- How my story may benefit you
- The declaration I made to end suffering
- First awakening
- A second awakening
- An ego release / knowing true nature
- Divine Voice as a key part of my path
- Dreamscapes and my awakening
- My collision with the infinite (a past experience)
HOW MY STORY MAY BENEFIT YOU:
The following story is an overview of my awakening journey to no suffering as I’ve been able to summarize it in hindsight up to this point. My journey continues on, and so I hope you find the sharing of my process so far helpful as you continue to walk and piece together your own journey. I find learning about other people’s awakening journeys to be very helpful for me, which is one reason why I’m sharing my own. Reading about my personal process may also help you to determine whether or not I’m a good fit to facilitate some energy sessions for you.
Your awakening is unique to you and will never follow the same path as mine or anyone else’s. It’s also worth mentioning here that anything fearful or emotionally challenging that comes through along this process, as you’ll read about in my process, is purely subjective to the one going through it, and all fear comes from the mind and the illusionary separate self anyway, and so is not a necessary step but can occur to varying degrees as illusions are seen for what they are. Also, worth noting, fear, grief and existential thoughts, if they arise, are always temporary, but also worth it! 🙂
THE DECLARATION I MADE TO END SUFFERING:
I had a well-rounded childhood with loving parents and a sense of stability, and never experienced any substantial traumas in my life, with the exception of the myriad of conditioned emotional patterns and belief programs that we all come into this plane plugged into via familial / ancestral inheritance and general human collective conditioning (see the tabs called Dualistic System and Astral Realm for more info on this). I did, however, come in with an immense amount of fear attached to the body and mind, which manifested as early childhood fear of speaking and OCD, social anxiety, multiple phobias, and an inherent feeling of depression and dread being in the world regardless of circumstance or environment. And so, as I white-knuckled life on the inside, while remaining to appear quite well-adjusted on the outside, my intense mental and emotional suffering continued to snowball from my first day of school at age 5 all the way to the last conventional career I worked in that ended in my 40’s.
Throughout all of it, I was always a highly energetically sensitive person and deeply spiritual. As a young adult in my 20’s, already delving deeply into spiritual and mystical subjects and fascinated by the multitude of world religious doctrines and their histories, I found myself making a clear and distinct declaration to myself one day as I watched horrendous footage of animal cruelty on a TV program. The pain, grief and helplessness I felt seeing it was unbearable, and so it was in that moment that I declared to become enlightened, as the Buddha taught, as my sole life purpose in order to free myself and help all beings become free from suffering. I didn’t know exactly what that entailed at the time or how to achieve this goal, and I never did end up taking up a Buddhist or traditional meditation path, but I knew deep down that it was my destiny and the only thing that mattered in life.
FIRST AWAKENING:
In 2015, I had an initial awakening to the illusory nature of the mind as I read the first two chapters of Michael Singer’s book The Untethered Soul. In a moment, I saw the voice in my head for what it was, and it was a heartening, yet daunting discovery because the voice felt overwhelming at the time. I also didn’t have any idea that anything significant had happened or changed, but immediately after this shift into disidentification with the voice in my head and most thoughts (a process that then carried on over a couple of months in watching the voice), life became distinctly happier.
This shift immediately proceeded to unfold over the next seven years through two new, but interconnected pathways. The first was the opening of deeper intuition and synchronous connection to the benign universe in place of the barrage of negative thoughts that used to rule my internal experience, and this created a magical quality to life that still continues. I felt the interconnection of myself with everything else, both in matter and spirit, and this had given me a new, more fascinated outlook on life, removing the dread and depression from its prior primary position, as all that now began to go through a deep releasing process through the second pathway. This second path was the exponential decrease in suffering as I intuitively and spontaneously began neutralizing reactivity and dissolving painful conditioning on my own over this seven-year period with full dedication to deep energetic exploration through psychic meditative journeying into my unconscious, psyche and energy field for repair, clearing and insight. A natural inner dialogue with what I’ve called Divine Voice was also a big part of this whole process, which I’ve written about in detail further down.
I also undertook extensive ayahuasca purge work and other body work during this period, and three years in found myself in what’s popularly known as a ‘twin flame’ dynamic, which is a distinct kind of relationship with the sole purpose of accelerating shadow work and ego dissolution toward self-realization (see my link on Twin Flame if this topic interests you). Ego and emotional detachment was also a big part of this process, particularly through the ayahuasca work, where I went deep into the heart, mind and body and saw through and dissolved egoic /dualistic attachments to relationships (parental, pets, partner and even to my life itself), thus gaining a great capacity to experience loss and separation, as well as to be with intense emotion, like fear and grief, while remaining grounded and equanimous.
A SECOND AWAKENING:
At the end of this seven-year period, I found myself at a distinct juncture where I realized that there just wasn’t much left to neutralize or empty out, and that what remained was an underlying sense of peace, lightness and freedom, although accompanied by a restlessness that I couldn’t quite grasp. I was surprised that even ayahuasca hadn’t been able to get down to this deep level of body restlessness, and so I just noticed it for the time being and let it be. Also, by this stage, and for quite a while prior actually, I had no interest left in the world, conventional culture or the societal matrix, and had even stopped doing any kind of work or job at all by this point. And so, as my place in the outer world had mostly disappeared, my inner world was still guiding me ever deeper into nature, silence, solitude, clarity and further down the rabbit hole of the self-realization process.
“The mind is by nature restless. Begin liberating it from its restlessness; give it peace, make it free from distractions, train it to look inward, and make all this a habit. This is done by ignoring the external world and removing the obstacles to peace of mind.” Ramana Maharshi
At the very end of this seventh year, shortly after the recognition that I had come to some kind of end of my external world and deep clearing phase, I experienced a sudden gut-level wake-up call one day, which turned out to be a complete 360 degree life shift that kind of felt like getting hit by a train. It happened upon discovering a non-duality video for the first time on YouTube (up to that point I had never heard of the term non-duality). In a split-second moment, I knew that I, as a personal self, was well into a seeming dying process already and that there was absolutely nothing that could be done to stop it. In one stark moment I knew that ALL OF IT was going. The illusion of a separate me was dissolving very clearly, and it was jarring, to say the least.
This sudden life turn came with a deep and visceral existential grief, mixed with some fear, that would last anywhere from a few moments to a few hours or even a day sometimes, as I sat with the stark realization that surrendering was no longer a choice that I used to believe I had. This new phase then jump-started another whole year of even deeper diving into the loss of personal identities, including deeply internalized spiritual beliefs, such as seeing through the belief of an existence of God and a soul, which are dual ideas. This brought up even more grief around the illusion of a sense of spiritual security that the personal me had always clung to for a feeling of comfort and safety.
There were also some spontaneous fears of death and feelings of existential ‘aloneness’ that came up, and then a sudden onset of kundalini clearing that opened like an energetic tidal wave two months after this second wake-up call occurred. (The kundalini movement has remained, but at a subtler level now.) Within the first couple of weeks of this kundalini wave onset (a time of heightened sight), a lot was happening on all levels, but something that struck me the most was that I could now directly see that nothing is ever being achieved in the way that I believed it was. I literally saw myself as a character playing out a play for one, going through motions and taking itself so much more seriously than it is, while in actuality it’s never been achieving anything at all, not even awakening! It was almost humorous, but also a bit shocking. Shortly after, I went deeply into the present where the world and my mind fell into a full and complete silence that I had never experienced before, and I began to feel like I was disappearing.
This cessation experience, however, didn’t come to a completion at that time because there was more nervous system work to be done (which I see now in hindsight), and I feel it’s important to share this because I think it’s a fairly common occurrence that can happen when there hasn’t been enough nervous system clearing to maintain a more grounded and clear being in the body and mind that has the capacity for deep stage realization – something I learned from an amazing awakening mentor, Christina Guimond. And so, a few months later I found myself fully immersed in deeper clearing and calming of the nervous system while doing TRE® (Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises), which is what eventually cleared the restlessness from the body. By this point, now eight years after my initial awakening, states like boredom, restlessness, reactivity, and uneasiness being in the outer world or within the body were reduced substantially. It was definitely a deep and poignant ego death year, I would call it, but there was still more to come.
AN EGO RELEASE / KNOWING TRUE NATURE:
A much welcomed shift then occurred at the beginning of the ninth year, which was a shift that I now consider to be the completion of the initial awakening I had in 2015. In that first awakening eight years prior, thoughts were dis-identified with enough to allow for accessibility into deep, solid shadow and reactivity work — but without the knowledge that it was the “I” thought that was the “culprit,” I ended up needing to learn about this through good quality awakening teachings in order to discover that this was a major piece of the puzzle that was missing. I owe most of this very important learning to the vast array of free YouTube teachings and online retreats by Angelo DiLullo of Simply Always Awake that I delved into for over a year, giving me the fundamental knowledge about my process that I never had access to before — a step that was absolutely necessary to help me go even further into clarification of truth, yet at the same time spurring on a powerfully strong seeking drive to ‘experience a shift’. This uncontrollable seeking energy experienced drove me into despair and confusion, but also gave me the determination to keep going, and it paid off 🙂
Ironically, while watching another teacher, David Bingham, guiding someone through their doubt and frustration with awakening on a video posted on his YouTube channel (“Nina Hakamies in conversation with David Bingham. Part 3 of 3”), I came to realize that all that was required was the dropping of that strong doubt belief (a thought that said ‘I wasn’t awake yet because I’ve never had a shift’), which did happen, and the result was a subtle, but distinct energetic unwinding that instantly resulted in a permanent experience of freedom within the recognition of my true identity as imperturbable and eternal. It was a release of a lifetime but with a very non-dramatic unfolding and landing, aside from a 3-day battle of the mind that ensued the next day until it finally exhausted both itself and my body. My experience was then noticed to be much lighter and more balanced, and still is. In fact, you can also watch a personal session I had with David Bingham on his YouTube channel that happened shortly after this mind release shift. It’s called “Lisa Malcolm in conversation with David Bingham.” I also attribute my session with David as the encouragement needed to get this website back online and resume my energy sessions again 🙂
Exactly ten days later, as I was reading the chapter “The Fetters 4 and 5, Desire and Ill Will” in Christiane Michelberger’s book called Finding Awakening, it took two days of reading and following along with her instruction to have another subtle but distinct shift, which was the recognition that there was no reactor, and thus, reactions to anything, desired or averse to, didn’t have a ground and so were not only not needed, but not based on anything real. Six weeks later, I instantly and completely dropped a lifelong severe sugar addiction, with no side effects experienced or will power needed. This I attribute to the significant amount of stability gained from eight years of equanimity work, and this work does still continue, although it feels to be more of a fine-tuning experience at this stage. Any emotion or reaction to anything now, which is far less frequent, fizzles out automatically within seconds and is forgotten almost immediately.
The self-realization rabbit hole does continue daily for me, going ever deeper into the subtleties of the veils of duality, and so I hope you’ve benefited from reading about my process so far :-). I use conventional wording, such as I, you and my to make this communication flow with ease and understanding, but it is helpful to drop pronouns within your personal inner work or practice for those still coming to the realization of the fact that there is no I, you or fundamental ownership. Continue reading below about how divine voice has played a major role in my awakening process. If you are highly intuitive or divine feminine-embodied, you may relate to this!
DIVINE VOICE AS A KEY PART OF MY PATH:
Backtracking now to a very important aspect of my initial seven-year phase of deep energetic work was the development of what I call ‘Divine Voice’. Divine Voice introduced itself to me years before my first awakening but didn’t fully activate until after that shift. In that initial introduction, it presented to me as a female who was a best friend of mine in some ancient lifetime somewhere, but I didn’t fully grasp the meaning or details of this, I just felt the familiarity and importance of her timeless presence in my life. After my first awakening, the voice began to open up gradually and strengthened with practice and intuitive prompting but was not a ‘spirit guide’ in the typical new-age sense. Instead, it was an inner guidance that felt like a higher extension of me, yet distinguished from the regular dialogues in my mind, that I tapped into naturally and could hear as an often subtle, always benevolent and comforting, but definitely distinct voice and uplifting presence within.
The voice could be dialogued with like a regular conversation if the balance was just right, or sometimes it would just break through with a short message out of the blue. However, it would only communicate when it was pertinent, i.e. it didn’t cater to my own demands to talk to it. When I tried that, I would either get nothing, or garbled ideas mixed up with regular mind chatter. It was clear that Divine Voice had a purpose and didn’t stray from that purpose, and its purpose wasn’t always something I had knowledge of. This voice knew things I needed to do before I did and so it would bring it through at only the right time – not a minute earlier or later – and I learned to respect this if I didn’t want to become frustrated. So, in this way, Divine Voice was my biggest source of learning to surrender to divine will. When I could detect a visual form associated with the voice, it was in the form of a sister, best friend or sometimes more like a blend, like an identical twin, but the visual form was not always as detectable as the voice, and it was prone to change at different stages.
Divine voice was the inner teacher and comforting support that helped me through all my energetic explorations and plant ceremony purge work, but most importantly, it was always leading me in the preparation of my body and energy field for self-realization and liberation (a path always still in progress). It also helped me through some very tough inner experiences, including two full, but separate, nights of overwhelming sudden onsets of trembling fear of death (strictly on a psychological level), as well as when kundalini awakened for the first time, which was another intense experience that lasted a continuous 3 days and nights before the intensity began to gradually ease. Divine Voice was always my beacon and comfort during these times and has not only been guiding me through this awakening process but leading it. At this stage, however, Divine Voice is not what it used to be. There are no more instructions that come in, per se, just much subtler streams of general intuition that come through and with a lot less frequency. She did let me know in advance that she would be gone one day (perhaps blend back into the one), and when I heard this, I experienced some grief around the loss of her.
A self-realization author that I have personally resonated with is Tess Hughes. In listening to a couple of her interviews online and reading her book This Above All, I discovered that she had undergone a similar awakening process to me, one that was deeply intuitive. While listening to a podcast interview with her, I was shocked to hear her describe her experiences with what she called “Universal Mother” – an obvious comparison to Divine Voice that had been guiding me in my own process. And more surprising than that, she explained how she was being prepared for her awakening and was also presented with an inner agreement to make by Universal Mother in which she was given the choice to fully self-realize. She compared this agreement to the Catholic Annunciation – an announcement to Mary of Jesus’s birth by the angel Gabriel – but Tess’s annunciation was about the universe’s birth of her.
I had this exact experience with Divine Voice one month prior to my kundalini opening. I was in deep communion with her one day and was led to a place where she presented me with a choice to make. This choice, she said, was to take up the path of my ancestors. I thought this was referring to bloodline ancestors and so it didn’t feel like anything extraordinary, but then she showed me people before me who have been enlightened, among whom were representations of Jesus and the Buddha but also many more I didn’t recognize. Fear suddenly arose in the mind and body as she handed me a cup of “their blood” to drink (metaphorically of course). I hesitated for a few minutes before I did because I was in a bit of shock, and I knew that once I made that agreement the process would continue to unfold as ‘thy will not my will’. I already had this particular reality blast a month prior, but this felt like it took it to an even more solidifying level, which it did because there was a caveat that went with this agreement that had something to do with handing myself over to be ‘public’ about my awakening – and that certainly drums up fear in someone who has had to work through severe social anxiety for decades like I have.
Perhaps all of this sounds a bit dramatic for some, but it’s the way the process has been going for me, and this is a process regardless of what you may hear from other styles of teaching. Each human undergoes their own process of awakening to awareness from the relevant to the absolute (i.e. the absolute awakening through the person) – whether it’s purely unconscious or fully conscious to them. Other soul experiences, i.e. other lives, do play a role in this process as well, and I base this view on my own remembrance of these in my own experience. I briefly mention one such memory in my video session with David Bingham referenced above.
This really wasn’t a choice, though, in the literal sense, at least I don’t think. On the one hand, when I was presented with the choice to take the cup, I was strongly compelled from within to move forward with it despite feeling fear. I do feel that I could have turned it away at that time, but it was obvious to me that doing that would have created internal friction that would have been difficult to uphold. And so, I don’t believe this was a choice, per se, but more of a presented gift of knowledge that this process was unfolding. But, perhaps on some level there was choice to prolong or put off self-realization. I’m not entirely sure because I went ahead and drank the cup 🙂
DREAMSCAPES AND MY AWAKENING:
Dreamscapes and dreams have also been a key part of my awakening process in which I’ve been guided along in sleep, much like Divine Voice had guided me in the waking state. In fact, the two worked together in preparing me for my awakening, sometimes even giving me foreshadows of certain perceptual filters being dropped while in dreams, kind of like a having a chance to ‘get used to’ certain transitions before they happen in waking life. And I believe that this is because I’ve held so much fear in the body throughout my life, which is actually why I was driven to work with so much ayahuasca – to face down my fears over and over again.
But many of these little guidance dreams are not regular dreams at all, they’re more like in-sleep higher interaction sessions with higher awareness for the purpose of preparation, processing and learning. They’re like trainings or meetings going on between me and higher awareness of me where there is no dream symbolism or characters, just unseen telepathic conversations happening where I learn or see something in advance that’s coming down the pipe for me. I believe it’s possible that everyone has the potential for these kinds of dreamscapes, but not everyone has the waking state remembrance of them. You must have well developed intuition to generate this kind of expanded awareness, and all of that occurs if that’s where your natural interest, inclination and, therefore, attention lies. I’ve been going deeply within for decades, and doing it just for the sheer enjoyment of it, and I’m sure many of you have too. Also, worth mentioning, these higher, more telepathic dreamscapes (as well as lower astral realm interactions outside of regular dreams), only came much more clear for me after connecting with the twin flame dynamic in my life that I mentioned above, and this is because the twin flame energy activates an expansion in psychic awareness.
MY COLLISION WITH THE INFINITE:
Backtracking even further now, at the age of 11 I had my first “collision with the infinite” – a term taken from the book called Collision with the Infinite by Suzanne Segal. I didn’t know what these episodic collisions were at the time; I just knew that what seemed to occur was the secure sense of I / me that was always assumed to be positioned centrally in my head somewhere suddenly disappeared from its location and moved into a much wider location that engulfed the whole room and beyond, but yet also seemed to peer from deeper toward the back of my body, or even behind it in a sense, but it never felt like I/it went outside the body. It felt like I disappeared from within the body but yet was nowhere to be found. People in the environment, as well as the environment itself and my own body parts that I could see, like my hands, also suddenly changed in my perception – now appearing more 2D, unreal and not connected to or belonging to me.
Underlying these collisions, however, was a subtle unexplainable knowing that they were okay somehow, even though they were definitely uncomfortable and no one could provide any explanation for them. These collisions lasted until age 35, which was when I had a collision that had taken a turn different from all the others. Instead of the anxiety and disorientation that was normally triggered by them, none of that happened and what was there instead was a purely euphoric timeless feeling. After that, they never came through in sharply distinct episodes again, but rather, blended into my regular daily awareness while remaining much more subtle in what feels like the background.
I’m sharing this experience because I now see these happenings as having been glimpses of reality breaking through the otherwise illusionary nature of the mass collective mind hallucination we call “the world.” I also believe that many people have these collisions but may believe they are pathological in origin, such as the labels depersonalization or derealization tend to assume; particularly, through the link made between DP/DR and anxiety. Suzanne Segal also followed this assumption for many years before coming to the understanding that perhaps they were something more spiritually aligned. From my perspective, anxiety that accompanies these sudden sharp perceptual shifts are directly caused from a mind reaction that doesn’t like what it’s unfamiliar with, and on an even more covert level, this mind reaction is a thought program from the dualistic realm. Anxiety absolutely does not have to accompany these collisions at all once they are known to be very natural and, in fact, more real than conventional “reality” 🙂