Before I begin this story, a little disclaimer: what follows is just that—a story. I’m not fabricating the events, but I am wrapping language around something that ultimately can’t be captured in words. I’m telling it from a time and place that feels distant from when it happened. My memory is imperfect, the details are fuzzy, and I invite you to hold it all lightly as you read.
I didn’t grow up as a spiritual seeker. My family wasn’t religious—we were more or less a-religious. My oldest brother, whom I’ve always adored and emulated, was incredibly passionate about logic, reason, and science. He had very strong and cynical opinions about the ignorance and horrendousness of the masses, and this greatly impacted my development. Spirituality and religion were openly mocked—not just as silly, but as harmful to humanity.
So I grew up deeply conditioned to reject anything remotely spiritual. I was actively resistant and hugely judgmental toward anything that came in a “woo-woo” package. And yet—somewhat hilariously—I also gravitated toward holistic and alternative practices. I loved yoga. I started collecting Buddha statues when I was about 15 or 16. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse was one of my favorite books in high school.
There was a quiet heart-based longing buried under all the intellectual rejection. But my mind was a brilliant and brutal taskmaster, and it always won.
I was a “good girl”—an excellent student, a rule-follower, someone who tried to make others happy. I believed every thought I had. I saw no difference between myself and my thinking mind. It was all one and the same. I didn’t question it.
Tears were weakness. Joy was fine if it was tied to accomplishment or control. And I began, very early, using food to soothe myself—sneaking it, binging it, using it to manage what I didn’t want to feel.
By my late teens and early 20s, I was deep in the diet/binge cycle. Weight Watchers, restriction, then bingeing again. I wore perfection like armor, and this pattern felt like my deepest flaw—a sign that I was broken, wrong, and if I couldn’t fix it, I would never be okay.
Then I had my son in 2016. And something in me cracked.
I’m fairly certain I had undiagnosed postpartum anxiety or depression—whatever label fits. I was overwhelmed almost all the time. I didn’t think I knew what I was doing. I was exhausted, struggling to nurse, and too paranoid to ask for help. I truly believed someone might take my baby away.
The mind ran wild with evidence of how broken I was.
I turned to food again—more intensely than ever. I ballooned to a higher weight than I was at nine months pregnant.
One day, my husband sent me a photo he’d taken of me holding our son. I opened it on my phone and immediately recognized my beautiful boy—but I had no idea who the woman holding him was.
Truly. I did not recognize myself.
Here's the photo:
That moment could have led to a total breakdown. And maybe it was a kind of breaking open. But instead of collapsing into crisis, something entirely different rose up—something deeper than thought. It wasn’t my mind speaking. It was a bubbling up of intuition. A whisper of wisdom. And it simply asked:
“What the HELL is going on here?”
But not in the usual self-critical way. It came from somewhere benevolent. It was a genuine, tender curiosity. A doorway.
In that instant, something shifted. The default mode of judgment gave way to something new.
The thoughts still came—but now they were accompanied by curiosity. A curiosity that wasn’t searching for answers so much as it was reaching underneath the questions themselves.
The mind, of course, tried to take over again.
It latched onto the familiar problem: weight. It told me I needed help. So I joined Weight Watchers again, followed the rules, lost weight, and reached my goal. But something felt different this time...
There was a new question alive in me: Could I heal the binge habit? Could I stop living as a victim to it?
I dove headfirst into self-help. I was determined to fix the problem. I joined a wonderful online community called Half Size Me, run by a woman whose story mirrored mine in many ways. She introduced me to a book: Just a Thought by Dr. Amy Johnson.
While she pulled from it selectively, I devoured the whole thing.
And something in it pinged that curiosity again.
I found my way to more of Amy’s work, and then into her online community. I didn’t agree with everything. My mind definitely resisted. But I couldn’t stop listening. I was drawn to the content—not intellectually, but instinctively.
My mind screamed warnings—This is spiritual. This is dangerous. This is wrong. But by then, I was beginning to see the nature of thought, the nature of conditioning. And I was no longer so quick to believe everything that passed through my mind.
What was being pointed to in Amy’s work was radical:
We are not our thoughts. Thoughts are stories. Experience is impermanent. The brain does what brains do. And it’s not personal.
That was a shocking idea. Because if I wasn’t my thoughts, or my feelings, or even my body… what was I?
The curiosity deepened.
Amy’s community introduced me to even deeper teachings—especially in the realm of non-duality, which I didn’t understand (and still don’t, really).
I was exposed to teachers pointing to something beyond the mind. Something before it. Something between and beneath it. I didn’t know that even existed.
I saturated myself in content: audiobooks, print books, podcasts, videos. I listened to so many voices and perspectives. I wasn't trying to get anywhere. I wasn’t trying to “awaken,” though I’m sure my ego was quietly thrilled by the idea once it heard about it.
But I was devoted. I meditated daily. I journaled, engaged in self-inquiry, sat with Buddhist koans. I practiced not as a means to an end, but because something in me needed to.
Then, one hum-drum afternoon, everything changed...
I was sitting on my couch reading a book by Lisa Cairns called For the Love of Everything. (A print book, which I rarely read; I’m an audiobook girl.)
I couldn’t tell you now what the book said. I don’t remember the words. But suddenly, in the middle of reading, I felt like I was being peeled open—like a banana. (Yes, really.)
It was as if my skin—both physical and energetic—was gently and deliberately being pulled away.
Everything I had believed to be true was gone.
I didn’t feel fear. I didn’t feel awe. I didn’t feel bewildered. I just… was.
For the first time.
There was no separate “me” in the way there had been a moment before. That identity had dissolved. What remained was spacious, still, whole.
It wasn’t dramatic. It was obvious. Like a remembering. Like, “Oh. Neat. Of course.”
And since that moment, everything and nothing has changed.
The version of “me” who lived then is not the same one speaking now—and yet there’s no separation between the two. It’s all one movement. It’s all one play.
I still have habits that pop up. I still have thoughts. I still take care of this physical body (or try to). But I know now, deeply and unshakably, that there is no one here doing any of it.
There is no “me” who awakened. Life simply became aware of itself. Or maybe it always was.
What remains is not detachment from life, but full-hearted intimacy with it. Exactly as it is.
And the knowing, not from the mind but from the marrow, that the “self” I once tried so hard to fix was never more than a beautiful, fleeting wave on the surface of something infinite.
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Coming Up in Part 2:
In the aftermath of this shift, I continue to discover how many myths and misunderstandings I believed about what awakening would be like—and I see, unsurprisingly, that these same concepts show up in so many others. Because of course they do!
In my next post, I’ll gently explore five of the most common myths I’ve encountered about spiritual awakening and how they can subtly keep us feeling stuck, striving, or unworthy of something that’s already here.