Part I- Crossing the River: An Unfiltered Reflection of Spiritual Awakening

Part I- This post marks the first in a three-part series—an unfiltered reflection on what spiritual awakening has looked like in my life, from the first cracks in the surface to the deep rupture that led me here.

This path didn’t start yesterday. I’ve been asking hard questions about existence, purpose, and healing since around 2018, after a slow but steady unraveling of everything I thought I believed. I experienced my total collapse in 2023—burnout, grief, identity death—and it became the breaking point that cracked me open. But something else happened more recently. About two months ago, a deeper shift began. Maybe it was the psilocybin journey that opened a new door in my consciousness. Maybe it was the fact that I’ve been more devoted to stillness, meditation, and actually feeling instead of bypassing. Maybe I was finally ready. But whatever it was, it marked the beginning of a new era. A quieter, more grounded, more brutally honest layer of awakening—where the illusions couldn’t survive and the truth started rising, fast.

This trilogy was born from that space.

In Part II, we’ll dive into nervous system regulation and how the ego, while trying to protect you, often becomes the very thing keeping you stuck. We’ll talk about how healing isn’t about avoiding fear, but making space for it, and allowing the body to catch up. In Part III, I’ll share what it feels like to be in The Void—the liminal space where your old self, identity, and programming dissolve. The in between. It is a sacred stillness before the becoming, but it’s one that can feel like death.

And in this first post, Crossing the River, I bring you to the moment where the real work begins. The moment of awakening and where the choice is made. Where your old life stands behind you, and the unknown—wild, terrifying, and beautiful—beckons you forward.

This is how it started for me. This is why we’re here.

I know spirituality and healthcare are often seen as separate worlds—one clinical, the other intangible. But I'm sharing this because, for me, spirituality has become practical. It's the missing piece no one talked about in the break rooms or during codes. Healing isn’t just physical—it’s emotional, mental, and deeply spiritual. And neuroscience is finally catching up to what ancient traditions have always known: that spiritual practices like meditation, prayer, and breathwork can literally rewire the brain, regulate the nervous system, and help shift us out of chronic survival states.

If we ignore that, we’re only treating symptoms, not the soul.

Living The Dream--Literally

I’ve always been a dreamer. Not necessarily a creative or entrepreneurial one—but a vivid dreamer. The kind of dreams that warp your day. The kind you remember a decade later and still feel the way they moved you.

Fifteen years ago, I had a dream that changed everything.

In the dream, I was locked in a cage. Restrained by a collar and chain. I was in the upstairs level of a bank—a real one, still standing 12 miles north of my childhood home. But then I unlatched the collar. I opened the cage. I walked out. Nothing was stopping me. I had the power to free myself the entire time. And I wasn’t alone. My biological mother was with me. We escaped together.

We ran until we reached the bank of a massive river. It was deep, wide, and cold. On the other side were green hills, trees, flowers, golden light—a kind of Valhalla. I looked at her and said, “We have to swim across.” She was terrified, begging me to find another way. Truth be told—I was terrified too. But I knew there was no other option.

In the river were three enormous eels. Thrashing. Circling. Gnashing teeth, waiting for us to enter the water. There was no other way across. We had to swim—and swim right through them.

I stepped in first. I looked back and said, “If we don’t do this, we don’t find our peace.”

The dream was so vivid—I remember the icy water, the panic, the fight, the strength. I kicked off the eels as I swam for my life. I felt the riverbed rise under my feet as I reached the other side—and then I woke up.

I wrote that dream down. I think about it almost every day.

For years, I didn’t know what the three eels represented. Were they people in my life? Events? Traumas? None of that ever really fit. But when I started questioning my existence, my purpose, the nature of this world—something shifted. In 2018, my curiosity cracked open a door into something deeper. Spirituality. Awakening. And a different lens.

When I first began that journey, I looked for meaning and protection in crystals, marijuana, and sometimes meditation. Crystals are beautiful—they hold and transmute energy, I believe that. Marijuana can be medicine, but for me, it often magnified my spirals into self-doubt, paranoia, or wild fits of laughter. And meditation? My mind was too loud. I either got frustrated or fell asleep.

But I never stopped talking to the Divine. To God. The Universe. Whatever you want to call it. I never stopped asking, “What is my purpose?” And “Why can’t life support me in peace, just by being alive?”

I often felt guilty for even asking. Selfish. Foolish. But the knowing wouldn’t leave me. The life I was living didn’t fit. It wasn’t it. My ego couldn’t picture anything else—but my soul could feel it. And five years later, I collapsed. You can read more about that in my other posts or the About section.

So why share this dream now?

First, we all have an instance in our life when we begin to question things. Namely, our existence. Our life. Not in a dark or depressive manner, necessarily, but we often have to acknowledge: Why are we doing this? It was in asking this—and really examining the feeling that something was off, that the life I was living did not feel right—that I began to wonder: What else could be out there for me? What other possibilities are there? What do I truly need?

Second, because this is the first of a three-part series I’ve written this week. A Trilogy of Truth, if you will. My truth. I decided to go down the path of finding the answers to these questions in my own life. I am Alice, following the rabbit down the hole into another understanding of being. A place where identity unravels, where programming is questioned, and where everything I thought was certain becomes fluid.

Crossing the River

The Hidden Battle: Calming the Nervous System Beyond Spiritual Idealism

The Void In Between

These three posts belong together. They are messy. Spiritual. Emotional. Human. This is the map of transformation I wish someone had handed me when I was drowning.

So if you’re in the thick of it—if you're staring down the river, questioning everything, maybe even fighting for your life—you’re not alone.

And maybe the monsters in the water aren’t here to destroy you. Maybe they’re here to show you that you can survive them. Maybe they’re here to teach you something. Or help you remember.

Keep swimming.

You don’t have to see the other side clearly.

You just have to decide you’re worth reaching it.