My Journey of Awakening: From Peak Experience to Integration

In 2018, my life seemed amazing. But I was depressed. I had done some personal development work, made some transformations in my health, and grown professionally, but I was still searching for something more.

Through a moment of awakening, my awareness grew rapidly. But I hadn’t yet integrated this awareness. I didn’t have the tools to make sense of it. Life got a lot harder before it got easier.

Contents

Intro
My 20s: fulfilling material needs
My early 30s: a moment of crisis
The moment of awakening
The years after the moment
My health journey
Experimenting with work and careers
Feeling stuck once again
Working with coaches, embodiment, and healing
Emotions and embodiment
Transforming presence and communication
Drama stops
Relationships and vulnerability
Alignment with life
Transformation in perception of the world
Where I go from here

Intro

I remember being a kid in high school, going through the motions of attending classes without feeling connected at a deeper level to a mission or purpose. When I attended my first philosophy class, it was the first time I felt: this is what I’ve been looking for. I decided to major in philosophy in college.

The day after graduating from high school, I had an early moment of awakening: the realization that there was so much more to discover about life, this world, and our perception of reality.

I went off to college hoping to find answers. Through my major, I expanded my range of thinking. I gained insight into how to frame and think about problems differently. Unfortunately, the deeper I got into my major, the more disillusioned I became. I was not finding the answers I sought. Instead, I had learned a lot about philosophical inquiry and rigorous analysis, yet I didn’t feel any closer to insight into the mysteries of our world and the full range of ways to perceive it.

My 20s: fulfilling material needs

After college, I took a job, and for my 20s I largely put aside this yearning for greater insight, perception, and awakening. Instead, I immersed myself in hard work, building a career, global travel, meeting interesting people, dating, and gaining all the experiences my interests guided me toward. I immersed myself in professional growth, improving my skills in communication, management, presentation, and leadership.

However, I couldn’t let go of the desire to perceive more about our world, reality, and other realms. I sought out various plant medicines for peak experiences. Although I gained insight from these experiences, I didn’t feel like I had discovered what I was looking for.

What these years did give me, though, was material comfort and financial stability, which freed up time to pursue my interests.

I learned that fulfilling my material needs, gaining experiences and financial freedom, didn’t give me the joy, freedom, and peace that I was seeking. I kept feeling like there was more I had to search for.

My early 30s: a moment of crisis

In 2018, when I was 32 and at the peak of my career thus far, life had other plans for me. On paper, my life seemed amazing. I was living in Portland, Oregon. I had bought a house and lived there with my girlfriend, whom I loved, and my dog, Lucas. I was playing in two bands, had great friends, lived an active lifestyle, and was continuing to travel extensively, having all the luxury and adventure experiences one could want in a lifetime.

But early that year, something switched for me. For reasons unknown at the time, I became horribly depressed. I stopped wanting to hang out with friends. I would cry for no reason. I remember lying in bed one day. My girlfriend and I had made plans with friends of ours. I just lay there in bed, crying, and told her I didn’t want to go. I told her I wasn’t sure why I was crying. I truly didn’t know. The tears just kept falling.

I had no tools to understand or deal with what I was feeling and going through, and the people around me didn’t know how to help me either.

I turned to therapy and self-help books. Therapy helped me, but I still felt that something was missing. I turned to deeper shadow work through Carl Jung’s writing.

I turned to philosophers like Ken Wilber, who gave me a framework to understand awakening, including the ego–shadow divide, the mind–body divide, and the self–environment divide. But this only helped me intellectualize the journey. It didn’t lead to real transformation.

I learned the hard way that we are raised to analyze problems with our minds, but the key to transformation, healing, and awakening lies more in discovering what is in the body than in the mind.

The moment of awakening

I turned to yin yoga and meditation. I meditated for hours daily in pure consciousness meditation, spending long periods of time sitting with my mind cleared and my attention resting in pure consciousness. After about eight months of this, I had a very powerful moment of awakening that changed my life forever.

In retrospect, I realize this was a non-dual moment of awakening. At the time, I didn’t have the words to describe it. Even trying to put the experience into words was challenging. I remember trying to describe it to my therapist. I was seeing a transpersonal therapist at the time who had had his own moments of spiritual awakening and understood me at a feeling level.

I will do my best to describe it. In a flash, I felt a profound acceptance of the nature of everything. Acceptance of the way the world is, and of the oppositional and complementary nature of things. The way sometimes we are happy and sometimes we’re sad; sometimes we’re at work and sometimes we’re on vacation; sometimes we’re moving and sometimes we’re still; some are alive and some are dead; sometimes we’re healthy and sometimes we’re in pain; sometimes we connect and sometimes we don’t; sometimes we love and sometimes we hurt. If it sounds like I’m talking gibberish, it’s because it’s so hard to put into words. It was a moment of profound acceptance of the dualistic nature of our world, through a glimpse of non-dual awareness, where my awareness was not bound by an energetic struggle to categorize the world or to move in one direction or another, but was simple acceptance of the nature of things exactly as they are.

It was then that I let go of who I used to be and decided to become a different person. I bought a one-way ticket to Hawaii and immersed myself in discovery.

Along with this moment came clarity on what mattered to me. It was clear that I cared about friends and family, personal growth and transformation, music, and the ocean. Since then, I have immersed myself in these daily.

The years after the moment

I wish I could say that I became enlightened, that my life became much easier after that moment, and that I no longer had any worries. Unfortunately, it was quite the contrary. My life actually felt like it got much harder in the years that followed. Perhaps not in a material sense, but my awareness had expanded rapidly through the meditation and my moment of awakening, and I had very few tools to deal with it. I became aware of a lot more: energies I would pick up from other people, insights about myself, and deeper perception of my emotional world, my physical body, my dream world, and the spiritual world. Yet I didn’t quite know how to deal with all of this.

I also stumbled a lot spiritually. I became materialistic about my spirituality, wanting to reach deeper and deeper states of meditation. It took me years to realize this error. Reading Chögyam Trungpa’s book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism hit hard.

There was no doubt that something truly transformational had happened. My friends noticed changes in me, and I noticed them too. There was more openness in my energy, more expansiveness in my thinking, more openness to possibilities, to different paths in life, and to different choices. I was attracting different kinds of people into my life. I attracted a romantic partner who, through a committed relationship in the years to come, would give me a deeper sense of love and fulfillment than I had ever known with previous partners.

I had more joy than ever before. I felt more freedom than ever before. But it wasn’t all rosy. I didn’t have the kind of peace I really craved. I turned to Buddhist texts, Hindu texts, emotional work, and more therapy, this time in the form of Internal Family Systems (IFS).

In this phase, I learned that my moment of awakening was a powerful peak experience. But I was still far from that awareness being my companion in every moment. To integrate the teachings of that level of awareness, it would take a lot more work.

My health journey

Growing up, I had migraines, asthma, allergies, and respiratory issues. I had migraines so bad in my early teens that I just cried out of helplessness. My parents felt helpless too. The migraines hurt so much that I would just have to lie down and wait them out. I collapsed in the staircase of my school from an asthma attack. My respiratory issues and allergies worsened too as the years went on. I was constantly having trouble breathing, congested, sneezing, and feeling miserable. I stopped hanging out with friends as often and retreated. I also had injuries that later resulted in chronic hip and shoulder pain. I desperately wanted to heal myself and be healthy.

In my 20s and early 30s, I had begun a health transformation journey. I explored every medical treatment I could find, and though they helped deal with the symptoms somewhat, I was no closer to healing myself holistically and building resiliency. I pursued dietary, environmental, and physical changes, along with massage, therapy, and acupuncture, and they helped me get further. I could breathe better more consistently. I cured some of my allergies (as verified with allergy tests before and after), and I got fitter.

But after my moment in 2018, I became relentless in wanting to heal myself and get to the root of my issues, so that I could have resilient, holistic health. I experimented day and night with dietary routines, supplements, sleep routines, and every facet of health I knew.

Through daily practices of awareness and relentless behavior modification, I gradually transformed my health to what it is today — not perfect, but resilient. I feel joy from my body feeling healthy each day. My immune system strengthened: I went from catching a cold or flu every three or four months to once every one or two years. My sleep became reliably good, my digestion clear, and my energy consistent from morning to night.

In the years that followed, I also immersed myself in various bodywork modalities, like the Alexander Technique, Gyrotonic, breathwork, and the Linklater method. I did posture and alignment work. I continued my practices of meditation and yoga. I did self-myofascial release (SMR) and trigger point work. I was determined to live pain-free in my body. If I detected any pain, I wanted to know its root cause and how to free myself of it. And I got closer each year to this ideal.

Now that you know the pain of my early years, you can imagine my joy at this transformation.

A key lesson I kept learning day after day, year after year on this journey, was the connected nature of various arenas of transformation. From physical health to mental health, presence and connection, spirituality, and energetic health. Each is connected to another. Transformation in one can create transformation in another.

Experimenting with work and careers

In the years after my moment of awakening, I also experimented with a variety of work, including selling granola at the farmers market, opening a health food café, mentoring low-income high school students, recording and publishing music, and part-time teaching work in the technology industry.

Feeling stuck once again

All of this work, day and night, led to incredible transformations in my physical, mental, and energetic health. I felt deeper joy, freedom, and love. I felt a deeper contentment and greater peace than I ever had before.

However, I still felt like I hadn’t found what I was searching for. I still felt that there were things blocking me from experiencing greater joy, freedom, peace, and self-love. I still felt a dissonance between my inner world and my outer world, between who I was and the life I had. I still felt dysfunctional in many ways. For example, I remember walking back one night after performing music in Long Beach and getting a feeling like my life was going in a circle. But I didn’t know how to get out of it.

I felt very dissatisfied with how I was showing up with friends, and in public with strangers. Although I felt more open than when I was younger, I still struggled to be completely myself. My words and sentences were not yet fully aligned with who I was and what I truly wanted to say. I wanted to relate and connect with people at a deeper level, yet I was unsure how to do this.

I was perceiving so many different energies, in conversations with people, in public spaces, and in myself, that I instinctively knew I wanted to heal and that were blocking me from feeling greater joy, freedom, peace, and self-love. Yet I did not know how to achieve this transformation.

I felt stuck again, not knowing how to make the transformations I was seeking. I felt like I was walking parallel to the life I wanted to lead and the person I wanted to be, but I didn’t know how to get there.

I realized that I needed to see myself, to see my life, through a different lens than any I had been using before. I couldn’t make the transformation that I sought, because I couldn’t see myself through these different lenses.

Working with coaches, embodiment, and healing

I began working on deeper transformation day and night. I sought out coaches ranging from archetype coaches to spiritual coaches, career coaches, creative coaches, and embodiment, somatic, and transformational coaches. It was through these years that I finally found what I was looking for, decades after I first had that curiosity as a kid.

Working with coaches, I spent day and night doing the deepest healing, embodiment, shadow, emotional, and energetic work of my life. I spent hours daily reviewing video footage of myself, both how I showed up on my own and in communication with others, as well as video footage of others in my group healing and transformation program. This gave me deeper insight and allowed me to help them achieve transformations as well.

(Here is a full list of my training)

Emotions and embodiment

I went deeper into feeling my emotions than I ever had before, including sadness, anger, rage, depression, jealousy, joy, grace, and others. I became intimately familiar with each emotion and allowed myself to feel it fully, without resistance or suppression, letting it flow through me in as much quantity as the moment brought until it passed. I stopped trying to control my emotions and allowed myself to feel whatever I was feeling, whether I was alone or with others.

Our society pressures us to conform to certain social etiquette, to not express ourselves fully emotionally in certain settings, especially at the workplace. In doing this work, I learned how harmful this can be in creating suppression.

I also learned the difference between reacting to one’s feelings and truly feeling the emotions. On the outside, it can be hard to tell the difference. But the result tells it all. With the former, one stays stuck in it. With the latter, the feeling moves through you and you move on.

Transforming presence and communication

I transformed my communication patterns by noticing the deep correlation between my choice of words and topics and the deeper stories and judgments I held about myself. For example, I noticed when I would use sentences like “I want to do this, but…” as a way of making up reasons why I couldn’t do something, even though it was very much possible for me to do it. Or how I would often say “I’ll try” instead of “I will.” These are just a couple of examples.

But the transformation wasn’t just in my choice of words. It was also in what I chose to say in each moment and the topics I chose to talk about, and this continues today: choosing connection with others, choosing to relate to others at a deeper level.

My facial expressions transformed too. Reviewing video footage of myself, I awakened to just how much fidgeting, anxiety, struggle, and pain I was carrying. Bit by bit, by allowing myself to show up more authentically as who I am, I transformed my presence with others, including the way I held myself and my facial expressions.

Note that this was not about trying to perform in a different way. In fact, one of my biggest transformations was that I stopped performing. I stopped wearing a happy mask when I was upset. I stopped pretending to be someone I was not. I stopped trying to project an image to others and just showed up as myself, healing what I needed to heal to let go of all these masks and performances.

The change in my presence and facial expressions came organically from showing up authentically as myself, not as a learned behavior. I feel this distinction is important because it is the difference between authenticity and continuing to perform, just in a different way. And what we want is authenticity. We crave being authentically ourselves with others. I discovered incredible peace in making this transformation.

Early on in my quest for self-development, I sought out teachings that taught me how to act, how to present myself. Through this work, I learned that there’s a difference between performing a role, or trying to present an image, and showing up without masks. One is still performance; the other is authenticity.

I write more about this in The Art of Personal Transformation.

Drama stops

Early in my life, I had figured out how to stop drama: moving away from people who brought drama into my life and making choices that led to less drama. But through this work, I was able to stop the drama that remained within my own mind. The everyday drama I put myself through in subtle ways, from indecision, to inaction, to rumination on interactions with others, increasingly stopped as I became more embodied and allowed myself to feel whatever I was feeling in the moment.

Relationships and vulnerability

My relationships transformed as well. I was able to show up more authentically as myself. I was able, more than ever, to be truly vulnerable. And I saw how this changed the people around me as well.

Alignment with life

I felt a greater alignment with life, and clarity on what I wanted.

Transformation in perception of the world

The way I perceive the world has changed over the years. When I was younger, I was perceptive of energies around me that I didn’t quite understand, whether they were things I was picking up from other people or from elsewhere.

In the years that followed my moment of awakening, I immersed myself in the awareness of different realms. Sometimes I would simply be in life, in the material realm: in conversation, moving through the world, being with other people. This is the realm where we tend to spend most of our time.

As I became more aware of my shadow material, of the way I communicated, and of the dissonance between how I was showing up with others and how I wanted to show up, I started to perceive in much more depth the layer beneath the surface, which revealed my own and other people’s shadows and the true selves underneath them. I would often be with people and perceive a dissonance between their true selves and something they were saying, and recognize a yet-unhealed shadow or emotional element related to it. Sometimes I would perceive an energy or archetype that had been passed down generationally and was influencing their actions without their awareness.

In addition to the material realm and the true-self realm beneath the shadow, I continued spending substantial lengths of time meditating, sitting with my mind clear, to feel the energies and insight beyond these realms.

Although initially I found it useful to intentionally spend time in each of these realms, over the years I have allowed myself to move more fluidly in awareness of them, whether I am alone or with other people, switching awareness between them depending on what enters my awareness, and recognizing what I’m perceiving. There is less control in this approach and more allowing.

Over the years, I’ve also noticed the distinction between when I am relating or connecting to others at a spiritual level, versus an intellectual, emotional, or relational one. Sometimes I will feel a spiritual connection to someone, feeling a connection at a soul level. Sometimes I’ll feel an intellectual connection, discussing some heady topic. Sometimes I’ll feel someone’s sadness, or joy, or love, emanating from them, and it creates resonance in me. Sometimes I’ll feel a friendship, familial, or romantic connection. And often the feeling moves fluidly between these different types of connection.

As I write this in 2026, I’m reading Simran’s book Conversations with the Universe, and I realize that she captures so well how I perceive the world. Daily life feels like a constant conversation with the universe: seeing the events occurring around us in each moment as an orchestration of the universe, and seeing the meaning in every single thing that happens.

Where I go from here

As a kid, I desperately wanted to understand the world. To be able to perceive the world in more ways. To know the full extent of the mind. To discover the mysteries of our awareness. Making these discoveries has been the most fulfilling journey of my life, and it is a journey that has not ended.

I continue to discover more ways to heal, more ways to show up authentically as myself with others, more ways to deepen my relationships, and more ways to live a more fulfilling life. Reading Martha Beck’s book The Way of Integrity earlier this year humbled me, showing me more ways I could grow and live with more integrity and authenticity.

As I’ve journeyed on this path, I’ve realized that the more I’ve gotten in integrity with my true self and grown my awareness, the less tolerance my consciousness has for acting out of integrity with myself even in the smallest way. Speaking a word I don’t mean. Taking any action, no matter how small, that feels out of integrity with who I am, my health, or my emotions. Greater awareness demands that we live life with greater integrity. That is not easy, though it becomes easier to know when we are out of integrity.

Having taken this journey, it is a gift to be able to help others grow their awareness and perceive more about themselves, their shadow, and their potential, in order to unleash greater joy, freedom, peace, and love in their lives.

It is because I have struggled so much in my life, with physical health, mental health, and emotional health, with trauma, with performing, with wearing masks, with seeking but feeling like I couldn’t find what I was looking for; it is because of my endless search, I realize now, that I am able to see both the areas of transformation and the potential in others, and to help them make transformations in their lives, free themselves from suffering, expand their sense of fulfillment, grow their sense of joy, love, peace, and freedom, and transform their relationships.

I spent years not being aware that I was searching through the wrong lens. I was trying to find answers in the wrong places, because I didn’t realize the answers would only reveal themselves to me when I started seeing through a different lens. This was the key to transformation when I was stuck. Expanding my range to see through different lenses allows me to spot when others are stuck because they don’t realize the lens they need is different from the one they’re currently seeing through. The potential for transformation when we find the right lens to see through fascinates me. And transformation can happen rapidly.

If you're stuck and suspect you've been looking through the wrong lens, I'd love to talk.