A Long Journey Home

In 2011, my life changed and the Universe set me on a path I could only see in faraway dreams, hidden beneath the anxieties I carried since before I could remember. Before such dreams manifested, the nightmares appeared real. In a pivotal turning point of crisis, after years of longstanding mental and emotional strife, I fell ill and did not recover. The onset felt like I had the flu (or worse) every single day, and yet a part of me knew it was deeper than that. My whole body seemed to be shutting down. The chronically anxious and depressed yet high functioning nervous system I relied upon to engage with life’s demands was now sending a clear signal - it refused to operate under the same stressful conditions, the increasingly apparent lack of self-care and self-love, and forced me to consider a new path I would not have otherwise allowed. I could not sleep nor could I function awake, my brain felt offline. Unable to think or to cry, the pain and fatigue felt like being lost in the undercurrent of a giant wave with no understanding of the overwhelming forces swirling around me and within me. I was panicked, despairing, and in anguish. After a spree of appointments searching for answers from the traditional medical community, I was diagnosed with “chronic fatigue syndrome,” a label used when others cannot be found. Did I have every symptom listed for this condition? Yes. Did it provide answers to my search? No. I tried everything the traditional medical and psychological communities had to offer: medications, psychotherapy, nutrition and diet, rigorous exercise, and much, much more. I sought out healers far and wide across the landscape of traditional and alternative practices. I desperately wished for answers to my suffering and went many nights, months, and years wondering if they would ever come.

I sought all sorts of external energy boosts and pain relief to stimulate me or get me through the day, but not until I was able to recognize the powerful energy lying dormant inside me - you might call it kundalini, prana, chi, or simply, the life force that animates all things - was my journey able to take shape. My mind-body (or body-mind) experience was a representation of the deeper emotional wounds and subconscious limiting beliefs I carried about myself, others, and the world: the conditioning from past experience, ancestry, and beyond, otherwise known as trauma, which was constricting and holding hostage the energetic life force of my being and the pathway to a healthy, safe, and abundant life.

Throughout my journey, I took bits and pieces from the healers I encountered across the spectrum of science and spiritual arts. As a grad student in clinical psychology, I learned from a psychoanalytic, attachment-oriented, and trauma-informed perspective about the influence of unconscious forces and early relational experiences manifested through a uniquely wired nervous system to produce an infinite array of physical, emotional, and mental symptoms of distress. A part of me had always known that a label like “CFS,” let alone any other complex medical or psychiatric diagnosis, could not truly unearth the roots of my suffering, but I was not yet ready to journey deeper within and discover the answers I sought. My intuition - the inner guidance we all possess beyond the conscious thinking mind - had not yet received permission to speak louder than my conditioned patterns of fear and self-doubt. The pain felt connected to everything I had ever suffered from in my life. It was physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual suffering. Only when I was open to learn from my inner experience rather than run from it was I able to glimpse what my life could become.

Over time, I began recognizing a deeper truth of who I am beyond the fear conditioning and feelings of unworthiness that had dictated all prior thinking and decision making. I felt an expanded awareness of my mind-body experience becoming more and more intensely available in every moment, providing me choices beyond what seemed to be a pre-determined, helpless fate. I began to sense I was not broken nor did I need to be fixed in the ultimate sense, though I was in desperate need of radical change and the courage to let the pieces of my life fall where they may.

Like scar tissue, I had built up years of protection against the vulnerability of my sacred heart, the place inside holding my deepest pain and my deepest love, both of which felt just out of reach. When we hide our true nature, we stay hidden from the world and attract people, places, and things that cannot truly see or empower us because they are magnetized by the character we are playing: the charade, the performance. Instead, they light up the very things we dislike about ourselves and continuously invite us to wake up and recognize what we are no longer willing to tolerate or put on display.

For all of my life, I had been unable to relate to my inner world in a way that did not blame, shame, or punish myself for being who I was, which prevented a deeper opportunity to know myself, care for myself, and lean into the gifts I possessed just for being me. The physical ailments were a simple bodily message wrapped in a seemingly unsolvable puzzle to finally release the tight fist of grasping at a perfect personality and surrender to something greater, a freedom to be exactly me and honor myself every step of the way.

I often say I would have preferred a nicely-worded letter from the universe to consider a new path, but I likely would have thrown that shit in the trash and kept on beating myself into submission.

The journey did not end there. As I began to explore a new frontier in understanding the self, a new world began to open both inside and around me, one that I could not make sense of logically or reasonably, but which made itself known through the awakened voice of intuition and the synchronicities that life brings to our doorstep when we are ready for them. We may call this world the world of Spirit, or any name of your choosing, and loosely define it as that which exists alongside the physical world, but cannot be proven by a purely “evidence-based,” rational mind, only felt and revealed when we surrender to the great mystery. Suddenly, people, places, and things came streaming into view to validate the inner realities I always sensed were true but just out of reach. Just like the deep vulnerabilities in my own heart I could not touch, I became privy to a “higher” guidance leading me to new landscapes of understanding in myself and others.

At this point, I began to collect puzzle pieces from an even wider away of informational and experiential sources and form my own puzzle. This puzzle could not be comprehended solely in the conscious thinking mind but involved a greater universal intelligence that seemed to flow through the body like a river. The life force that was previously constricted like a dam now began to flow unimpeded, opening me to grander mental, emotional, and energetic experiences beyond belief, beyond what my conscious mind could understand but which a higher, more expanded mind always knew to be true. I began to feel a deeper knowing guiding me home.

Specifically, forms of clairvoyance, mediumship, trance channeling, and Spirit guidance came online in striking and often overwhelming fashion. I spent days, weeks, and months listening to all that was streaming in, never wanting to disconnect from this new light bulb of inner authority. However, life is about balance and these states often left me discombobulated, ungrounded, and emotionally triggered in the very body I had set out to heal. The past few years have been spent rigorously grounding this information and integrating my experience to find BALANCE, something we all inherently seek. Balance between my clinical foundations and spiritual expansion, balance between the possibilities of the universe and the wisdom of the Earth, balance between intuition and physical reality, and balance between mind and body.

To this day, I continue to be led home by this intuitive guidance. The guidance moves through me, available at all times, but also requiring a deep sense of attunement and commitment to self. Naturally, the body-mind mechanism gets scared, gets triggered, goes “offline,” temporarily forgets its truth, and plays out old, familiar patterns. But each day, I wake up ready to trust again, to practice walking the path being revealed one step at at a time, to surrender to the great mystery, and to continue the journey home. It is the journey of the Soul, for lack of a better word, that which existed before this particular mind-body mechanism was born and that which will continue on after it dies. As has been said by many spiritual teachers, only fear dies.

The story continues with many colorful experiences in the form of physical healings, heart openings, altered states, psychic capacities, and an ongoing, ever-revealing connection to the Source of it all, of which we are all a part. One identity that needed to be reformulated was that of my clinical self. I had stumbled into the right arena, but had not yet found the right stage to fully present myself to the world and, therefore, allow the true expansion and integration of who I am to serve both personally and professionally. More importantly, the wall that hid my heart and all its love began to dissolve, leading me to a deeper connection with myself, others, and the world. I began to feel whole within myself and trust the path of awakening that was always there waiting to be discovered.

If your journey looks or feels at all like mine, or my words light up something inside you calling you to investigate further, you may be in the right place at the right time. There are no coincidences, only divine synchronicities. I am here to walk the path of true freedom, no matter the cost. All are welcome.

Once you create space for all that has been blocking access to who you truly are and who you are meant to be, you will no longer feel victim to the belief systems and emotion states pervading your view, and will learn how to unlock the greatest potential of this uniquely wired nervous system you have chosen in this life. Your emotions can change, your beliefs can change, and your nervous system can be tuned like the finest instrument it truly is. The years of outdated symptoms, labels, and treatments, which may have felt comforting in their initial clarity but later became forms of imprisonment, are ready to be released in service of a deeper understanding. It is time to heed the call of a very important, yet simple message you have been receiving and avoiding all your life, until now:

We are our own greatest healers. We may simply need the right guidance to access the healing power within and allow it to flow freely once again. Just like the flower that grows naturally toward the sun, there is a natural intelligence that moves toward healing, if we can only step back to honor the divinely placed obstacles in its way – the shadows keeping us from the light.

This is my life’s work joy – my gift to you.

In Spirit,

Daniel