The Journey From Unconscious Scapegoat to Awakened Seer - Part Three

How Pain Opened the Door to The Divine

In the previous intallment, I wrote about numbing myself with alcohol, being trapped in a narcissistic and violent relationship, and the single force that kept me fighting for a better life; the love I had for my daughter.

I was moving through a dark night of the soul, trying to end a pattern of generational trauma that no one in my family had ever managed to break.

When I was asked to compromise my integrity in exchange for success in the business world, I refused, and I nearly lost everything.

Part 3 begins at the moment I thought I had finally won it all.

Like a game of snakes and ladders, I had climbed rung by rung, believing I was near the top, only to land on a snake at the final moment and slide straight back down again.

What followed was not just another setback, but a complete collapse that led to a crisis of consciousness, a near-death experience, and an encounter that would turn my understanding of reality upside down and open my inner eye.

Standing at the Peak

After a long period of relentless effort, I had fought my way back to the top of my game. Life was opening up again. I was travelling abroad, standing in places so beautiful they felt almost unreal. My daughter was thriving in a wonderful school, spending her weekends riding horses that lit her up from the inside out.

She was loving life and I was too.

I had also stepped into my first relationship since my previous narcissistic partner, and this man appeared to be everything the former was not, warm, caring, and easy going. For the first time in years, I was beginning to let down the barriers I had built around myself and to hope for the kind of relationship that others seemed to expect as a natural part of life.

Beneath the contentment of that time, there was a knowing that my life would mean nothing if I did not use it to help others rise too and an urge rose within me to express this in a meaningful way.

A Life Filled with Purpose

I now found myself working for an incredible company, where I lead a team of ten, supporting individuals facing homelessness and poverty in reclaiming their lives. I invested every part of myself into my work, designing and delivering quality projects built on genuine care that offered sustainable opportunities and real hope. These individuals were not faceless statistics to me, they were human lives, each deserving respect, dignity, and the possibility of a better future.

I knew what it was like not to come from a loving home, to grow up without the safety and warmth that so many take for granted. I also understood how your life can shrink into something that resembles survival more than living. When every door appears closed, you reach for whatever will numb the pain, because even temporary relief can feel like the only option left.

I knew what it was like to have others look down on you as though you were broken, somehow less than them because of the circumstances you had fallen into and could not get out from.

My mantra had always been, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

My perspective was simple. If I could rise against the odds and climb out of that place, then they could too. That conviction drove me. I gave my work everything I had, pouring my heart and soul into making a real difference to those in this community.

“I know what it is like to be knocked down, but I also know what it is like to rise.”- Maya Angelou

For the first time in my life, it felt as though everything was beginning to come together.

After so many years of climbing, fighting, and refusing to give in, it finally felt as though all the effort and every tough decision had been truly worth it. Our lives were changing. I could feel it. I was over the moon with happiness and carried a sense of true fulfilment and optimism in every area of my life. I had finally escaped the cards that life had dealt me.

There was a fabulous sense of new beginnings unfolding in every direction, and for a brief moment it felt as though I was on top of the world and I could have it all.

And for a while, I allowed myself to believe that perhaps things were finally turning in my favour.

The Fall from Grace

But life has a way of shifting just when you begin to believe you have ‘got there’, and this part of my life was sadly not meant to last. Once again, that bloody finger of fate pointed straight at me and said, “Oh no you do not, young lady. Not so fast. Where on earth do you think you are going?”

One fated day, my whole life was turned upside down in an instant. Whilst at work, I had a freak accident that changed every area of my life. In a single moment, my entire trajectory veered off course, permanently.

My life went from normal, whatever that means, to something utterly unrecognisable. What followed was a seven year stretch of drastic, unrelenting change in which everything about me was stripped down, shaken apart, and forced into an entirely new direction. There were moments when I genuinely did not know whether I would make it to the other side or not.

If you have experienced something similar, you will know that when life hits you like this, then nothing makes sense. All you can do is hang on and hope you reach the other side in one piece.

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”- Mary Shelley

What came next would dismantle everything I thought I knew about myself and the world we live in.

The Unravelling Begins

So here is what happened to initiate that change.

As I was going about my usual day at work, I accidentally fell down a flight of stairs and severely damaged one side of my body, including my hip, spine, and fracturing a leg. From that moment onwards, everything changed beyond recognition.

What followed after was a period of hard hitting, unforgiving and merciless change.

Yet the physical injury was only half the story.

What I did not realise at the time was that the impact of my lower back hitting the concrete floor had triggered a premature kundalini awakening, the kind that ordinarily unfolds naturally through dedicated spiritual practice. Instead, mine was forced open through physical trauma, plunging me into what is known as a spiritual emergency. It can be destabilising and potentially dangerous when brought about in this way, but at that point in my life I had absolutely no understanding of this concept.

By the end of that chapter of my life, I would be totally unrecognisable to myself.

And this was only the first stage of the crack in the foundation of everything I thought I knew.

Refusing to Break

Before I understood the severity of this accident, I had already stepped into the familiar role of pretending I was unbreakable. As my team helped me up from the floor, overwhelmed by excruciating pain and shock, I slipped straight back into that old coping mechanism and told myself it was nothing. I was so determined to be independent, so afraid of being a burden, that I tried to carry on with my working day as though nothing significant had happened.

However, after being at home for several hours later that evening, I had no choice but to reach out and get help, as the pain had become unbearable, and no amount of gritting my teeth was going to get me through this alone. I knew something was seriously wrong.

I went to the Accident and Emergency Department at my local hospital, where the doctors showed me the extent of the damage through an X-ray and an MRI scan. They were astonished at how calm I appeared. I was not calm, I was in shock, completely dissociated and zoned out, retreating into the same protective numbness I had relied on many times before when the pain became unbearable.

They told me to rest, warning me that the damage was so severe that I would find it hard to work again. The thought of giving up my work that felt like a calling would have broken my heart, so thinking I knew better, I decided to ignore their advice.

Within a few days, I wobbled back into work on crutches, plaster casts, and morphine, battling my way through every step. I had no one to bail me out, and I refused to return to the life I had tried so hard to escape. There was no way on earth I was going back to my life then.

However, when you are in that much pain, even the simplest tasks become mountains, and every part of daily life became a battle I felt I was constantly losing.

As if that were not enough, I had just moved in with my partner, relocating from the city to a rural area, which meant a brutal daily commute, two hours to London and two hours home again, whilst injured, medicated, and exhausted. My timing was terrible.

Looking back now, I must have been utterly mad, completely out of my mind, but at the time I could not see another way to be.

And I could not see that my determination was only driving me deeper into collapse.

The Unravelling

The next stage of my descent arrived with a force and it all began to unravel very quickly. My home life cracked under the pressure, and the collapse of my romantic relationship yanked hard at an old, familiar thread.

The belief that had shaped my entire childhood, that love was conditional and support would always be scarce for me, rose sharply to the surface of my being. I had grown up in a world where asking for help was dangerous, where vulnerability invited punishment, mockery, or neglect.

So when those around me withdrew, prioritising their comfort over my pain, it felt painfully familiar as though I was being pulled back into the same harsh reality I had known as a child.

“Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.”- Pema Chödrön

When I traced it back, I could see how often I had accepted this pattern without protest, believing it was simply my place, my burden, to carry everything alone and just get on with it.

And if you have ever been caught in cycles like this, you know how they return again and again, no matter how much work you think you have done or how many changes you make.

Everything was breaking, and there was nowhere left to hide.

Falling Out of Myself

It was here, in the brutal collapse of my inner world, that I felt myself beginning to fall out of the life I had held together for so long.

Despite pushing myself, I just could not hold it together anymore. I was no longer the strong one, or the capable one who held everyone else up and kept life moving forward.

Instead, I was crumbling beneath a pain that refused to ease, a pain that seeped into every part of my being. And I had no idea how to allow myself to be seen in such a broken, vulnerable, shame filled state such as this.

Then came the slap of reality I had been avoiding, the one that lands where it hurts most.

“I did not matter to anyone.”

The loneliness, isolation, and heartbreak that comes from feeling that you do not matter, that you are cut off from love, unseen and unheard, is a painful place to find yourself in and can be almost too heavy a load to bear.

That, my dear reader, in my humble opinion, is one of the most soul destroying experiences a person can encounter in life.

And in that space, because I believed I did not matter, I began to actually dissolve from the inside out, disintegrating from the very substance of matter itself. My body and spirit slowly pulled apart under the weight of that belief, as though some essential thread between them was loosening.

This became the first of many lessons to come:

How truly powerful our minds are.

It felt like the beginning of a soul death, a quiet, internal collapse that no physical injury could fully explain. I did not know it then, but this was the first crack that would split my life wide open and allow the Divine’s blueprint to work its magic through me.

When She Chose Anywhere But Home

I knew I was losing my grip on everything, but nothing cut as deeply as the realisation that I was now losing my daughter too. As the crisis in my life escalated, I spent less and less time with her, something I will regret for the rest of my life. I had in fact, taken my eye off the ball and did not see how deeply she was struggling too.

A new school.

Rural isolation.

No familiar friends.

She grew lonelier and lonelier with each passing day, and the painful truth is that I was far too consumed by my own suffering to see it.

She began escaping the tension in our home by spending time with one of the only neighbouring families who had children her age. Soon, she was always there.

She loved the lack of rules, the freedom, the rebellion, the fun, and perhaps most of all, the absence of pain. Home had become heavy, and she sought refuge wherever the weight felt lighter.

Then she stopped coming home altogether.

Stopped attending school at fifteen.

Stopped listening to me.

No amount of begging, reasoning, cajoling, or discipline made any difference. I could feel her slipping further and further away, and there was nothing I could do to pull her back toward me again.

That was the moment that fear really came home to roost.

That big, fat, enormous fear that she was getting lost in the same way I had nearly lost myself all those years ago.

Watching History Repeat Itself

The fear hit me hard as I saw what she was walking into. She had fallen deeply in love, her first love, with a handsome, charismatic boy from that family. And as I tried to protect her from the chaos I sensed in that environment, she pushed further away.

The family was steeped in alcoholism, gambling, and antisocial behaviour. I had witnessed it in my own childhood and recognised the signs instantly. But she could not see it. She only saw the freedom and exhilaration in the chaos of her new chosen family.

Thoughts of how I was going to prevent my daughter from following my path tormented me. I had pushed so hard to avoid the generational curse that seemed to haunt us.

Yet here it was, unfolding exactly as it had in the generations before, despite every effort I had made to break the pattern.

I was exhausted from pushing that boulder uphill, only for it to roll back down and smack me in the face again, no matter what I did to change it.

And if you have ever watched someone you love walk straight into the very pain you tried to protect them from, then you know the helplessness that grips you in a way words rarely capture.

My heart broke. I could feel it crack inside me. I had fought so hard to give her a better life than the one I had escaped, a life where I was surrounded by addicts, dysfunction, and chaos. Yet here she was, pulled into the very world I had run from, and loving it.

History was repeating itself before my eyes.

It was one of the most difficult moments of my life, and I had many to choose from; but realising that her soul had its own journey, one I had no right to pull off its course, forced a painful surrender.

I had to hope, with everything in me, that she would make it through without destroying herself in the way I nearly had. But she was determined, and she had her own path to walk, and I had to let her walk it.

You cannot save someone who does want to be ‘saved’.

“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you.”- Kahlil Gibran

And so, with a heavy heart, I allowed life to remain as it was. I had to honour her free will and resist the instinct to slip into rescue mode.

I found it incredibly painful to restrain myself in this way and allow life to be her teacher.

Standing back as she walked into the abyss was the hardest test of all, but I knew, deep down, that I had no right to interfere with her soul’s own becoming in this lifetime and had to trust that she would receive what she needed from the experience.

The Pain of Letting Go

As my life continued to collapse around me, my own body began failing even more. The pain became unmanageable. Work had became impossible, so I had no choice but to leave the job that had given me such purpose.

Suddenly, I was alone.

Truly alone.

No job.

No family.

Dwindling savings.

No romantic relationship.

Friends disappearing fast.

No purpose to nourish my soul.

Just me and the pain.

That was all that remained.

And it sounds mad, when I look back to then, that even my cat was run over and killed by a heartless hit and run driver. It felt as if life was taking every last thing I had ever found love or comfort in.

This time willpower was not enough. There was no pushing through, no distraction, no busy-ness to hide in.

My motivation evaporated.

The only thing I had lived for, trying to give my daughter a better life, had also slipped away, and I did not know how to live solely for myself.

As debt mounted, I could no longer afford treatments to manage the pain, and I found myself unable to function in any meaningful way.

So I did what I had done as a child. I withdrew inward.

Except this time, it was not imagination that saved me.

There was no Aslan and Narnia, as I mentioned in my first blog of this series, where everything was magical, where there was no doorway into another world where pain could not follow.

Instead, I sat in an old garden chair from morning until night, barely moving, lost in my thoughts.

Hours slipped by in silence.

I sat there in shock, grieving everything I had lost despite my best efforts. I kept wondering how on earth my life had led me to this place yet again.

In the end, all I could do was sit with the ruins of my own life and admit I no longer knew how to make it different.

Sitting with the Ruins

There comes a point in every descent where you stop fighting and simply face what is left, and that was where I found myself.

Sitting there day after day, an ancient and terrible ache began to surface within me. It felt like a primordial terror rising from my very depths. What was coming into my awareness. was the belief that I had no right to exist in this life.

Looking back now, as I reflect on these events, I can see how that belief had been hardwired into me from childhood and had shaped so much of my perspective on life. It explained why I had always felt somehow born wrong, unseen and permanently on the outside of everything.

As I write this now, I find myself wondering if I had been conditioned to forget the one eternal truth that belongs to all humanity, a truth I now understand:

That we all have the right to exist, because that right has been given to us by our Creator.

“You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars, you have a right to be here.”- Max Ehrmann

But at that point in my story, I had not yet claimed that as a truth.

As the days blurred into one another and I remained unmoving, still as a marble statue, something strange began to occur. I began to feel as though parts of me were slipping away, disappearing one fragment at a time.

Bit by bit, it was as if my soul was drifting away from the world of matter.

I felt myself dissolving.

It was as though I was dying inside, my soul loosening its grip on my body. I could feel myself thinning, as though I was fading from my own life force. And the truth is, I nearly succeeded in this endeavour, as you will soon come to see.

What I now understand is that I was experiencing an existential crisis, one brought on by the premature kundalini awakening.

It was unfolding in front of my eyes in full, blazing technicolour.

It was not subtle. It was not gentle. It was the beginning of a stripping away of everything I believed myself to be.

It was here, in the rubble of my former self, that the real unravelling began.

Falling Into Darkness

I did not realise it at the time, but this was when my body began its slow descent into death and eventually a rebirth.

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”-Mary Oliver

As I sat there broken and dazed in the cold and the rain, trying to understand how my life had crumbled so completely, I began to notice what felt like an alarm rising inside me, trying to alert me, trying to get my attention.

It cut through the fog of my mind with such clarity that I could not ignore it. I felt flushed, feverish, aching from head to toe, so I dragged myself to bed hoping it would pass quickly.

But it did not.

It became worse.

Dangerously worse.

As I lay there in my darkened bedroom and my temperature climbed higher and higher, the strangest coldness washed over me, as though my life force was expiring, as though death itself was coming to meet me in this downward spiral.

A pain erupted in my head that felt as though it was imploding from the inside out.

I lay there for three days until I could no longer get out of bed to reach the toilet, drifting in and out of consciousness. I could feel myself weakening with every passing hour.

At some point, I realised I had not drunk anything in nearly two days. My head was too heavy to lift from the pillow.

My mind flashed back to a survival programme I had once watched, explaining that the human body can only go without water for three days before it begins to shut down.

I knew my health was crossing into dangerous territory.

I was in an upstairs bedroom with no phone, no visitors and no way of getting help.

I knew instinctively that I was slipping away. If someone did not find me soon, I would not be here for much longer.

In those hours, I understood with terrifying clarity that I was running out of time.

On the Threshold

Caught in this twilight world between life and death, I was tempted to give in to the beckoning of oblivion.

If I am brutally honest with you, letting go at the time, felt so much easier than trying to drag my life back on track yet again. I felt I had only the tiniest spark of strength left to fight with.

There had been too many battles, too many years of pushing uphill. I simply lay there, sinking deeper into that liminal space between this world and whatever lay beyond.

Then a sudden urgency rose inside me, forcing a choice I could not avoid.

Did I wish to let go or fight to stay in a world that felt harsh, unforgiving, and stacked against me at every turn.

A world where, no matter how hard I tried, I never seemed to come out on top.

A world where I always ended up alone, always on the outside of life, always the misfit.

I had watched others glide through existence as though the universe had cleared the way for them, and a part of me ached to be one of those people.

Alas, no, I was not one of them. I never had been, and that was not my pathway to experience then.

Continuing to be totally transparent with you, I admit I had often felt as though my life had been cursed from the very beginning.

With that realisation, painful feelings rose sharply within me. It confirmed an old belief that I had somehow been born wrong, and there must be something terribly wrong with me.

And if that was the truth, then what was the point of trying to change anything.

Why not surrender.

Why not just let go.

In that moment, when I was deciding my own fate, the pull to let go was almost overwhelming.

Letting go felt like the easiest option, and it came with a dangerous sense of relief that was difficult to turn away from.

The Love That Anchored Me to This World

Even as my body slipped towards oblivion, love found the one place in me that had not yet given up. And although my daughter and I had become estranged, I could not leave her to face this world alone.

I loved her far too much to do that to her.

No child should endure the loss of a mother’s love at such a young age.

My mind drifted back to a memory from my own childhood, when at eight years old I came home from school and my mother told me, casually and without emotion, that she had sat in the graveyard all day with a bottle of pills, ready to end her life.

The ease with which she said it stayed with me forever.

The fear that I might come home one day and find her gone filled me with an anxiety I did not have words for at that age.

She was not the best mother, but she was my mother, and I loved her. I could not do that to my daughter, and I would not. That was where I drew the line.

“Where there is love, there is life.”- Mahatma Gandhi

And that love, even though we had become distant, even through the estrangement, was enough to make me summon the strength to try.

From that moment, I knew I had to find a way back from this slow drift into what felt like a permanent sleep.

I felt the urge to fight, to hold on dearly to life.

The only problem was that my body refused to move and I could not lift a single part of it up from the bed. I was completely helpless for the first time in my life.

I wanted so badly to fight back, but I feared I had left it too late.

I had chosen life, but in that moment, I feared life might not have chosen me back.

The Silent Cry for Help

As I lay there trapped, drifting in and out of consciousness, limp and lifeless, something strange moved through me.

An urgent impulse to call my daughter home rose with a force I could not explain.

I had not seen her for weeks, and I had no idea how I was meant to reach her when I could not even move.

As my mind searched for what felt like an impossible solution, I heard a voice inside my head, a voice that did not feel like my own, telling me to reach out to my her with my thoughts before it was too late.

With the last remnants of my will, I focused on her:

Please come home.

I need you.

Please help me.

I know I am dying.

Come now.

I repeated it over and over again in my mind, like a mantra, willing her to feel it.

My final thought where of her beautiful face, and then I slipped under again.

Answering the Soul’s Call

When I surfaced again, it was as if time had folded in on itself.

I had no sense of how long I had been unconscious.

The room felt distorted somehow, as though I was suspended between worlds, neither fully alive nor fully gone, caught in a strange half life.

The next thing I became aware of was the sound of my bedroom door opening slowly, as though from a great distance. I was unsure if I was dreaming or not, and then I heard a voice.

“Mum?”

“I am here.”

“Are you all right?”

I thought I was hallucinating. I tried to answer but I could not, because I was no longer able to speak or see.

But she was here.

She had come home.

My baby had come home.

The overwhelming relief that flooded through me in that moment was immense.

She told me much later that she had felt a sudden, overwhelming urge to return, as if something had pulled her home in a way she could not explain. The smell of death in the room hit her the moment she opened the door and it frightened her.

She told me much later that the scent stayed in her memory for many years.

And even though she and I had been at loggerheads, she set every argument aside without hesitation.

She walked straight past the hurt and the distance between us and stepped into a fierce, instinctive love. She called an ambulance at once. In that moment, it was my daughter who came to my rescue, because her soul had heard the calling of mine in its greatest need.

Coming Next in Part Four: When the Blindfold of the False Self Dissolved

What happened next transcended the limits of mortal existence entirely. In the next instalment of The Journey From Unconscious Scapegoat to Awakened Seer, I guide readers through the liminal space beyond death, where the veil between worlds thinned, allowing me to cross a threshold into the otherworld.

It was here that I became liberated from the constraints of the small self and met by a love so pure and powerful that it altered absolutely everything.

In that realm, my eyes were opened to the truth of the divinity within me, and where I realised that my pain, once experienced as a curse, had always been pointing me towards something far greater than I could have ever imagined.

Join me in the next chapter of my journey.

See you there!