Return to the Center of the Maze

I asked to face my terror again. I got a surprise.

[This article has taken me more than three months to write, so it’s a little longer, and a little more intense than usual. None of it is written by AI, as always].

I’ve been thinking a lot about demons recently.

Back in 2017, my “awakening experience” changed my view of what reality was instantly. I’ve been telling the story of what happened next with increasing honesty, and I’ve been on probably fifty podcasts. I have a settled narrative, and I feel reasonably content that it’s true. But there are some pretty creepy aspects of the story that I still have no real explanation for, and they have bothered me for years. So I’ve spent the last few months exploring them.

In October of 2017 I experienced a spontaneous awakening moment (or psychotic break?) on a trading floor in Manhattan. This was followed by a couple of months of confusion, destabilization, and spiritual inflation. Then, on Boxing Day 2017, I had a sudden descent into insanity and an endless abyss of depression. It was only after ketamine therapy that I began to recover in March of 2020.

The most intense aspect of the two years I spent in a living hell was that many of my experiences felt evil and demonic. It seemed that there was something within me that definitely did not have my own best interests at heart. In fact, it wished only for my destruction. One of my overriding thought loops was that I had made an irreversible mistake and was going to be damned to hell forever.

I became obsessed with Moloch, the bull-headed Canaanite god of child sacrifice, and similar figures: Ba’al, the Minotaur and Satan. The mythologist Joseph Campbell talked about the Minotaur being at the center of the labyrinth. And it felt like I was being drawn there against my will. I have intellectual theories for what it all meant, but a part of me knew it was unresolved.

So I asked to return to the center of the maze, and see what evil was still waiting there for me. What I found there was not what I expected.

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Demonic Possession or… Heartburn?

While I was in Florida on vacation in April, one of the members of Leading Edge’s 150-person community, Justin Wilford, PhD contacted me. He’s an expert in Internal Family Systems (IFS), and coincidentally messaged me to tell me that the fear of irreversible, damning mistakes is a classic feature of what are called Unattached Burdens (UBs). Made famous by IFS practitioner Bob Falconer, UBs are negative energies, beliefs, or emotional states that a person carries, but that didn’t originate from their own lived experience. One thing that’s interesting about the theory of UBs is that it’s they themselves that carry the belief of irredeemable damnation, not you. Bob even believes that there may be some larger UB force that lies to these lost souls and tells them that they’re irredeemable and that’s why they need to stay here and feed off of us to survive.¹ I wondered if that was one explanation of sorts for why I felt overpowering shame and guilt, despite the absence of any evidence of its cause.

Around the time all this was happening, Leading Edge hosted a session with Stephen Zerfas, the founder of Jhourney. Jhourney focuses on jhana meditation teaching and retreats. I was initially skeptical of the many reports² that this kind of meditation could reliably produce bliss states on demand. But when they started coming from people I trust inside our community, I knew it was worth exploring in greater detail. The aspect that resonated for me was that my (extremely early) understanding of jhana meditation aligned with Falconer’s recommended meditation for dealing with UBs. What he calls the “Sealing Light” meditation is focusing on the part of your body that seems to have the most life force in it (usually your heart center) and then allowing it to expand. This also appears to be how you kick off the very early stages of the jhanas. Falconer likes this practice because it doesn’t waste energy or create conflict by putting up barriers and defenses, but instead allows us to cultivate our life force in ways that should be positive either way.

As I engaged with jhana practice more deeply, I noticed that there was a profound burning sensation all the way down my throat into my heart center. I gained a much clearer sense of my inner physical state. Whenever I tried to focus on any pleasant feeling, it would be overwhelmed by a sensation of irritation.

I believe that emotional, spiritual and physical ailments can be mutually reinforcing. It’s what makes reality so tricky to unpack. I enjoy spicy food. I drink a pint of cold brew on an empty stomach in the morning. And then I also realized one of the legacy psychiatric meds I’ve been on for the last few years is acidic. I emailed my psychiatrist to see if he could discuss alternatives. Thirty minutes after I sent that email, I had a pre-arranged meeting with a mutual contact through Leading Edge. Only when I started the call did I discover that the man I was speaking to, Jason Goldberg, had just founded his own CPG product with a holistic response to gut acid and esophageal repair called Kiss My Acid Goodbye.

And then, in the remarkable way that my life seems to run right now, the next day Justin Wilford had arranged for me to have a personal 1:1 session with Bob Falconer to interact with any potential UB of my own. I actually haven’t had the sense of having made irredeemable mistakes or even really many bad days at all for many years. But I was still terrified at the idea that some demon would suddenly start talking with my voice. As my mind is always a jumble of unreliable thoughts and ideas, I decided to focus on the body and make the burning sensation the topic of our session. While I still remain agnostic about UBs, there were indeed moments when I felt like I was responding with voices and intentions that were not my own. But equally, I could have been making it up. What was interesting is that that sense of burning moved around whenever I tried to focus on it. Sadly, the part where Falconer tried to guide the UBs back into the light had no effect on me. I didn’t emerge with a glorious sense of redemption. And the burning remained.

As a result, I made the heartbreaking decision to quit my excessive caffeine consumption for the first time in over twenty years. Over the next few weeks, without the stimulation from coffee, my physical sensitivity increased. I was pretty exasperated when I realized how long the burning had probably been there in the background, just below my awareness. When I had a strong emotional reaction to something, it made my chest burn, which made me irritable, which made me more angry, which made me more irritable. As a result, I would end up snapping at my children for really very trivial things. I realized it was one of the drivers of why I never stop moving and thinking during the day, then dissociate into my phone during idle time on evenings and weekends. At those times when the burning is there, the passage of time is literally painful. It robbed me of the tranquil moments that should have been most precious with my family. I couldn’t even sit and help my boy with his homework without a beer in my hand. Despite all the work I’ve done on myself as a father, it was particularly bad with my wife because the dissociation crowded out a lot of the time that I should have been helping her carry the mental and physical load at home.

I was still wondering if the burning was related to some kind of evil force. A demonic presence severing my direct connection to divine joy. So I continued to explore the topic of demons and possession and, in fact, had an incredibly long essay about my experiences and the different theories until reality conspired to offer me an entirely different interpretation.

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Samara and the Phoenixes

Two weeks after what I half-jokingly refer to as my “IFS exorcism” experience, Mona Sobhani, PhD and Allison Paradise announced the formation of their new practice, The Phoenix Era.³ This is a two-on-one energy healing experience where both of them work on you simultaneously. They are both good friends of mine, and I’ve interviewed both for Leading Edge.⁴ They are also both accomplished neuroscientists. Mona wrote a pivotal book in my life: Proof of Spiritual Phenomena. It describes her journey from materialist skeptic to someone who assembled the robust statistical and empirical evidence for psychic phenomena and reincarnation. And now it has even resulted in the spontaneous materialization of her own gifts.

I’ve seen probably fifty different spiritual practitioners in my role as the founder of Leading Edge. This session was qualitatively different because I intrinsically trusted both of them. Throughout pretty much every single energy healing or intuitive reading I’ve had before, there’s a significant skeptical part of me that’s wondering if I’m being conned or imagining things. But I know Allison and Mona and their intentions, and even more powerfully, they confirmed each other’s readings throughout the session.

For as long as they’ve known me, I’ve had this sense that either I am evil or I’m going to accidentally do something evil. This feeling came up again recently through my fears of lack of discernment in exploring mystical ideas. I had come into our session terrified about some sort of historical relationship with demons. And I’m still definitely not discounting that some aspects of my time in hell may have involved contact with those kinds of forces. But they don’t seem to be present in my life now. And yet the burning has remained.

Allison & Mona immediately said that I wasn’t evil. Instead they both independently observed a dissociated part of myself around my throat. Allison saw it as angry and red, she described actually seeing it even before our session. When she focused on my throat during our healing, she said an unusually intense wind blew up around her in LA, where she lives. Both of them also identified a disruptive feminine energy in my presence. One of Mona’s insights was that I was somehow suppressing my core essence, and that was enraging another part of me. It was like I was unable to speak my truth, and that was creating irritation in my throat, between my heart and my head.

The next morning I had already arranged a session with Mary, the intuitive I have found so helpful. I deliberately told her nothing about what I was experiencing as a test against my own skepticism. It was a test she passed immediately. She said she saw an angry, feminine part of myself that had been fragmented from me. The cause of that fragmentation was judgment. Me believing that wild part of myself was evil had prevented me from integrating it and had frozen it in time. She described how this creates a raw, untamed emotional anger. This animal nature was in my feminine side. It just hadn’t come into my full awareness, full consciousness. She described the process of how we go from unconscious wholeness, to unconscious fragmentation, then conscious fragmentation, finally conscious wholeness.

Her metaphor was that my own unconscious fragmentation was like taking a three-year-old and shoving them into the closet, turning out the light, and leaving them there for 30 years alone in the darkness. “Then you open the door 30 years later. Are you going to find a cute little three-year-old who’s adorable? Or are you going to find something that might not look so good?”

I believe in paying very close attention to the specific stories that we personally find most emotionally resonant. I believe they are one way our unconscious communicates with us. In the nights directly following my awakening in 2017, I dreamed in huge abstract symbols. One night I simply saw a glowing ring, apparently a Jungian symbol for wholeness. But my only frame of reference for this was the scariest movie I’d ever seen; The Ring. I became convinced that, true to the plot of the movie, I was destined to die in seven days. And I merrily went around telling my concerned friends as much. But I think that delusion also held some wisdom for me in retrospect. The Ring is about a psychic child, Samara, whose powers are terrifying and uncontrolled. They lead to her being thrown into a well and forgotten about. She emerges, enraged, with catastrophic results. I even dressed as her for my Halloween costume back in 2014.

Shortly before my son was born, I had a dream, with the intensity of something close to a vision. I saw a baby and expected it to be my unborn son. Instead, as she turned around, it was a baby girl, her face was twisted with rage and fear. I woke up terrified and confused.

I think the fact that The Ring is [correctly] regarded as one of the scariest horror movies of all time indicates that this isn’t just a “me” problem. In fact, a variant of this story is actually pretty common throughout human culture, as noted by Joseph Campbell’s biographer (and Leading Edge interviewee), Dr. Stephen Larsen:

The shaman descends to the matrix of creation, to reenact the archetypal quest of the hero: once again magically to transform the Great Mother from her angry, withholding aspect to her life-giving, bountiful aspect. He ignores the appearance of ugliness and does something nice for her. And only then does she respond in kind, granting the shaman his wish…

… It would seem a highly reliable rule of thumb, whenever one confronts such a grotesque hag in dream or fantasy, to give her the kiss, or as the Eskimo shaman does, comb her hair. For to him who is willing to face the appearance of ugliness is beauty given or the life-giving boon bestowed.

Obviously Mother Nature has solid reasons to be angry with us right now. For individuals, our body is also the primary place the feminine, the unconscious lives. People talk a lot in abstract terms about the intelligence of the body. But I think we are going to discover that it is much more sophisticated than we’ve ever realized. In his recent Substack, pioneering biologist Dr. Michael Levin recently noted that:

The fact that you don’t feel your liver being conscious is irrelevant – you don’t feel me being conscious either. It may not have the linguistic chops of your left hemisphere and can’t speak up for itself, but we’re working on that (interfaces to communicate with diverse intelligences).

I find it amusing that the organ he picked, the liver, is associated with anger and intense emotion in many ancient cultures. If we simply ask our body what it needs, we may get non-verbal cues or symbolic answers. As my experience has already revealed, dreams are obviously one powerful way it does that⁵, and I have found the period between sleeping and waking particularly fruitful.

In writing this essay, I encountered the inversion of this idea, which was so powerful and simple it really blew me away. I believe that we exist in something like “Earth school” to learn lessons that evolve our consciousness. One of Carl Jung’s most famous quotes is: “until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” But once you make the unconscious conscious, perhaps you can also co-create your fate. One of the clearest signs that we have a lesson to learn is a strong emotional reaction to something. So once you have a clearer sense of an unexplained emotional or physical sensation, perhaps you can simply ask for lessons and experiences that show you their underlying cause. And so I did: I asked what the burning was about.

What was funny is that I then realized I had already been receiving relevant lessons. One of the first things more spiritually-mature people had told me before I started Leading Edge was that these kinds of communities were like rocket fuel for revealing your flaws and shadow. In the weeks before I met with Mary, Mona and Allison, the topics of trauma, rage, and dissociation repeatedly had emerged in community dynamics in dramatic and surprising ways.

Meanwhile, after six months of diligent work, my Egoscue physical therapy has successfully resolved much of the corkscrew in my body, and in the process has revealed deeper imbalances I didn’t even know I had. And it now seems to be zeroing in on a structural weakness in my hips, also an area associated with emotional repression. It feels like I am going to the center of the maze within my own body.

Before (left) and after (right)- 3 months of Egoscue rotated my right shoulder and hip (yellow line, back to the center of my body (white line).

I now realize I have leaned on my right leg my whole life. The torque in my body was towards the right side, symbolically interpreted as the analytical over the intuitive, and perhaps this is also reflected in the way that I permanently lean to the right. This was causing chronic back pain and now sciatic issues. In resolving deep structural imbalances, perhaps our bodies can then talk to us more accurately. For example, Dr. John Sarno is famous for the idea that chronic lower back pain can be caused by repressed emotions, particularly rage. He claims that even just the awareness of this possibility can sometimes instantly resolve the problem.

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Trauma and Rage

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”

-Joseph Campbell

As all this was unfolding, I had already (!) agreed to undergo The Richards Trauma Process with Leading Edge member Amon Woulfe. He describes it as a full factory reset for your nervous system. Like a computer, our subconscious can be running all sorts of redundant programs in the background. This process offers a way to shut them all down. Just three short, powerful sessions involved semi-hypnotic reprogramming and produced a much deeper biographical understanding of the various different traumatic events in my life. I won’t spoil it for future participants, but it climaxed in a safe and therapeutic expression of my emotions, particularly rage.

I’ve previously been pretty dismissive of the way therapy-speak has invaded normal life and the corresponding “trauma-fication” of everything. I felt I personally don’t “deserve” emotional outbursts because there was nothing especially traumatic in my past. That said, my wife’s interpretation of my mental health crisis was that I had a life filled with unresolved micro-traumas. From a very premature birth, to being bullied at school, being laid off and losing my father. The pressure was slowly building over time with no real emotional release valve. Then when I started meditating, this gave my demons an opportunity to kick the door in. And while my personal history wasn’t especially dramatic, you never know what you are holding on an ancestral basis. For example, my grandfather fought in World War II in Burma. My father was a child during the Blitz. My other grandfather was a teenager on a machine gun at the Somme in World War I; the bloodiest day in British history. There is also a pretty virulent strain of mental illness running through my maternal line.

About ten days before my son was born, I was pretty extravagantly deranged. I was overcome with an inexplicable horror that he was at risk of attack by an evil force. And yet, I made the rather unwise decision to watch the petrifying horror movie Hereditary. Essentially, it’s about demonic possession being passed down through family lines. Once again, it was less about the specifics of the story, but more the emotional intensity it generated that was most telling. Years later, on a long flight to visit my sister in Berkeley I was gripped by the inexplicable idea of Moloch being some kind of family possession. I can’t really explain why. When I arrived at her house, I tried to explain my garbled reasoning. She looked at me with polite confusion. But then I immediately walked into her bathroom and at exactly my eye level on the shelf above the toilet was the book of Alan Ginsberg’s poem Howl, about Moloch.

And, as much as I now believe that reincarnation is probably real, I still find it hard to apply the concept to myself. It’s difficult for me to truly accept the idea that I might contain lifetimes of suffering and trauma that are still playing out through my karma now. Over the last few months I had another strong unconscious impulse draw me to revisit the end of the excellent first season of the TV series Westworld. I had also watched it during my period of depression and had felt very significant at the time. The plot focuses on lifelike robots in a theme park for humans. These “hosts” are doomed to circular loops of behavior where they are systematically abused by the park’s guests. A key theme of the plot is a maze as a metaphor for the robotic hosts coming to consciousness; a mysterious minotaur even appears throughout the series. The protagonist, Dolores, a loving, mild-mannered robot rancher, is on a quest to find the murderous figure Wyatt. [Spoiler alert] She eventually finds out that Wyatt is a repressed part of herself; the part that remembered every abuse, every death, every loop across decades of exploitation by the human guests. Like Dolores, we might all be carrying a lot more pain than we can rationally explain or remember.

One major risk is that constant excavation of traumatic causes and stories creates a labyrinth all of its own. But I think the wider acceptance that trauma can be pre-verbal, ancestral or even pre-incarnation means we don’t need to feel guilty for not having an obvious excuse” for a good cry or emotional release.

The explicit message of Westworld’s plot is that conscious wholeness only comes from reintegration of this exiled part hidden in the center of the maze. In contrast, like the psychic little girl Samara in The Ring, all the hosts eventually escape the park in an orgy of violence. Shadow work is even more essential than I realized if you’re expecting to accrue any degree of real-world spiritual power. If we gain the kinds of superpowers that can come through spiritual growth, without resolving these hidden traumas, you then risk explosive emotional consequences. I’ve been in an inner development process for the best part of the last ten years. And yet I was shocked and embarrassed at how much of my previously unknown shadow has been revealed to me over the last few months.

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The Ultimate Treasure.

“Your nervous system will always choose a familiar hell over an unfamiliar heaven.”

- Kathy Overman

For years I’ve understood that the route back to human flourishing leads through reunification with the right hemisphere, and therefore the directly interconnected heart and body. I just didn’t realize that the emotional confrontation involved might feel dangerously demonic in its intensity.

I’m still not sure what the relationship of the left hemisphere is to this hero’s journey. How much it both prevents or protects us from this confrontation. I don’t know if those hostile thought loops that accompanied every attempt to open my heart were trying to keep me safe, retain control, or even to kill me.

Directly after my awakening I became obsessed with a poignant movie called A Monster Calls; where a terrifying demon appears in a little boy’s garden every night. But his true intent is to help him understand and release the trauma of his father’s death. I forced my confused and concerned family to watch it with me. Only looking backwards, do I now realise that every individual mini-crisis of those years in hell was triggered by an appeal to open my heart. The night of my descent into insanity was marked by the intention to have a son. One of the scariest nights of my life, accompanied by waking visions of demons, was the night of his birth. My final ketamine trip vision was hellish, and again it related to my son. What followed immediately afterwards was about four hours of fairly persistent crying. Mona’s intuition was that this emotional release was part of what prompted my recovery.

Asked about ‘the meaning of life,’ comedian Jimmy Carr responded with a five word answer: “Enjoying the passage of time.” I’m hopeful that long-term resolution of my previously unconscious trauma will help get me to that most desirable of all states: true presence. Perhaps this is the “boon” or treasure at the center of the maze. And perhaps we may get there by integrating the burning rage of any Minotaur we find hidden there.

One thing that I hope stands out from this ongoing story is that, while Leading Edge was the trigger of so many of these shadow issues, it was also the container that is spontaneously providing most of the solutions. As you can also see from this narrative, Leading Edge had a spooky knack of consistently providing me with solutions before I even knew I was looking for them. Every single person mentioned in this article is either a part of Leading Edge or someone who I met through our members. The last time I went through this experience, I had relatively little help. This time I am also being held in an intimate support group with some of my closest friends from Leading Edge. My experiences with Allison, Mona, and Mary also broke my frame, where what I thought for years was one cause may in fact have been another. I’m still not sure if all of this was prompted by “just” heartburn. But the removal of stimulants that might cause heartburn raised my awareness of my emotions and sensations in a new way.

I don’t think this is the end of my story, it’s the start of a new one. And I plan to write about which kind of somatic and emotional processing methods are most effective for me in the months ahead. In fact, the last few days have given me a new possible diagnostic direction that makes me feel more hopeful than at any point in the last ten years. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the last three months have refined and clarified my entire understanding of my life so far. I cannot think of a stronger endorsement to be a member of one of these groups or to form one.

“Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us.
The labyrinth is thoroughly known.
We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god.
And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves.
Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own existence.
And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world."

-Joseph Campbell

1. I tend to believe viral mass media moments can sometimes reflect the collective unconscious. As I’m a mediocre parent, I’ve watched Kpop Demon Hunters roughly four times. It’s now the most watched Netflix film in history. The central antagonist is a demon called Gwi-Ma who feeds on souls by putting voices of worthlessness into our heads.

2. This piece from Nadia Asparouhova was a hell of a read.

3. Their description: “The Phoenix Era is a healing and coaching collective of multiple healers with scientific backgrounds. We offer personalized support for navigating profound life transitions — moments of transformation that feel like a rebirth. We draw on psychology, neuroscience, and mind-body science while remaining open to experiences that extend beyond current scientific understanding. Our unique triad approach — narrative, somatic, and energetic healing—helps uncover root causes, shift patterns, and create lasting behavioral change. Working with multiple healers at once provides you with distinct perspectives and complementary sets of expertise. But most importantly, we empower you with the skill set for transformation — the skills you need to carry yourself through the fire.”

4. My interview with Mona on her path from materialism to mysticism. here’s my second of two interviews with Allison about working with intuitive children.

5. Check out Dan Lawrence’s amazing lecture for my Accelerating Wisdom series.