Pilot

Hello, Friend.

I’ve been thinking about how I can change the world.

In 2018, I dissolved my bodywork practice, tore up my client list, walked away from an entire network of connections, and, with no set plan, consciously drifted into an intense healing journey of personal development.

I’d been studying and working full-time as a therapist since 2001, and had slowly become exhausted with the irresponsible and exploitative approach of the spiritual industrial complex and the increasing commodification and disrespect of sacred healing arts I witnessed. My departure from that scene was a messy and graceless but necessary extraction from many misaligned and unbalanced relationships that allowed me to begin my reconfiguration and recalibration. But I never anticipated or foresaw the eventual scale or depth of the unwinding process I’d embarked upon.

My sporadic and intensely self-conscious documentation of this personal journey was an essential and liberating part of my recovery and healing process and is already spread across my social media accounts, so I’ve undoubtedly written some of what follows before. But now, close to my solar return and at the beginning of an entirely new chapter here in this dedicated journal space, I feel to rather undramatically scalp and reiterate some essence of the discoveries I made in navigating it, both in gratitude for and celebration of growth and progress, but also that I might record some sense of and reason for the still pointed clarity and relative tidiness which is directing me forward now.

The last few years have been wild for all of us. But it’s only very recently that I’ve come to realise and appreciate them as a hard reset, a complete personal deconstruction through a sequential flow of challenging and uncomfortable initiations that have allowed a divinely synchronised reimagining and necessary restructure of how I view and move in the world.

Discovering the new perspective.

I’m a lifelong spiritual seeker, and it’s beautiful tracking back now to see how things stacked up even before I knew they were. Since my awakening over two decades ago, my healing journey through yoga, massage and bodywork, underpinned by a consistent kriya practice and overlaid and accentuated by the influence of all the divinely timed synchronous relationships I’ve formed and moved through with an expansive and ever-shifting cast of masters, teachers, colleagues and friends might have cracked my doors of perception open, but it was plant medicine that blew them off.

It may not be accessible or advisable for everyone, but sitting in sacred ceremonies was an escalation that granted me phenomenal insight and divine visions of the infinite possibility of the Human condition, brought me into direct connection with source energy, and finally allowed me to make peace with myself and begin reimagining my place in the world.

The Pandemic.

The pandemic arrived on the tail end of several years of already intense self-investigation. For most of the lockdowns, I was holed up artfully slumming in a faded and crumbling storybook Boho Victorian townhouse that I rented bits of in West London. I utilised the time, space and energy the world grinding to a halt provided to constructively integrate the intense shamanistic immersion and subsequent pilgrimage I undertook the year before to tie it all together and then articulate a personal response to the events of the pandemic as it unfolded. Without any intended sense of drama, conspiracy or theatrics and regardless of whether anyone will ever prove me right or wrong, I immediately, at a cellular level of intuition, understood the pandemic story to be a practical, tactically divisive dystopian experiment, a thinly veiled power move hoisted on the collective which was exploited by our governmental states and the corporations controlling them for their own benefit and agenda.

Whether they were premeditated or opportunistic, the literal gamut of high-level corruption and chicanery that surfaced during the pandemic illuminated the harsh truth of how spiritually disconnected humanity has allowed itself to become and how scared, weak, and helpless we are as a race. It is with gratitude that rather than become overwhelmed or reactionary about it, I was directed to take the opportunity the lockdowns presented to mentally and physically shape up, utilise the disconnection and solitude to my advantage, and approach the whole show as a liminal soul test of sorts, activating and cementing a resolute and tremendously empowering sense of personal meaning and spiritual purpose that enabled me to emerge from the pandemic cleaner, clearer, and stronger than before, from a situation I respectfully understand many people experienced as a life-shatteringly intense existential crisis state of loss and emergency.

How I understand the human body as high technology.

Body sovereignty was undoubtedly one of the most contentious and divisive of all the pandemic issues, and it immediately presented a pertinent challenge to both established and emerging pillars of my professional and spiritual life. Working through that challenge ultimately imprinted a new, indelible, unashamedly abstract and mystical tenet on me that I’ve carried forward that has radically altered almost every aspect of my experience.

Through years of inner engineering, bodywork study and practice, sacred ritual and firsthand ceremonial experience, I’ve come to understand that the human body has an innate and unassailable intelligence, so much so that it’s my belief that nothing science can invent will ever be as powerful, complex or limitless as anything that already exists in our internal or external natural world. We are the complete spectrum of existence, personified. That’s not to say our bodies aren’t fragile systems that naturally degrade over time and frequently need support and protection. But when we correctly tune in to them, we discover and receive perfect vessels that offer unlimited, unparalleled, and multi-dimensional opportunities for expansion and healing, capable of taking us far beyond anything we could ever synthesise and provide with science or pharmaceutical medicine.

Natural living and wisdom is the key to unlocking this technology, and it will begin to provide for and support itself in perfect simplicity and synchronicity once we understand that and do our best to allow it to. But this fundamental change still requires responsibility, awareness, vision, commitment and discipline. Which leads me to share a deeply personal revelation and achievement.

I stopped drinking alcohol.

Everyday society is jam-packed with relentless subtle siren calls of distraction that suppress our potential by tangling us up in self-imposed patterns of limitation. Sex, drugs, poor-quality processed food, video games and mainstream media are the most obvious and talked about examples I can think of, but the list is endless. In my case, in the years leading up to the pandemic, I received multiple clear spiritual instructions to give up drinking alcohol, which I completely ignored, as I was aware that I approached it as a panaceasic tool that I culturally accepted and believed in and used to socialise, ground myself and recover after treating clients, or reach for to mask my everyday complexities, disappointments, absence, or lack.

While I perceived the first lockdown required an urgent and wholly in-situ navigatory escalation of self-exploration and discovery, the second requested clear, regenerative, revolutionary visions of the future that brought my inner and outer worlds together into wholeness. The way I used alcohol as a comfort and distraction stood as a direct obstruction to that happening. It didn’t fit. So, in August 2020, I finally gave it up and have maintained a very comfortable and beneficial sobriety ever since.

Thankfully, I never had a severe problem with alcohol. But it’s the most significant personal change I can use to illustrate what I want to say. I recognise that it dulled my senses and made me lazy and avoidant, and the future requires that I am neither. Three years on, there is no doubt that I think, feel and function better without drinking it and that I’m more balanced, capable, confident, responsive and aware than I ever was under its influence. Once again, as with plant medicine, I get why sobriety isn’t for everyone. But it’s important to me.

What comes next

We’re alive in unprecedented times of escalated challenges and upheaval. Like many people around the world, I’ve begun to flow in a totally new way I haven’t before. Uninstalling my old code and programming and laying down the foundations of a new and less domesticated operating system has been a long and messy grind of a trip. But while the time I spent deep-diving my personal epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, and politics might been frustrating, pointlessly indulgent, or just plainly weird to some, it allowed me to pull so many different threads together for myself that I wouldn’t have done otherwise, beautifully enabling me to let go of many self-limiting patterns of behaviour and belief in the process, waking me up to the reality and responsibility of what it is to be alive right now given the direction the world is headed and allow me to start consciously embodying more of what is I believe is needed of me.

So what is that? Well. Though I might have transitioned out of the phase that kicked off sometime in the first half of the 2010s, I can’t draw clear lines underneath any movements I’m making. In fact, I have absolutely no doubt that my deprogramming and exploration will continue, so in a way, attempting to set goals, storify the ambitions of any work I dream of doing in practice or content, or even settling on a definitive avatar of myself would be illusionary, delusionary and pointless in many ways. But what I can do is commit to continue healing and simplifying and releasing on this journey into the unknown. Letting life live through me and doing my best to share what I find within it.

So there it is. A slow and steady intense and simplistic work in process. If you’ve made it this far, you’ll understand. The future is finding new ways to transmit the truth as we perceive and discover it, living in ever deeper conscious awareness, with unwavering resilience, courageously sharing the lessons we’ve learned and the knowledge we’ve picked up in all the ways we can in the hope that more and more and more people around the world intuitively discover, wake and wise up to realise that life doesn’t have to mean suffering, that our bodies are sacred vessels worthy of highest, purest love, and that the earth we walk on is a gift that will support us all once we manage to step out from under the dense veil of our collective amnesiac oppression and stop so needlessly, savagely tearing it, ourselves, and each other apart.

So here I am. My sigmatic journey entering a new phase, more deeply tuned into my own unique rhythms and rhymes than ever before, implicitly trusting in the divine plan, and earnestly intent on being more consistently available as a transparently evolving boots-on-the-ground multidisciplinary spiritual practitioner than I ever was before in all the ways I possibly can be. Which is just as well. Because looking around right now, there’s a whole lot of work to do.

Namasté, Aho! and Haux haux.

I love you all.