I used to think I had it figured out.

I'd built a life I loved. A creative career in Hollywood, a community of people who trusted me, and a sense that if I just kept my heart open and followed the signs, everything would work out. I'd found the version of spirituality that felt like home to me, and I lived in it happily, floating from one good thing to the next.

Then lightning struck. Literally, that's how it felt. Energy tore through my body and my life came apart at the seams. My sense of who I was, what was real, and what home even was, all of it dissolved without warning. I didn't have a name for what was happening. I just knew I was in more pain than I thought a person could survive.

The descent

For more years than I care to mention it did not let up. Not for a day. There were stretches where I wanted to die, more times than I can count. (I didn't actually want to end things, but I didn't know how a person was supposed to keep living in that much pain either.)

I'm telling you this because I don't want to be one more person who talks about awakening like it's all just light and expansion.

Some of it is the opposite of that, and if you're there right now, I want you to know that someone else has been there too, and lived.

My mind stopped working the way minds are supposed to work. Clouds became unbearable. When one passed over the sun, the whole world changed color and I felt it as physical pain, like something had reached into my chest and shattered my insides.

I would look at a cactus and it seemed to pierce the air around it instead of sitting there the way plants are supposed to sit. Ordinary things I'd known my whole life - my own street, the word "bagel," a horse - would suddenly feel foreign, like I was encountering the concept for the first time and it made no sense that this was what it was called or what it did.

Instead of feeling the connective thread that runs through existence, stitching it all together in a way that made sense, the thread of continuity came undone, and I experienced each molecule as a separate entity, a thing entirely unto itself that related to nothing and was terrifying in its isolation.

The opposite of what I feel now.

There was a static running through everything, especially on the left side of my body and head, like a television tuned between two channels. I could hear people talking to me and also feel myself somewhere else entirely, both at max volume, neither one clear.

Some days people looked dead, and it terrified me, like watching a room full of people I loved and not being able to find them behind their own faces. This was one of my least favorite states.

My body felt like it was under attack from the inside. Some days it was a thousand pound elephant sitting on my chest.

Other days it felt like someone had taken my brain and my whole reality and put it in a blender on high speed, and I was just trying to hold myself together while it spun.

Some days I thought I had rabies. (Google the symptoms. They are the same!)

The pressure never fully let up. It was like climbing a mountain with a boulder on my back every single day, reaching the top leveled and undone, and then having to start climbing again the next morning with no rest in between. Because the nights. Oh the nights...

The nights

Nights were their own kind of hell. I would find myself pulled into something like the astral realm, and I still don't fully understand what happened there. It was somewhere between watching a movie and being inside one, not in it enough to run, not out of it enough to simply watch.

At times it felt like possession, like something was moving through me that wasn't entirely mine, but it also wasn't not mine. None of it is really possible to describe.

I would hear what sounded like choirs of screams, and see the visual equivalent of that (whatever that means) for months at a time.

Somewhere in those months I realized that hell is an actual place a person can experience, and I was in it.

Losing the ground

Perspective stopped making sense. Things far away looked like they were floating in the sky instead of sitting where they should. A conversation at a picnic table would look warped, like I was seeing it through a fun house mirror or from underwater, while some other part of me watched from a completely different place, like a radio caught between two stations, both playing too loud, neither one clear enough to understand.

I lost my sense of where I was in space and in time. My own driveway, the road I'd driven a thousand times, would suddenly look like a dream I didn't recognize. I couldn't hold the thread connecting my house to my street to my town to my mother three thousand miles away.

Everywhere that wasn't the exact spot I was standing on went grey and unreachable, and I knew nothing had changed, but still it looked and felt different. The fear made no rational sense, and it was also the realest thing I had ever felt.

Experiences like this often get labeled as psychosis, but what was different here was that I never lost the thread. Actually the opposite. I was more aware than I had ever been.

A meta awareness knew that what was happening was not normal, and I was still there, watching the agony of it all from just outside, even as I knew none of it was actually happening. That awareness was sharper than it had ever been in my life. You'd think that would have made me feel safer. It didn't.

Looking for help

The more I tried to share my experience with others, the more I was misunderstood, and the lonelier I felt. So I learned to keep my mouth shut. Especially to my spiritual community, who had language for bliss, but none for this. That was the biggest disappointment and heartbreak of all.

I saw around fifty different practitioners trying to find relief. Doctors, healers, psychiatrists, brain scans, emergency rooms. I was put on Risperidone, Zoloft, and Wellbutrin at different points, none of which touched what was happening.

I mention the specifics because when you're in it, you're desperate for anyone who can speak your language, and most practitioners can't. And there's nothing more disheartening than having to educate a person you're paying to help you.

It's not their fault. How would they know?

What I needed to hear was that what I was experiencing was not a mistake, that others had been here and survived, and that trying everything while nothing seemed to work is an important part of the path. We all go through this. It was not a sign that I was failing.

Finding my people

What I found, eventually, was not a way back to the life I used to have. I found an understanding of what was happening to me, a few trusted guides who had been there and were more okay on the other side than they had been before, and friends who knew the terrain because they were in it too. Those guides gave me hope that this was important and would be worth it.

We could let our guards down around each other and talk about feeling misunderstood, or like our insides were in a blender, and I mean that physically. Nobody compared it to something it wasn't and thought they understood. While everyone's experience is valid, this is a unique thing and it needs to be treated that way.

Slowly, as my system found safety with the people who came to become the When Lightning Strikes community, it softened into the knowing that I was not alone. I also started hearing wisdom, gnosis even, come through the members of the community. While we were suffering, we were also witnessing what the Bhagavad Gita, the Vedas and the Christian mystics all describe being revealed through us in and as each other.

Something holy was unfolding in the middle of all the fire.

We hadn't read our way there. Books gave names to what we were beginning to know directly.

What this showed me is that this process is sacred and ordered, and that in its madness it is rewiring our consciousness toward what saints and sages know. I could watch it happening day by day, in and as each one of us, as this sacred fire was burning all that was not love down.

I learned that there were thousands of us out there, awake in the middle of the night wondering what was happening to us and whether we'd be okay. While we felt like we were losing everything, especially our sanity, something auspicious was also happening. Knowing that is what healed me. That's the work I do now.

What I do now

I founded When Lightning Strikes because I needed it myself, a lifeline I couldn't find anywhere else while I was going through this. Now I offer that same lifeline to you.

It's a community and grounded resources that actually help for people in the middle of their own rude awakenings. I also write the Lightning Letters for anyone who needs company on the way.

I'm not a coach, and I'm not here to fix you or hand you a five-step plan. I call myself a Dark Night Companion, because what I offer is what I needed most when I was in it: someone who's been there, who won't flinch at what you're going through, and who can walk beside you while you make your way toward what's waiting for you on the other side.

So where did it all lead?

Someone told me once, back when I was in the worst of it, that this would become a gift. I didn't believe them. I couldn't have. But it has.

I was at a wedding not long ago, and everything that normally blocks my awareness had moved out of the way. I could feel the illuminated divine in and as everyone there. The couple, the musicians, the guests talking and laughing, all of them like different shapes the One was taking, all coming from the same source, which was the same as me. I could feel them looking back at me as me.

It was so beautiful I could hardly hold it. But I could, because every cell of my body was also vibrating with this shimmering glow of something that cannot be named, because no name does it justice.

And what's even more miraculous is that I don't just experience this at weddings. I experience it at funerals, in hospitals, in the places on earth where there is great suffering too. My body as a container now has this capacity to be with it all, and experience it too, as the One in all.

Words can never capture this, they can only point to it, and they fall short. But this is where I believe the process is taking us.

No matter how long it takes, it is a process, and processes don't last forever.

They result in something you probably can't imagine if you're in it now. So you'll have to trust me. Given where I started, this is nothing short of a miracle to me.

Kate, the personality, is still here. But so many of the identities I used to hold so tightly have fallen away. The one who had to fix everything, the one who had to be the sunshine in every room, the one who thought she had to control the outcome or nothing good would happen.

Those were never just personality traits. They were attachment strategies, ways of staying loved and safe in a family that needed me to be those things. When they finally fell away, they left me standing in a room full of my own exiles. All the parts of me I'd abandoned in order to keep everyone else okay showed up at once demanding my attention.

What's left in their place is a kind of trust I never had access to before, a sense of being carried by something I can't name and don't need to. I don't understand what animates me, or what animates all of it, but I don't need to understand it to feel it, and mostly what I feel now, in the middle of an ordinary day, is awe.

I still have hard weeks, but I live from a home inside myself I didn't know was possible to find. And somehow, in the middle of all of it, I am radically ok. What I spent my whole life seeking now permeates me, because it is me. And it is also everything else.

If you're in it right now

I know how this ends. And I am so excited for you.

You're allowed to fall apart.
You're allowed to need support.
And you're allowed to trust that this, all of it, is leading somewhere.

— Kate