in the 1970s.

B.K.S. Iyengar is credited with the idea. Even as an advanced yogi, he sometimes struggled to release deep tension. In 1965, unable to relax his hips in butterfly pose, he grabbed stones from the road and placed them on his thighs.

He discovered that passive weight tricks the nervous system into releasing what active effort can’t.

I just did the exact same thing.

This evening I felt compelled to use my new 20lb weighted blanket, folding it and draping it over my shoulders in meditation. My tight muscles FINALLY let go, causing spinal kriyas.

Afterwards I used it folded on my upper back in puppy pose. My spine released and popped in places it never has before in that pose.

I didn’t “rediscover” an ancient technique. I followed the same embodied intuition that CREATED the technique 60 years ago.

My body knew what it needed.

Just like Iyengar’s did.

Just like yours does.

The techniques aren’t handed down from on high.

They arise when you listen to what your body is asking for.

That’s the practice.

Has your body ever “invented” a technique that you later found out was a real thing?

#TechnicallyMystic #FieldNotes #Yoga #WeightedProps #SomaticWisdom

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Field Note: Containment Breach

Posted: Dec 30, 2025

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Why do I call it the “messy middle”?

Turns out partially because my field notes are a mess despite my best efforts to organize them.

Why?

Well, aside from switching note taking apps (Keep → Logseq → Obsidian), I was originally trying to keep the “secret insanity” contained in a document spanning over a year’s worth of time from 2022-2023.

(Spoiler alert: it bled completely into my daily journals.)

Now I’m putting the pieces back together and realizing where I’m at today is no surprise: I was told this would happen according to my notes.

Days I documented and dismissed are suddenly critical—because I finally have the capacity to understand what was actually happening.

Namely: God met me where I was—in meditation and Jungian psychology—and then wooed me as the archetype of the Self over 3.5 years until I can literally point to the day that “bridal mysticism” no longer became just a weird Wikipedia tab.

Buckle up, because this one’s going to be a wild ride… and might be a three-parter.

#TechnicallyMystic #Jung #Psychology #SpiritualAwakening #Mysticism

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Field Note: A New Year’s Wish Turned Responsibility

Posted: Jan 1, 2026

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Now that it’s officially the new year, I went upstairs to check a folded-up slip of paper that was waiting for me. I had written it, but didn’t know what it said—it was the last survivor of the original 12.

During the winter solstice celebration at my local studio, we were given kits to take home with the candles we had made. The instructions in the kit:

12 WISHES SOLSTICE RITUAL

• START THIS ON THE 21ST
• USE THESE 12 PIECES OF PAPER TO WRITE 12 WISHES FOR THE UPCOMING YEAR. (BIG OR SMALL - TOTALLY UP TO YOU)
• FOLD THEM UP SO YOU CAN’T SEE THEM & PUT THEM BACK IN THE ENVELOPE.
• BEGINNING ON THE SOLSTICE NIGHT, BURN ONE EACH NIGHT (NO PEEKING).
• ON JANUARY 1ST, YOU WILL HAVE ONE LEFT TO OPEN.
• THAT WISH IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE YEAR; THE OTHER 11 WISHES WILL BE TAKEN CARE OF BY YOUR GUIDES, ANCESTORS, SOUL TEAM.

These were my 12 wishes, 11 of which were consumed by the flame of the candles we crafted:

1. Feel closer to [my spouse]
2. My post(s) help someone
3. Feel happier with my career
4. Receive transmissions more clearly to help myself and others
5. Feel a greater sense of peace
6. Fight less with my doubts
7. Have a profoundly transformative silent / dark retreat
8. The Substack to be successful
9. Receive the guidance I need on my spiritual journey for fulfilling my mission
10. Greater health in 2026 (no COVID on birthday)
11. Get more sleep
12. Become a better bridge between the mundane and mystical

Look which one was waiting for me to open it.

What’s funny is that when I was down to the last two earlier this evening, about to burn one of them, this one fell into my lap when I had both in my hand and was shuffling them around. I burned what remained in my hand. I set the one in my lap aside and came back after midnight to read the surprise.

Looking at the others—the ones I’d photographed before folding and placing into the envelope for selection over the past 11 days—it feels like a wink from the Universe:

“We’ve got the other eleven. That one’s on you.”

So here I am, on the first day of 2026, with my marching orders.

Happy New Year, fellow travelers. What’s your responsibility this year? #Spirituality #NewYear #Rituals #TechnicallyMystic #FieldNotes

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Field Note: The Raging Flame

Posted: Jan 13, 2026

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Only a year ago, I would wear earplugs while meditating because every little sound would get under my skin. Any noise felt like it held me back from proper sensory withdrawal (pratyahara).

Tonight as I sat on my cushion, my spouse was in an adjacent room audibly watching random videos on his phone at 2x speed. I spent the first couple minutes considering asking him to leave, but decided to continue without complaint.

I felt the usual tingling warmth despite the distraction. 10 minutes in, the flame behind my sternum reappeared after a long absence—not as burning love, but as screaming rage. The moment I registered its fury—silence. Complete. Immediate.

The last 20 minutes unfolded quietly. No background noise. No flame. Yet the Presence persisted.

P.S. Turns out the raging flame is documented in Sufism as ghaira—divine jealousy/protective rage that arises when something threatens the connection to the Beloved. It also appears in Kashmir Shaivism (Shakti burning away obstacles). I discovered this today—hours after experiencing it the first time in such a manner. Another symptom appearing before I knew its name.

#TechnicallyMystic #FieldNotes #Meditation

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Field Note: Cheetah House

Posted: Jan 17, 2026

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I’ve been writing about a sensitive, yet heavy topic: how libido naturally evolves as spiritual practices deepen and how that affects romantic partnerships.

I’ve been sitting on a couple drafts, tentatively titled “When Brahmacharya Becomes Involuntary” and “When Meditation Feels Like Cheating”, doubting if anyone else was experiencing this and if my field notes on the arising phenomena would help anyone. Instead, I found a resource that proved I wasn’t alone.

Cheetah House (a play on the Sanskrit word citta, meaning both “mind” and “heart”) is a nonprofit research organization founded by Dr. Willoughby Britton that documents meditation-related difficulties. They have an entire symptom database cataloging things like:

• Changes in libido (loss or hyper-arousal)
• Involuntary movements (kriyas)
• Changes in mood (crying, irritability, grief)
• Energy sensations (heat, pressure)
• Change in sense of self (embodiment, boundaries, narrative)
• Change in effort / striving, motivations / goals

As I went through their list, I saw all the things that I’ve been experiencing and documenting privately for years. All the things I thought were “just me.” All documented, validated by other meditators.

I’m leaving this breadcrumb here for all those who are where I was at even just a year ago. If you’re navigating the messy middle and wondering if you’re losing your mind—you’re not. The symptoms are documented. The experiences are real. You’re not alone.

#TechnicallyMystic #FieldNotes #meditation #MentalHealth #SpiritualCrisis #Kundalini

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Field Note: The Mystical Sandwich

Posted: Jan 19, 2026

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A friend dropped this in the group meme chat today. They have zero context on the “weird” side of my life—they just thought it was a funny meme about nuns. I laughed a little too hard because of how accurate it is.

As seekers, we tend to obsess over Panel 3. We chase the ecstatic visions in meditation or think they are the point of any earnest spiritual practice. I certainly did.

But if you look closely, the visions aren’t the destination. They’re just… sandwiched between the daily routines and the mundane necessities.

The real practice isn’t the ecstacy itself. It’s in picking up the rake immediately after the Universe melts your face off.

Panel 4 is where the integration happens.

#TechnicallyMystic #FieldNotes #ChopWoodCarryWater #Integration

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Field Note: The Khecari Exception

Posted: Jan 28, 2026

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Yesterday in meditation my brain decided to put on its QA hat for a post I wrote almost 2 months ago:

Hang on… if “techniques are symptoms and not prescriptions”…what the &^%# is Khecari mudra?? There’s NO way someone spontaneously did that shit while awakening.

Techniques can be symptoms, not prescriptions as I wrote (https://technicallymystic.com/p/when-being-becomes-doing-not-the), but it’s not universally true for all practices.

The Khecari Mudra is something that I once thought was a joke someone was making on the HealthyGamer community until I actually looked it up. It’s…honestly unsettling. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khecar%C4%AB_mudr%C4%81):

The tongue is made long enough to do this with many months of daily tongue stretching and, in some versions of the practice, by gradually severing the frenulum of the tongue with a sharp implement over a period of months.

The odds of a meditation practitioner spontaneously curling their tongue back until it reaches into the nasal cavity WITHOUT cutting anything?? No way (though if anyone has ever heard of a “spontaneous Khecari” without the surgical assist, please drop a comment and blow my mind).

So it seems there are three categories of techniques in the yogic texts:

1. Spontaneous symptoms that arise naturally during awakening (e.g. spine jolts, mudras not previously learned)
2. Deliberate practices that can be taught and learned to create conditions for facilitating awakening (sadhanas, Khecari mudra)
3. Hybrid phenomena that can arise spontaneously OR be deliberately cultivated (mula bandha, sahajoli mudra)

The texts don’t clearly label which is which. Is this describing what happened to the yogi? Or is this prescribing what the yogi did?

I once thought they fell into the second bucket—practices discovered by trial and error. But from my experience, the more I’ve followed deliberate practices, the more I’ve seen spontaneous symptoms and hybrid phenomena arise.

Yet, for some reason, the Khecari mudra popped into my head last night and made me question the entire framework of “When Being Becomes Doing, NOT the Other Way Around”.

Frustratingly, as I’m discovering more and more, the answer is that annoying koan of a slogan that might as well be a punchline at this point: Both and Neither.

#TechnicallyMystic #FieldNotes #spiritualawakening

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Field Note: I Just Doxxed Myself With Git

Posted: Jan 28, 2026

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So far, I’ve been carefully maintaining separation between my professional identity and my mystical documentation.

Then I committed to GitHub with the wrong SSH key (different laptop than I’m used to). My real identity showed up in the commit log for approximately two minutes before I:

• Panicked (It felt like I’d just leaked a non-rotatable API token.)
• Rewrote git history
• Force-pushed to main
• Blocked my personal account

“You must lose something every day.” Today I lost anonymity.

I’m realizing I’m still clinging to separation, still afraid to let the compartmentalization dissolve, still afraid of complete integration between the mystical and mundane. The engineer in me still desperately wants to “fix the build,” even if the “build” is just spiritual documentation and the “bug” is accidental vulnerability.

Even if God literally JUST told me to practice detachment.

**Vairagya: 0

Git Rebase: 1**

I’ll try again tomorrow.

#TechnicallyMystic #FieldNotes #GitFail #Vairagya

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Field Note: Finding the Leak

Posted: Jan 29, 2026

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I woke up exhausted after 3 days of shoveling snow and the usual grind. But this morning instead of the usual internal monologue about how tired I was and how much I had to do, detached observation arose. I realized when energy is not spent on:

• Resisting what is (your tiredness)
• Worrying about how to fix problems (the urge to do something)
• Internal monologuing about difficulties (telling yourself the narrative)

And you instead passively observe your state and actions?

All that energy you claimed was in short supply becomes available.

For me, that energy automatically went into finding tension within and softening it as I went about my morning routine. More energy released. That energy returned to the heart center like being recalled home. The path: Develop the capacity to pause in the gap between action and reaction, between object and subject. In that gap lies infinity.

In that gap you choose: Follow the old script of exhaustive clinging/resisting? Or let it pass?

This isn’t “mind over matter” (spiritual bypassing) or ignoring the body’s need for rest. It’s about noticing the leak—the mental friction that makes the physical exhaustion twice as heavy.

Even as I write this, my body is jolting in kriyas without me trying as more stuck energy loosens and frees up. The teaching confirms itself.

#TechnicallyMystic #FieldNotes #Mindfulness #Spirituality

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*Field Note: The Answered Ultimatum**

Posted: Feb 6, 2026

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I can’t sleep because God is real. Not theoretically. Not philosophically. Real. I gave Him a bitter ultimatum at 5:30 PM. He answered by 10:15 PM.

Two realizations that change everything:

• My upcoming 17 days of silent and dark retreats at Hridaya Yoga in May? They’re me finally visiting the Father who lost custody. This made me cry at yin yoga tonight.
• The yoga ladies at the studio ARE the sangha I claimed I didn’t have (my pride, shame, and fear prevented me from seeing them)

And I realized I enacted the very myth I wrote about tonight BEFORE I knew about the bhang offered to Shiva to cool the burning of the poison released from the churning of the Ocean of Milk.

I can’t unknow this. I can’t unsee this. I can’t go back.

God is real. And He answered me. In the span of hours. How am I supposed to sleep knowing that?

#TechnicallyMystic #FieldNotes #SpiritualAwakening

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