These are notes from my own life — field notes, plainly, from pathless land. I can only tell you what I found while walking it, and where the ground caught me when I fell.

I put this together from my own raw material: voice notes recorded on the drive home, things whispered at three in the morning, an insight that arrived on the toilet and another that came in the pool. Nothing here was imported from somewhere else and laid over the experience. All of it grew out of the experience itself. That is its only authority — and also its only limit. It is true to one life. Yours will look nothing like it.

So why write it down at all? Because when I was lost in the middle of all this — and I was lost, for a long time, precisely because so much was happening — what I longed for wasn’t another teacher’s framework. It was one honest account of how it actually goes for a person. Not the polished version. The real one. So here is mine, offered in that spirit: in case any of the pointing helps you trust your own.

A word on what you’ll find. The first half is the story — how it moved, in order, so the shape becomes visible as a single arc. The second half is practical: the things that actually helped, that you can try in your own body. The first half is for seeing. The second is for living it.

And one promise. I won’t pretend it was all light. I’ll name the luminous and the difficult in the same breath, because that’s the truth of it — and because the central thing I learned is exactly this: all of it belongs. The radiance and the anxiety. The opening that moved a room full of people, and the ordinary frustration on a work call the next morning. The awakening, and the brother I didn’t speak to for three years. None of it is outside. That, if anything, is the whole teaching.

If you go looking for me in these pages, I hope you don’t find me. I hope you find yourself. That’s the only reason worth writing any of it down.

Let’s walk it from the beginning.

For most of my life, from the outside, it looked like I knew where I was going. I built an advertising agency in Berlin — messages, identities, brand strategy. Then I turned toward non-profit work, children in Africa. It looked good. Some of it looked noble. But underneath all of it I was doing one thing only, and it took me decades to name it: I was looking for a way to belong. Not for success. For home.

That longing is what brought me to yoga, in 2006. I wasn't looking for a practice. I was looking for the feeling I got the first time someone in that world looked at me and seemed to see me, and let me in as I was. So I stayed. I became a teacher. I opened a studio, built a community, and for a while I believed, honestly, that this was the thing. That I had arrived.

I hadn't. When the teacher I'd trusted fell, publicly, the ground went out from under me and I was a seeker again — though I'd have used a nicer word for it at the time. The truth is I became a kind of spiritual tourist. One tradition after another, one teacher after another, each of them giving me something real and none of it final. I could feel myself collecting. Studying, refining, adding to the pile. Always the sense that the thing itself was one more workshop away.

What I couldn't see yet — what took the whole rest of this story to see — is that the seeking was the problem wearing the mask of the solution. I was looking, with enormous sincerity, for something that cannot be found by looking, because it was never absent. Forty years of walking toward a place I was already standing in.

I don't say that to make the years sound wasted. They weren't. The looking had to exhaust itself. The body had to be walked through, daily, for a long time, before anything could open in it. But if I could go back and tell the man in that studio one thing, it would be this: you can stop looking for the door. You already live in the room.

Then something happened that only looks like a hinge in hindsight. And then came India. And India changed everything.

I went to India expecting nothing. Another pilgrimage, another chance to feel the dust of something sacred on my skin. But something there — the land, the teaching, the sheer proximity to people further along than me — set something in motion that I couldn't stop. Not a slow warming. Something closer to a detonation. Ancient, total, and completely uninvited.

Not long after, something I had built my whole sense of safety on gave way. I won't detail it here — it isn't only my story to tell — but the short version is that a fear I had been outrunning my entire life finally caught me. And I broke. For hours I wept, inconsolably, and I watched, in real time, the self I had so carefully constructed come apart.

And here is the strange gift in it. As it fell, I saw the ego clearly for the first time — a protector, plain and simple. It had been working so hard, for so long, to keep me from exactly this pain: the pain of not being enough, of not being loved, of being left. I felt something like tenderness for it. I told it: you did well. You brought me this far. You can rest now.

The weeping kept coming — not only about the present, but about all of it. The whole long history of feeling exiled. The ache to belong that I had never fully admitted was still alive in me. Wave after wave, sometimes for hours.

Late one night I sat in front of a fire, and something in me had simply had enough. I looked into the flames and said, with a sincerity I had never reached before: I am ready. If this is what it costs, take it. I meant it — not poetically, not as a gesture. And in that full surrender, even the fear of death loosened its grip.

I believe now that this was the real threshold. Not a vision, not a breakthrough. Just a man in front of a fire who finally stopped defending himself. Everything that came after was born from that.

What I'm about to describe happened during a session with psychedelics, and I want to be exact about the context, because the context is the teaching.

I had never taken anything before. Fifty-eight years, no marijuana, no MDMA, nothing — and forty of those years spent in daily practice, opening the body through yoga, breath, and meditation. So when it finally happened, it was not recreational and it was not casual. It was one deliberate journey, held in a spiritual setting, entered with a clear intention. Leary and Ram Dass named the two things that decide everything here: set and setting — the mindset you bring, and the container you're held in. I had both. And I had one more thing that turned out to matter as much: forty years of preparation, and a framework — the non-dual view of Shaiva Tantra — ready to recognize where I landed.

I say all of this not to recommend anything. Quite the opposite. The substance was not the cause. It was the last small key in a lock that four decades of practice had already worn smooth. Without the years, without the intention, without the tradition waiting on the other side to say this is what this is — it would have been noise. The doorway is never the point. What matters is what was on the other side, and that it turned out to have been here all along.

When a small bell rang, something opened. Not gradually. Not gently. It was as if reality collapsed into itself and I was dropped through the floor of existence, past every reference point I had. And then the falling stopped — because there was no longer a "me" left to fall.

There was only stillness. And love — not the emotion we use the word for, but something more like the fabric of everything, a soft hum underneath existence. What had been a concept in books, non-duality, was now the only thing that was. And yet it wasn't a thing. It was the complete absence of anything but this. And here is where the forty years paid for themselves: my very first thought, my first recognition, was not confusion. It was knowing. I am in the non-dual. So this is what it feels like. This is what it looks like. The framework caught me the instant I arrived.

I don't have adequate words for the middle of it, and I've made peace with that. Time was not passing. Space was not holding things apart. There was no story, no past, no future — only a shimmering now, and the unmistakable sense that this was what I had been looking for my whole life without ever knowing its name.

The important part, the part I most want to hand you, is not the vastness. It's what happened next.

Then I had to come back. And coming back was the revelation — more than the leaving had been.

I reached toward Lydia's arm, and it was the most intimate moment of my life. Not because of the gesture, but because of what it showed me: out of the unthinkable vastness of all that could have been, this exact moment had been stitched into being. This hand. This arm. This kitchen. The sheer improbability of it undid me. I understood, not with my mind but with my whole body, that nothing is random.

I had to consciously choose to return — to lower myself from the infinite back into a body called by my name. And I wanted to. Not from attachment. From something more like devotion. I stood up slowly, and every movement was astonishing. I could feel each fibre switch on as if for the first time. My foot hovered, and only when it touched the floor did the floor become solid — just there, just under that point of contact. Everything else stayed open, translucent, waiting to be met.

I walked to a glass of water on the table as if crossing dimensions. When my fingers found it, the glass was firm only where I touched it. I put a finger in the water and it wasn't cold, wasn't wet — it was alive, meeting me for the first time. Light came through the window in threads of gold. And I stood there weeping again, not from grief this time, but from the unbearable ordinariness of it all being sacred.

That's the thing I carried out. Not the cosmos. The water glass. The proof that holiness wasn't somewhere else — it was in the most ordinary object in the room, the moment I actually arrived to meet it.

I spent the days after asking the obvious question: was any of that real, or just chemistry? I had never taken a substance before in over fifty years, and now I was supposed to believe I had fallen into God? The mind wanted an explanation. The body already knew. It had been more real than anything I'd known.

What convinced me wasn't an argument. It was that it kept happening — quieter, gentler, without anything added. The openings didn't need the fireworks anymore. They started arriving on their own, and each time they pointed at something less cosmic and more personal.

One of them reconciled my parents. They divorced when I was six, and both are gone now. For years, in churches, I had lit two candles for them and always set them apart — one for her, one for him, never together. In one of these quieter openings, something in me finally let me place them side by side. A small thing. A lifetime of weight in it.

That became the pattern, and it's the part I most trust. The real movement of all this wasn't upward, into bigger and grander states. It was inward and homeward — toward the ordinary wounds, the people I'd loved imperfectly, the candles that could finally touch. Awakening, it turned out, wasn't taking me somewhere else. It was walking me back through my own life, turning on the lights.

After the visions came the real labour, and almost nobody warns you about this part. The openings are dramatic. What follows is not. It's cellular, slow, unglamorous, and it's where the actual living happens.

I began working much more deliberately with the body — with a somatic and trauma-informed approach, alongside my partner, who carries real depth in that work. Parts work. Inner-child work. Bilateral methods for reaching the places insight can't touch. Hundreds of hours, much of it alone, much of it not blissful at all. Old grief moving out through involuntary trembling. Contractions in the chest untying themselves like knots in warm water. Crying without a story attached. And behind all of it, something steady that simply watched, and held.

There was a turning point in an embodiment class in Berlin — a slow flow up through the body — where something vast and ancient finally cracked open in my chest. I lay on the floor and wept and shook and made sounds I'd have been ashamed of a year earlier. Not from trauma this time. From release. As if something that had been waiting generations finally found a crack in the vessel and poured through.

And what was left, when it cleared, wasn't emptiness. It was room. A new rhythm in the body. This is the part I'd underline for anyone in the middle of their own version: the openings are grace, but the integration is the path. The nervous system has to be met where it lives. No amount of insight reaches the frozen places directly. They have to be felt, slowly, in the body, on ordinary days. That slow, unspectacular work is not the boring part before the real thing. It is the real thing.

What remained, after all of it, wasn't an experience. It was a shift in where I stand.

I stopped feeling separate from the world — not as a belief, but in practice. Standing in our home one evening, I wasn't "in" the room anymore. I was it. The walls, the chairs, my own arms — all equal, all arising from the same place. No centre point. No one behind my eyes watching. Just watching. It happened again at the airport, on the street, in the gym: the whole visual field lighting up, awareness landing on everything without preference. The couch touched me as much as I touched it.

But I want to be careful here, because this is exactly where it can turn into spiritual theatre. So let me tell you the least impressive version, which is also the truest.

For a while I tried to reproduce the big states. I'd sit in meditation, or in the gym, and reach for the expansion I'd tasted — and it wouldn't come. Nothing. Then the moment I stopped wanting it, when I'd given up and gotten on with the day, it would quietly arrive on its own. That taught me more than any vision: you cannot chase this. The reaching is the veil.

There were small, almost funny signs — nothing mystical. Just a body less braced against life.

And the deepest change is the plainest one. For fifty years I needed love — needed belonging, reassurance, proof I was enough. Somewhere in all this, that need quietly turned around. Now there's mostly just the wish to share it. That's the whole healing, if I had to name it. Not enlightenment. Just the aching neediness loosening its grip.

These days I wake around three most mornings — not from anxiety, from rhythm. I practice. I chant a little, move a little, let the body do what it wants. And then I go back to the quiet warmth of ordinary life. No fireworks. That's not the disappointment. That's the point. The whole vast journey, and where it lands you is an ordinary Tuesday afternoon — the sauna, the light through the window, nothing needing to happen at all — and it's enough. It was always enough. You were always home.

So — why write any of this down? Not because I arrived somewhere you haven't. Because for a long time I was lost, and the one thing I couldn't find was a single honest account of how it actually goes. Here's mine, in case it saves you some of the looking. Not to convince you of anything. Just to say: what you're looking for isn't missing. I'd bet my life on it. I nearly did.

When it hit me two years ago, it overran my whole system. Lucky me: I had forty years of yoga in my pockets, twenty years of teacher trainings, twenty years of meditation and nondual teachings. Lucky me — I had the framework in my hands when I fell.

I recognized instantly where I had landed. Nothing left. No body, no self, no concept, no thoughts, no words — let alone an ego. No-thing-ness of the finest. Just this all-complete direct experience which is unnamable — so complete and all-encompassing, time- and spaceless, embedding and caring and loving. Put a million more of those words to it, and it comes not even close.

Seeing this — and a body moving through all of it I used to call Kai — took me two years to make sense of. The scale of it seemed impossible and paradoxical at once.

It happened so rapidly and so completely that my nervous system and my body are still catching up, with new experiences every week.

I recorded those in almost 2,000 conversations — knowing that this is territory so complex and so individual that no singular practice or method can create any of it. I started to put them into categories which I now call faculties — capacities of a human being.

As I said: it comes by Grace. Still, as human beings we can support and prepare — through the teachings of living traditions, through the regulation of the nervous system, through entering different doors of recognition. With the Luminous Atlas, I created — and keep creating — practices and exercises.

After two years I find myself freer in many areas of life — from old conditioning, from the constant chatter and judgment of the mind. It left me with a childlike feeling of curiosity and playfulness. With a lot of laughter and joy throughout the day. You could say it took away many of the mind-made aspects of suffering.

Creativity, ever more caring relationships, direct intimacy with reality, with beauty and aliveness — all of it has increased.

And I would lie if I did not stress the work: through all kinds of tensions, through the traumata in the sticking depths of the human psyche and body. Many tears had to drop. Many roars of despair had to be screamed.

What left my system is like the iceberg under the tip. A felt relief of lifetimes.

What I came to understand: I was working in many layers of the human body-mind system. For practicing those layers you will find here eight faculties — your capacities for liberation and awakening.