The Terrifyingly Beautiful Process of Self-Realization

A Journey Into the Center of the Heart..

I took my first ecstasy pill when I was 16 years old.

That night, on a sweaty party bus, I experienced something I had been searching for my whole life..

Love.

Not the kind that my parents provided me.. or religion told me about.

This was a different experience entirely.

For the first time in my life, I experienced a love so heart-opening and raw, it was overwhelming.

So overwhelming, that I felt the need to go up to just about every person I met that night and tell them how much I loved them, and how we need to be new best friends..

& while the ‘heart-opening’ high never lasted, and the comedowns had me questioning my very existence- these formative experiences deeply shaped my journey.

On the one hand, I was a dumb kid who was experimenting with street drugs that pose serious risks..

Seeking an escape from my adolescence- all the rules, the inauthenticity, and the reality that the fairy tale of life that I had believed in as a younger child… was GONE.

On the other hand, despite largely pursuing these experiences from an unconscious place- I was shown glimpses of God that night.

I had never felt such intense emotions..

You could just sit there and cry at the beauty of it all.

Everything was perfect.

Fear vanished completely.

All that remained was the best attributes of the human experience.

When you looked at someone, all you saw was their purest essence.

I would go on to spend the next 10+ years unconsciously chasing that feeling..

It was such a profoundly different “love” than the “love you” from my parents, or the “Jesus loved you so much he died for your sins” from the church.

After experiencing it myself, the love I'd been taught felt like a distorted concept- and this one, the kind that came with a side of massively dilated pupils, felt much closer to the real thing.

I then began to question, at a fairly young age, whether all these people who were swinging the word “love” around all the time- had ever actually been in the presence of true, unadulterated love before..

& I couldn't shake that question. Because if that state was real.. and it undeniably was- what were the rest of us walking around settling for?!

---

The Source of All Love

I believe we are all chasing this state, whether we’re conscious of it or not..

& there are many different levels of awareness on this topic.

Some have no clue that they deeply crave love, and would be terrified to ever admit it.

Others may have some idea that they deeply desire this, but cram it down and try to distract and avoid, in an attempt to numb the pain.

While others, maybe more spiritual and open in temperament, are very aware they desire and need love- but may contextualize this as needing other humans’ love.

What I am speaking to today, however, reaches far higher than each of these levels of awareness.

Human love is awesome- but there is a love that transcends the commonly conceptualized human notion of love..

It’s far more of a state of being, than an emotion.

Love is the highest expression of truth.

It is the absence of distortion- pure coherence.

Love is how God expresses.

You cannot experience God, but through love.

Once you understand this, the idea of trying to “know god” from the mind seems very silly.

There is a “you” inside of you that is timeless, boundless, and infinite in potential.

But for most of us, we have at BEST only caught glimpses of this- on rare occasions throughout our lives..

Just to go back to sleep- living from the mind, looping in familiar parts, selves, fears and karmic momentum.

---

The Pain Deep Within

It sounds simple to say “just live from your heart” or “love is the answer”..

I think we all inherently know these things to be true (at least, if you’ll let yourself really sit with it).

But to actually LIVE and EXPERIENCE these truths- that requires a journey far, far deeper.. into the center of our own heart.

One that, for most of us, if we were to be honest with ourselves- we are absolutely TERRIFIED of.

So instead- we continue to live lives as if we ARE our identities, our strategies, our preferences, our parts, and our selves.

Acting out dysfunction & fragmentation…

Looping in karma and unresolution..

- because at least it’s familiar, and somehow seems less scary than the “vast unknown” of the heart.

Isn’t it kind of funny that we all deeply crave to know God & to know love- yet the strategies and tactics through which we attempt to get these needs met are the very things that BLOCK us from experiencing it?

That’s the tricky thing about congruences.. and fear.

We attract more of that which we fear..

Virtually all of us fear not being loved.

We fear death & endings.

We fear absence..

We fear being turned away from & rejected.

& so, what does our lived experience end up entailing?

Deep feelings & reflections of fear, being unloved, abandonment, absence, and so on..

It hurts deeply- it’s SO painful, so we do what we can.. to try to not feel it.

This sends us further into the mind, into layers and layers of distraction and dissociation.

Some choose outward busyness.

Others fragment inward.. constantly sourcing from absence & dysfunction, locking their worst fears in the basement.

The more we do this, the deeper the suffering.

The deeper the suffering, the more we feel the need to turn away from life and participate in greater and greater degrees of absence & taking from life, in an attempt to get our needs met.

We’re here, physically, but the TRUE YOU is not really here.. and hasn’t been for a long, long time.

It’s fucking PAINFUL.. if you’d really let yourself go to where I’m pointing you towards, within yourself.

So painful that, if you were to allow yourself to truly feel all the pain that you hold in your heart, you would crack open and not be able to function in your day to day life for a while..

So you close off, instead.

Which is FAR more painful, but as long as you continue to stay OUT of your heart- you don’t have to feel it..

---

My Journey

I’ve had my own very personal experience with these themes over the last decade- going from intense awakening, to falling back asleep, to another powerful spiritual awakening, just to slowly fall back asleep again.

Ironically.. after each awakening, I was CERTAIN I had “arrived”.

It’s as if all of the suffering, mistakes, struggle, fear, and challenges up until that moment- suddenly made all the sense in the world..

They all brought me to THAT moment of awakening.

& yet, inevitably, these incredibly elevated states of consciousness that I had temporarily accessed would somehow manage to slip through my fingers..

Each time this happened, the descent back down the mountain became more and more painful in my heart.

If all you've ever known is the mind- the looping, the fear, the struggle- you don't even realize other channels of experience exist.

But after an awakening, and being shown life from such a radically different vantage point.. to then lose that, and come back into your regular old states of suffering- is an experience that I can only describe as heartbreaking.

I spent many years chasing that initial “awakening” experience- via plant medicine ceremonies and spiritual practices.. just to realize that what I was chasing was going to forever elude me.

What I came to learn, through many painful cycles of reaching incredibly elevated states & having advanced realizations, and then falling from grace, just to repeat the process all over again.. is something Carl Jung spoke beautifully to.

“No tree can grow to heaven, unless its roots reach down to hell.”

I loved that quote- and thought I'd lived it. What I didn't understand is that every lesson on this path has LEVELS.

I’m no stranger to shadow work, I spent YEARS doing it in my earlier 20’s..

Facing the most uncomfortable and shameful aspects of my inner world..

I thought I had sufficiently addressed the unintegrated, lower aspects inside of me by doing so.. enough to where I had prepared my being to be able to HOLD higher states without fragmentation or dysfunction.

I was wrong..

What I experientially learned over time, was that shadow work and processes of awakening are only 2 of the 3 phases of spiritual advancement that seem to be required for self realization.

The 3rd phase, what we can call spiritual maturity, focuses on the unsexy work of integrating your subtle systems, nervous system, etheric body, and overall channel- to be able to HOUSE and HOLD the levels of consciousness that you’re trying to access.

I managed to access consistently high states of consciousness & awareness during my 1st awakening period about 10 years ago..

I did so AGAIN in 2021, after a ceremony that rocked my world..

The 2nd go-around, I managed to “hold” the states for many many months afterwards..

I felt like “Jeremy” had died, and I got to experience what life would be like if I wasn’t run by my software, algorithms, and preferences..

But then, inevitably, the pendulum swung back..

By mid-2022, some of my preferences and karmic patterns were starting to creep back into my life.

This happened so slowly, however, that I wasn’t aware of it.

By winter of 2022, I woke up with stabbing nerve pain in my lumbar spine and couldn't move for days.

This entered me into a ~3 year season of confronting the job I'd started but never finished: Self-Realization.

My awakening in 2021 was so intense, and so far-reaching in my system, that when I slowly “went back to sleep” and shifted back out of my heart and into my head- it caused me literal injury.

My subtle systems & nervous system basically just said “nah, we’re not doing this anymore”..

That journey, while incredibly difficult and painful in every sense of the word- brought me back home to my heart- in a way that I have been searching for my entire life.

The RAW LOVE that I described experiencing at age 16.. I never stopped reaching for that.

I may not have known how to get it, or where to get it, or who I needed to BE in order to HOLD it- but I never stopped trying.

& while much of that journey involved unhealthy approaches, coping mechanisms, and dysfunction..

That’s how growth looks- when you’re IN IT.

There is no “love and light” without “shame and fear”..

You can’t just DO BETTER, until you have truly let karma run its course and your system/being is finally READY for higher.

For me, meeting my mentor represented my own version of “I am finally sick enough of the pain, looping, isolation and suffering- that I am willing to do whatever it takes to get back into my heart”...

So that’s what we did.

I unwound so much negative karma it would make your head spin..

I spent more weeks laying in bed than I can count.

I went through indescribable detoxes- both in biology and my subtle systems- letting go of congruences that had anchored themselves in my tissues for lifetimes.

I cried more tears than you would believe.

I had every single one of my worst existential fears come up, many many times… so that I could experience them DEEPLY- and finally choose to get help (from above) and let them go.

During one specific leg of my unwinding.. I spent 8 straight months, solely working on exiting “detrimental structures” that I was in.

I had over 150 that I was sourcing consciousness from.. & in doing so, I was creating detriment to myself and others. Once I knew that, I was willing to do whatever was required to heal this.

So.. I woke up every single day for 8 months, & probably did 3 sessions a day of inner work- working with benevolence to exit detrimental structures that I was entangled in, and sourcing from..

There were many ‘multiple month’ periods that I felt lower than apathy..

There isn’t really a word for how you feel, when you’re deep in deconstruction of your inner terrain.

Basically it’s like a mixture of schitzo, manic and bipolar, if I had to try to describe it.

I would wake up and feel absolutely TERRIFIED, for no reason.

There was no external trigger in my life, no one threatening my safety..

It was all inside my inner world- as we continued to deconstruct things that I had locked away in the basement.

Everything I THOUGHT I was, and everything I THOUGHT I knew- was being unwound.

I’ve never let myself feel suffering as deeply as I did in this season.. It’s hard to put into words for you guys.

It makes me emotional just writing this right now.

Imagine the most broken & hopeless you’ve ever felt, and then multiply that by 10..

This path is not for the faint of heart- but I didn’t come to this dysfunctional planet to live a normal life and then die.

I am here to evolve as a spiritual being- so I pushed on..

The entire “ground beneath me” was being deconstructed.. and all I had to hang onto was LOVE.

Love- the only force I knew of that could transform all the suffering inherent in being human into a priceless GIFT.

Hanging onto love (as my north star) was the ONLY THING that got me through the ~2 year deconstruction period, in which I worked with my mentor to intensely shed everything that was not ME.

Parts, selves, preferences, lower codes, detrimental structures, files & algorithms, etc..

Gene work, upgrading biology, organ work, and so so so much help from benevolence.

I want to be very clear that humans cannot and do not heal themselves, it is only through GRACE and LOVE that higher beings (God + others who help) work WITH our systems to create what humans call “miracles”.

& if you spent even 10 minutes in my mind/system in 2023 or 2024, and compared it to now- you would never, EVER doubt the power of LOVE again.

---

What I’ve Learned

This is what it looks like to change your congruences..

It’s not good enough to say “I deeply want to know love”- because underneath the surface, virtually all of us are deeply congruent with turning AWAY from love, with absence and voids.

It’s extremely hard work to accept love, let alone HOLD IT within you, as a default state of being.

There is so much FEAR that stands in between who you perceive yourself to be- and love..

The TRUE YOU doesn’t have fear, but the layers and layers of “non-you” have hundreds of fears- and those are what are blocking you from experiencing God’s love.

In this way, the return to the HEART is a journey through the forest of your worst fears.

One of my greatest fears that this work showed me, was my fear of “death” or “endings”.

During the ~6 month period where I was releasing my congruences to these fears & lower structures- I was genuinely preparing for my own death..

Not in a suicidal way, but in the sense of- I was so deep in “the work” that I felt like I was closer to being ready to graduate from this realm, than I was ready to go back into “human life” again.

I went so far into the fear.. so far into the unwinding of the stories, parts, strategies and selves- all stacking on top of the TRUE ME- in an attempt to try to PREVENT death from ever happening..

That I eventually made it to the other side.

I no longer fear death or endings, which is a crazy crazy thing to say.

When my mentor first told me she had ZERO fear of death, I didn't believe her. I get it now- and it's possible, in this very lifetime.

I have zero congruences to fearing death, endings, dying, etc- and this alone has freed me up to truly LIVE.. for the first time in my life.

It's hard to live from LOVE when you deeply fear death- your own or your loved ones'- because the heart closes itself to protect against future loss.

However, in doing this, you never truly LIVE either.

What I’ve learned about love, along the way, is so profound- I want to share a few things with you.

Love looks at this situation and chooses to live openly ANYWAYS.

Love understands that those we love will die one day, and we ourselves will die too..

& yet, love chooses to be open ANYWAYS.. because that is what gives life MEANING.

Love understands that NOTHING that is real can ever be taken away or lost..

If you go your whole life hiding in your mind, acting out our parts/selves and preferences- pretending you are THAT… you will have gone your whole life having never TRULY lived.

Really sit with that.. Is that what you want for your life?

I’ve learned that LOVE is what gives suffering meaning..

You’re going to suffer anyways- you might as well transform that suffering into something so beautiful it transcends words..

Your life can be a GIFT of DEVOTION- if you choose to live it from love- even knowing that one day, you and everyone you love will transition from this realm.

Much of this journey is hard to measure, as we’re working on “subtle systems” and the plumbing within one’s system that houses and routes consciousness…

I wish there was a clearer way I could show you me BEFORE and me NOW..

I’m sure many of you can FEEL the difference, though.

I’ve always been a kind person.

I’ve always loved people..

I’ve always truly CARED about people & doing right by them.

But I would constantly get “snagged” throughout my life- tangled up in strategies, hiding, taking from life, and other dysfunctions..

I didn’t know how to properly approach humanity, relationships, and life- when so much of my experiences were that others wanted to take from me, control me, blame me, pedestalize me, etc..

So it was much easier to just keep my heart closed and guard against people & life itself.. in an attempt to try to cope with my fears, lower codes, & detrimental structures that I was sourcing from..

I thought that the things I had continually experienced in the past were PROOF of why I needed to be these ways & continue to use these kinds of strategies.. to “protect” myself.

But they were not.

I was shown that these experiences were created by MY CONGRUENCES with them- which then attracted them into my reality, over and over.

So I chose to do the gritty work to GROW UP into what I now think of as “spiritual maturity”.

Spiritual Maturity is about INTEGRATION & is STRUCTURAL in nature.

I had enough peak states of awakening and years of shadow work to change my trajectory- but more of either wasn't what I needed.

What I was missing were higher forms of the internal structures, pathways & subtle systems that HOUSE consciousness in my system..

My plumbing was riddled with old, lower ways of being- meaning no matter how enlightened a state I accessed, it had to travel back through corrupted pathways.

The more I became aware of this, the more serious I got about unwinding this.

I just woke up one day and I was so tired of being versions of myself that were not my TRUE NATURE.

& I KNOW I'm not alone in this.

---

---

Your Personal Invitation

Most people have no concept that living from your ‘true nature’ is even POSSIBLE.. & so, they settle for living from their mind.

This may work for a while, until one day- it just doesn’t anymore.

You wake up, and regardless of how great your life may seem on the surface- you just feel EMPTY.

You may love your family, or your kids, or your husband/wife.. but you can’t truly FEEL that overwhelming love for them..

It’s much more of the IDEA of love that you feel for them..

The concept, not the experience.

Or maybe, like me, you wake up one day with chronic pain or an illness that turns your life upside down- and forces you to take a real inventory of the suffering deep within your heart.

You may consider yourself spiritual, or godly, and know immense amounts about the CONCEPT of God..

- but inside of your heart, there is so much pain and separation that you wouldn’t even know where to begin, if you were willing to be honest with yourself.

You think about the remaining decades you have left on this earth- and struggle to understand what it’s all for..

You’re here, living out your day to day, but you feel NO ALIVENESS.

You’ve become so disconnected from who and what you really are.

I know this very well, because I’ve lived it.

My suffering has gifted me a level of empathy I couldn't have accessed otherwise- and what I see underneath all the forced smiles and 'I'm great' responses..

- is deep, unacknowledged pain, in virtually everyone I encounter.

The looping. The fear. The angst.

The aloneness & isolation.

The disconnection from who & what you actually ARE.

The existential heartbreak that you can’t even explain.

The deep voids within you.

I lived it all.. & I’ve also tried all the “solutions” that the mind THINKS will solve it.

Drugs, drinking, girls, sports, social status, religion, bodybuilding, plant medicines, community, chasing money, spirituality, new hobbies, building a family, moving locations, making art, changing careers..

You name it, I’ve probably tried some version of it.

All the while, nothing worked..

Nothing LASTED.

Sure, I’d get temporary dopamine and relief or enjoyment for a year, or 2 or 3..

But eventually- I’d find myself right back where I started..

I was still ME- just me with a different identity, preferences, and forms of expression.

Yet, all along, there was this subtle whisper from a timeless part of me- that never seemed to go away..

Pushing me to keep going, keep trying, keep reaching upwards.

Even though I couldn’t even articulate what exactly I was reaching for- other than to truly know God.

Some part of me KNEW that God would not have created the human experience just so we could suffer endlessly and then die, and maybe do it all over again if we’re lucky..

The more I leaned into my heart, the more locked-away compartments cracked open and released.

Fear after fear surfaced, and my heart would show me WHY this was such a strong fear for me & what I was truly afraid of underneath it..

God & Benevolence would help me, every single time, to let it go.

I would be met with their overwhelming loving presence, and the overwhelming knowing that I was being divinely supported.

I would be shown how all FEAR is simply misunderstanding, and largely a matter of perspective.

I started to catch glimpses, almost like peeking over a wall, of a reality in which I could navigate my life on earth without creating ‘more of the same’..

I started to experience more and more knowings that got louder and louder over time- of a new path that was becoming available for me..

One in which I no longer reference the past, my fears, my experiences, my momentum- and instead, I source from the heart and gain access to “new information” from the source of creation, moment to moment.

If you truly want to access your ‘true nature’, you have to do the scariest thing you will ever do..

Jump out of the plane without knowing how to work your parachute, trusting that you will figure it out on the way down- because GOD would never ask you to do something from any place other than LOVE.

Yet EVERYTHING IN YOU is going to feel crazy..

There will be many days, weeks, even months- where you are convinced you’ve gone absolutely insane.

There is nothing to compare this journey to, there is no logic to apply here.

It’s called the “path less traveled” for a reason.

We live in a world that cannot fathom that the heart houses FAR more intelligence than the mind, and that maybe the mind isn’t the best leader..

Maybe the heart houses FAR more power and ability than we are aware of, or give it credit for.

But you can only know that on the OTHER SIDE of the trust-fall.

So therein lies your conundrum..

Do you listen to the tiny whisper that has been there all along, before you were even born into your current body?

Encouraging you to take the leap..

To wake up, and REMEMBER who you are and why you’re here..

Or do you continue to listen to society, your mind, culture, and virtually everyone around you- who are living from THEIR mind and acting from a deep, existential place of fear, unresolution & absence?

The only way out is THROUGH, my friend..

All my love,

-J

PS: If you’d like to support my work, please ‘restack’ / share this post or send this to a friend who needs to read these words & drop a like/comment for me letting me know what was most impactful for you!

About the Author:

Hello friend! I’m Jeremy but most people call me J-Griff. I am the heart & voice behind Higher Yield.

---

Connect With Me:

YouTube | Instagram