These are not teachings.
They are reflections from lived experience — from the middle of life as it actually unfolds.
I am here with you
There are times when things become less clear than they used to be.
When what once felt certain begins to loosen, and what replaces it has not yet fully formed.
Confusion, quiet change, pressure, stillness, reorientation — these are not problems to solve here. They are simply part of what can be present.
If you are in something like that, you are not separate from it, and you are not alone in it.
Nothing here asks you to become anything.
Nothing here requires agreement or belief.
There is no method, no direction, no path being offered.
We simply slow things down a little, and stay close to what is actually here.
Take what is useful. Leave what is not.
I will walk with you in this, in language only — not to take you somewhere, but to keep things simple while you are here.
We are here together.
What is the Middle of Awakening?
The “Messy Middle of Awakening”
What Is the Middle of Awakening?
Many people arrive here without meaning to.
Something has shifted.
Old ways of seeing no longer hold, but nothing solid has replaced them yet.
Life still looks the same on the outside, yet inside it can feel unfamiliar, unsettled, or strangely empty.
You may feel more sensitive than before.
Less certain.
Less interested in the things that once motivated you.
At times, even disconnected from the person you thought you were.
This is often the part that no one talks about.
After insight.
After clarity.
After the sense that something true has been seen.
And yet daily life does not suddenly make sense.
Relationships feel different.
Meaning feels thinner.
You may wonder if you have gone backwards, or if something has gone wrong.
Nothing has gone wrong.
There is a phase many people pass through when awakening begins to touch ordinary life.
It can be confusing, disorienting, and frequently misunderstood.
Not because it is unusual, but because it does not fit the stories we are told about spiritual change.
This page exists to quietly name that place —
and to offer orientation, not instruction.
You don’t need to fix yourself.
You don’t need to move forward.
You don’t need to become anything.
You may simply need to understand where you are.
Awakening Without performance.
Enough-ness
There is a version of spiritual life that looks impressive from the outside — the right vocabulary, the right practices, the right teachers, the right posts. A carefully constructed identity built around being someone who is awakening.
It is easy to mistake this for the real thing. It can feel meaningful. It can even feel profound. And because it is often surrounded by others doing the same thing, it rarely gets questioned. The whole environment can reinforce it.
But underneath, something quieter often knows the difference.
Genuine spiritual depth rarely announces itself. It doesn't require an audience. It tends to move in the opposite direction — toward simplicity, toward honesty, toward a willingness to be ordinary and even unremarkable. The more real the awakening, the less there seems to be to perform.
This matters because performance spirituality doesn't just waste time. It actively gets in the way. It keeps attention fixed on the image rather than the reality. It turns the spiritual path into another project of the very self it claims to be transcending. And it can go on for years — decades, even — while genuine depth remains just out of reach.
The uncomfortable truth is that most spiritual seeking contains some element of performance. That isn't a reason for shame. It is simply worth seeing clearly.
Because the moment it is seen — really seen, without flinching — something shifts. The constructed identity becomes a little less convincing. The need to appear spiritual loosens its grip.
What remains is quieter. Less decorated. And considerably more real.
The Pain of Spiritual working is REAL.
The Opening words to the the mini-book…
"Do you feel you’ve woken up in a life that doesn’t quite fit the map you were given? You’re not alone.
So many people are currently sensing a quiet, persistent awakening—the feeling that the world as they’ve known it isn’t fully their world anymore. I’ve seen it in friends, clients, and in my own reflection.
Conversations with friends and loved ones, that once felt simple, now drift, and a quieter inner weather begins to shape the days. I realise now, that this isn’t a sign of failure. It’s a signal of evolution.
My soul, and now your soul is illuminating a path towards a truer alignment: a life where deepest values, and yet ordinary responsibilities can coexist, softly and truthfully.
At first this feels like a crisis, as your world isn’t the same as it now appears to be. But, this isn’t a crisis to endure; it’s an invitation to awaken. If you’re reading this, you’re not broken. You have started a journey that you’re no longer in control of… you don’t have the control of your life you once had....."
Read on….
Why Spiritual seeking
becomes exhausting
Too much doing not enough Being
There is a particular kind of tiredness that serious spiritual seekers know well. It isn't the tiredness of laziness or disengagement. It is the exhaustion of someone who has been trying very hard for a very long time — and still doesn't feel like they have arrived anywhere solid.
Another book. Another teacher. Another retreat, practice, or framework that promises clarity and delivers, at best, temporary relief. The seeking itself becomes compulsive. And underneath the compulsion is a quiet but persistent anxiety that without continued effort, something will be lost — or that the one true method, the missing piece, is just around the next corner.
This is one of the more honest things that can be said about the spiritual path: seeking, if it goes unexamined, becomes its own form of suffering. Not because the impulse is wrong — the original longing that starts someone searching is usually genuine and worth honouring — but because the seeking mind, left unchecked, doesn't know how to stop. It mistakes movement for progress. It confuses accumulation with depth.
The seeker collects experiences, insights, and frameworks the way others collect possessions. And just like possessions, none of it quite satisfies.
The irony is that exhaustion itself is often the turning point. When the energy for continued searching finally runs out, something unexpected can happen. The noise quietens. The grasping loosens. There is simply nowhere left to go and nothing left to try. And what was being sought — some quality of stillness, of presence, of simply being at peace with what is — turns out to have been available all along, underneath the seeking rather than at the end of it.
Rest is not a detour from the spiritual path. For many people, it is the path itself.
Why Awakening
can feel so destabilising
The Pain of disorientation
Ask most people what spiritual awakening looks like and they will describe something luminous. A sudden clarity. A dissolving of separation. Peace that passes understanding. And those experiences are real — they happen, and they matter deeply to the people who have them.
What gets spoken about far less is what can follow.
For many people, the period after an initial spiritual opening is not peaceful at all. It is disorienting. The frameworks that used to make sense of life — identity, purpose, relationships, beliefs about who one is and what the world is — begin to feel unstable. Things that once provided meaning quietly stop working. And the experiences that started everything, the glimpses of something vast and real, can become frustratingly difficult to access or sustain.
This is not failure. It is not a sign that the awakening was false, or that something has gone irreparably wrong. It is, in fact, a well-recognised pattern in genuine spiritual change — one that has been described across traditions and centuries, even if modern spiritual culture rarely names it clearly.
The reason awakening can feel destabilising is straightforward: it is destabilising. Something real is shifting. Long-held structures of identity, meaning, and perception are being reorganised at a level deeper than the thinking mind can easily follow. That process is not always graceful. It is not always comfortable. And it almost never runs to the timeline the mind would prefer.
What makes the difference, for most people moving through this, is not more spiritual experience. It is orientation. The ability to understand what is happening, to place it in a larger context, and to find enough steadiness to remain present with it rather than fighting it or running from it.
Awakening asked something of you when it arrived. The middle asks for something different — patience, grounding, and the willingness to trust a process that doesn't always make immediate sense.
When thinking stops
explaining everything.
No thought is a benefit
There are periods in life where thinking no longer provides the same sense of clarity it once did.
Thought still appears, but it feels less authoritative.
Less like explanation, more like commentary.
This can be unsettling at first, because thinking is often relied upon to organise experience into something understandable.
When that function softens, there is a tendency to try harder to think clearly, to refine, to analyse, to resolve.
But the resolution may not come through improved thinking.
It may come through noticing that experience is already occurring prior to explanation.
Sensations arise.
Emotions arise.
Perception happens.
And thinking arrives after, attempting to describe what is already present.
When this is seen directly, thinking does not disappear, but it loses its role as primary interpreter.
What remains is not confusion, but a simpler relationship to what is happening.
Less need for explanation.
More allowance for directness.
Not everything needs to be understood in order to be lived.
Being Spiritual gives pressure
The Pressure to Become More Aware
In many spiritual and personal development spaces, there is a quiet assumption that awareness should continuously increase, deepen, or refine itself.
That something in you is on its way toward a better or more complete version of awareness.
This creates a subtle internal pressure.
Even when the language is gentle, there can be a background feeling of:
I should be clearer than this
I should be more present than this
I should be further along than this
But awareness is not a project moving toward completion.
What is already present does not need to become more present.
What is already happening does not need to be upgraded.
The pressure to evolve awareness can sometimes obscure the simplicity of noticing what is already here.
Without comparison, experience is just experience.
Without a timeline, presence is not behind or ahead.
The sense of “not enough awareness” is often not a perception problem.
It is a comparison problem.
And comparison always adds weight to something that is already complete in its immediacy.
Life Does Not Ask for Constant Interpretation
The joy of not knowing
There is a quiet way in which life happens without needing to be explained.
Most moments do not arrive with meaning attached.
Meaning is often added afterwards, through interpretation.
This is not wrong or unnecessary. It is simply how the mind works.
But there is a difference between interpretation being helpful, and interpretation becoming constant.
When everything is interpreted, nothing is simply allowed to be.
A walk becomes a statement about progress.
A feeling becomes a signal of development.
A thought becomes evidence of where one is in a process.
Over time, this can create a sense that life must always be translated into something meaningful in order to be valid.
But much of life does not require translation.
It can be met directly, without being turned into a message.
There is a simplicity in allowing experience to remain unlabelled for longer.
Not everything needs to become a story.
Sometimes what is here is simply what is here.
And that is enough for it to be lived.
Reflections from life - the way life moves by the side of who we are
What Stage Am I At?
Do you ever wonder what stage you're at — in meditation, spiritual understanding, self growth?
The moment you ask that question you create a before and after. And then a destination.
Eventually I realised that naming the stage wouldn't have helped. What was needed was patience, not positioning. Acceptance, not desire.
I have a friend who constantly criticises his mediumship — it's never good enough, always something that could be better. But that's not the point.
The moment he — and you — accepts being here, everything relaxes. And then it naturally improves.
Spirituality is not a race. It's a presence. What do you think?
Going Backwards or Moving Forward?
I've noticed that when things start to feel messy — when life stops going the way I thought it would — my first instinct is to assume I've gone backwards.
Over time I've learned that this moment is often when something real is trying to integrate.
Not a mistake. Just something honest arriving.
The Emotion Is There. But It Isn't Mine.
Do you find that every emotion feels like a problem to solve?
When something rises now, I try to stay close enough to feel it — without pushing it away. And that seems to change everything.
I can stand beside the emotion without letting it in. I don't reject it. I don't claim it.
It's there. But it isn't mine.
That small distinction has made more difference to my inner life than almost anything else I've learned.
You Pick What Drains You or Lifts You
Earlier this year I chose not to be pulled into the way a narcissistic family member had decided to live. It meant choosing what was real for me — even when the other way looked easier.
I felt bad for a while. All my life I had tried to hold my family together. Choosing differently felt like splitting it apart.
But what I discovered was this: by saying your behaviour isn't for me, I didn't break the family. I set myself — and them — free.
The choice between what drains you and what lifts you isn't really a choice at all. It's a decision about how you're going to live.
Facing the pain, I decided it didn't define me. It held me for a moment — and then I chose freedom.
The first step was the hardest. The second was liberating.
On Losing It
There were periods — more than a few — where I thought I had lost it completely.
Looking back, I see I hadn't lost anything. I had simply stopped holding myself together in the old ways. And that felt unfamiliar.
I was used to having clear boundaries. But they fell away when they were no longer needed.
We make slow, subtle progress that we don't always see. The growth is happening. It's just quieter than we expected.
The Only Memory That Mattered
Before attending a funeral recently I used to think that real stability meant not being affected by things.
What I discovered was that real stability allows you to be fully touched — without losing yourself.
The grief came. I was completely okay. I sat with people in real pain and remained present. Not unaffected — present.
I read the eulogy. And I finished by saying that I had a hundred memories of Howard to draw upon — but there was only one that truly mattered.
The day I realised I loved Howard. And Howard loved me.
Have what's important first. Everything else after that.
What Meditation Actually Feels Like
I wrote this today after sitting:
When I close my eyes and finally let go, a quiet hum of joy ripples through me — like warm sunlight hitting skin. The mental noise stops by itself. I feel light, centred, completely at home in my own body.
And then everything feels exactly as it should be.
That's it. No drama. No revelation. Just that.
Love Based, Not Fear Based
I'm doing some work with an organisation that has lost its way. The committee is full of protective egos and the organisation has become stagnant — a boundary of fear built around something that no longer exists.
Building a wall around nothing makes no sense.
Unless you fill it with love. And that's the difference.
Not protective but inclusive. Not empty but full. Not fear based but love based.
True relationships work the same way. The ones that last aren't held together by obligation or fear — they're held together because people simply choose to keep loving.
The Shortcut
This weekend the to-do list was growing faster than I could work through it. People needing support, tasks piling up, stress levels quietly rising.
And then I realised — I can't do all of this. It's too much.
So I took the shortcut.
I connected to essence and let spirit do the work. And once connected, the peace was too good to ignore. Everything became clearer. Decisions became easier and more natural. Nothing felt too hard.
You have the most beautiful resource available to you — one that asks nothing and gives everything.
What Are You Grateful For?
I'm grateful for the strangers who became friends. The souls who trusted me with their healing. The journeys we've walked together.
The honesty shared. The breakthroughs witnessed. The tears and the laughter. The devotion to truth. The mutual growth. The sacred conversations.
The spirit that guided us. And the deep bond we now share.
Gratitude isn't a practice for me. It's what's left when everything else quietens down.
What I Didn't Expect Awakening To Feel Like
I used to believe awakening would make me calmer, softer, more resolved.
What I didn't expect was how exposed I would feel at times. How much tenderness was underneath what I once thought was strength.
Just seeing that allowed the tenderness to become the strength.
The realisation that nothing could actually hurt me meant I could finally see that everything was already perfect. Nothing was broken. It never had been.
The Insecurity Doesn't Need Answers. It Needs Gentleness.
In the early days of developing my mediumship I remember desperately wanting reassurance that what I was experiencing was real.
Eventually I saw that the need for reassurance wasn't about the mediumship at all. It was about the insecurity underneath — and insecurity doesn't need answers. It needs gentleness.
It's okay not to know. It's okay to feel lost, or to need support, or to want someone to tell you you're on the right track.
Be kind to yourself. Self acceptance isn't weakness. It's the whole point..
Insight Isn't A Performance Standard
Have you noticed how quickly you can turn a genuine insight into pressure to perform?
Even something true can become heavy when you expect yourself to live it perfectly every single day.
We don't get it right all the time. At the beginning, maybe only ten percent of the time. If we even remember to practice.
Falling over isn't the problem. Deciding to go again is the only option.