My fingers are walking the spines in the psychology aisle at Powell's on West Burnside, and I already know I'm not actually looking for a psychology book. What I want is the personal story people keep asking me for — the spiritual awakening itself, the Portland freelance drought before it, and why my whole sense of consciousness got turned up to a setting it was never built for. The questions repeat enough now that I'd rather answer them straight, in one place, without pretending I've got this more figured out than I do.
Quick disclosure before we go further: a couple of the links ahead are affiliate links for tools I've actually used at my desk in my Sellwood studio, and if you click through and buy something, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Full details are linked elsewhere on the site. None of that changes what I actually think about any of it.
What Does a Spiritual Awakening Actually Feel Like?
Two years ago, mid-freelance-drought, I woke up one morning and the volume on the world had been turned up past a setting my nervous system was built for. Dust motes hanging in a patch of kitchen light stopped being just dust — they looked like they were dancing, glowing, carrying some code I suddenly understood without being able to explain it. My heart was going hard, and it wasn't the coffee.
For about a week, I felt like I didn't have skin. Every sound had texture. A stack of produce at the grocery store looked so saturated with color it pressed on my chest like actual weight. It was beautiful and deeply inconvenient. I had a client logo due and couldn't look at my tablet without the pixels feeling like they were shouting. Some people would call a stretch that intense a dark night of the soul, though mine only lasted about a week, not a season, and a few people online have described similar physical intensity as kundalini energy moving through the body — maybe, though I've never wanted to pin something that physical down with a label that specific.
Crying in the bathtub most of that week wasn't spiritual bliss crying. It was "I don't know who I am right now" crying. The fuller list of what that week actually included, including the static in the studio and a handful of other things too strange to fold into this answer, lives in its own post, because trying to cram all of it in here would bury the actual point. If it happens to you, one thing I can tell you for certain: the sensory overload passes faster if you let yourself do less that week, not more.
What Actually Helped in Those First Confusing Months
Not therapy language, not a five-step guide, and definitely not an ascension coach charging by the session — I couldn't have afforded one anyway. What actually helped was small and almost embarrassingly simple: a personalized Moon Reading that was free to start. It didn't try to sell me a personality transplant. It talked about my moon sign and soul purpose in a way that felt like a cool cloth on a feverish forehead, and it gave me a tiny bit of ground to stand on while everything else felt like shifting sand.
If you're in that disoriented stretch right now and don't know where to start, that's still what I point people toward first. It's low-pressure, it doesn't ask you to overhaul your identity in a weekend, and it gave me language for what I was going through before I had any language of my own.
The Spiritual Tools That Didn't Work For Me
Crystals were the first thing I bought — rose quartz, a chunk of clear quartz, something labeled black tourmaline — mostly because they looked good on the corner of a beat-up drafting table I'd found secondhand, and because a shop employee told me they'd help. I never learned what any of them were actually supposed to do. I never picked one up with any intention, not once — they just sat there collecting dust while I felt a low hum of guilt every time I noticed them. Owning a spiritual object turned out to be nothing like having a spiritual practice.
Headspace got about two months of half-hearted mornings before I quietly deleted it, then I downloaded three or four other meditation apps that same year hunting for the one that would finally stick. None of them did, and not because the apps were bad. I was treating the shopping itself as the practice, like scrolling for a better guide could substitute for actually sitting still. Switching apps every few weeks trains you to quit right when something starts working, usually around day nine or ten, exactly when it gets uncomfortable enough to become interesting. The tool was never the actual problem. My relationship with starting over was.
How Do I Know If I'm Actually Grounded?
Here's the thing about being grounded — it doesn't mean feeling calm all the time, and it took me a while to stop expecting that. For me it means noticing when I've drifted into that floaty, disconnected feeling and having something physical to do about it right away, rather than a mood I chase. Eating something heavy, actually heavy, works better than any breathing pattern I know. So does putting bare feet on real dirt or concrete for a few minutes, or scrubbing a sink, something with texture and resistance. I needed grounding techniques built for someone with a normal, slightly messy freelance life in a city, not for someone living at a retreat center.
The test I actually use is simple: can I hold a normal conversation and remember what someone just said to me a minute later? If the answer's no, I stop whatever spiritual thing I'm doing and go do something boring instead.
Freelance Life and a Consciousness You Didn't Ask For
Freelance deadlines don't care how expanded your consciousness feels. If anything, the awakening made the work harder for a stretch, because I could no longer numb out through a project the way I used to when a client email made my stomach drop. My friend Ingrid, a fellow freelancer and one of my closest friends, asked me once, bluntly, why I kept describing all of this like it made my work life easier. It doesn't, not exactly. These days, when a client email makes my stomach drop, I treat that reaction as information instead of ignoring it — it usually means the project needs to end, not just that I'm having a bad day.
Social life got strange too, at least for a while. Conversations I used to have without thinking suddenly felt thin, like I was speaking a slightly different language than everyone around me. I spent real time navigating friendships after my awakening, feeling like the only one hearing a hum under everything. I still don't have a tidy answer for what my soul purpose is, and I've stopped expecting my illustration portfolio to hand me one. What I do have is more synchronicities than I used to notice, such as repeating numbers and a song at an oddly specific moment, though I try not to build an entire belief system out of any single one of them.
Why My First Breathwork Circle Backfired
The drafty community center breathwork class was mild by comparison to what happened months later. A stranger snored through half of that first one, which felt deeply un-spiritual, mostly annoying, and honestly made me hungry for a burrito by the end. But at a different session, a local wellness event, the breathing itself went further than I expected. About twenty minutes in, my hands went numb, then my face, and I wasn't quite in the room anymore. I could hear the facilitator's voice like it was coming from underwater.
That's where I met Maren Stockwell, a fellow seeker who ended up next to me in the integration circle afterward. We traded numbers before we'd said much else, and she talked me through the whole thing afterward at length, the way she tends to process things out loud. It took a solid ten minutes after the session ended for me to feel back inside my own body. Nobody had warned me that breathing that intense can trigger something closer to dissociation than bliss, and it's not the same sensation at all — it's your nervous system hitting a wall and pulling an emergency brake.
Since then I check in with a facilitator about pacing before I start, and I stop the second my hands start tingling instead of pushing through to see what happens next. If something like that happens to you and the disorientation doesn't lift on its own fairly quickly, that's a conversation for a therapist or doctor, not a journaling prompt.
Does Journaling Always Bring Clarity?
Not always, and journaling gets recommended like it's risk-free when it isn't always. There was a stretch where every entry turned into the same three pages of circular worry, replaying a client email or an argument until the page was just anxiety with better handwriting than my texts usually have. Closing the notebook, I'd feel more tangled than when I opened it, not less.
Some of that spiraling overlaps with what people call shadow work, sitting with the parts of yourself you'd rather not examine, though that's really its own separate conversation. What actually helped was giving myself a hard stop: a timer, or a rule that the last line of any entry has to be a question instead of a conclusion, so the page doesn't get to have the final word.
Other nights, journaling does the opposite. I remember sitting at my desk once at three in the morning, pen moving faster than I could think, three full pages deep before I realized, somewhere in the middle of the second page, that I'd completely forgotten about an invoice that had been sitting overdue in my inbox for weeks. Rain was going against the window the whole time, that steady, low static behind everything else. That's the version that actually works. It doesn't spiral. It empties something out instead.
I Tell Friends to Start Small, Not All at Once
Two years into an actual daily practice now, here's what I actually tell people who ask where to start: skip the idea that you need one big dramatic overhaul. Start with whatever's already true and already in front of you — five uncomfortable minutes of sitting still instead of scrolling for a better technique to try tomorrow, noticing the weather instead of managing your whole nervous system at once.
When my brain won't quiet down enough to sit with any of that, sound helps more than willpower does. That's what pulled me toward brainwave entrainment audio in the first place — sound frequencies nudging your brain toward a calmer state, no chanting required — and I've kept using Billionaire Brain Wave sessions on the days my head feels too loud to draw anything at all.
And if you want a low-pressure place to actually start, before you spend a dime on anything else, that free Moon Reading is still the first thing I point people toward. It's grounded, it's specific to you, and it doesn't feel like a performance. Take a breath, drink some water, and be patient with whatever shows up. You're doing fine.