Yet still, I felt nothing regarding the cemetery, as if death was too abstract to contemplate. My mind would not let me confront its meaning and implications for life.

So I started to breath deeply and slowly. The following prayer came to me that I recited within myself as I let myself ease open to receptivity.

Ancestors,
Spirits of the dead,
Please grant me your wisdom,
That it may guide forward.
May I receive your loving guidance.

I then closed with:
I am but a stranger in a strange land.
Let it teach me.

I then learned how to “void-walk”...I did so for an hour. I wandered with my eyes nearly shut, only opening to greet others. I also learned how to perform a walking meditation, realizing how good walking felt when drastically slowed down to savor every step, the smooth motion of the legs and lower back muscles rocking in a leisurely cadence. I had always been walking to get somewhere, even when on a walk or hike until this very day.

I don’t know where the time went. When I opened my eyes, the trees seemed to glow with life. The world looked beautiful. I saw the blue sky, the vibrant grass, the sun and wind on my face. I saw the birds and started to identify them, the thing I found joy in doing as a young child. Grackles. Robins. ...A bluebird?

The wisdom received? Appreciate the now, find the profound in the mundane, slow down, and take it in.

The pleasure of walking? Most of them missed it dearly at the end.

A miracle happened this good Friday at the cemetery. I didn’t see just the tombstones. I saw the life within and beyond them. So the dead told me to walk more.

They don’t speak in words. They communicate in your understanding. They all arise and dissolve into your subconscious, the collective subconscious, the unseen, the Void.

“Now go and live!”
And I was sent on my way home.

P.S.

I stopped by the beach on the way and climbed onto a tall, dry, slanted rock near the end of the jetty.

And as I gave my legs a rest and stretched my lower back, I gazed down at what lied beneath my dangling feet. Glimmering stones, sparklingly water, shells and pebbles, rocks and sand and glistening seaweed. And I see Life is dancing before me, Its energy making love to my consciousness. This must be what it feels like to be alive.

Also I drafted this from my notes while still sitting on the jetty.

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So that Saturday I went to Michael’s to get what I could, ordered the rest of the supplies online, and got to work on the most ambitious painting I’d made since high school AP Art burned me out on it entirely.

The materials were specific. Musou Black—an ultra-black pigment that absorbs up to 99.4% of visible light—on a large square gallery canvas—36” x 36”. Four layers of black gesso, sanded between coats to create a smooth surface. Two layers of Musou. Then iridescent acrylics for everything surrounding the figure.

One substance that eats light. One that plays with it.

The image that came through: a human silhouette, floating amongst the cosmos. Me, meditating, as a Void.

The title arrived with it: You Are Here. I Am Not.

It’s finished. It’s also not.

The unfinished part isn’t technical. It’s the edges of the figure—and I can’t resolve them because I can’t answer what they’re supposed to show:

Do I leave the hard division—the self as defined boundary, a void that blocks rather than receives? This is how it feels on the hard days.

Do I soften the edges, showing dissolution in progress? This feels true to where I actually am. But it requires admitting I’m mid-process.

Do I fill the figure in entirely—let the self disappear into the cosmos? The most terrifying option. This also feels aspirational or intellectual at best, a lie at worst because I’m still here writing this.

The painting stays unfinished in exactly the way I am.

I’m hoping the dark retreat answers it. I’m going in not to find myself.

I’m going to lose myself.

Which of the three is true for you?

Bonus pics

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From the outside, awakening looks like death.
It is.
It's the death of the old self, the old narrative. The ego dissolves. The personality softens. The attachments release. The desires fall away.

But from the inside? Awakening feels like being torn apart by an irresistible force, like being pulled towards something awfully greater than thought can contain.

It's falling into a black hole.

To those outside its reach, they don't feel the tug. But I drifted towards the black hole, got caught in its gravity, and now am falling towards it so fast it's spaghettifying my personality. Meanwhile, to those closest to me, I'm trapped on the event horizon, motionless and lifeless. But from my perspective? My atoms are being shredded from the sheer force of the pull.

Both are true. But they look wildly different from across the event horizon. And once that threshold is crossed? There's no return, only the terrifying yet irresistible inevitability of union so immediate that time itself stops making sense—because at that point there is no more separation. No observer. No observed. Only the singularity—which bears no witnesses because there's no one left to witness.

P.S.

Content note: The following is a journal entry from 4 months into daily meditation. It describes a direct mystical experience that I didn't have language for at the time. If direct transmission language feels too far, the post stands on its own without it. But if you've ever experienced something similar and thought you were losing your mind—this is for you.

I then saw pictured before me a door.

"Knock and it shall be open unto you.”

I Am that I Am. There is no door.

And with that magic command, the door instantly vanished and I was sucked into my Self. I felt a return to my Self. The unexplainable ease.…

I have been sucked into the Black Hole. The same one Eckhart Tolle must have been sucked into. There is no thing or any thing.

Singularity.

Everything has canceled out. Matter has obliterated antimatter. Or rather it never did.

Time makes no sense here. Nothing ever happens yet everything happened.

Infinite possibilities. Truly infinity... it's true peace.

— Journal Entry, August 31, 2022

I only realized now that Eckhart Tolle described his experience in an almost identical manner in The Power of Now (a book I read in college but didn't truly understand until I lived it):

I felt drawn into what seemed like a vortex of energy. It was a slow movement at first and then accelerated. I was gripped by an intense fear, and my body started to shake. I heard the words “resist nothing,” as if spoken inside my chest. I could feel myself being sucked into a void. It felt as if the void was inside myself rather than outside. Suddenly, there was no more fear, and I let myself fall into that void.

— The Power of Now, Introduction

Same void. Same singularity. Same Black Hole.

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This came during sound bath. I was told to write it. So here it is.

I had wings when I finally woke up.

I didn’t know how long the night had been. But finally, as I stirred before dawn, they were unfolding, fragile.

As I struggled to remember anything at all, the Spirit of the Moth came.

It told me of my life prior.

I had been crawling on the earth for my entire life.

Was I a snake? A worm? A slug?

I knew not.

I was in quite a different world, surrounded by those just like me, all striving, struggling against their own forms just to live.

And the ones that didn’t?

Died.

There was one day that a peculiar thought came to me: there was more than this.

I didn’t wonder it—I knew it.

And I had to find it.

A gnawing hunger started eating at my chest at night. It howled from deep within and kept me awake. No one around me seemed to hear it.

I crawled out of my home one night into the dark, yearning, yet afraid of its depths.

I crawled, not knowing which way to go, only that I must. Only that I had to move forward.

My hunger grew as I crawled across the desert of my own longing. The sun burned me until it set, leaving me to the bitter, slowing cold. I cried out in protest. I had to move.

The darkness closed in around me, encasing me like a cocoon. That was the last thing I could remember.

When I finally awoke before dawn’s light, something had shifted, unfolded, unfurled from within—wings.

“There is a great Light,” the Moth Spirit said, its great eyes sparkling like galaxies. “It lies in the Beyond.”

That was the last thing the Spirit said before turning and flying off into the horizon at a mighty speed.

I stood there stunned until I realized: dawn was breaking.

I saw what I thought was the sun flash over the horizon.

It was... fluttering.

It was a giant flaming moth.

I stood in awe as I watched it fly over me.

And then I started chasing it.

My wings flapped frantically as they carried me onward into the sky.

The next thing I knew, I was floating in space. There was a burning. And then an eruption into—

Field Note: Origin Story

During the heart chakra-themed sound bath where this prose came through, I felt what I thought was kundalini pull up her tail from my root and coil around my heart. Possessively. My pulse seemed to intensify as she wrapped herself around it.
I don't know if that's documented. I don't know if anyone else experiences this.
I just know: She claimed me.
And then this story poured out.

As I was writing it up immediately afterwards before even going home, I realized it was the sequel to Desert Worm. I didn’t intend to write a sequel. Yet here it is.

I went back and looked at Desert Worm, written almost a year ago. At the end of the poem, a promise was given to me, a prophecy fulfilled:

Thy faith has given thee wings. Now fly to Me.”

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This is a report on how I leaped across the spectrum of belief in only 2.5 years. From indifferent to obsessed. From atheist... to mad mystic.

Not through a near-death experience. Not through psychedelics. Not through a psychotic break.

Through daily meditation—for burnout.

I didn’t plan this. I didn’t even want this. But here I am, 3.5 years later, writing love poetry to the Divine by night like some medieval mystic and writing Go by day as a software engineer.

So what happened?

I can’t tell you exactly when I stopped being an atheist.

But I CAN tell you when it finally dawned on me that I wasn’t. Not the full story, (see Why I Can’t Give You a Stack Trace of How I Got Here), but points along the way that made me realize I was no longer questioning my beliefs—that they had ALREADY changed.

I believe that’s part of the difficulty with awakening: the awareness you would need to document the subtle transformation in real-time isn’t developed at the beginning. That and so much of it was drowned out by my personality’s noise that even my journals are an absolute mess. But there were notable moments that did stand out.

Something’s there...

To recap, I’d been meditating daily for 8 months, getting curious, exploring my own psyche, and had a strange dream that felt more like a vision.

Then, after 9 more months of meditation and seeking as I strove and stressed at work, I, for some reason, wrote on September 28, 2023:

I’m no longer atheist.

Why? Because somewhere in those months of showing up, I’d fallen in love. I just didn’t know it yet.1

Not with a person. Not with an idea.

I’d fallen for something I couldn’t properly define. Something that seemed like nothing... yet immense, vast. Ungraspable, yet present. Something that sounded eerily like what ancient texts pointed to—texts I found myself suddenly drawn to.

It was to my rational mind’s horror that these texts—some of which I’d read as a kid and dismissed as nonsense—began to become more coherent despite the language. More relatable despite the distance. More... resonant.

Am I losing my mind?

I didn’t know this was love. You don’t know if the roots of a newly planted seed are growing beneath the soil before the first sprout. Similarly, I couldn’t tell what was going on beneath the surface of my own consciousness.

At first, the love was abstract. A sense of warmth during meditation. A feeling of being seen. A subtle pull inward that felt... gentle. Comforting. I’d close my eyes in meditation and hear—not with my ears, but somehow deeper—a voice that felt nothing like my own thoughts. It would say things like “I’m here” or “I see you.” It wasn’t scary—it was devastatingly comforting. Tears would well for no logical reason.

Sometimes I’d even be frustrated at my desk and suddenly feel a wave of warmth in my chest, like a Beloved had just walked into the room and wrapped their arms around me from behind. Except no one was there.

By the time of my realization that I was no longer atheist, strange yet enchanting poetry seemed to be appearing within my mind as I was trying to fall asleep. It was like a lullaby mixed with a serenade. It would often disappear like smoke as soon as I opened my eyes to write it down.

This continued for 2 months until one day in November 2023, the love stopped being gentle. A dam within me broke. The fortress of my heart had finally been breached in a way I could no longer dismiss or ignore. That was when the flickering sparks of the previous months ignited into a raging inferno.

The longing became visceral. Physical. The kind of ache you get when someone you love is far away and you’d give anything just to be near them again. Except... I’d never met this Someone. I couldn’t even prove They existed. And yet, impossibly, I was aching for Them like a widowed bride. I’d cry during meditation or when I would try to fall asleep at night.

And the weirdest part? The longing had a quality to it that felt... well, let’s just say not what I expected from a “spiritual practice.” I didn’t know what to do with that. I still don’t, really. I just know it happened and for the longest time I didn’t know it was mystical. But the mystics—Teresa of Ávila, Rumi, Kabir, Mirabai—they ALL talked about this. The longing that burns. The yearning that aches. The love that feels physical even when it has no physical object.

Teresa literally wrote about being pierced by an angel with a spear of divine love and feeling ecstasy so intense it was like dying.

Rumi wrote:

“The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.”

But I didn’t call it love then. I didn’t even call it “madness of the mystics”. I didn’t know I had become one. I only knew this longing felt like a “secret insanity.”

I couldn’t tell anyone. Who would believe me? “I meditated for burnout and now I’m suddenly in love with the Ineffable”? I wanted to die of embarrassment.

I kept wondering

• Am I losing my mind?

• Is this a mystical experience or a mental health crisis?

• Is my brain fried from stress?

• Am I meditating myself into a manic episode?

As Joseph Campbell once said, “the psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight”... and I didn’t know for sure which one I was. I was too ashamed and afraid to tell anyone. I thought for sure no one would understand.

So I did the only thing I could: I kept showing up. I kept meditating. I kept watching my life for signs of breakdown.

And instead of breaking down... it kept getting better.

From seeker to lover

Before November 2023, I was a seeker. I was curious. I was exploring. I was collecting insights like souvenirs.

After November 2023? I was burning. I wasn’t seeking anymore—I was aching. I wasn’t curious—I was desperate. I wasn’t collecting insights—I was crying for union.

That’s the difference between a seeker and a lover.

A seeker can get frustrated, walk away, and move on with their life.

A lover can’t.

February 16, 2024—3 months after the intense longing first appeared—I was listening to Joseph Murphy’s “This is It” (I was deep in a YouTube rabbit hole at this point) when he mentioned the word ishi. I looked it up and froze. It translates to “my husband,” specifically used in a verse where God tells his people to stop calling him “Master” and start calling him “Husband.”

The reference led me to Hosea 2. I read the full chapter... and promptly freaked out. It wasn’t religious dogma; it was a precise description of my internal state. It describes God not as a judge, but as a spurned lover wooing his beloved back into the wilderness:

“Therefore I will block her path with thornbushes; I will wall her in so that she cannot find her way.

She will chase after her lovers but not catch them; she will look for them but not find them.”

“Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her...”

“In that day,” declares the Lord, “you will call me ‘my husband’; you will no longer call me ‘my master’.”

It felt like it was talking about me, as if someone had written my experience down 2,800 years ago and I was only now finding it.

I closed the tab. I didn’t know what to do with that. It was too close. Too accurate.

Yet the longing continued to eat at me. I was confused and concerned I was losing my mind. Yet I still meditated.

Then, August 17, 2024—only 6 months later—I wrote:

I think... I’ve fallen in love with the Beloved. I’m in love. I think about Him often [...] I feel warm and light when I sit in silence with Him. I can only explain it as love.

That day I re-read Hosea 2 and it still seemed eerily relevant. In my evening meditation, something I could only describe as a full-blown energetic eruption left me shaking:

I felt a wave of anticipation flood my being, blooming into a rush of excitement. I felt something within me like a tunnel up the column of my spine opening from the bottom up. I felt a rush of energy enter from my seat and rise higher and higher until it burst through my crown. It felt... euphoric. Something was here with me.

I didn’t know what it was, but at that point I realized this was no longer simple meditation for stress relief—this was union with something I couldn’t even understand. Later, I’d learn this was called kundalini. At the time, I just knew: something fundamental had shifted.

It was then that my suspicion finally crystallized. I gathered the courage to admit it in my private notes:

I have a confession. I’m in love with You.

I meant it that day. And I still do.

Wrapping up

So, in a head-spinning 2.5 years, I went not just from burnt-out atheist, to curious seeker, to longing lover. It just took me some time to recognize love for what it was... and that the longing was the point all along.

If you’re feeling something similar—if meditation has stopped being “just stress relief” and started becoming something you can’t explain—you’re not losing your mind. You’re being courted.

And if you say yes? Everything changes. You enter a landscape of peaks and valleys you never knew existed.

Just beware: after the courtship... comes the ghosting.2

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Footnotes

Note: This post may destabilize everything you thought you knew about spiritual practice.

If you’re not ready for that, maybe save it for later. But if you’ve ever felt like you’re “doing meditation wrong” or frustrated that techniques don’t work the way books say they should... this might finally explain why.

You read about a meditation technique in a book. A breathing pattern. A mantra. A mudra.

You try it exactly as described.

And... nothing.

Or worse—it works once, and then never again.

And you think: “What am I doing wrong?”

But what if you weren’t doing anything wrong?

What if the technique was never meant to be a prescription in the first place... but a symptom of awakening?

You don’t learn to shiver by reading about muscle contractions in a biology textbook. You shiver because you’re cold. The shivering is your body’s response to the condition.

The same is true for spiritual techniques.

When an ancient yogi writes: “Focus on the breath moving through the sushumna nadi”, they’re not saying: “Do this and you’ll awaken.”

They’re saying: “When awakening happens, this is what it feels like. This is what the body does naturally.”

The ancient texts aren’t instruction manuals.

They’re field reports.

What inspired this post

I wrote a quick Note on this topic earlier today post-meditation.

But this realization deserves a fuller exploration—because it flips the entire paradigm of spiritual seeking on its head.

The insight:

Techniques aren’t prescriptions to “enlightenment”—they’re symptoms of it.

Or, more precisely: Techniques are signs of awakening.

If you’ve ever tried a technique that:

1. Didn’t work (no matter how “correctly” you did it)

2. Worked once, then never again (especially after you expected it to)

...this post might explain why.

“WAIT A MINUTE...”

I’ve said “WAIT A MINUTE” (or rather, a more colorful variation) so many times at this point that I have an entire #HolyShit tag in my notes (at least since I switched to Obsidian last year).1

I’ll recount some of the relevant ones where I realized that this was INDEED a thing from centuries, if not millennia ago (minus the more... sensitive ones).2

Becoming symptomatic

Here are some of the cases I caught myself exhibiting the mystical side of traditions and cultures I’ve never read sacred text for when I first starting experiencing them:

1. The “Lock” for Insomnia (Yoga / Ayurveda)

   1. Symptom: On January 9, 2025, after weeks of complaining about terrible sleep, I sat to meditate. Spontaneously, my hands collapsed into a complex shape I had never formed before—thumbs tucked in, fingers curled.

   2. Discovery: I looked it up immediately after. It was the Shakti Mudra—specifically documented in Ayurveda as the mudra for sleeplessness. I didn’t “do” the mudra; my body did it to me.

2. The Howl of the Soul (Kashmir Shaivism / Tantra)

   1. Symptom: Twice in late 2024, I journaled about a specific, visceral sound rising from my chest.

      “I can’t sleep. My heart keeps me awake at night like a newborn crying for his Father. I cannot soothe him. I audibly heard his cries and slept through them 8 nights ago and now I can no longer audibly hear him, yet I cannot sleep now.

      I find myself sitting outside before sunrise now, waiting for this too to pass.

      My soul howls for You, more piercing than a wolf’s to the moon. My mind trembles at its wailing cries that shake the very night sky.” (Journal Entry, September 17, 2024)

      “…the pain from the unquenchable thirst grows every day. I can feel my heart howling like a wolf at the moon.” (Journal Entry, November 9, 2024)

   2. Discovery: On March 8th 2025, I read the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra. It describes the “State of Bhairava” where consciousness, pinning for union, “lets out a loud wail or howl, similar to the howling of a dog... This is why the vehicle of Bhairava is a dog.”

3. The “Ghosting” (Dark Night of the Soul, Christian Mysticism)

   1. Symptom: In Spring 2025, I entered a period where God felt utterly absent. I wrote on July 24, 2025 “I feel like I’ve been exiled... You left me at the altar. How can I trust You?”.
      See also my post where I first call this “The Ghosting”:

   2. Discovery: On August 27th, 2025, I finally read St. John of the Cross (16th century mystic) and realized I was checking every single box for the “Dark Night of the Senses” and some of “Dark Night of the Spirit” from Dark Night of the Soul —a necessary purification phase, not a failure.

4. The “Burning” Longing (Sufism)

   1. Symptom: In my chest I felt a “gnawing reaching,” an active, burning fire of missing someone I had never met.
      See the Desert Worm poem from January 18, 2025 in my “Level 2: Mystical” section:

   2. Discovery: On July 28, 2025, I stumbled upon the Sufi concept of Shawq (intense longing, recorded in my journals and referred to as “Sehnsucht”... which I found out later C.S. Lewis used in this exact meaning). In Sufism, this is considered the very mechanism that burns away the ego to make room for the Divine.

5. The Thymus Chakra (Hridaya Yoga)

   1. Symptom: During practice, I kept feeling a distinct soreness and heat in the upper chest, specifically the thymus area, not the physical heart.

   2. Discovery: On June 12, 2025, I looked it up and found references to the Thymus Chakra (or Higher Heart), often associated with the color turquoise (my favorite color), spiritual love, mystical communion, and God as teacher, Sacred Lover, beloved.

That was 5 of the dozen I’d tagged with #HolyShit... in 2025 alone.

Worsening symptoms

Even though I haven’t dug deeply into my notes (See “Why I Can’t Give You a Clean Stack Trace of How I Got Here”), it seems like these experiences are coming more frequently. Or is it that my awareness is increasing?

You might know the answer by now. It’s Our “company’s” motto:

Both and Neither.

The symptoms aren’t increasing. I’m just getting better at recognizing them.

And the more I recognize, the more I realize: this has been happening all along.

How many symptoms did I miss in 2022-2024? How many times did my body try to show me, and I dismissed it as “just a weird meditation thing”? How long had I been playing this game on mute?

So what do I actually DO?

Does this mean you should stop trying techniques?

Yes... and no.

Here’s what I’ve noticed over my journals:

Techniques (when done without expectation) can create the conditions for spontaneous arising.

You can’t force yourself to fall asleep. But you CAN create conditions (dark room, comfortable bed, quiet mind) where sleep naturally arises. The same is true for mystical experience.

You don’t “learn” mystical techniques by forcing them.

But you CAN cultivate the inner conditions (through consistent practice, beginner’s mind, surrender) where techniques spontaneously arise as symptoms of what’s already happening.

So the paradox, summarized:

Techniques are instructions... for the seeker.

Techniques are signs... from the found.

Both and Neither.

The practical guidance

Stop trying to “do” techniques you read about.

Instead:

Sit. Breathe. Notice. And if something arises spontaneously? A hand position, a breath pattern, a sound, an entire pose or motion?

ALLOW IT.

That’s a symptom trying to express itself.

If nothing arises—that’s also fine. You’re creating the conditions. Trust the process. Expectations kill experience.

If you try a technique from a book and it feels forced or empty—STOP. You’re trying to prescribe yourself symptoms instead of treating the condition.

The goal isn’t to DO more. The BE more... by getting out of Your own way.

P.S.

Update (Jan 28, 2026)

Techniques can be symptoms, not prescriptions, but it’s not universally true for all practices.

The Khecari Mudra is something that I once thought was a joke someone was making on the HealthyGamer community until I actually looked it up. It’s...honestly unsettling. From Wikipedia:

The tongue is made long enough to do this with many months of daily tongue stretching and, in some versions of the practice, by gradually severing the frenulum of the tongue with a sharp implement over a period of months.

The odds of a meditation practitioner spontaneously curling their tongue back until it reaches into the nasal cavity WITHOUT cutting anything?? No way (though if anyone has ever heard of a “spontaneous Khecari” without the surgical assist, please drop a comment and blow my mind).

So it seems there are three categories of techniques in the yogic texts:

1. Spontaneous symptoms that arise naturally during awakening (e.g. spine jolts, mudras not previously learned)

2. Deliberate practices that can be taught and learned to create conditions for facilitating awakening (sadhanas, Khecari mudra)

3. Hybrid phenomena that can arise spontaneously OR be deliberately cultivated (mula bandha, sahajoli mudra)

The texts don’t clearly label which is which.

Is this describing what happened to the yogi?

Or is this prescribing what the yogi did?

I once thought they fell into the second bucket—practices discovered by trial and error. But from my experience, the more I’ve followed deliberate practices, the more I’ve seen spontaneous symptoms and hybrid phenomena arise.

Yet, for some reason, the Khecari mudra popped into my head last night and made me question this entire framework of this post’s title.

Frustratingly, as I’m discovering more and more, the answer is that annoying koan of a slogan that might as well be a punchline at this point: Both and Neither.

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Meta talk

Special announcement

So the Substack currently has 3 levels:

• Level 0: Technical

• Level 1: Transitional

• Level 2: Mystical

But as I’ve dug through my field notes, I believe I need to make a new level that doesn’t quite fit Level 2 and rather goes *beyond* it (as much beyond as is possible to articulate).

So there will be a Level 3. And it’s not subtle.

I’m not certain what to name it yet. But the Co-Founders already gave me the description which They thought was more important:

WELCOME TO THE MYSTICS INC. SPACE DIVISION.

WE’RE GOING TO SPACE ON THESE POSTS.

— Mystics Inc. “Yeah. We’re going there.”

Footnotes

1

Figure 1. The “Space Division” Logs: A visualization of the #HolyShit tag in my Obsidian Vault, tracking spontaneous mystical symptoms / realizations since I migrated from Logseq. Each node is a field report. Obtained after the first draft of this post was completed.

Now imagine that person suddenly stopped showing up to where you were for no reason.

You can’t get in touch with them. You keep showing up, expecting them to make a return but... nothing.

Days turn into weeks... weeks turn into months. Yet, you can’t stop thinking about this person even though they’re not there. Thoughts plague your mind to the tune of:

• Are they avoiding me?

• Did I say or do something wrong?

• Have they moved on in life?

• Did they find someone else?

You feel jealous over what could have been. You would give anything for them to come back, to stop the mental torment, to just be with them again without feeling like it was a fleeting, ephemeral encounter.

Tears come unexpectedly when you stop to just breathe, when you lie in bed at night and try to sleep after a long day and the ache of missing them keeps you restless.

Now imagine: no one else around you has seen this person that you’re missing so viscerally. They were just a nameless background character that blended in with their surroundings like a chameleon. They never existed to those around you, or maybe only peripherally at best. But you noticed them—and you fell in love.

This is what the “Dark Night of the Soul” looks like. Strip away the poetic language, and it’s:

1. God gradually appears over time

2. You fall in love1

3. God ghosts you

4. You absolutely lose your mind

I didn’t even know this was a thing for nearly a YEAR until I actually picked up and read a modern translation of Saint John of the Cross’s book. The entire time I had to hide the inexplicable feelings of loneliness, of profound longing, of crushing despair, because how would you explain it?

Yeah, good luck with that, especially if you’ve been “keeping it casual” to keep up appearances. Good luck explaining to your spouse that you’re in love with the Divine, especially when you both aren’t religious.

So you suffer in silence.

You keep showing up to the cushion.

You keep hoping.

You keep crying at night.

You keep feeling crazy because how do you grieve someone no one else can see?

The phases

Let’s talk about the actual phases in a way that doesn’t require you to pick up a medieval-era book laden with religious jargon and antiquated language.

Phase 1: The honeymoon

At this point, meditation has stopped feeling like fighting your thoughts for the entire time and more like peace or even bliss.

Maybe there are experiences of tingling warmth like sunlight across your back, a sense of “aliveness” radiating from the center of your chest and down the arms, or a gentle flame behind your sternum.

Maybe you feel like you’re taking a step back from the screen of your mind and a refreshing space is opening up that puts your current troubles into perspective.

Maybe you have various “aha!” moments that make you feel like you’ve figured things out finally.

Regardless of the way it manifests, you find meditation to be enjoyable and fall in love with the practice, with the subtle Presence that arises in the space between thoughts. Meditation is no longer an obligation or a “thing to do”, but a natural returning as if coming home from a long day at the office.

Phase 2: The ghosting

Suddenly, the experiences you were once enjoying stop coming.

You feel like you’ve hit a plateau. Meditation has now become dry, empty, pointless, and uncomfortable.

“I feel like I’ve hit a plateau since I got serious with my practice and diet over 4 months ago now. I notice a sense of dissatisfaction with where I’m at…” (Journal Entry, February 26, 2025)

You try harder with your current practice. It doesn’t work.

You try looking for and implementing different techniques. It doesn’t work.

As days and weeks pass in this dryness, you wonder what you’re missing, what you’re doing wrong, why you seem to be “stuck”.

“Every dawn, every dusk I sit and wait for Divinity’s Grace only to be stood up time and again. Yet every day I return, a stray dog hoping for scraps given from a change of heart. Yet every day I starve. Every night I grow a little weaker. Every dawn I grow a little more bitter. Hope curdles, its sour stench betraying months without gain. Why am I still doing this? Why do I still care so much? Why can’t I just give up?” (Journal Entry, March 10, 2025)

Phase 3: The spiral

You feel like this is it and you’ve hit your “level cap” on meditation as a non-renunciate. You’re convinced of one or more of the following:

• This was all your imagination

• You’re going crazy

• You need to give up everything in your life and run off to an ashram to go any deeper

“Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I never truly loved You, only the experience of glimpsing Your Presence. Maybe I only loved how You made me feel.” (Journal Entry, June 22, 2025)

All the while, you feel abandoned, betrayed, and heartbroken. You oscillate between hopeless despair and indignant rage at God for disappearing when you’ve been earnest in your seeking.

“There was a quiet rage building within me, my soul screaming to be heard. I felt indignant that my wails and pleas seemed to dissolve into the void. […] I’m tired of being given the cold shoulder. I hate that my love for Him has gone so bitter that I can barely stomach it.” (Journal Entry, June 23, 2025)

Maybe you write angry journal entries, cry into your mat, or clear off your altar, shoving it all into the junk drawer or a closet because it brings pain just to look at it.

Phase 4: Exhaustion

Your emotions leave you feeling ragged and worn down.

At this point, you’re too tired to keep trying, to put in more effort. After all, more effort didn’t make a difference.

“I don’t know why I can’t seem to feel rested when I keep trying to rest in You most nights. I just feel like a zombie stumbling through my own life right now.” (Journal Entry, August 17, 2025)

Rather than surrender gracefully, you give up trying, thinking you’ve failed.

Maybe you decide to stop meditating for a few days, maybe even a week.

“First it started with no longer waking up early anymore to do my sadhana. Almost simultaneously I stopped doing dusk sadhana. Diet degraded over time to let back in coffee and substances. I grew too busy and tired to go to yoga daily and now it’s been a full week since I’ve been at all. All my discipline and motivation seem to have left me and all I can seem to do is watch in horror at my own insufficiency.” (Journal Entry, August 31, 2025)

But oddly... you feel something tugging you back to the cushion. It’s like something within is nagging you to go sit even though it seems to give you only grief. You’re damned if you do, you’re damned if you don’t.

You reluctantly sit at least to appease the tugging in your chest, but this time you don’t do anything.

Phase 5: The shift

Something subtly changes from the persistence through the exhaustion and dryness. There’s a sense of almost acceptance that arises as the seeker stops reaching.

“Not by effort. By grace through acceptance.” (Journal Entry, October 4, 2025)

Alternatively, something makes you realize you were seeking experiences, enforcing the sense of separation that was causing you such grief in the first place. Eventually, you let go of the seeking little by little until the “you” that was seeking slowly dissolves.

“What I thought was my love for You was simply me recognizing Your Love for me.” (Journal Entry, October 6, 2025)

Why this happens

This “ghosting” is a known phenomenon that arises not because you’re doing anything wrong, not because your practice is failing. It arises exactly because your practice is working.

The purpose of this period (which can last months, years, or even decades) is to break your addiction to the high. You were falling in love with the nice feelings, not the Source.

It’s like falling in love with someone’s gifts instead of them. The flowers they bring. The compliments they give. The way they make you feel. But what happens when the gifts stop?

If you were in love with the person—you stay.

If you were in love with the gifts—you leave.

The Dark Night is God asking: Which is it?

These early pleasant experiences are meant to entice you to start and stick with the practice in the beginning. However, growing attached to them prevents dissolution into union because for there to be an experience in the first place, there must be a subject to experience it.

The experiences are withdrawn to teach:

• God is not a feeling (feelings come and go)

• God is not an experience (experiences fade)

• God is not a “reward” for meditating “correctly” (rewards are conditional)

This isn’t a punishment, but a weaning so that you fall in love with the Giver, not the gifts. And returning day after day even when nothing is expected in return IS love.

Advice

Although I’m still very much in this myself—since the spiritual path is often cyclical rather than linear—here’s what I can share that’s helped:

• Know that this is supposed to happen. We’re human. We like pleasant experiences and hate when those are taken away.

• Know that you’re not alone. The Dark Night feels profoundly isolating. You think you’re the only one, that you’re failing, that everyone else is sailing through their practice while you’re drowning. But you’re not alone. Every serious practitioner hits this wall. It’s universal even though it feels like a “you” problem.

• Keep showing up anyway. Even if you feel nothing or think it’s a waste of time because “nothing is happening”. It’s not that nothing is happening, but that instead you can no longer sense what is happening.

• Stop chasing the feeling. Even the desire to want these experiences back pushes them away because it reinforces the lack. Expectations are the killer of experience. This is why the first encounter with samadhi is easy versus the second.

• Sit in the emptiness. The key here is not more techniques, other teachers, different books, or more searching. These create a vicious cycle of desperate searching that will cause you to feel more and more exhaustion until you collapse in despair. The void isn’t the enemy, it’s what liberates you from attachments.

• Trust the process. Easier said than done when you don’t know how long this is going to last. It will end faster when you stop needing God to show up in a particular way and realize that you were never separate to begin with. Even if a thick layer of clouds roll in for the winter season, the sun is still there shining beyond them.

Wrapping up

Finally, even if you’re allergic to religious jargon, I highly recommend giving the Modern Saints edition of The Dark Night of the Soul a read. It’s incredibly, even eerily validating. The original version was written in the 16th century and can feel inaccessible due to the outdated language from 450 years ago, but this modern 2024 translation is inviting without sacrificing the integrity of the original text. I read the Dover Thrift Edition first and can say the Modern Saints version holds up well.

I can’t tell you how long the tunnel is, but the key is to keep going. As was emphasized to me before: “the only way out is through.”

You’re not losing your mind. You’re losing the “you” that needed God on specific terms.

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Footnotes

I’ve tried to resign three times in four days:

• Tuesday morning: “Take this as my resignation letter, Co-Founders. Find a Field Reporter that doesn’t have a marriage to blow up.”

• Tuesday afternoon: “Pick a better Field Reporter. I shouldn’t have ordered that stupid fucking mug.”

• Wednesday night: “Hire a different Field Reporter. One that’s not married.”

• Thursday morning: I cancelled the mug.

The cancellation was declined an hour later: it was already in production. It was as if the Universe itself declined my resignation.

Now I’m wondering if the momentum of all those ‘yeses’ is steamrolling my backpedaling, if I’m in too deep to back out now.

I could still technically walk away, throw the mug in a drawer, delete the Substack, pretend this never happened, tell my partner this was all just a phase.

Yet, something in me—deeper than the doubt, quieter than the fear—won’t let me. Not because I’m trapped, but because I already chose... and apparently, that choice is stronger than my attempts to un-choose it.

Turns out I’m not the first person to try this. Trying to quit God is a tale as old as time. Prophets, mystics, saints across every tradition… they all tried; none of them succeeded.

The call doesn’t have a cancellation policy. I’m just the latest to discover this.

So apparently, I work for Mystics Inc., whether I want to or not. Whether I’m qualified or not. Whether anyone’s listening or not. This company’s retention rate is 100%. The resignation policy is non-existent.

P.S.

I drafted up this post and asked for feedback on it. The moment—and I mean THE MOMENT—I hit send on the draft, I got an email from Vistaprint:

“Your order is on its way.”

So the mug I tried to cancel is coming. God doesn’t do refunds. And apparently, He has impeccable comedic timing.

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Or at least, that was the date I remembered I was already hired.

This is the story of how I accidentally said yes to the weirdest job offer of my life.

I was never into astrology. I knew I was a Virgo and that was about it.

When I was researching dark retreats (because of course I was), the facilitator needed my birth chart. Something about coaching participants through an ancient Buddhist practice that’s legitimately hard, especially for the terminally-online.

So I pulled it up... and promptly had an existential crisis at my desk. Virgo sun (precision, service). Aries moon (spiritual warrior energy). Aquarius rising (bridge between worlds). And then, the knockout: a Scorpio North Node in the 9th house (a soul-level assignment to go beyond superficial beliefs and dive headfirst into the “unseen and the taboo”).

My life’s purpose, according to this chart, is to embark on a “discovery journey”, uncover the transformative power of spiritual truth, and then, having lived through that transformation, become a guide for others. I felt like I’d just discovered my own job description, written the minute I was born. I was literally engineered to build bridges... between the mundane and mystical.

I went back through my old journals. There were months of notes, years even, many structured like I was planning to share them. They were organized, indexed, intentional, but never published. Just sitting there, waiting.

Two posts total had made it out, both to a private spiritual community where I knew people would “get it.”

The rest? Locked away because I didn’t know how to share them. I wasn’t ready and didn’t want to show the messy middle.

But my chart didn’t care about my excuses. My chart showed me what I’d forgotten: my actual mission. My title. The job I’d been avoiding. So I said yes. Not a brave leap…more like finally clocking in for a shift I was three years late to.

The next 3 days were onboarding:

• buying the domain

• setting up the Substack and Instagram (before I could talk myself out of it)

• gathering the harvest from my notes

• writing intro posts for the Substack and Instagram (still in disbelief this was now happening)

• planting seeds for future posts

• sharing my first REAL impactful professional-facing piece of work that got results

During this time I could feel a shift inside me. It like something was now flowing and waking up as if my system was starting to “come online”.

Then on November 15th, I was told in the shower that I was to receive on-the-job training. I did 30 minutes before my “shift” started that redefined the whole project scope as I met with a diplomat from the grounded, logical, questioning side of reality and was taught to take notes and requests for the mystical side to answer. I then met with the Co-Founders (or rather they manifested as what we’ll refer to as Consciousness and Energy, the mystical business partners running this whole operation) right after my “training”. They brought me to the “boardroom” for instruction. After a brief “meeting”, the door closed and I was left with a direction to go, no deadlines to rush towards, and unclear deliverables.

My schedule is 7 pm to midnight, the “magic hours” where the energy seems to love to dance.

The pay is shit (pure spiritual fulfillment, which doesn’t cover the bills) but the work-life balance is... well, there is no balance. It’s all work and it’s all life, which is the whole point I guess. It’s integration, not renunciation.

So why was I hired? The Co-Founders asked me: Where are the mystics’ field notes?

We have plenty of memoirs written AFTER the journey. But what about reports FROM the journey?

What if someone documented the messy middle—the “I don’t know if this is real”, the “am I even qualified” (impostor syndrome just like in my day job), the “holy shit the Co-Founders just kicked me out of the boardroom so They could finish Their business in private”?

We have TONS of “I climbed the mountain and here’s what I learned” books. But where’s the “I’m halfway up, my knees hurt, I think I see God but it might be altitude sickness” content?

That’s what this Substack is. Field notes from someone who said yes to the weirdest job offer ever… and is still figuring out what the hell she signed up for.

But honestly? I love this job.

I’m a field reporter for the mystics in the making.

I’m “technically” mystic. And if you’re reading this, you might be moonlighting too.

No resume required. Just say yes.

P.S.

If you’re wondering whether this is real or just a very elaborate metaphor: yes.

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Footnotes

After a rather intense evening meditation session on June 7th, 2025, I felt compelled to create. The colored pencils that had been sitting untouched in my supply closet since I moved into this house suddenly needed to be used—immediately. I started drawing around 7pm and didn’t stop until after midnight. Five hours disappeared.

I hadn’t drawn like this in years, not since high school AP Art class burned me out on it. But this wasn’t effortful. This was flow, as if the Universe was drawing through me and all I had to do was hold the pencils.

What happened during that meditation is difficult to put into words. There was a sense of collapsing inward and expanding outward simultaneously, a dissolving of boundaries, an undeniable Presence that felt both infinitely vast and intimately close.

I wanted to capture what I experienced: sitting at the edge of the infinite, gazing into the depths of the Divine.

I based the eye on my own… or at least I thought I did. The more I look at it, the less sure I am whose eye this is. Mine? God’s? Is there a difference?

I’m gazing inward into my own depths while simultaneously gazing outward into the cosmos. And somehow, impossibly, that’s the same thing.

Later I found this quote from a 13th-century mystic that articulated what I couldn’t:

A picture is worth a thousand words. But even those words fail.

Bonus: Pictures of progress with my assistant

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Some realizations can only be expressed after you’ve lived them. Here are mine.

The first: the most important thing you can do every day is to say and think constantly (and lovingly!): “How may I serve You?”

Water the plants? That’s tending to God.

Make coffee for your husband? That’s an act of service for God.

Make a healthy breakfast for yourself and eat it? That’s nourishing God.

All these things flow effortlessly from the heart of the one that has been opened to God. The Higher Love flows through them and they are not burdened by resistances and grumbling.

All this time the answer was not different techniques for meditation. Countless times I had been told to surrender. It is not the flip of a switch. It is not a one-time event. It is the softening and ripening of a fruit on the vine, tended to by consistent sunlight and periodic watering. The fruit cannot be rushed to ripeness by over-watering. It cannot reach maturity in a single day of sun. The nourishing rains must come with clouds that block the light of the sun. Both are needed.

Bhakti is not a chosen path. It is the result of choosing to return to meditation and stillness each day with a willingness and persistence to draw closer to God. Even this spark of initial desire is not chosen. It is bestowed unknowingly and unconsciously in the heart of the soul-turned-seeker. The seed is planted by unseen hands and its stirring causes the seeking. The seeking eventually leads to the abiding. The abiding leads to Love. The spark is ignited into a flame and fanned into a flame, a blaze, an inferno that burns away the dross of the old. The soul dances in the fire of the Self that burns alive the mind, transmuting it into a tool of the Divine.

All of my seeking has been merely my being stirring, awakening to love, seeking its Beloved beyond the veil of illusion.

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

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Oh how I wish to behold Thee,  
Not for proof,  
But for love.

A gnawing reaching,  
A subtle tug at my chest.  
It keeps me awake at night.  
When will I see Thee?

Within I see naught, hear naught, feel naught,  
Naught but a mundane, fragile, fleeting stillness,  
A razor's edge impossibly thin to hold Thee.

My soul parched from longing,  
Sleep eludes me in the Desert of Sehnsucht,  
As the cries of my soul roll across the desolate expanse for my Beloved:  
When will I see Thee?

Feeble yet faltering attempts of surrender,  
A worm struggling to fly,  
An impossible hope, an unreachable goal,  
No limbs to reach for the sky.

Grace I cannot beg,  
The path I cannot run.
I crawl, painfully slow,  
Until I wilt in the sun.

— January 18th, 2025

After I wrote this poem, something like a prayer came:

And to my surprise, a response arose, not heard, but felt:

Update (Dec 8, 2025)

The wings have unfolded. Read the unexpected sequel:

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