I grew up in a well-educated but deeply traumatised family, with struggles around addiction, mental health, trauma, and loss. Yes, just like nearly all of us, I have been through the dark night of the soul. It’s my understanding that this is part of the human experience: to lose connection to the All, to believe we are separate, alone, and unsafe — and then to find our way back to the truth. The truth is, we have always been deeply loved. Faith is where it’s at.

The gift of my upbringing is that both my parents sought to heal themselves. I, too, grew up to experience my fair share of trauma, addiction, and some mental health struggles for good measure. But I saw there was a way out, and I was definitely going to take it. I became abstinent from drugs and alcohol on January 1st, 2010. My quest for spiritual connection, however, had already been ignited in my early teens, when my mum sought spiritual and complementary healing and filled her bookshelf with all things law of attraction, metaphysical, and beyond. From an early age, I knew and felt that the evolution of our collective consciousness was being accelerated in this lifetime.

I had a spiritual awakening at the age of 19 — albeit a violent one. It came in the form of visions and downloads in Thailand, April 2000, when I went into psychosis that lasted two months. During that time I was drugged and hospitalised against my will, and I had many visions. Eventually I learned that all I needed to do was stop telling people with clipboards and white coats what I was thinking. That way, I could get off the medication and come back to earth. That was 25 years ago. Since then, I’ve come to understand that, although it was traumatic for me and my family, it was also a valid lived experience — one that I now embrace.

My entire life has been a quest to get into right relationship with myself, and through that, into right relationship with a Higher Power — the Oneness that is in all, through all, the manifested and the unmanifested.

If I’ve gone too far out for you, that’s okay. But if you’re still here, still reading, and something in this speaks to you? Then you’re definitely my people.