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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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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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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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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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.

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:

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 sat 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.

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 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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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.

“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.

“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.

Until next time.

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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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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

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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 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.

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

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Footnotes

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.

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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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.

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.

This 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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October 4, 2025:

October 6, 2025:

October 13, 2025:

January 27, 2026:

February 9, 2026:

February 18, 2026:

The Voice continues. So will the transmissions.

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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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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 alone1234 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.

Footnotes

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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.

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.

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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.

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 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. They turn purple.

9. I skim or read 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, closing the tab(s).

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 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.

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:

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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