There were two major spiritual experiences that I’ve had in my life. One that happened when I was 18, and another at 21. I hate using the word spiritual because it’s associated with so many different things, but for me spirituality is an inherent awareness that we all have to varying degrees, though some people have shut it out entirely. But I’d describe it as an awareness or simply as a connection to the universe.

Below I’ll describe these experiences as briefly as I can while still including the important details.

Messages from Another Place

During the first one at age 18, I had more or less a life of a typical teenager in America; school full-time and working part-time. However over time, I began to feel all sorts of things and didn’t know why. My intuition was telling me things that I honestly did not understand. I would have random deep insights and gut feelings and I had no idea what the source was. I would have urges to write poetry and create images with messages that came to me that I ended up not even understanding until after the experience. I also felt I wanted a pure/liberated mind but I actually did not know what that meant. I’d go into focused, pretty much meditative states a lot, but not even on purpose. At this point in time I had not read anything about meditation or spirituality or any of these things whatsoever.

I had cravings to spend time in nearby forest-y areas just because I noticed I’d learn something new every time I went, and I’d gain clarity of mind. Being there would teach me things.

So to make a long story short, this entire, slowly-unfolding process of discovery ended up attuning my mind to one single moment on a treadmill at a gym. I was running, and I began to do what I typically did on the treadmill – focus on the sound of my feet hitting the treadmill to go into a more focused mind state. I found it was easier to run this way; with a clearer mind, not so focused on the physical discomfort. This experience ultimately led me to explore more about myself and my mind, eventually leading me to the world of meditation and spirituality, all enhanced by the right gym flooring installation to support my practice. This is why I decided to lease commercial gym equipment, as it allowed me to create a personal space where I could continue this journey of self-discovery and mental clarity. It was during one of these sessions, while using gym equipment hire, that I truly began to understand the power of a focused mind and its impact on my overall well-being. Additionally, if you’re looking to enhance your physical space for self-care practices, consider consulting the experts at gymflooringexperts.co.uk for premium gym flooring solutions. For more information on gym equipment, you can check this helpful resources.

However this time was different.

Everything around me suddenly began to go white – literally just whiteness everywhere around me. And I could not feel myself running or feel my body AT ALL. Then, everything my mind had been cooking up previously – all of the poetry I was coming up with and random insights I’d receive that I didn’t even fully understand for months and months – all of it came together in this single moment.

I got a little freaked out; partly because I didn’t really understand what would happen if I continued to run, but mainly because what just hit me shook my entire being to the core.

I had the deepest urge to cry I had ever experienced. Crying was the only thing that could release the mixed and intense emotions I was feeling. I felt that I finally found something I had been looking for for years, yet I couldn’t put an actual timeline on how long ago it would be that I started looking for it, since I hadn’t been consciously aware that I was looking for it.

Being able to go back and read the poetry and writings I had created before the experience with a whole new understanding was such a trip. It was incredible to see that something was calling to me with all these messages without me fully understanding it at the time.

I went home and cried out of happiness the entire weekend. For being reunited with something – like being reunited with a part of me that I hadn’t been aware of previously.

But the main thing about it was that it felt like it shattered everything I knew to be of reality in that single moment. I felt like everything in my life previously had been an illusion, like I was just awakening out of a huge lifelong dream.

I can’t explain the effect that this had on my life. Words make it sound so flat.

My mom had been out of town that weekend. When she came back, I attempted to describe it to her. However, I couldn’t do it without crying, and I had no idea what words to use to describe my experience. I still really don’t, because in its nature, it is indescribable. I can only come sort-of close. But when trying to explain it, I told her “okay imagine that you’re living as usual one day, with your current understanding of the world as it is and all of your current perceptions. Then suddenly out of nowhere, you are transplanted to this different dimension that looks exactly the same but operates by a whole new set of rules that add context to your life and your being. It shatters the idea of what you knew to be real. I feel like I went to a different planet.” Keep in mind that I was explaining this with broken words and sentences between tears. She probably thought I was insane, but I’m lucky she didn’t chalk it up to that.

Afterwards, I felt like I was glowing for a long time. I felt a very unique sense of general love for all existence. A type of love I had never experienced before. It was like the energy of my being was resonating at such a high frequency. One that allowed me to pick up on certain signals and things I had never seen before.

I felt like I had something to tell the entire world. That I needed to tell them the realities they were living in may not be what they thought; that they could find whole new worlds that were unimaginable to them. That they needed to awaken from the dream they were living in. I started a website (which at the time was taizen.net; taizen meaning “gradually advancing calm” in Japanese) to try to point to all these new things I had experienced.

However, despite the website, all of this posed a new question: Now what? What am I supposed to do with this experience? Where do I go on a personal level from here?

In comes the over-intellectualism and the finding of reading material. Sometime after the experience is when I found and began reading things on Zen Buddhism and meditation. I was delighted to find this as it matched so much of what I found to be real. It helped me articulate and illustrate my own experience. However there was so much emphasis on meditation, that I naturally assumed that that’s what I should start doing. Meditating!

The illusion of having to “get” somewhere mentally/spiritually

This as it turns out, is a very common problem encountered by those who meditate. You meditate thinking that more and more you are “achieving” something, by sitting still and learning to quieten your mind. I think this is largely due in part that we are used to doing something in order to achieve some result. In this case, that result might be “enlightenment” or some new awareness.

This adds a lot of expectations and sometimes pressure onto the meditation process. You’re looking for signs of growth, or using it to look for answers.

After my experience at 18, I began becoming TOO into meditation because I felt like I had some sort of mission. That experience I had was so significant that I assumed there was something else I needed to find. I expected meditation to get me somewhere – as though my first experience was just like a sign that I was going places (spiritually/mentally/psychologically) and I had to induce it myself.

Wrong…wrong, so wrong. While meditation did help me find more answers, I realized instead of letting things unfold naturally (like they did with my first experience), I was literally forcing myself to become more aware. This is not how it’s supposed to work.

So I had started meditating around age 20. I’d go to the Zen Center (Rinzai sect) in New Mexico for nearly two hours per day. I loved the Rinzai sect’s process of meditation – not only sitting meditation (Zazen) but walking meditation and a tea ceremony afterwards.

I also loved that particular Zen center. The owner had been a programmer and abandoned his programming job to be a Zen teacher and the owner of the place. He was incredibly intelligent and approached Buddhism in a similar manner to me: more practical to everyday life, more about increasing awareness, less about the rituals.

So, I meditated consistently for a long time. I remember walking around campus at the University of New Mexico just not in your typical state of awareness. Almost feeling detached from my body. I didn’t really care about what I was learning, I was far more interested in my progress with meditation which to me felt like an achievement with much more impact.

Finally, I went with my mom to our yearly camping trip to Weiser, Idaho, a folk music festival that I had grown up going to and loved. However this time, once again, I was more focused on meditation.

This is where things really escalated and you may as well have just put my brain into a container and shook it around a million times.

In my tent on the campgrounds, I meditated, almost day and night. Sort of like you would do at a meditation retreat. Weird things started happening to me. Sitting there and meditating in my tent, I would feel an intense pressure in my forehead, the area in which many people call “the third eye.” The pressure became so intense that oftentimes it would force my eyes shut, and I would go into a sleep-like state. However, I became really confused because I would come out of this sleep-like state not knowing what state I had actually been in. It was like sleep, but some part of me was still awake/conscious during the whole thing. Not like a lucid dream, but like I’d come out of it not knowing whether I was awake or asleep.

My senses became unusually acute. I could hear people’s footsteps, animals, or other things making noise around the campground from far away with incredible volume and precision.

Sounds also had a strange bodily effect on me. Like they would make me feel things easily.

Different Realms of the Self

As I progressed into meditation, I began to find that there were different worlds: the world that I illustrate with speech, the world of my thoughts, my dreams, and a “world experienced beyond the constraint of my thoughts” for lack of a better way of describing it. The “world” beyond my thoughts was what I was putting energy into through meditation.

I felt at the time that the point was to align these, so they were all in tune with each other. Instead of our normal state of awareness in just being able to be aware of ONE of these at a time, I felt like I was starting to be able to see all of them at once.

It was like I was able to view all parts of my created worlds from an aerial view, while simultaneously being fully involved in one or the other.

This really kind of freaked me out to be honest. There are not enough words in any language to actually accurately demonstrate what this experience is like. Through meditation, I had loosened my idea of my “self” enough to be able to catch a glimpse of a more massive, all-encompassing self. But in the process, I was in the beginning of an identity crisis.

I didn’t know how to interpret or handle what was happening to me. It felt ultimately like a battle between different parts of my self. I felt intuitively that the “soul” part of me was trying to break free from the constraints placed on it by normal, everyday human awareness. And then the typical, normal everyday awareness part of me (what I call the “ego”, or understood sense of self that we develop throughout our lives on Earth) was holding me back with intense fear, saying “no, no don’t go there!”… I felt that to go farther than I had already gone on that road, I had to abandon everything I knew or thought was real. I still don’t know if this was abandonment of my understood knowledge in general or just in regards to my identity or what.

Because I’m prone to anxiety (being that I have generalized anxiety disorder), I started to feel intense fear about the experience and had an anxiety attack, which then lead to about a year or more of bad, bad anxiety. I feared that because I didn’t go farther in the experience and backed away with fear, that I’d consequently go insane and I felt that I left a part of my “identity” somewhere along the way.

So I had to stop altogether and tend to my anxiety. I remember thinking, “I have to get past this anxiety in order to be able to continue further.”

You Are More than You Know!

Regardless of the fact that I’m prone to anxiety, I think it’s safe to say most people would be freaked out in this experience. Most do not understand or know themselves as anything beyond their own personal sense of self, which comes from experiences here on Earth, as well as a product of conditioning, culture, etc. As it turns out, this is only a part of the picture. Our true nature and selves are much more massive than this, but we don’t experience that typically on a daily basis. I know from experience!

We are, ultimately, attached to our sense of self – because it’s the only framework by which we understand our selves and relate to our Earthly experiences, and losing this idea of our selves feels like death. The death of the self is really only the death of the ego, not the death of our ACTUAL selves. But it feels like the end of our world because that’s all we know of it.

All of this brought me to a question that is still not answered. What WOULD have happened if I had continued on this meditation path and had no fear? What would be different about my daily experience today, of the relation between my self with the world?

A counselor I had miraculously encountered at the time that was knowledgeable about these things told me that because I was only 21, my identity was still developing, and continuing on a road that undermined an established sense of self could be dangerous to my being able to function normally here on Earth. That it could have led to psychosis.

I still don’t know if this is true or not, but I think it might be. I have come to understand that I think we may need to have a firmly planted sense of self BEFORE we go exploring the realm of the “soul” (or whatever term you want to use for it). Transcending the ego is something Buddhists talk about a lot, and I think it is possible while here on Earth. But at this point in time, it’s not something I’m going to pursue.

“Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes, and the grass grows, by itself.”― Basho Matsuo

These days I just focus on living well, staying happy, being grateful for my experiences and not becoming too preoccupied with anything else happening unless it unfolds by itself.