Book Review: The Body is a Doorway

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The Body is a Doorway by Sophie Strand leads to the doorstep of self-empowerment. It starts with the recognition that the body is rich. Intricate, nature-based systems give us insight to the piece of the puzzle and through that, provide us a way to experience the nectar of interconnectedness that heals our existential longing, if only for a fleeting moment. There’s no need to give our individual power away to narratives of health that are fundamentally based on lack. The Earth is rich.  Our embodiment and beingness is already wealthy in riches regardless of physical status.

The originality of Sophie’s prose reads like a botanist’s journal had a love affair with a professor of postcolonial literature. What results is a perfectly sculpted body of work that takes a steady walk through a diverse ecosystem of healing potential. What struck me most is Sophie’s ability to give bitter medicine in the form of sweet milk. This memoir is autotheory, a format of feminist critique where the normative gaze is woven between information and story. It’s “power through knowledge” and Sophie successfully distances herself from masculine logic and meaning-making. (Fournier 2021) Sophie does bring a queerness to her experience, especially in the forest. The flora and fauna and death-rebirth ecosystem need nothing but themselves to keep on going. By extension, humans need reasons and things beyond themselves. 

The Body is a Doorway gives me a lasting love affair, generous, considering it started as a one-night stand (an evening of bed rotting and reading till 3am and suddenly, the book was done).  This book was an oblique take-down of health “wellness” as a concept and reframed it and self care and disability as differently-abled values. So generous.

Sophie refers so often to mythology, that one must wonder if she has coffee with all the cast of characters or if they are her marathon partners. She talks in myth as fluently and with integrity as a professor. In referring to Penelope’s myth, Sophie weaves and unweaves a death shroud– Death is never finished. This perpetuates the pain of being, which for Sophie seems to lie in the nebulous unknowing of what will set her body into a flare: her stomach to vomit or her nerves to freeze like a deer in headlights. Never escaping, she befriends the value of never-ending. The only story that ends here is her ability to escape pain. For Sophie, and for her readers, the light isn’t at the end of the tunnel; it’s already inside for you to step through.

Dragon Cairn on Overlook Mountain (Anastasia’s photo, June 2017)

There’s no trite mention of transcendence. And I know well the healing power of the Catskills (especially Overlook Mountain, mentioned several times in the book)–the right meadow or trailhead or glimpse of golden light at sunset will put you in an altered state. A deep connection to land can activate the transpersonal self–a wide, expansive, or field-like conception of self (Fox, 2017)–and this experience is duly and beautifully conveyed here: 

I ducked under a fringe of ivy trailing down from a stone entryway that had once held a door. Someone had camped on the mountain, setting a fire in the blown-out remains of a hearth. Peppery drafts of ash and pollen streaked through the roofless ballroom. Spiderwebs laced up the windows, long and glassless. Peppermint starbursts of mountain laurel hovered like pink clouds at the top of a staircase that led into open air. (Strand, p. 70)

Can you feel it? Can you be there? Can you step through the empty door or fly through the open window? I work with clients who explore the psycho-spiritual experience. In the years of this work, we do a lot of imagining. The scene  quoted above from The Body is a Doorway, is an invitation that I might use. Step out of your day to day. Step out of normal. Step out of the self that is limited by what you can only see around you. Can you expand into the smell of peppermint starbursts or feel the draft of ash? Where does this imagining take you?

I’ve encountered those who spiritually bypass, unable to drop into the embodiment of their bodies, unable to feel the pain or reaction to any experience. They often say, “It’s the Universe’s plan” or “Just go with the flow.” Dangerous detours. And there are others I’ve encountered who frequent a psychotherapist’s office, without resolve or meaningful progress in reframing their painful inner experience. To both of these individuals I’d recommend Sophie’s book because she does neither. She is able to find stable ground and then she digs deeper, just looking. Sometimes she encounters miniscule but alive ecosystems that remind her of life, and this is what brings her back, despite the spiritual and physical discomfort. A kaleidoscope of poetic descriptions awaits those who dare to drop into Sophie’s body of work. With Sophie, you’re in for a circular experience, a term artist Zara Kand used in a review of an unrelated Surrealist art show referring to the way the artist “negotiated the gallery space… how my mind moved from examination to inquiry to insight and back again.” The surreality of Sophie’s work provides a similar landscape to narrate.

The normative narrative around health is the problem. Remember how I said I found The Body to be an oblique critique? Sophie effectively asks, “Is this a health problem?” When the body doesn’t work as it should, when it generates pain, adverse reaction to life, hemorrhaging function for an embodied and leashed-form of incarnation, of course—there’s a health problem. This is what Hygeia, the goddess of health, would be invoked for. When it’s a question of comfort, Venus is the main character. The journey must go below and beyond the workings of the mainstream narrative of white, cis embodiment. Sophie’s self care and allowing herself to be in flow with the nonhuman world–the spores, the plants, the animals, the collective unconscious–affords her the wealth of disability. There’s so much that lives between the cracks. Broken, breaking, crack, renew, recalibrate, regenerate. The circular experience of weaving a never-ending story in the fabric of ripped, patched, spun. The Body is a Doorway is an excellent manual for your own journey of being and becoming.

 

Email your local library. Have them order a copy. Once you read it, return it, put it back on the shelf like you were planting a seed. Let others discover their power through this work, too.

 

What I was referring to…

Fournier, L. (2002). Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism. MIT Press.
Fox, W. (1990). Transpersonal ecology: “Psychologizing” ecophilosophy. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 22(1), 59–96.
Kand, Z. (2024, September 10). A Circular Experience: “With the Moon Under Our Feet” at the Hansell Gallery. https://dispatchesmag.com/review-with-the-moon-under-our-feet/

Strand, S. (2025). The Body is a Doorway: A Memoir. Running Press.

The writer behind The Conversation

Hi there! Thanks for reading. I’m a writer, editor, and transpersonal guide who explores psychospiritual growth.

I write my own story. In that light, my writing is service–the stories I share about my own psychospiritual growth, the process of self exploration & self transformation, and the way culture affects us are my gift to the world.

I share the knowledge and processes that anyone can implement to achieve inner peace. This is a transpersonal point of view and embodied transformation through creative writing.

And, I explore the deep stuff–what we do when we recall past life experiences; how we engage the archetypal resonance of embodied experience; when to call the “weird stuff” you’re experiencing a spiritual awakening and when to call a mental healthcare practitioner.

  • If you are a mental healthcare professional who wants to integrate transpersonal psychology into your practice, go here 
  • If you are a mid-life woman who wants to hold your own, let teach you about managing your light in a dark world here

BTW: I love tattoos and coffee.

***

Curious about seeing the world and the mind as multidimensional? What does that mean for science?

  • Check out Public Parapsychology. Learn more about what psi is and why psi belongs to everyone. Join other seekers and citizen scientists who are exploring parapsychological phenomena for the benefit of understanding the spiritual nature of the material world
  • Also consider joining The Parapsychological Association. Support an organization of professional scientists and independent researchers who are pushing the boundaries of our current understanding of the mind. Programming and publications include excellent resources for mental healthcare practitioners and healers who support individuals with transpersonal experiences

Psychospiritual Growth: Chiron and writing through the wounded healer

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Chiron is an easy energetic fantasy. Think about a romanticized version of someone that is damaged or troubled or haunted by past experiences, but this person brings insight and depth and with these, heals others through the very nature of their presence. The wounds have value. But Chiron as an archetype is difficult to embody and address in a group. No one wants to hear about your suffering, let alone be part of it, right? Arriving at the point of “healed,” where the wounds finally start shining their diamonds from the rough.

I’m at another turn of the spiral right now, and Chiron is still here. He’s the centaur in the room. I wrote about my experiences earlier in my journey with Chiron in another post. Different time, different place.

 

So let’s go deeper for a higher vibration.

The Story of Chiron

Chiron is both–animal and (wo)man. Chiron is never of this world but is yet in this world. His place in Greek mythology is solidified with being wounded by a poisoned arrow, and being immortal suffers through this pain for eternity. Ironically, he was unable to heal himself, but became a gifted teacher and healer of others. The gift of Chiron, is that we may become powerful healers for others who we share the same wound with. To end his own suffering, he gives up his immortality for Prometheus’s freedom. If you’re familiar with Prometheus’ myth, he was imprisoned and tortured for eternity by the Gods for giving fire and enlightenment to man. Chiron, even in death, served humanity. His ability to die, leave his body that was in anguish from a wound caused by an errant arrow. What couldn’t kill him made him in agony until he became human. 

In astrology, we take the metaphor that Chiron (the energy of) is the wounded healer. We say that where the wound is, the light gets in. Chiron speaks to the energy of emotional wounds acquired now or across time. Each moment is a good moment to embrace embodiment. This is how to recover from trauma.

This is where “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” turns into “what doesn’t kill you should have killed you, at least one version of you.” 

Breaking patterns

Death is what causes us to break a pattern. Christine Simmonds-Moore writes about the nature of reality as fractals in Paranormal Ruptures. She says that fractals (mathematical patterns or meta-patterns, patterns of patterns) are a good way to understand parapsychological experiences. (2023). When we consider that the nature of reality is light and information (information transfer), and the body is a material mediator of that spiritual nature, then looking at patterns can help the logical function of the mind to organize what may seem vast and overwhelming. The nature of fractals can be an organizing framework for phenomena that are pathologized and neglected. (Moore, 2023)

Healing is natural. Depression, the kaleidoscope of emotional energy within it, manifestations of bodily dis-ease, lapses into liminal states, and dysregulated engagement with shared reality are healthy during the healing process. 

My personality had, for years, been based on those terms. A constellation of traumatic events as a young child who experienced trauma, and later, my body’s tendency toward dysregulation due to atypical neurology, led me to disassociate easily. I had a vivid imagination, one that worked in overdrive to compensate for the world I didn’t understand how to survive in. A growing intellectual body is providing support for this idea. A child seeks to avoid the pain (traumatic experience) and thoughts, perceptions, and memories are put behind a sort of barrier. (2025, Wade) Disassociate tendencies provide a way to function in the world, that is, have a sense of self. (2025, Wade) The disinhibitory pattern has been called cognitive disorganization. It’s associated with positive traits such as a high capacity for creativity because of new and unique associations that can be made. (2025, Wade) In other words, my Chironic nature contributed to the sickness, even though it was also helping me. My creative thinking was breaking the pattern and pattern breaking. The poison and the medicine are one in the same.

Transformation through writing

So I wrote. If you’ve read my work, you can immediately pick up on how introspective it is. In autofiction, I rarely interact with people around me. I meticulously characterize the sensory world. I have to write what I see around me to come back to this reality:

In my office: a hand-painted bench that my younger brother and I painted; our initials on it; our paint splotches in random drops. The cardboard carpet piece is half the size of the room, with random thoughts, and scribbles, and doodles. The scrap of red carpet on the other side, with lines of white and yellow… the floor length purple curtains that now, in the weak morning light, are casting a soft purple glow. A pink glittery hula hoop suspended from the ceiling with white ribbon and pink shower curtain hooks. The 3-foot-tall fake sunflower that was given to me by my older brother when I was 18, an item that has travelled the world and back—currently tied to black metal shelves with sparkly pipe cleaners: green, silver, blue.

 

In my fiction, I offer fantasy worlds. My current work in progress (a novella tentatively called High Voltage) offers an alternative reality, a mirror of the current world, in which the most fucked up around IRL are actually the ones to create safe spaces. Here’s how I made the world safe; written to mirror what I wanted to see in the world: 

 

Mithras brought his hands together, bowed, and said, “Step back,” to everyone else. A ball of light floated up out of the ground, then broke into four, which floated out horizontally above Orestes. Mithras laid his pack down and kneeled next to the man, placed his hands at the bottom of the spine. A whirring sound began. Orestes’ frame vibrated and lifted from the dirt, shimmering and floating and twisting and turning into air, then fell back down to the ground, the sudden levitation over. The body started to twitch. Hands reached up, the legs kicked. Torso and legs stood and folded over. The balls of energy disappeared into Orestes. The air held still. His body radiated.

 

It’s the magical world that I fell into that made me heal. It’s where superpowers–mind-mind communication, encounters with magical beings, floating in the liminal space between lives, encounters with body and ego death–that free the spirit. Wade (2025) notes that functional dissociation is encouraged in cultures that value spiritual and anomalous experiences. 

Trauma and the difficulties of life can break the mind, cause disassociation, and linger. Traumatic childhood. Creative adult, right? It’s common knowledge in psychology that childhood experiences shape our adulthood experiences. That’s part of being human. 

And yet, we are also souls, and we bring into this incarnation lifetimes of those childhoods. The pain that accompanies the soul is existential. 

My pain has been just being on Earth.

If existential pain is pathologized, we’re invoking Chiron–the pattern of emotional wounding carried across lifetimes. The undying pain. 

“Who became my power, my essence?” Ask yourself that question. And listen –that person– is the doorway to step through. Become that person. Who is the Prometheus in you that Chiron will sacrifice his life for? How can you die in one way, to let your humanity shine through in another? This is a way of activating Chironic energy. This can be a series of tests that lead to portals where you ask, “Should I step through here?” and let the old version of you die. 

The wound is the medicine–and likewise, the repetitive stories. 

Patterns over incarnation is the karma we bring. It’s the repetition of actions. When we’re stuck in the pain, the patterns can’t break. For me, it’s being in the world. A dizzying influx of sounds and sight impressions. Existing as a single person in an inhuman government. A civilization so large that I am annihilated in small existence. Identifying the patterns, seeing where they break, is where your light comes in.

Light increases light. Sharing here, and as always, as my divine mission to bring my own journey to words to the world as medicine.

A text from a student who received a box of all my autofiction books.

 

What I was referring to…

Cameron, K and Wade, J. (2025) Childhood trauma and the emergence of precognitive abilities: a correlational study. International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Advance Publication Archive. 108. https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/advance-archive/108

Simmonds-Moore, C. (2023). Parapsychological Experiences as a Fractalized System. In Paranormal Ruptures. essay, Beyond the Fray.

 

The writer behind The Conversation

Hi there! Thanks for reading. I’m a writer, editor, and transpersonal guide who explores psychospiritual growth.

I write my own story. In that light, my writing is service–the stories I share about my own psychospiritual growth, the process of self exploration & self transformation, and the way culture affects us are my gift to the world.

I share the knowledge and processes that anyone can implement to achieve inner peace. This is a transpersonal point of view and embodied transformation through creative writing.

And, I explore the deep stuff–what we do when we recall past life experiences; how we engage the archetypal resonance of embodied experience; when to call the “weird stuff” you’re experiencing a spiritual awakening and when to call a mental healthcare practitioner.

  • If you are a mental healthcare professional who wants to integrate transpersonal psychology into your practice, go here 
  • If you are a mid-life woman who wants to hold your own, let teach you about managing your light in a dark world here

BTW: I love tattoos and coffee.

***

Curious about seeing the world and the mind as multidimensional? What does that mean for science?

  • Check out Public Parapsychology. Learn more about what psi is and why psi belongs to everyone. Join other seekers and citizen scientists who are exploring parapsychological phenomena for the benefit of understanding the spiritual nature of the material world
  • Also consider joining The Parapsychological Association. Support an organization of professional scientists and independent researchers who are pushing the boundaries of our current understanding of the mind. Programming and publications include excellent resources for mental healthcare practitioners and healers who support individuals with transpersonal experiences

Psychospiritual Growth: A download on the road

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Years ago, I felt the call to go west. When I did, I spent a lot of time in Joshua Tree, California. It was a place of pilgrimage for psychospiritual growth. It was the place that my inner fire ignited into a much bigger version of what had been. Before Joshua Tree, I had whiffs of a creative spark. During that time in Joshua Tree, I had more intuitive knowing of my path of service being the way that I use language and writing to transform my inner experience so I can be aligned with my soul and live in inner peace, and help others embark on such a journey of transformation for themselves. But I couldn’t rush the process. Back then, I wasn’t strong enough mentally or emotionally to bring that vision fully to life. This trip was different.

 

Another call came right before the fall equinox in September 2023: Go west. This time I knew there would be another fanning of flames, although I didn’t know what it would look like.

It’s a feeling inside that is more like a soft pull in a certain direction versus an alarm bell ringing for a fire, although a fire inside had been lit. It had been years since I visited Joshua Tree–years marred by the pandemic, busy-ness, and sickness. Those years were also full: learning, growing, shedding, and stoking the inner fire that had re-ignited in the high desert. The inner call felt like a celebratory march to the place that was burned into my heart.

I left Alabama and navigated west along route 20, then route 10. I hugged the Mexican border and watched fields of oil rigs in the Permian Basin in Texas turn into swaths of solitary Sonoran desert dotted with saguaro cactus. I drove through White Sands, New Mexico, marveled at the dunes of gypsum, and turned north. My destination that night was a small campground I was familiar with just south of Roswell, New Mexico.

Connecting in Roswell, New Mexico

One of the reasons that I enjoy road trips is the long, solitary days of driving. I am in my head as much as I am in my heart. The manic motion of the passing landscape coupled with the vacuum-like quality of being sealed inside my truck (windows up, air conditioning on) feels like a sensory deprivation tank of a very constructed nature. As I drove, I was able to go into my mental reel of memories of the times that I felt disempowered: each time a lover had put me into a box of what I was worth as a reflection of his emotional availability; each time I was bullied by a family member for pursuing intellectual adventures in lieu of their family-oriented small-town life, a mental lack of availability to imagine anyone could do anything different than what they were doing. Reviewing the mental reel is part of my process of opening up inner space. I feel obliged to witness the memories that still have a charge to them and therefore power over me. Each time it gets a little bit easier to let go. This time, after years of doing this, I felt free. An overwhelming sense of love emerged from my being. The love was for myself and it came with pride that I had never let those people hold me back.

I arrived at Bottomless Lake State Park in New Mexico (just south of Roswell) in the dark. I couldn’t get my bearings because there was absolutely no light around me. I knew I was driving near the campground, so I simply pulled over to a gravel area. I didn’t know if I was on a site. My dog joined me as I slid into the back seat of my pickup truck. There was enough room for us to lay out and comfortably sleep. I kept the windows shut because the mosquitos were out in droves. Effectively, we were still in a vacuum.

Despite being tired from a day of driving and thinking, I found that I couldn’t sleep. As I lay in the dark of the truck cab, I took stock of what was happening: the moonlight outside illuminated everything with a silver glow, but it was disorienting because everything looked silver. The shadows ate the objects outside. The temperature was comfortable and I laid on my blanket for extra cushioning. I had a sensation of motion—something that often lingers with me after long days on the road—but I noticed it wasn’t only in my feet and legs. I felt a racy sensation through my arms and chest, too. I noticed my heart was beating faster than normal.

I kept turning over.

My dog got up from the bench seat and jumped back onto the center console. She turned to face me and I noticed, in the silver moonlight, that her ears were flicking up and down. She watched me with her curious and inquisitive eyes.
That’s how I knew something was happening.

Coco and I somewhere in New Mexico

My dog, Coco, is a trained service dog. Years ago, at the beginning of my recovery from bipolar disorder, she was reactive to fluctuations in mood and perceptual anomalies before I had any idea of the onset. When a hallucination was about to start, or when a manic swing was going to erupt, Coco would forcefully act upon me so that I would stop what I was doing and sit down to ground. If I was driving, she would jump into my lap, press her paws into my face, and wedge her butt on the steering wheel so it wouldn’t turn.

But this wasn’t one of those times.

Because she wasn’t reacting, I could safely assume this was not a manifestation of my disorder—it was something else.

My heart started to race faster as my eyes rolled back into my head, which felt like something had cracked across the top of it. I heard a high-pitched whistle. I breathed into the intense “download.”

Downloads are a term I’ve heard used by people who work with high vibrational energy and entities. Some folx who channel light language, an innocuous script and potent healing energy from the collective mind, say this is part of the 5D (dimensional) shift. If someone is activated energetically, they might receive downloads that affect their energetic field. In more mundane terms, this is the process of moving stuck energy–thoughts, emotions, memories that inhibit a clear connection to the inner self so that the higher vibrational energy can be experienced. The inner peace and soul alignment is on the other  side of moving that stuck energy and being with the higher vibrational energy.

This was not the first time a download has happened for me, but with Coco as my witness, it was the first time I was clearly able to distinguish the spiritual experience and not the psychological disorder one. I remember being grateful that no one was around so that I could writhe and make noise in peace. I wondered how I would explain this to any passerby. Later, when I met with my spiritual teacher and therapist, I told her about this. I cringed. I said that it really felt different than when I wasn’t well, and because she had treated me through my recovery, she knew exactly what I met. She told me to think of it as a gift and a blessing, evidence of all the psychological growth I had undergone.

I eventually made it to Joshua Tree, California. After visiting some friends and hitting up my favorite places, I decided it was time to leave. My friend Zara was surprised—I had lived with her while in Joshua Tree all those years ago. Her friendship was solidified over creative bonds and artistic explorations. But I knew, intuitively, that I had achieved mission-complete and there was no need for me to linger. Zara helped me celebrate the fire in Joshua Tree—she went with me to have a lightning bolt on my hand, representing the dynamic energy that zapped me and cracked me open while living in Joshua Tree. Zara was one of the first people who I felt truly saw me creatively, saw my vision and understood how I wove different threads together to have new fabrics of ideas. So it was much to my surprise that I left Joshua Tree just as soon as I had arrived.

“I’ve outgrown Joshua Tree,” I told her. It was what my inner fire told me then—no other way around it. It’s what my intuition said. And I knew, too, it’s what my download confirmed. All of this was surreal. One might say that these beliefs are characteristic of a person who is not mentally well. Energetic downloads and part-alien civilizations are not terms associated with a Western worldview—or the belief in such things, I should say. With my dubious mental health history, I might double down on defending myself. It is hard to be seen as someone who has these beliefs AND the mental health history that I do. There are two mainstream narratives that I come into direct conflict with there: a bold, independent woman doesn’t need to be tamed, and a woman with bipolar disorder will forever remain an unpredictable, moody, manic pixie girl. I live outside these narratives, but I am constantly encountering people who expect those exact circumstances in me. The world hasn’t had its major breakthrough and transformation, even though I did. The fire of inner transformation is what enabled me to revise the story and have breakthroughs so that I could choose how I engage with (or disengage from) the mainstream narrative.

 


A few years prior, when I actually did live in Joshua Tree and frequented the library in neighboring 29 Palms, I re-read a hardcopy essay on my struggle to convey exceptional experiences—that is, times when I have had sensory impressions that came from somewhere beyond the purely material world. I was hung up on conveying what it was that I was trying to say. What I was ascribing to “I” was coming across as a tunnel that I had been working on for a while. What I was trying to say wasn’t coming through. I had to open the conversation up—ask what the words wanted from me.

The essay was about the journey inside to inner space—extolling the virtues of personal evolution. It’s part of the process of understanding “higher purpose.” But my essay was falling flat. Phrases like “finding myself,” “knowing myself,” “higher purpose” felt deflated. They lacked force. A reader could get a sense of what I was referring to by my descriptive language, but I couldn’t convey the electricity in my experiences, which is what gave me the enthusiasm to write about them. Most importantly, I couldn’t activate the experiences for the reader,which was what I was trying to do. The space between the thoughts and me, the observer of them, was still too tight.

I started to play with the medium, the language, by going in and out through words that shifted my awareness. I watched for the shape of the letters on the page, then I tried focusing and unfocusing my vision, moving from words to shapes, words strung together, and then back. This became dharana—meditation—on the words. I was singularly focused on them. Eventually my field of vision started to blur. My peripheral vision blurred, too, and the library bookshelves turned into cases full of neon beams of light, and the books on them became crystals.
The idea of the interconnectedness of all of the ideas and writers, and me to them, became apparent as I witnessed the network of lights across the books. The image registered in my mind as a felt sense registers in the body. And then I had a fleeting thought that I was a medium, a part of this vast network who, through the act of writing, pulled ether into material, and with that, created our world because information is our world. We are not the information, we are not the source of the information, and yet we are not separate from it. I felt a deep sense of satisfaction in the core of my being then, and the vision vanished. The meditation was broken.

Unbeknownst to me then, I had activated a trip of sorts, detaching from myself and the world as it is perceived by my mind to a place of pure awareness. This is analogous to cultivating the Witness, the mode neutral being of awareness, separate from the self and yet still connected to the ethereal as a medium for the Self. In doing so, I disidentified from the self as a thing that was perceived, the world through my body and mind identities. It is the practice of opening the I-Self channel.

When I left the library, touched by the experience, I was unsettled by it and I have been unsettled by it ever since.

I was able to gain some clarity about what I experienced by learning how to interpret the experience through the lens of psychosynthesis. I was immediately confronted with questions for reflection: why did I need to convey my experience in a most authentic way? How was I able to detach consciousness from my body and move into pure awareness? Where did “I” go? And how does all of this contribute to a movement toward wholeness on part of my being?

After I left Joshua Tree, I continued my exploration of the Mojave Desert and then went east into Arizona. Dry, sandy terrain turned into grasses and wildflowers and pine forests that crept up the sides of mountains. I decided to drive up Mt Hualapai, an unimproved forest road that was rutted out in places. “Chains or four by fours only.” It was the night before the full moon in Aries, and perhaps this motivated my fiery ambition. I sought the quiet of such a remote camping spot so I could sit and hear my intuition more clearly. That is, I knew my download in New Mexico was important but I didn’t know why. No big breakthroughs came, no aha! Moments, but I sat in the peace and stillness of wild forest. I rose with the sun and enjoyed the dawn hours of tranquility. I felt at one with the nature around me, and I acknowledged that that was all I needed. As I drove down the mountain a few hours later, I encountered a baby elk. I had the overwhelming intuition that it was a gift from the woods, the encounter. I looked up indigenous symbolism at a truck stop for morning coffee. I read on an internet encyclopedia that elk symbolize sovereignty and inner power.

Later that week, I happened to be attending the Parapsychological Association’s monthly meeting. One of the table chairs, Everton de Oliveira Maraldi, a scholar of religion and parapsychology, was holding a discussion on exceptional experiences. An exceptional experience is anything that falls under the umbrella category as out of the ordinary framework of Western psychology—near-death experiences, hearing voices, telepathy, alien encounters, etc. I believe that exceptional experiences are a natural and healthy part of psycho-spiritual development. They occur not out of a diseased or disordered brain but from our connection to consciousness outside of our brain.

I find that in the scientific community, there is an earnest effort to somehow bridge the gap between Eastern or indigenous wisdom and Western, scientific study. I had this in the back of my mind as I mulled over the elk sighting, the download, the impulse to go west and honor my inner flame. These journeys usually have a rich personal significance for me, meaning made out of synchronous events and fortuitous encounters on the road. I’ve always held a position more aligned with Eastern and indigenous wisdom, that I travel because I am in tune with the world and what I need to do to find my most empowered perspective. It is no coincidence that things have happened on my road trips as they do. But what is the way to bridge the gap and provide a scientific framework for understanding these occurrences? And how can I anchor my deep-seated belief in the consciousness of the cosmos working through me (a spiritual point of view) while I live out the human experience (which comes with narratives and a whole lot of psychological ick)?

This is why I have been involved in the parapsychology community. I want to be part of that bridge. Likewise, Everton is creating a bridge, too. He takes a cultural, religious approach when dissecting an exceptional experience, and when that, the bridge leads to more normalization and more discussion of exceptional experience and inner space. The point of dissecting them is to know something about our human experience in general, how these experiences appear across cultures, and specifically, where there is room to allow more self determination in the case of the experiencer—there’s a difference between a researcher or an outside party (like Everton) observing an exceptional experience and an experiencer-reported event (like me describing my download). Moreover, like this trip to Joshua Tree, I am reminded that it’s the journey and not the destination. Keep on trucking.

The biggest challenge here is to know how and when to treat the exceptional experience as a thing unto itself (revealing some measure of psychosocial growth or numinous event) or as a symptom of a disease.

Regardless, it is very important to document such happenings so that there is a more clear map of inner space. (I can help you with writing these things out. Reach out to start a conversation.)

I believe this is the fire that ignited in me in Joshua Tree. It was during the years that I was estranged from my beloved town in the high desert that I did a lot of work on myself, my socio-cultural self, the one beyond the “bipolar disorder girl.” I’ve long outgrown that personality in favor of rigid self care, an understanding of the neurodivergence of bipolar disorder, and a healthy respect for mainstream Western psychology. It’s dogmatic and materialistic and looks at the mind like a machine sometimes, but this is a good balance for the depth psychology I am trained in (psychosynthesis) that perceives each individual as a spiritual being having a human experience. The emphasis is on the spiritual and not the materialistic.
It is no longer hard for me to be seen because of all of the psychological and spiritual work that I have done on myself. In fact, I welcome the act of being seen because I can talk about exceptional things and hold the space for others to relay theirs. I believe this is part of my bridge-building service to the world. I just had to go west to let the energies roll through me.

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Hi there! Thanks for reading. I’m a writer, editor, and transpersonal guide who explores psychospiritual growth.

I write my own story. In that light, my writing is service–the stories I share about my own psychospiritual growth, the process of self exploration & self transformation, and the way culture affects us are my gift to the world.

I share the knowledge and processes that anyone can implement to achieve inner peace. This is a transpersonal point of view and embodied transformation through creative writing.

And, I explore the deep stuff–what we do when we recall past life experiences; how we engage the archetypal resonance of embodied experience; when to call the “weird stuff” you’re experiencing a spiritual awakening and when to call a mental healthcare practitioner.

  • If you are a mental healthcare professional who would like to work with me on your journey of psychospiritual growth or integrating transpersonal psychology with your client practice, go here 
  • If you are a GenXer who wants to learn about a transpersonal worldview and write your own story in a group setting online, go here
  • If you are interested in my work with language and changing the mental healthcare narrative through transpersonal psychology, I invite you to read the curated pieces from my portfolio that are on this website and reach out

BTW: I love tattoos and coffee.

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Curious about seeing the world and the mind as multidimensional? What does that mean for science?

  • Check out Public Parapsychology. Learn more about what psi is and why psi belongs to everyone. Join other seekers and citizen scientists who are exploring parapsychological phenomena for the benefit of understanding the spiritual nature of the material world.
  • Also consider joining The Parapsychological Association. Support an organization of professional scientists and independent researchers who are pushing the boundaries of our current understanding of the mind. Programming and publications include excellent resources for mental healthcare practitioners and healers who support individuals with transpersonal experiences.