Running from spirit for years

And that caused a lot of mental health issues and anxiety and depression and whatnot and burnout So one of the reasons why I started doing this, other than feeling called to do it, is just my own personal experience of spiritual awakening. I had my first major spiritual awakening at the age of 18. I had no context and had no idea what had happened. And then, when my identity came back after about four months of being in the what I would call kind of the empty emptiness or the desert of emptiness, it's a very kind of flat emptiness that lasted about four months.

But after my identity returned from that prolonged experience of emptiness, it was very scared and I didn't have any context. So then I ran through addictive behaviors for about seven years. And that caused a lot of mental health issues and anxiety and depression and whatnot and burnout until I personal will had completely been eroded and I saw that I couldn't keep running from emptiness and then I turned towards emptiness and you know basically ran towards it with doing a lot of therapy. I had a fund a therapist that was very helpful in type of therapy, which is the type of therapy that I've used to help create the theory of one and two.

And then also found Adi Shanti and his teachings and his Sangha and community, the open gate Sangha, and began to kind of obsessively work with him. and go on retreats with them I was in Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin at the time, so I would fly out to California three or four times a year and go on retreats. And then, yeah, so and that really turned everything around for me. And then pretty rapidly at that point, I was able to move through a large amount of the awakening stages and experiences, or not that there are stages, but awakening pieces, and move into abiding awakening a few years after that.

And then Sharon Landreth asked me to teach a few years after that, four or five years after that, after a lot of integration had happened. And here we are.