A Spontaneous Awakening

This is a story I haven’t shared with too many people, and one that is deeply personal, but almost 6 years later, I feel called to share more about my journey of what some call ‘awakening’, and what I only knew as a complete sudden understanding of the world in a totally new way.

For the purpose of this story, i’ll take you back to the beginning of my journey into spirituality, in 2013 (I think?!) lying under the stars in rural Malawi, Africa. I was studying for a Global Citizenship Award at the time through my university, and my chosen focus was on sustainability, sustainable tourism and volunteer tourism in Africa. I had been teaching in a school and assisting with sustainability projects for two months, and was coming to the end of my time there.

As I looked up at the Milky Way which was the most vibrant, mesmerising, brightest array of stars and planets I still to this day have ever seen, I started to cry, and a tsunami of complete awe and love washed through my body. I can still feel it tingling now at the memory of it.

I recall feeling so minute and so completely aware of myself there and then, miles away from home and yet staring up at the same moon as my family, while simultaneously incredibly aware that what I was looking at was light that may have travelled for billions of years to reach my eyes. It was like I was looking into the past, present and future all at once, and I was overwhelmed with the magnitude of it. In that moment, I remember questioning time, and what this little life was, for the first time in a profound way.

That feeling stayed with me from there on out, but only in little glimpses.

I had also had previous strange ‘spiritual’ experiences a few years prior, which I’ll go into in more detail another time perhaps, but I knew then that there was more to this little life than that meets the eye, and I felt that my body was physically changed.

In February 2020, my best childhood friend Luke Walley passed away suddenly, very tragically and unexpectedly. He had not only been my non-blood-related brother for much of my life, he had always been my confidant, my safe-space growing up, and as he was a physicist but also a true yogi by every definition of the word, he was my spiritual guide from a young age too. He was profoundly awake and aware. A true ‘old soul’ in every sense of the word. While everybody else was stuck in the teen years of ‘self’ and ‘me, me, me’, Luke was vegan, a meditator, and took his guardianship of this planet incredibly seriously. He had a connection with animals, the Earth and other people quite unlike most anyone else i’ve ever met. He had grown up in Uganda and so had a beautiful way of greeting people like an old friend - always a BIG hug. Usually barefoot!

I had always been in awe of his mind but never truly understood. He had an incredibly fascinating intelligence that was unique - he just… understood stuff. I have since discussed this in depth with his mum, and it appears he always had just a very natural understanding and depth about very esoteric, complex subjects around spirituality, the world and the cycles of life and death.

In a bizarre, but also completely reasonable for Luke, turn of events, a few years before he passed away he had recorded a video speaking about a meditation he had done on the idea of his own death, while on a retreat in India. In the video he had spoken about what he would want his loved ones to know in the case of his death, and spoke of how he felt he had come to terms with the idea of mortality through this meditation.

When Luke passed away, I went into a grief so deep I wasn’t sure I would ever escape.

A month later, the world went into lockdown and many people began to question the nature of our media, authority figures, and the world of science and allopathic medicine. I was one of them (again, another story for another day), but it flipped my whole world upside down.

I spent around 6 months in a cave of such deep deep despair, depression and anxiety, I barely left my bed. I was existing in so much fear my body stopped responding in the way a body should. In this time, I began hearing my name called… A male voice, just saying ‘Bethan’ firmly and loudly as if trying to get my attention. I thought I was losing my mind and tried desperately to convince myself that it was a dog barking, or a chair squeaking, or a person outside. In fact, I was absolutely terrified that I had ‘broken’ my mind through anxiety, grief and depression.

As suddenly as it arrived, the fog lifted one day. I remember literally thinking ‘enough is enough’, dragging myself into the shower, scrubbing my house from top to bottom and, although the grief was still extremely heavy, feeling able to live a little again.

Around a year later, I was working for a yoga and Pilates studio, and had been practicing yoga every day. I had practiced asana on and off over the years before, and I had been meditating to keep anxiety and panic attacks under control since I was around 15 (more mindfulness), but this was the first time I had gone ‘all in’ with the practice. I was studying a yoga teacher training course at the time and was immersed in the practices, but didn’t yet know much theory around them.

One day, I was chatting to a local yoga teacher, and we started to discuss Chakras. Part way through the conversation, I had a feeling almost like I was possessed by… something else? I started talking about the Chakra system - but not only the Samkhya yoga version… I had a clear understanding of other systems of energy too. The words were pouring out of me and the clarity was incredible! I was so exited by the conversation and I recall the teacher saying ‘where did you learn all of this?’ - I had no idea. I just knew it.

Since then, this has happened many, many times with yoga… I study hard now but there have been many instances where knowledge has just seemingly ‘popped’ into my head about incredibly esoteric subjects that I had no prior conscious knowledge of, and can’t remember reading about it. I now have much more scholarly knowledge of what this is, and can now call it spontaneous awakening amongst many other words… I also now, since studying and practicing these ancient traditions - especially Tantra - have a much deeper understanding of how the practices work to awaken ‘siddhis’ but I still often can’t comprehend or explain it! It is well beyond words but if you know, you know…

As the years have passed, I have found myself on many an occasion also wondering whether some of Luke’s soul, or at least knowledge, was somehow passed to me upon his leaving his body… Maybe due to our deep deep soul connection.

But I guess I’ll never know.

What I do know, for sure, is that there is so much more to this life than meets the eye, and that i’m committed to spending my whole life exploring and dancing with that.