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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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

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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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 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”1

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. Present: 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):

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.

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).

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.

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Footnotes

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.

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.

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.

Case Study #2: MBTI—”corporate astrology”

Katherine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers weren’t psychologists. They were Jungian enthusiasts who read Carl 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.

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—where the physical postures are just ONE limb of a practice that includes breathwork, sense withdrawal, concentration, meditation, and ultimately: samadhi (dissolution into God).

• Real astrology isn’t “What’s your sign?”
  It’s a sacred blueprint for your soul’s journey through this life—a map of archetypal energies seeking integration, wounds seeking healing, gifts seeking expression.

• Real psychology (Jung’s work) isn’t personality typing.
  It’s individuation—the terrifying, sacred process of integrating your shadow, healing your inner splits, and becoming WHOLE.

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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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?

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.

In the story, the devas (gods) in an alliance set out to retrieve the nectar (butter) 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.

A recognition of embodied mythos

Tonight, I realized something (which I later confirmed in the footnotes below)—This myth unfolds within you—in meditation.

Vasuki isn’t just a mythological snake. Vasuki is YOUR spine.

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.

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.

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Footnotes

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.

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.

During Monday evening’s 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 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 by Emily and Amelia Nagoski—GREAT book by the way), 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.

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.

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.

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 plus and Uddiyana 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.

[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

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.

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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. I thought I’d only ever be able to manufacture that feeling, cobbling it 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:

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)

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)

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

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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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 stack trace 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 stack trace. 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 stack trace.

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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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”.

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:

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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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.

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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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.

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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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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