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My Journey with Chronic Fatigue and Insomnia

My insomnia began at the age of 11, during a stressful time in my childhood. One night, the pressure I'd felt to achieve a high grade in an exam at school brought about poor sleep the night prior. You can read my full story below to better understand the context and the psychological and spiritual elements involved.

Normally an extremely life-loving child, I'd felt so foggy and bad during the day of the exam that I began to dread bad sleep. This, of course, made it more difficult to sleep. But my focus was more on the fear of feeling so tired and unable to show up like I wanted. Beneath this fear was, really, a fear of inadequacy.

They say what you focus on grows, and though I couldn't name it at the time, I was chronically fatigued. For the next 30 years, no matter how much I'd slept I was never refreshed and could hardly function.

On trips and travels throughout my life I struggled to get any sleep at all: Camping, sleeping at other people's homes, hotels, AirBnBs, airplanes, and vacation resorts. In the last three years of my 30+ year-long journey with sleep and fatigue, I couldn't sleep at home either. Edibles masked the issue for almost two years, though I still never felt refreshed. They stopped working, and the journey of trying different sleeping pills began.

None worked; not in any reliable sort of way. I kept changing medication, to the point that my doctor said he could no more for me.

I was scared by how little sleep I was getting. The sensations I was feeling in my body brought me to panic. I'd already had a visit to the ER during a trip abroad, and later at home, lying awake at night and feeling as odd as I did, I had contemplated visiting the ER again. Not only did I envision all the illness that my lack of sleep would cause me in the future, but soon I began to wonder if I had a future at all. I didn't believe the body could go on much longer with as little sleep as I was getting. After over 30 years of hoping to get better and then getting worse, I was losing interest in fighting. But what not fighting meant was something I had never understood before.

At this point, it's important that we frame insomnia as what it really is: an anxiety and fear that we keep reacting to with more anxiety and fear, which interferes with our body's natural built-in ability to sleep. We cannot lose this ability or sleep drive - but we can interfere with it. This is why my approach to sleep recovery deals primarily with ending this loop of anxiety. It's a tricky path at times, but those of us who'd gone through it can shed light on the way for others. But back to my story: That I was losing interest in fighting may sound like I was about to give up on life, but what really was happening was that I was letting go of struggle. Giving up the fight meant giving up the effort to control a natural process that doesn't benefit from control. Becoming aware of where that anxiety-inducing control lies is a big part of recovery. Another big part is retraining our nervous system to feel safety.

Insomnia was like an overwhelmingly intense spiritual trip in the way it brought me to face myself. I'd begun to receive clarity regarding my entire journey with fatigue and insomnia, from the moment they began at age 11, the triggers and childhood traumas, and even (for the spirital audience), my soul's blueprint. I was moving through the fog, despite the intense discomfort. But the single most important factor in my recovery was realizing that this was an issue of anxiety and fear, not sleep.

I began relating differently to the anxiety and discomfort. Simultaneously, I'd heard recovery stories of others insomniacs, and that alone made all the difference. I never knew there were others who suffered like me. After all, no one in my close proximity could ever understand or relate to what I was going through for more than 30 years. Hearing those recovery stories melted away the loneiness and instilled hope in me when I needed it most. A huge thank you is owed to Daniel Erichsen for his pioneering work in the field of insomnia, meeting the actual needs of insomniacs where the medical field fails to (check him out on YouTube). In retrospect, I was able to find others because there was a tiny crack in my story regarding how special and mysterious my struggle was. It was a simple "what if I'm not alone in this" that allowed me to be guided to the truth that I wasn't.

With my issue now in correct framing, and boosted with hope having seen that the struggle did indeed end for others, my "sleep confidence" (as we call it in the sleep coaching world) rose. There was a lot of healing in my newfound optimism, but the main healing was in no longer reacting to my fear. I befriended my discomfort, no matter how odd and intense it felt, but stopped making it a problem that needs solving. The more I did that, the less of a problem I had -- not because I was solving it, but because the belief I had a problem was fading. The fact is no body has an issue with sleep drive. While there is so much miseducation in regards to sleep, the truth is that our bodies know how to sleep, and how much.It's the mind that, through anxiety-inducing thinking, interferes.

Having understood this fully led to healing not only in regards to fatigue and insomnia, but anxious and fearful thinking in general. My spiritual seeking dropped away, as I saw that it too was a self-perpetuating phantom issue. But it wasn't just that: I finally dared to live. Fear was not the ruler of me anymore. Of course, none of this means that it doesn't arise, only that it is not dwelled upon or made into a problem when it does, i.e. I don't react to it the same way. Similarly, I am quite comfortable with discomfort (at least relatively to my past), and thus don't avoid life like I used to. During my years with chronic fatigue and insomnia I kept my life small as I believed that I had no energy to cope and advance, only barely survive. Chronic fatigue and insomnia transformed me completely and gave me gifts and freedom that I wouldn't have otherwise acquired in this life.

What Ended My Spiritual Seeking?

From the Identity that Heals to the Identity that Lives

I explain in the full version of my story (below) that my spiritual seeking was instigated by my fatigue. Naturally, when the fatigue ceased being an issue, the spiritual seeking fell away. This, even though I was always certain that the solution would come from attaining spiritual enlightenment. What really and essentially fell away was the struggling identity. The seeker was a part of that structure.

However, this doesn't mean that truths I worked hard for on my path have lost validity. I don't disagree with all that I'd taught in the least. Rather, my expression has consistently has sharpened. It's become more focused, precise, and simple. I continue to blend empowerment, nonduality and mysticism. My main focus, which you may know as being under the name Rest Easy, is awareness of how the mind interferes in the natural flow of life, claiming problems where there are none, and generating drama and pain. As you likely know, healing for me is about shedding the identity that needs it.

Why I Share My Story and Why In Detail

Chronic Fatigue, Insomnia, Awakening and Embodiment

A major purpose in telling my story is not “See how much I suffered,” but “I can see you because I suffered." It is hugely important to me that those who come across my work, certaily those who work with me privately, feel seen. I lived in "no one can see me" for very long as you're about to see. Healing really took off when I felt seen for the first time ever, listening to someone's detailed insomnia story. This is why I decided not to minimize the details of my own struggle.

My hesitation was that I'd come off off as special, but actually, what propelled my healing forwardwas learning that I was not special. Yes, we are all beautifully unique in our own way, but specialness is different -- it separates us.

Making out struggle special often keeps it in place, placing healing out of reach. All of us in the insomnia and chronic issues space, and all who've felt life's hardships as unrelenting, have tasted more despair, fear, frustration, and loneliness than we believed we could handle. We are not alone in this, rather we share something in common.

I thought there would never be anyone who could see me, I was wrong. Loneliness is a feature of being in hell. It comes with the territory. But I'm here to tell you someone, whether myself or another, knows the dark spaces you've visited, and perhaps right now you find it hard to see a light at the end of this tunnel. Your struggle, however, isn't who you are. It doesn't have to be part of what makes you special, nor does it have to seem so mysterious that ther is no solution. It doesn't have to become an identity.

The human spirit has made it through hell and will always persevere. Others have been there, can see you, and most importantly have made it through - just like you will.

I do this work to provide the help I wish I had. I'd gone through what I did so that I can share my insights from the journey with you from a place that really sees you.

My Story is 30+ years long, so grab a cuppa and come on a journey.

The Struggle to be Free of the Struggling Identity

Excel!

In the early 90s, at the age of 11, I had a Computers class. We had a test coming up in Excel. Symbolically, it couldn’t be more perfect, because the pressure to excel caused me to have poor and little sleep the night before. I didn’t know to call it anxiety back then, but the pressure I’d placed on myself was so much that on the day of the exam I couldn’t focus, and I got a relatively bad grade.

After this day, I was afraid of not sleeping for the first time in my life. An extremely life-loving and joyful kid, my mind now could not look away from the possibility of things going wrong. I didn’t know how to get out. I didn’t know that this was something called anxiety. The whole situation was foggy, not simple and clean as I share it now, as an adult. Then, I had no language to convey my experience to those around me. Also, given the pressure I felt to perform well, I was ashamed and felt that I needed to get my act together so that I could avoid anger from adults and mockery from friends.

Context: The Events That Preceded That Night

MASCULINE IMBALANCE

Leading up to that night of poor sleep was a rather big shift in my life. I had moved back to my country of birth, Israel, after nearly 3 free and joyful years in the US (7-10 years old).

During that time I had completely forgotten my mother tongue (Hebrew) and didn’t feel much connection with my past in Israel. Returning was a culture shock. At first, I didn’t understand what people were saying when speaking to me and felt awkward for being unable to respond. Also, I needed time to adjust to their directness and the sense that people were stepping into my space.

When I left for the US, my family had split, and upon return, reunited. As other family members had quite a bit of adjusting to this transition to do themselves, absence of emotional support began to affect me. As a result of the family reunion, I all of the sudden had masculine presence around me that I did not have before. Whereas before I could fight for what I wanted, now I was afraid to. This had a path-altering, and frankly suppressive, effect on my life and spirit. My will wasn't going to be validated or listened to. Throughout the years it became almost non-existent. Spiritual approaches that vilified desire would replace the position of childhood authorities as suppressing (or denying) the self.

In addition, my life’s landscape now also included extremely competitive friends when it came to grades in school and overly serious teachers. The entire atmosphere was telling my sensitive spirit that my worth is defined by my performance. I felt that my actual self wasn’t taken seriously, and gradually substituted it for the self that would be tolerated and, possibly, approved of. At the time, I didn't know, of course, that I was parting ways with my life-loving self and heading into decades of spiritual, psychological and physical war as my struggling self.

ZERO LIFE FORCE: Astral Attacks or Self-Sabotage Due to Feeling Inadeqate?

On a more mysterious note, leading up to that difficult night before the Excel exam, I started to have what I call “depletion episodes.” These would happen from time to time during 5th and 6th grade, each episode lasting several minutes during which I was completely frozen. This wasn’t mere fatigue, it was a complete inability to respond. It was as though my entire life-force had been sucked out all at once, leaving me with only enough energy to feel the horror of my situation. I’ll never forget the panic and fear I felt the first time it happened, as I wondered if this debilitating stranglehold would last forever.

Whether you think of these episodes as astral attacks, stress and self-sabotaging psychology, or the latter making me vulnerable to the former, they didn’t happen at random times. Loss of body-control would overtake me at crucial moments that sabotaged relationships I cared about. Situations I was found in were not what they seemed, but I could not explain myself as I was too paralyzed to respond. Also, these overpowering episodes would happen right when another kid and I had started a fight (I didn’t shy away from fights as a kid, and it earned me the nickname “Danny Van Damme”). They were sabotaging my life, and I could do nothing about it. As they kept happening, however, I learned that I could fight back, or resist the stranglehold, but it took a staggering amount of effort to manifest the slightest reaction to my environment.

By the time the episodes had stopped occurring I was living in a constant state of fatigue and fog. It didn’t matter how much I’d slept during the night, I was never refreshed. Who I was felt buried underneath rubble, my confidence along with it. My heart was in one place, my body, another. My focus was on making it through events, not advancing in life.

Except for one lucky day in high-school in which I felt perfect, I can’t remember any other day that felt “right” in my body for the next 30+ years. I lived in constant hope that “tomorrow will feel like it’s supposed to” — like I felt before all of this, like my life-loving self.

The Search for Energy: Conventional Healing and Spirituality

My fatigue had led me, from the age of 11 and onwards, on a search for energy. Really, I was seeking the end of feeling off and wrong. I began my search by reading the philosphy books that were present in my household at the time, at least those I could understand. In my teenage years and with the advent of internet, I moved on to psychology, which I also studied in university later on.

During high school I did try to convey my situation a few times, and even with a larger linguistic context I still couldn't, because I didn't truly understand why I was tired all of the time no matter what. The best I could do to explain a condition that was mysterious to myself, was suspect and convey that I had depression. In truth, I'd never really lost touched with the life-loving self under the rubble, I just couldn't get him out. My occasional complaints led to a few visist with professional, which actually eneded up developing in me an “anti” attitude toward psychologists and psychiatrists. I left those few sessions feeling more anxious, and frankly, I didn’t feel much human warmth or connection in them. At the time, a little validation would have gone a long way, but I was treated as a problem to fix, a behavior I'd very much internalized and became my way of relating to myself.

Later on I’d try doctors, and quickly resolve that it was too exhausting of a road for me (until, much later, insomnia would “force me” to try again). Being young and looking healthy within a "man-up!" society meant I'd have to try several doctors to just find one that won't dismiss me, then go through a series of checks, maybe go back to therapy, etc. I needed to feel better now, not waste energy I don't have on a path that won't pay off. I also didn't never had the money dor it.

Since all of this began, at 11, my nervous system had been growing more and more sensitive and was becoming hypersensitive. Things felt overwhelming quickly. Committing to long work shifts or any nights away from home was something I avoided. I couldn't be in places that expected normal functioning of me for very long. Pretending to be functional was itself exhausting, on top of the haze and fog that never left.

At the age of 21, my state and what now appear to me as fateful life events, had pulled me into spirituality. I started practicing various kinds of meditation and strange sensations and experiences followed immediately. I had no one to share them with or to help me make sense of them. By my introduction into spirituality I’d felt so different and so alone, and being spiritual in an unspiritual environment only contributed to that.

Soon, however, travel to India and Nepal changed that. It had opened me up to connection with a spiritual group that I'd be a part of for the next several years back in Israel. With them I didn't feel judged for being spiritual, but I also questioned the authenticity of their hippie ways. We gathered often, at first around a teacher, and later on our own. During those years I'd experimented a little with LSD and other "medicine."

Waiting to Live

Living within a hidden struggle that no one else seemed to relate to at all had led to feeling that I was the only one in the entire universe experiencing what I was. By then I was so used to hiding my state that it seemed like I myself was beginning to deny it was even there.

And yet, in my 20s and 30a, it dictated every choice I made. Feeling like I could only do the bare minimum, I was never able to build a life for myself. I took shift jobs, like waiter or server, and tried to do only as many shifts as necessary to make rent. I just barely made ends meet, and just barely made it through each shift. Slowly, I stopped dating as well, thinking what I'd even have to offer someone. I did have friends, and they truly appreciated who I was but likely had no clue that the depth they saw in me was something I was pushed to as a result of profound suffering. While some with insomnia and chronic fatigue react to the experience with shutting down their lives, I felt like I never really got a chance to start mine in the first place.

I took comfort in writing songs and other creative impulses. All of my songs were about struggle and liberation from it. There was nothing else on my mind. I had - and still have - an intense love for singing, and back then had a lot to pour out lyrically. Many of my songs were full of hope and victory after a long road; some, fan an attempt to accept my unresolved situation. Music played a tremendous role in soothing my sole and keeping me in touch with the emotional side of myself, rather than going numb.

Fortune came my way and finances enabled me to record some of my songs. I found a producer, who happened to be high out of his mind at all times, and the first song we recorded together turned out very well. He was impressed enough with my material to help me put a band together to record more material and start performing. This also meant that several of the musical choices were out of my control, however, for better or worse.

Playing with the band was something I waited for all week. It was a break from my suffering, an opportunity to let out steam. The life of a rock artist seemed like one I could perhaps manage even with the extreme fatigue. Singing was the only thing that was not tiring for me. I had placed so much hope in that dream, and that hope kept me from going under. When it collapsed, I had no energy to start over again, and I started to sink.

One the bandmates, whom I will always love dearly, was quite fond of alcohol. He was against anything commercial and, with alcohol's help, sabotaged every opportunity at success that came our way. The band found its end with police in my apartment, and me locked up in the bathroom to avoid a fight, with a fractured rib.

It remains a dream to pick up many of the songs I'd written in my 20s and record them professionally.

There was nothing left to look forward to. My hope now lay solely in spiritual teachings. As I dove deeper in, I drifted even further from humanity. Even when I'd had experiences of profound liberation, my nervous sytem couldn't maintain them.

At 32 I felt that I couldn't work anymore. I was ready to be homeless, without telling anyone. As the end of 2015 approached, I let go of control. Without me knowing it, Spirit was closing out my life in Israel. With no attachment to a job, a home, and people, there wasn't anything holding me there anyway. I had no guarantees for any kind of future, but anything seemed more appealing than upholding a role in society.

Life blew a wind that lifted me out of the country, eventually landing me in the USA. I became a wanderer for a few years. Yes, sleep was horrible, and yet, while I thought of myself as someone who sleeps poorly, I never quite defined myself as a full-blown insomniac. Not yet. I just felt something was wrong with me and kept fighting the fatigue -- fighting to function. I constantly felt like I was just waiting to live. It's like something in me knew a day would come and things would get better, but I just didn't know how far that day was. (Of course, if you're struggling and reading this, you're in a very different position, and the fact you've come in contact with this already signals that your struggle is ending.)

I ended up stranded in Florida for a year and a half, and getting out of that situation forced an exceptional effort out of me. That effort led to the birth of Sun Ray.

The Quest for Truth: The Spiritual Side of the Story

I’d spoken about what was happening in my life in my 20s and 30s, but the inner aspects are quite important to my story. Spirituality had turned the fatigue from a fear and anxiey issue to a need for spiritual awakening. This kept me escaping my body.

Yet I learned things along the way that I would not have otherwise — and would not have been able to help others with later on. Without this journey I wouldn’t be talking about soul-emodiment today. I know it was part of my soul’s path, and that I came here to anchor in the new earth.

My spiritual seeking was not about feeling good fast, even after years of isolation and feeling like life is giving me no quarter. Opportunities for feel-good shortcuts did present themselves to me, and despite my exhaustion, I refused them. I didn’t want to build my life on a false structure. I knew I would have to pay for it - or go through realignment - later. So I preferred to take my time painstakingly going through all what wasn’t true until I was certain of what was. I moved slow, and my spiritual insights and maturity developed not over years, but decades.

What I was essentially trying to do was no less than to figure out the entire purpose of all of existence, if there was one, because I believed the why of it all would provide the drive I was missing. A mystical drive, albeit. And yet, in suppressive circles of nonduality I kept encountering purposelessness, which made me withdraw further from life and my own body. I became aware in my thirties that since childhood - the age of 11 - I was not fully inhabiting my body. I didn’t feel safe enough to come down to earth, literally.

A major obstacle on my path, given that I am here to help in downloading the divine into the human, was overcoming the dissociative approach of many nondual paths. I reacted to the apparent certainty with which these truths were proclaimed with doubt in my inner guidance. As fitting for the old paradigm, I'd made the voices of external figures my authorities.

I was so insistent on avoiding false conclusions, that I remained in a state of questioning and uncertainty for many years. This had a real and draining effect on me, and eventually became about survival: While “authoritative” nondual teachers responded to everything with “you don’t exist,” I knew I’d better start listening to myself — existent or not — before I lose any anchor to this world or any remnance of well-being at all. It was a mental health struggle.

Funny enough, today it is clear to me that this knowing that called for self-trust was the voice of the divine in me. You may call this voice God, the higher self, or the soul, but either way following it was filling me rather than emptying me. That doesn't mean things became easy, but that my path became true, rather than evasive. Yet throughout my years in certain nondual circles I was being gaslit that it was the voice of my ego. Even if what many of them shared was the absolute truth, I still needed what I needed at the time.

This is why I agree that while guidance can be invalvuable, following your true north is the most important. Giving myself permission to follow mine was part of my challenge. It helped me gain spiritual authority in myself, to the degree that I don't mind how strange, weird, or misunderstood a decision of mine may seem as long as it feels guided or true to my soul. Overall, so much of my path had been about permission to be my full self, both spiritually and in regards to the suppressed inner-child.

I don’t view those same nondual perspectives as wrong, however, but as unintegrated or as half the story. I even teach them, but not as stand-alone truths divorced from our everyday human experience. I can say with certainty that I didn’t come here to escape the human experience, but to open it up to divine flow. The divine human doesn’t withdraw to heaven, but brings it to earth. This is about the crowning of love as the governing force of our world, not fear.

The Twist in ther Road

But to reach that point in the story, we must fast forward through long years heartache, years of wandering, being poor and terrible living circumstances. In 2017 I found myself in a “Do or Die” situation. I was either going to lift myself up by my own bootstraps or… the other option. At the time, I was living in the middle of nowhere, in a new country, without a bank account, car, or anything at all but tobbaco, a laptop and WiFi. And, of course, no energy.

But my spirituality had given me an understanding of the principles of how reality works, and I understood how to shift my inner world or structure, believing that my outer reality would follow. While throughout the years I would give my light to others, this was the first time I truly gave it to myself. I kept on the path even when the few people who visited my reality hated that I began succeeding (just a little) and leaving their playing field. Whether they admitted it or not, they wanted my light to remain limited to them. People always felt at peace with themselves around me, seen and not judged. But this time the sun ray of light was reserved for me. It was for them to learn to give that light for themselvs, and for me to do the same. With relentless conviction and focus, I did give it to myself and it did lift me up into a more empowered reality. I began to teach the same to others, and that is how Sun Ray was born.

Now I had some degree of independence in life. I had moved into my own place, and had a car to drive for Uber as I was nurturing Sun Ray. But new challenges presented themselves, and I didn’t know that there was still a long road ahead of me. One in which I had to learn discernment and to stop over-giving and self-sacrificing. I was so concerned with the well-being of others while they were not at all concerned with mine.

Toward the end of Covid I was already a spiritual guide with a highly praised book on a more grounded and self-responsible version of nonduality, lots of successful 1:1 work, and several workshops and courses behind me. My spiritual knowledge was immense, and my own insights countless. I may not have been a high-achieving person in the worldly sense, but when it came to spirituality, I was a complete perfectionist in regards to understanding the divine correctly. As I’d mentioned, I strove for a correct understanding of the divine and our purpose on earth to provide me with the correct context for earthly living. It may sound odd, but I needed to find a good enough reason to come into my body and down to earth fully.

It was mainly a set of my own mystical experiences and the teachings of Kabbalah that helped me unite heaven and earth. While I’d already had what they call “nondual awakening,” which only distanced me more from people (”what people?” some nondualists would say…), I now was clear that my purpose was not escaping the world to the divine — but embodying it in the world. This, and not the many previous awakenings I’d had, was “the second coming.” We are all part of it. It clicked in place for me that my service was in helping the divine crown itself in Malchut, its earthly kingdom. Or queendom, as I always say, for the Shekinah is God’s transcendence immanent with embodied life.

Now it was time to come into my body. For that, I had to face my own unconscious guilt and fear — through months of night with almost no sleep at all. This, as I said earlier, is what the divine voice I’d been listening to was guiding me toward all along. I would never believe it’d involve so much pain. As if years of financial struggle, isolation, and never catching a break physically were not enough. And yet, this final battle, which at times I wasn’t even sure I’d make it through (alive, anyway) also brought about revelations regarding my entire life journey and my personal purpose ahead, beyond the general idea of embodying formless love in form. That is why I understand my arc, as well as psychological influences early in life and even past/parallel lives that I will not get into here.

Sleep was always bad, but now it was hard to come by. Luckily, edibles had become legal, and they helped me sleep for the few next years.

Then, a trip abroad came, and edibles were not legal there. I was in a completely different and far faster-paced environement, and anxiety prevented sleep. It was so severe that even medications offered by family didn’t help. One of my main difficulties was sound sensitivity. I actually wasn’t lacking in sleep drive, but it seemed that every time that I would start to relax some random sound would shock me awake. Calming back down again took long because my system was in a hyperaroused state of fight or flight. After relaxing and being awakened by sounds several times, sleep became out of reach. This would repeat every night.

The truth is, throughout my entire life during vacations I would almost never sleep, also long before edibles. Trips away from home were actually some of my most challenging and painful times of coping. The one I took in 2025 ended in the ER.

But then I was back home, in my bed, and with my edibles. Sleep returned. For a month… I could hardly believe it when the sleepless nights returned and no amount of edibles were helping. Sound senstivity was at it again. A visit to the doctor started me rotating different pills to find the ones that would work. But given how bewildered I was about my situation, wakefulness made no way for sleep. At times, I thought I wouldn’t make it. I had faced teh worst fear scenarios in my mind. My life was nothing but struggle, and one I didn’t know how to come out of, and so I questioned any reason to continue. I was always a hopeful person, and still somehow still managing my obligations and work, but I couldn’t move forward alone anymore. Life not giving me an inch for the past 30+ years had reached a climax. I called on divine support, and having developed a very powerful connection with Spirit, I did find that support. It didn’t end the struggle, but it gave me strength and love. But I needed to keep my positivity and insist on it despite circumstances — just like I’d done when Sun Ray was born. This time, it was going to lead to the birth of Rest Easy… I dug deep and found power I never knew I had — and would never know if I wasn’t put through such an intense challenge.

And what it led me to — was finding support in the physical and human level, where I needed it. Spirit’s support was not the same as finding others here on earth that had been through intense struggles like myself. I said earlier in my story that I had believed there was no one on earth experiencing what I was. That belief shattered as I heard stories of ex-insomniacs and their suffering. And with it my loneliness began shattering. I became open to community and support and receiving. It was a feminine awakening. My relationship with my body shifted, and I started to befriend it and feel appreciation and love toward it. No longer seeing it as a hindrance was a tremendous shift. When I heard how deeply others had suffered and that they made it through, hope became so strong, and something in me calmed. Sleep returned. But at the same time, I no longer needed as much. I was full in a way I hadn’t been since childhood and my 11 year old self. My life-loving self had returned, and with it so much energy. I was absolutely clear I want to be there for others in a way that no one knew how to be for me.

Both my spiritual seeking and chasing sleep have ended. A new kind of ease fills my life that I don’t think would be there without the struggle. The struggle isn’t wrong, it’s like training — training to handle the excitement and joy and love life wants to bestow upon us, with calm. It taught me to flow in a completely different way, without the pressure of getting things done. I often quote the Tao Te Ching: “Nature does not hurry, yet everything gets done.”

I’ve found a mixture of excitement and ease, passion and rest. A balance of feminine and masculine.

This, to me, is the new paradigm I am here to help usher.