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MY STORY: AN AWAKENING THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

 

GROWING UP +
HITTING ROCK BOTTOM

I grew up with one tricksy older sister in, let’s say, a conventional American nuclear family in a small back-woodsy Connecticut town. My mother described me as a “gentle, warm & generous child.” My parents were committed to eachother, to us, and to breaking the cycle of alcoholic families on both sides. And they did break it.

But like so many families, our emotional vocabulary was haunted by what came before: Sharp outbursts, slammed doors, silence as a weapon, and a well practiced under-the-rug technique. Parts of me closed, armored up, complied and quietly raged or longed to rage.

When I hit my teens, it came out. Inspired by the nihilistic film, I started a local ‘fight club’ for me and my friends in the backyard. With my experience now, it’s amazing to look back. So many signs of depression, self-hatred, suicidality, and rage. And so few adults around capable of even noticing. Tae Kwon Do Moo Duk Kwan became one of my lifelines, a saving grace. Training to black belt taught me to channel all of this aggression into something with discipline and ideas of honor.

My early success as a filmmaker was an initiation into leadership. At 19, I wrote, produced and directed my first feature film ‘Moonshine: A real-life vampire story’ which premiered at the Sundance Film festival, making me the youngest feature filmmaker in the festival’s history. In the process, I began to scratch the surface of realizing how destructive my harsh inner critic was - and that it was somehow possible to rewire.

By 20, I was in a leadership role in my outer life, but my inner life, although tempered, was still largely unconscious. My achievements with the film were fueled and driven by a whip-lashing emptiness within myself. I found myself overworking on energy drinks and Adderall for weeks on end, sleeping very little, and heading towards a wall fast. Upon the completion of the film, I hit a three-day coma and a near-death experience that took me to rock bottom. It was what I would call an unconscious rite of passage. So many late teens / early twenties find themselves in a car accident or a painful ordeal… a coming to terms with limits… and for some, a life-initiated rite to catalyze the next vital stage of development: soul.

In the cloudy void of that coma, I felt my spirit leave my body, with the option to not return. Waking from this, I knew my life had almost slipped through my fingers. I was shaken to the core and it called me to question if there was anything higher than me, anything after death. What was I using my precious time for? Was I just wasting my little island of powers selfishly chasing money and fame? I took a long hard look at my deepest motivations and beliefs. I never believed in much in life. Growing up, I endured the rare obligational visits to our local Episcopalian church, but I wasn’t compelled to think about it hard enough. There’s more than an ounce of truth in the saying, ‘there are no atheists in foxholes.’ I was in my foxhole, and now I needed an answer to my most pivotal question: Is there a God or some greater interconnected web of energy?

REBORN IN SPIRIT

Shortly after my coma, one July night in my hometown at 1am, I couldn’t sleep. In an ocean of sounding crickets, I walked to the railroad tracks and made an agreement with myself: ‘I won’t stop walking down these tracks until I get an answer to my biggest question: is there anything greater in this world?’ Dawn broke, and I was tired and wanting to give in, wanting to find a nice bed to curl up in.

I kept going and then... It was like the moment before a car crash. Time and space slowed down to an infinite crawl. That specific unique moment in time in that place with the pine trees, the breeze, the lady bug walking across the tracks toward a patch of moss…that moment came with an indescribable feeling that descended! I was shocked out of the pre-ordained logic and into such liberating dimensions, aware of existence itself stripped of prejudices. Without any teacher aside from Life itself, I received my first direct solicited satori experience, seeing into our true nature: the divine essence & love. This was the beginning of what I could only call a ‘spiritual awakening.’ My lifelong Connecticut small-town materialist paradigm crumbled overnight.

Over a period of months, I was visited & guided by several subtly embodied High Beings who delivered light activations, and answered my intuitive questions. I had never believed such things were possible. The world was shifting beneath my feet. A divine wind of electric inspiration and limitless possibility fired up my soul, estranged all my friends and most of my family, and opened up new energies inside me. My intuitive knowing came online.

A new world was opening up. I was receiving guidance, and it proved deeply trustworthy. It felt like my own voice but much stronger and higher. So when the guidance came to give away everything I owned, it felt right: My car, all my belongings, and my entire life savings. A small price to pay for what was opening. Looking back on it, it was a reset, a shedding of old skin, a second birth. In light of all the changes, I naturally reprioritized my life, did an inventory of all my habits, selfish orientations, and extractive motivations… and centered my life around a direct relationship with spirit and goodness. The Golden Rule took on a sort obvious rubber-meets-the-road meaning, as well as the yamas and niyamas of yoga.

I then followed direct guidance to Virginia City, Montana where I lived in a tent on a stream and integrated a profound series of paradigm shifts. At the time, I didn’t know what I know now: It was accrued spiritual development from previous lifetimes. It came as a unity-consciousness samadhi state that, like a golden boundless frequency of love, largely consumed my waking state for the next 8 months and was accompanied by a lifestyle of synchronicities. I still now look back on that time with a sort of nostalgia for the all encompassing feeling of being in the lap of God.

FINDING IT + LOSING IT

After this multi-month peak experience at 21, I came back home and the winds of Grace dwindled. I had little conflicts with family. I gradually lost contact with that exalted unity experience that had lasted for 8 months. I slowly descended into the valley of a new base waking state. Looking back, I know that we descend because the next layer is ready. The next seeds of the unconscious are surfacing to be processed. Each of us have a unique soul address and a unique storehouse of ancestral multi-lifetime karmic material. The peaks and valleys are part of the journey. At the time, coming down from the grace of this samadhic mountaintop was one of the biggest heartbreaks of my life.

My longing called me to find again what I had ‘lost.’ I wanted to integrate this higher energetic standard into all areas of my life. I transitioned my work as a film director into serviceful waters, traveling & filming with a grassroots non-profit in the poorest rural villages of Argentina and Nigeria. In my hometown, I worked with some colleagues to start a grassroots arts collective to inspire & support the abandoned youth. During this whole time, I felt myself struggling to follow the scent of spirit alive within me. It was a challenging multi-year period of ‘finding it and losing it.’ Sometimes the voice of Spirit was strong. Often, my inner energies felt at odds with my relationships and my work. Sometimes I felt imprisoned by the resistances in my family, friendships, and my world. In search of greater wisdom, I wanted to ‘break free.’

TRACKING THE SIGNS + WHISPERS OF SPIRIT:

In 2007, I left home with a prayer to dive into Grace: no money, no tent, a backpack, toothbrush & one extra pair of clothes. I walked south down the Appalachian trail, hitchhiking between towns and worlds, journeying thousands of miles as a modern renunciant. The journey was inspired by a wise woman named Peace Pilgrim who walked ‘as a prayer’ over 25,000 miles and 28 years. Every day was a testament to miracles. But this was also a training for me. This way of walking in the unknown forced me to attune to the subtle domains of intuition & grace and depend on it in rubber-meets-the-road ways. My daily survival and nourishment depended on it.

Navigating with my prayers & sometimes blunt conversations with spirit, I walked the Appalachian trail, slept along the trail, slept at Rusty’s Hard Time Hollow, slept on park benches in downtown Greensboro, spent 5 days at the Roanoke Rescue Mission, met deep souls in monthly-rate hotel rooms, and was led to the divine abode at Meher Baba center in Myrtle Beach. Some times reflected my pains to me, others reflected my Grace to me. I found that, in the form of all beings & situations, the vast intelligence of Life responded generously in signs, guidance, answers to my questions, and opportune meetings everyday: meals, synchronicities, and chances to serve. I learned to track, listen to, and navigate the subtle. I embraced Peace Pilgrim’s dictum: "I own only what I wear and carry. I just walk until given shelter, fast until given food," she said at the time. "I don't even ask; it's given without asking. I tell you, people are good. There's a spark of good in everybody." I took the opportunity to serve those who had a point in destiny with me to feed the karmic laws and listened to the signs & lessons along the way. Finally, under an awning in the rainy streets of Miami beach, a homeless man asked me, “Does this journey have a purpose?” I said, “Yes, a spiritual purpose.” As I said that, i realized the questions driving me had been answered. He replied with a final sureness in his voice, “Oh good, because everything with a purpose has an end.” I knew my journey was over.

TESTING FIRES OF LOVE

Until this point, I had bought into some of the relationship prescriptions of traditions such as Buddhism. I assumed that the cost of fully following my heart + spirit was to sacrifice intimate relationships + attachments. Returning from my walk south at 23, I was called to shed these beliefs and dive deeply in. I discovered that the same grace + divinity I had already found in ‘the world’ could be experienced deeply in another being: God in a body to love and worship and serve! Her name was Tarynn. She and I met when I was 24. And she too found the infinite in me. We committed to our vehicle. And with that, a rocketship of soul took off. We left the atmosphere, far out of the orbit of any of our previous experiences, and into the heights of a divine devoted love. It was thrilling, terrifying at times. Great gains come with the potential of great loss. It was intoxicating, heart-bursting, and liberating. Far from being a form of bondage, I discovered the yoga of relationship to be the most sobering + real training grounds for love, care, devotion, wisdom, inner growth + spirit.

Relationship provided me with utterly honest reflections, unhindered by the polite conceits of a world who doesn’t have a daily stake in my growth. I knew she cared with every fiber of her being. Sometimes it was scary. Sometimes I was grateful. I was continuously humbled by my own resistances, fears, blind spots, miscommunications, and how little I knew about how to serve our relationship’s daily cycles and growth: spiritual development, deep trauma + emotional healing, sharing commitments, agreements, insights, finances + purposes in the world, and all means of practical. My spiritual tools were being put to a profound outer-orbit test.

They carried weight but when it came to the relational sphere of the deep fires of committed love (where traumas and huge shadows burn daily), my tools were rickety at best, dissociative at worst. At 28, 4 years after it started, the relation-’ship’ broke, along with my heart, and left me with deep reflections to account for.

FROM ME TO WE

In 2010 and 2011, I travelled to global gatherings with hundreds of awakened beings, hired to film and studying as a close student of spiritual teacher Panache Desai. Surrounded by a huge group of others with deep gifts, sharing in deep currents of divine love, I realized that on this spiritual journey, “I am not alone” and “from now on, I will always have awakened community.” Panache was a rare soul with many lifetimes of accrued deep spiritual devotion. During utero, he was blessed in the womb by Swami Muktananda and born into a profoundly spiritual family. Due to his inner atmosphere, he carries the power of kundalini shaktipat, an initiation that activates an inner unfolding of awareness that leads to progressively higher states of consciousness. He initiated me and others into the pathways + capacity to bestow this energetic transmission. The truth remains that our own unique life force, personal frequency, and karmas determine our transmission.

At this time, I directed a 10-minute short film called ‘Awakening’ that shared some of the profound insights of this journey. Almost overnight, the film was seen by over 1 million people. Many sent me messages testifying to its role in changing their life.

Over the years, I made deep meticulous studies of the great traditions of enlightenment and Liberation, diving deeply into non-duality and Advaita Vedanta with Rupert Spira, Francis Lucille, Greg Goode, Vipassana, my own intuitive practice, and other guidance. I intuitively began to get ‘under the hood’ of my emotional unconscious with a regular journaling practice: exploring, tracking, and writing the inner voices from the shadow material and repressed emotions. My meditation practice evolved. The experience of resting in consciousness, sometimes more or less pure, became very familiar and enjoyable to me. I integrated the teachings of the Gita and an array of devotional Hindu practices, Ramakrishna Parmahansa, Parmahansa Yogananda, Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, the Tao te ching, tantric traditions of Kashmir Shaivism, + others, testing these practices & principles on myself daily.

I moved to live and work from an intentional community in Shutesbury, Massachusetts called Sirius, a spirit-centered ecovillage. The quality of my inner circle evolved, layers of relational armor got to shed, and my intimate relationship life continued to deepen. As they say, “we are brought together for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.” These next relationships were ‘reasons’ and ‘seasons.’ I continued to bring my highest intentions, my fullest heart, and to bump into + clarify the limitations of my emotional & relational inheritance. I learned deeply about boundaries, meeting needs, deeper communication, apologies, and forgiveness. I hadn’t yet discovered what was most important to relationships: the unconscious. When we get 'triggered' and start acting like a child, what is that? How come we seem to regress to a petty 5-year-oldw These are the repressed parts of the psyche emerging. These arehen our partner says something in a certain way? discover core wounds, familial roots, rhythms of growth + resistance, and all the deep obstacles that can get in the way of even the most earnest sincere love.

I spent 2012 traveling with a team to film with the Zulu Sangomas and wisdom keepers in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Among many others, I met Paul Myburgh, who trained for 8 years as a Bushmen shaman living and hunting among them. He guided me into the use of deep penetrative thought to track and read the most subtle of energies in people and situations. Later upon my return, I began intuitively practicing and diving deep into interacting at profound psychic levels with hundreds of people over a 2 month period. This time period gave me a wealth of further confirmation and trust in my intuitive discernment & the complexities at the core of the human experience. In direct experiences, I discovered the shapes of the human conditionings, even sometimes the multi-lifetime causal points that drive a person’s mission & purpose now on Earth. These insights sparked my creativity.

In 2014, I began to produce more short films and launched the ‘Ring Channel,’ a universal short film series with 1 million+ views, It’s a series on the joy of awakening: spiritual cinema, visual poems, vibrational vid-amins. I felt called to step into leadership and began offering a series of conscious events at Sirius: energetic activations, group breathwork sessions, and wisdom teachings on the nature of rewriting beliefs, purifying conditioning, and accessing awareness. Sharing my gifts was bringing more joy and the rewards of new reflections in my daily life.

SICKNESS + MEDICINE

In 2016 I moved to Ananda Ashram in upstate New York for a self-structured 8-month retreat to deepen my realization with 5-16 hours daily of meditation, mantra, study, sadhana, and embodied practice. The rigor of sustained regularity began to work on me. Refining clarity and perception. Expanding insight and depth, moving through densities in tapasya.

But over months, the sustained intensity of self-study and explorative practice made obvious some of the deep limitations + blind spots of many meditative ‘enlightenment’ traditions, vibrational new age teachings, devotional Hindu architectures, and other paths that I was embodying.

I began to bump into, in my own imbalances, the often one-size-fits-all psychology and missing complexity of many meditative paths and traditions. The expanded frequencies generated in my practice were real, profound + potent, but many rooms (even entire floors) in my soul and psyche were still untouched by my deep sadhana. I couldn’t fully put a finger on it at the time, but I was seeing these same imbalances in the visiting teachers, in spiritual communities I’d participated in, and the historic revered masters who professed ‘final realization’ that founded lineages.

In 2017, Grace visited me in a devastating form, as an unseen tick bite on my left ankle. Two months later, my jaw locked up and my shoulders couldn't move. Then I got my tests back: Lyme positive on the Western Blot. Despite my efforts of full antibiotics and on-boarding the most Lyme-experienced naturopath in the tristate area and throwing every herb and modality at it, the Lyme persisted. Thus began a one and a half year journey. Chronic disease brought me humbly onto the entheogenic medicine path: Ayahuasca, San Pedro, Peyote, and Kambo. These sacred plant medicines + ceremonies facilitated a much deeper encounter with my ancestral core wounding, shadow material, and the root of the sense of separation. I had to face these core pains much more directly + comprehensively if I wanted to bring down, anchor, and ensoul my accrued light into my body + life. With pains throughout my body and threats of extreme disability, it took over a year to fully be symptom-free and earn a humbling compassion-inducing diploma in chronic disease. One key take-away among many: I invited many expert views but ultimately I had to learn to TRULY trust my own body's voice & inner knowing ABOVE all else, even above highly intuitive experts, doctors, and practitioners. Our body knows. I learned that each healing journey is unique. Chronic Lyme disease came to me to catalyze a deeper truth...

THE LIBERATING POWER OF THE UNCONSCIOUS & SOMATICS

By 2018, through chronic disease, I came to the humble wisdom of listening to the body and dealing with my suppressed emotions. The body truly keeps the score. There is a suppressed emotional terrain stored in the tissues that our culture avoids like the plague. Even most spiritual cultures avoid it like the plague. We do what we can to ride above these feelings. We’ll overwork, over-meditate, over-medicate, over-think, over-achieve, over-consume just about any substance or entertainment to avoid our conscious descent, to avoid welcoming our feeling body fully, and embracing the unconscious woundings of the shadow.

Before 2018, I had, in my eagerness to proceed quickly towards higher truths, been proceeding passionately on the ‘direct path,’ in large part. There are entire communities living as Advaitaholics speaking non-dual speak, in need of sobering insights for spiritual addicts. It’s not to dismiss the gifts of these paths, but what drives even spiritual addiction? Unprocessed feelings and unconscious impulses. This is what compulsively drives us. It’s an entirely new level of empowerment and liberation to become curious about the language of the unconscious feelings, and begin to welcome the full feeling body. This brings the Grace of our current realizations down into the body, into the unprocessed grief, rage, terror, shame, and guilt of early childhood, ancestral and multi-lifetime impressions. This is a project. A deeply healing, deeply liberating project. It brings our spirit more deeply into our body, and into the wild illuminated heart of the world.

And yes, we can go a lifetime with many profound spiritual attainments bypassing this project. Many revered historic masters developed premature diseases, faced relationship debacles, or even left legacies of trauma in their wake. The history of spirituality can be seen as an experimental struggle of how to bring daily life and the world around us up to speed with the vast peace, light, and love of consciousness realized by masters in deep states or in seated samadhis.

As I began to be curious and explore these deeper layers in myself, I discovered how none of us are just a single personality. I clearly learned that every one of us is a multiplicity of voices, of sub-personalities. And I learned a great deal about how these compartmentalized sub-personalities organize the consciousness from the deepest seeds of pain and separation all the way to the exalted heights of samadhi and beyond. This explains triggers. This explains why we contradict ourselves or can feel at war with ourselves. As Walt Whitman says, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.” I deeply explored a vast array of modalities from Somatic Experiencing, Hakomi, IFS, Family Constellations, NLP, Jungian Active Imagination and Dreamwork, Psychomagic, Somatic Couples Therapy, and many more. I took a yearlong training in psychedelic facilitation and somatic therapy. I uncovered the recent work on adult developmental stages from Terri O’Fallon, Don Beck, Robert Kegan, etc. and found that our sub-personalities all have different levels of development, from self-servingly impulsive to compassionately unified. I learned how to meet the missing experience of sub-personalities and to support in the healing and growth at many levels of the human psyche.

I officially started a private practice to be a friend of the soul for others and to support clients in this work.

I had noticed in my own life, as I transformed my unconscious feeling field, my friendships grew richer. My intimate relationship life dropped in much deeper as I met my future wife. Old persistent patterns fell away. I took on a greater ease around communication, humility, vulnerability and trust. The capacity to track lessons across many arenas of integrative development allowed me to extract learnings out of a much vaster array of situations in daily life. I needed less armor. As situations arose, I discovered entire continents of ignored development to integrate.

Living with and raising my partner’s child for over a year, I embraced parenting with depth, study, and enthusiasm, dynamic lines between discipline and affection. I had the opportunity to care for family members and elders in dementia and death. The royal integral path opened in front of me.

I expanded a 5th quadrant into Ken Wilber’s model for development:

  • Wake Up (meditative, consciousness, liberative, emptiness, enlightenment, radical freedom)

  • Grow up (full accountability & responsibility for our lives & decisions, moral, virtue, values, integrity, rites of passage, archetypes, understanding many perspectives)

  • Clean Up (shadow integration, trauma, unconscious repressed material, emotional work, body, breathwork)

  • Show Up (purpose, expression, leadership, creativity, service, work/vocation/calling)

  • Connect Up (relational, connection, listening, communication, secure attachment, authenticity, boundaries, needs, polarity, intimacy, family, tribe)

The integral path felt inside of me like all the mouths of the rivers flowing into the ocean of embodiment. I began to discover new intuitive systems for navigating my purpose and passions, balancing structure and flow to keep the rivers of inspiration in flux. A profound teacher of mine, Patrick Connor of Sharmada came back around at this time to meet me with new deep teachings expanding on the powers of intention work as well as means of truly facing the core wound from the fullness of the divine light.

I discovered that if I humbly opened my heart + intention to learn whatever my next most vital step is (in any domain), my daily embodiment + world began to shine more rapidly with the light of my higher experiences. A new maturity arose in what I have to offer the world.

Now I offer my guidance and support in one-on-one sessions for those who feel called and are walking their own unique path. The psychotherapeutic sessions are a safe and sacred container where we somatically explore together the causal layers of the inner landscape and resolve obstacles around your path forward. Through this intuitive assisted self-discovery, you have an opportunity to make leaps in your life and transform in profound ways. With compassion and skill, I prepare the sacred ground of each session with a field of intention, grace, and awake presence. Together, we uncover pathways of wisdom, joy and ease towards your next highest steps, decisions, and embodiments.

The journey is one of continuing and deepening, ever learning and integrating new pathways, embodying in deeper clarities. I like to say, ‘still learning in the still light’ or ‘God is the greatest striptease.’ Say whatever you like, this journey of life is a sacred and humbling one. I am humbled to meet each being along the way.

I continue to intend and pray to embody in this unique flesh the fullness of divine light, love and wisdom. I pray for embodying the full purpose of my incarnation, for reuniting the threads of tribe, land, nature, community, rites of passage, family, and all the generations. I pray for humility, for remembering and healing our relationship with the land, and for the next most vital step to be revealed with unmistakable clarity. I pray for the courage, strength, inner power, and light to be a part of ushering in a much more embodied and integral wisdom in our culture to make the path easier for younger generations to come.

I now live and work out of the Berkshires with my wife, Antonia Talayeh and our dog Quest.

CREDENTIALS: TRAININGS, INITIATIONS & STUDIES:

These trainings reflect decades of dedicated practice across contemplative, somatic, and transpersonal domains. They represent the lived foundation from which Ontodelic Inquiry has organically emerged.

  • Ontodelic Inquiry: Co-Developer of Integrative Somatic & Transpersonal Methodology, 2021-Present

  • Advanced Training: Chaos & Conflict in Group Systems (Outer, Inner & Secret Levels), Mukara Meredith, Certified Hakomi Trainer, 2025

  • Advanced Somatic Psychotherapy & Facilitation Training, Rainbow Bridges, Year-Long Immersive Program, 2021

  • Internal Family Systems (IFS), Derek P. Scott, RSW (IFS Certified), 2021

  • Sharmada Advanced Framework: Core Wounds, Consciousness & Energy Systems (Psyche Metaphysics, Depth Psychology, Somatic & Subtle Dynamics), Patrick Connor, 2016–Present

  • Diamond Approach Study & Online Training, 2022-2023

  • Extended + Residential Inquiry Intensives: Excavating Consciousness with Mooji, 5-Week India Program (2019), 10-Day Portugal Residential (2018)

  • Solo 8-Month Intensive: 1,800+ Hours of Daily Sadhana, Ananda Ashram, 2016

  • Workshop Development & Facilitation: Belief Re-writing Methodology, 2014-2015

  • Nondual Inquiry: Francis Lucille, 2011

  • Rob Burbea's Dharma: Extensive Study & Practice in Insight Meditation, Dependent Origination & Emptiness

  • Direct Inquiry & Nondual Philosophy: Private Studies with Greg Goode, 2009

  • Contemplative Studies: Multi-Year Retreats with Swami Purna (Yoga/Vedanta)

  • Vibrational Transformation & Shaktipat Training, Multi-Year Study: Group Intensives & Personal Work, Panache Desai, 2010-2012

  • Breathwork Facilitation: Group & One-on-One Sessions, 2013-2024

  • Transformational Breathwork Training, Founder Judith Kravitz (Founder & Breathwork Pioneer), 2012

  • Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT): Specialized Training for Pain & Trauma, Trainer: Steven Munn, 2009

  • Initiation into Direct Unity Experience: Spontaneous Awakening, Light Being Visitations & Core Commitment Formation, Prolonged Non-Ordinary States, Samadhis and Divine Love (CT & Virginia City, MT), 2005