Brave and Bold for a Better Earth
January 1, 2050
Today is the day I wrote about so many years ago. It marks a new year, a new decade, and the day by which I envisioned living on a healed, cooperative Earth.
I’m sitting in my moonlit study reflecting on how far the world has come. In 2024, the moon’s pale purity was a reprieve from the harsh realities throttling toward us. Now, it reflects the infinite light amidst shadow that characterizes our existence. We’ve gone from a world fueled by fear, antagonism, and ruthless “othering,” to a people fortified by hope and resilience who employ compassion, innovation, and transformation as their ultimate uniting recourses. So many leaders have been imperative to this change; I am grateful to be counted among them.
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Suzanne Taylor’s 2024 “Essay Contest” catalyzed my contribution to our changed world. She invited contestants to contemplate the future and recount how we contributed to Earth and humanity’s thriving. The competition combined many things I loved: considering consciousness evolution, creative writing, and a cash prize I could use toward my PhD tuition. Should be fun, I thought.
But as I began to write, the weight of the task struck me. This was not a mere creative exercise for funds meant to spur small insights. This was a personal reflection of cosmic importance, designed to push each entrant to fulfill a calling. The prompt urged us to ask our inner knowing what does the world need and what can I contribute?
At the time, I had convinced myself that I was doing enough. I had, after all, left behind my career in corporate law to pursue a PhD in consciousness studies to better understand how spiritual experiences impact our social and material lives. Alongside, I had accidentally discovered my own energy healing abilities, and I began facilitating small sessions of “Kundalini Activation,” a practice of energy transmissions that cleared people’s energetic systems and aligned them to their true essence. Yet with both my research and my energy work, I contented myself with a modest reach, happy to keep my “woo” in the shadows. I contributed my understanding about human potential, who we are, and our ability to heal on a person-to-person, if-and-when, one-at-a-time basis.
And then I answered Suzanne’s prompt.
I realized I had been hiding from the world. My research insights remained siloed within a confined academic community and my energy work within safe social parameters. While my proclaimed passion was to open people to their most authentic expression of existence, I myself was unwilling to put my cherished reputation as a “rational” person on the frontline. But as Suzanne wrote in Inside the Intelligence: Mapping the Path to Oneness, mankind’s progress required a few key people to align to a unified energy field and convey that “a pro-creative, happiness-inducing reality is joinable.” I had internally aligned; the missing piece was the courage to convey that reality to others.
What Did The World Need?
When I considered what humanity needed most, it mirrored our needs as individuals: to break old, stale patterns of being, to experience another way, and to feel safe to take a newly unveiled path. 2
Humanity needed to expand its schema of possibility and know that the emerging route would be sturdy and lead it to recovery, not cause it to flounder in a cosmic vortex of chaos. We all yearned for a reconnection to self, to others, and to something beyond.
If we were to become whole, then consciousness expansion and healing would have to become normalized, accessible, and commonplace – an essential pursuit for all. Spiritual experiences could no longer remain exclusive to those with the means to either ditch Western civilization for ashrams or invest in reclusive esoteric practices. These practices and ways of being had to be brought in both theory and experience to the masses.
My research on healthy spiritual transformations had taught me that on an individual and collective level we would need knowledge, experience, and guidance. With those three pillars, people could seek truth about our existence, experience something deeper that could bring them into alignment, and have the social support to see them comfortably through to a new reality. But the question remained: how could I contribute?
My Contributions
The realities of our world at the time meant that my particular positioning as an Ivy-League lawyer, consciousness PhD researcher, and energy healer could bring diverse parties together to learn about and experience deeper levels of consciousness. My contribution to humanity, I realized, would be to help bridge the practical and spiritual realms for as many people as possible. I could do so through (1) research, (2) disseminating information, (3) offering experience, and (4) providing guidance and community. I aimed to bring an integral approach to the study of consciousness to help people see that ascension and descension, transformation and grounding, and integrating spiritual experiences were all inevitable and imperative parts of the spiritual and human experience.
Research
I committed myself more deeply to my research. My PhD focused on how to integrate and navigate the aftermath of spiritual and mystical experiences. This research, which I continued and expanded upon beyond my degree, showcased the narratives and lived experiences of individuals who got a glimpse of something beyond our 3D realm during altered states of consciousness. The project created a map of a range of spiritually transformative experiences to help a rapidly awakening world navigate the human realities of the awakening process, such as how to maintain health, careers, social relationships, and a new sense of self. My research brought insights about both human flourishing and the Dark Night of the Soul (how to avoid it, what incited it, and tools to regain balance). After my PhD, I collaborated on research projects with various organizations to further our understanding of integrating all forms of spiritual experiences. I also partnered with subtle energy research organizations and became a leading expert on subtle energetics and ensuing transformations from energy experiences.
Dissemination
Pushing aside my impulse to hide my work, I published journal articles, presented at conferences, and teamed up with interdisciplinary research teams to further our understanding of the relationship between altered states and human flourishing. Importantly, I shared this widely beyond academic circles. I started a website and social media channels where I posted research insights and findings, and I began speaking on podcasts and doing presentations for various wellness platforms and 3
institutions. Eventually, I began my own limited video podcast series to discuss findings from my research and to share anecdotes as both a recipient and facilitator of energy work. I published a book on the findings from my dissertation, and I became known as an adamant advocate for gradual and safe spiritual emergence. My book mapped how people could retain the wonders of their old lives as they manageably and magically emerged into the new.
Inspired by the course I helped teach during my PhD called Spiritual Realities, I sought out guest lecturing opportunities at universities across the US and UK to normalize what had previously been an academically taboo topic. In the private sector, I sourced consulting opportunities in the psychedelic-assisted therapy and energy healing spaces to teach practices for safe, balanced, and thriving integration. I applied what I had learned from analyzing countless interviews about spiritual transformations, and I built and disseminated a model so people could fully embrace the path in a way that was grounded in our practical human experience with the eye-opening, objective, and mindful perspective that comes with a deepening of consciousness.
Offering Experience
As so many researchers before me had highlighted, knowledge means little without the corresponding personal experience. In my own case, I knew that to be true. I had gone from a materialist and atheist to a deeply spiritual person after my first Kundalini Activation session. No amount of reading or learning alone could have offered me that shift. The practice made me more planetarily conscious, more loving in word, thought and action, more discerning about what I put into my body, and more aligned in my vision and purpose. Because of the change I witnessed in myself and countless others, I knew the power of this practice to transform and reroute lives. If we could only popularize the practice, I knew we could create a profound ripple effect of unblocking, transcendence, and alignment.
Thus, I brought my industrious corporate skills to the mission. Employing many of the tactics from Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, I began to both spread the practice and my research findings on its benefits with an aim to go viral. The outreach targets were mavens, salespeople, and connectors, as they comprised the three groups of people that, according to Gladwell and Pareto’s principle, made up the 20% who effected 80% of social change. I recruited the help of Kundalini Activation facilitators who had well-established social media followings. Together, we contacted influencers, media outlets, corporate organizations, people of influence, and celebrities from various countries and walks of life and offered an opportunity to experience the practice. Each facilitator resonated with a particular social group. I leveraged my reputation and background to draw in people who would otherwise be turned off by esotericism, like lawyers, lobbyists, adjudicators, academics, politicians, entrepreneurs, doctors, and other professionals from the public and private sectors. I satisfied their left-brain desires with the research and right-brain yearnings with experience, contributing to a more awake and open atmosphere in each of their professional sectors.
More researchers and energy workers from other practices caught wind of our mission and we joined forces to make energy healing scalable. We teamed up with researchers like Dr. William Bengston to develop lines of healing products and at-home trainings to empower people to strip back layers of inauthenticity so they could evolve their own energetic system and help the surrounding collective. It took time, but we achieved the tipping point. Energy work became as ubiquitous as yoga or meditation. 4
Providing Guidance and Community
When navigating any change in life, the presence and guidance of like-minded, encouraging people is essential to positive growth. For that reason, I maintained a list on my website of all the resources I and others had created on navigating spiritual transformations. Alongside, I provided links to spiritual support networks and organizations committed to consciousness exploration, like the Scientific and Medical Network, the Emergent Phenomena Research Consortium, and the Galileo Commission. And, as my career developed, I began to hold workshops, seminars, and networking events designed for continued education, experience, and support in spiritual emergence communities. Through these efforts, transformation could always be met with the right company.
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Suzanne’s prompt made me realize I hadn’t been living in my fullest, bravest, and most authentic power. What she said in Inside the Intelligence was right: I was the product; I had to serve who I was; and I had to honor and celebrate my own emergence. I had to let go of my small story and the plans and ideas I once had for myself. Something bigger was at play. I had to step back and see who I was and what pieces of the puzzle I had been given to help create a more whole world. And I had to do this as much for myself as for others and the world. Once I did, I watched as each action I took contributed to meaningful, lasting change and helped create the pro-creative, happiness-inducing reality we enjoy today.
We are mirrors for each other to reach self-understanding and take committed action. Through example, we remind each other of who we are, so that we may each realize our essence and give back from that place. For me, it started with the Essay Contest, which called for me to double down on my research, disseminate it freely, and spread transformative experience far and wide. In that way, I helped spread the understanding of human potential as broadly as possible, inspiring others to do the same. With the help of many people who worked beside me, I contributed to changing our world. Together, we forged a tipping point for expanded consciousness.
The process of awakening was and continues to be something that unites us all cross-culturally, as it reminds us that beneath our flesh we are part of the most impressive, magnificent field of consciousness. Watching that understanding permeate our collective systems, beliefs, and way of being on this planet has been the greatest gift of my lifetime.
And with that – Happy New Year! Here’s to all the change to come. 🙂