A memoir: “From Andy Warhol to the Ashram” |

From Andy Warhol to the Ashram is a spiritual memoir told through relationships — the friends, teachers, and luminaries who appeared at life’s darkest and most luminous crossroads. Moving between intimate encounter and ancient pilgrimage, from a TM retreat in Sydney’s Blue Mountains to sacred sites in India, Egypt, France and beyond, it is a book about recovery in its fullest sense: not merely sobriety, but the slow, community-held return to wholeness. At its heart is a simple truth — that healing happens in connection, and that love, offered without condition, is itself a spiritual practice.

LONGING TO BELONG

The Gita highlights: “For the soul there is never birth nor death.” This is beautifully echoed in Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh’s “A Cloud Never Dies” teachings: just as a cloud turns into rain, snow, or mist rather than disappearing, the soul continues in new forms — meaning energy and love are never lost, only transformed.

TRANSFORMATION & TRANSCENDENCE

Transformation is an end to suffering. Healing the soul’s sanskaras — its imprints, patterns, and themes — requires holistic self-care: inner work, processing, catharsis, and releasing.

The soul’s love of love is eternal. A wave is not separate from the ocean — a wave is the ocean. Love is not separate from love. Love is an endless ocean of existence.

VIBRATIONAL LIVING

Vibrational living is self-actualised awareness — grace that engenders spiritual elegance, resilient dignity, and naturally abiding patience. Being present. Being still. Listening to the silence as the external and inner world harmoniously connect. Liberation from longing. Heightened awareness of being aware.

ACCELERATE SHIFTS IN CONSCIOUSNESS

I am in awe of the mystery, mastery, and magnificence of this divine life. I trust intuitively in my relationship with God — the knower of the past, the present, and the future. Abiding accountability. Authenticity. Reciprocity. Restorative stillness.

Darwin Shaw’s Effort and Grace quotes Meher Baba’s reference to the gradual effacement of the false self as “the progressive conquest of the unconscious by the conscious.” This means the goal of life, simply stated, is to make our unconscious minds conscious. However, between the unconscious and the conscious resides the subconscious — and this is where our central problem lies. The unconscious, subconscious, and conscious are layers of consciousness; layers of the soul.

The obstacle we must contend with is the residue of sanskaras — deposits of impressions accumulated from past experiences — embedded mostly in our subconscious minds. These sanskaras create veils over our consciousness, blocking us from the awareness of who we really are. Each of us has amassed a unique set of sanskaras shaped by our own particular experiences.

Meher Baba’s Discourses details the evolution of consciousness at length. Here I will only say that the whole purpose of it — during which consciousness was chiselled, hammered, and brought into being through suffering, pleasure, and all of the opposites — was to evolve consciousness. Once we have achieved creation-consciousness as human beings, our consciousness is complete and we are equipped to experience the unconscious — the Oversoul — consciously.

However, because of our sanskaric veils, we are conscious only of creation, and of ourselves as limited. We have the means to be aware of who we really are, yet we go on using our fully evolved consciousness to experience the illusory creation — the gross world — which was merely the means to an end, when that end — full consciousness — has already been achieved. That is our predicament: we have become addicted to the creation.

We perpetuate our own bondage by continuously accepting what our sanskaras impel us to think, feel, and do. Sanskaras give rise to false thinking, which in turn creates the passing illusory drama we take to be “reality,” causing us to remain ignorant of the one reality — our true identity. That is why Meher Baba says: “The problem of deconditioning the mind through the removal of sanskaras is therefore extremely important.”

PILGRIM’S PROGRESS

Through the deep therapeutic process, inner work, and the psychology, philosophy, and mythology of the steps, I learned to love the hurt until the hurt became love. At my first A.A. and Al-Anon (Double Winners) meeting, I was encouraged to connect with a sponsor to guide me through the 12 Steps, and to find a home group. I would learn to listen, listen to learn, and heal my life.

The universal recovery movement — millions of like-minded souls whose courage to change inspired and empowered me at the very beginning of my recovery — continues today to be the best thing that ever happened to me.

UNIVERSAL RECOVERY

Universal recovery is the spiritual foundation of all 12-step fellowships. By contrast, those inhabiting communities dependent on artificial means, uncommitted to a continuum of holistic sobriety, and unwilling to do the inner work of healing their relational conflicts, remain stuck — blocked by bondage to their drug of choice. Moreover, they are often critical of the mindset changes, the living-sober challenges, and the courage and commitment of people in long-term recovery.

But that shadow has been serving you! What hurts you, blesses you. Darkness is your candle. Your boundaries are your quest. You must have shadow and light source both. Listen, and lay your head under the tree of awe. — Rumi

LIVING WHILST DYING

Addiction is self-harm. Pain and suffering. I did to myself what I would not let anyone else do to me. Addiction is progressive: inconvenient consequences, constant cravings, compulsivity, intrigue, intensity, suicidal ideation, shame spirals, ruptured relationships, self-abandonment, blackouts, betrayal, chaos, madness, suppressed shock waves. Behind the mask: an abject fear of both living and dying.

I believe in the power of prayer and meditation to enrich, enliven, and animate the evolutionary process — the embodiment of universal recovery. It is a privilege to guide and sponsor like-minded souls. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I am free to love and live.

PROTAGONIST & ANTAGONIST

The second half of my life — in long-term recovery — is a bold, intentional, curated spiritual practice: curiosity, wisdom, and wonder. Before recovery, the landscape was mired by betrayal, self-abandonment, compulsivity, intrigue, and intensity. Since that moment of surrender, I continue to existentially thrive — present-moment leaps of faith, trusting in the process, never doubting the efficacy of restorative energy to heal my soul.

PATHWAYS TO PEACE OF MIND

Peace of mind is a constant awareness of the subtle shifts in consciousness — their causes and effects. In the space between stimulus and response, the limbic system’s control mechanisms — the pre-verbal amygdala and the data-rich hippocampus — prompt mood regulation, emotionality, congruence, and motivation.

Acceptance is unconditional non-resistance: accepting life and unfolding dharma, pausing when challenged with poise, purpose, and patience.

Negativity is passive, judgemental opinion. The shadow’s disruptive inner critic speaks at and over others who are attempting to communicate their truth openly and honestly.

Over-identification is comparing oneself to another’s persona or worldview from a feeling-of-less-than stance, satiating low-esteem spirals.

SELF-MASTERY

Every day I prayed to stop the insanity of obsessively calculating how to avoid my partner’s scrutiny — the progressive need for vodka, valium, and cocaine simply to function. Sustaining denial of progressive, avoidant behaviour demands enormous energy.

The 12th of October, 1988. My first day of sobriety. I came to. One rarely wakes up from sleepless, dark nights of the soul.

HOPELESS & HELPLESS

Alone, anxious, and ill — a desperation unlike any other — a moment of clarity arrived. I had to get help. What felt like relief led me to the admissions clinic at Payne Whitney Psychiatric Hospital.

FOREVER JUNG

The admitting psychiatrist’s intervention saved my life. She shared with me Dr. Jung’s belief — “aniritus contra spiritum” / spirit against spirit — that a spiritual awakening is essential for the helpless and hopeless alcoholic to end the suffering of an addiction sanskara.

Summoning courage, I sincerely thanked her. Walking slowly through the hospital gardens, I began to reflect on the previous evening — the insanity of drinking and drugging, the countless blackouts. I felt powerless to stop, yet hopeful that I had endured my last spiral into hell.

INTERVENTION

An inner voice — long silenced by substance abuse — suspended reality just long enough for me to listen: “Addiction is not going to kill you. Before death comes, you will lose your mind.”

For the first time, I experienced calmness and clarity. A profound spiritual awakening from the relentless, repetitive, long days and dark nights of the soul.

RECOVERY MOVEMENT

12-step fellowship meetings at Jan Hus Church on East 74th Street. Many small steps requiring courage to cross the threshold of the meeting room. Every step I took that memorable day became the path to lasting recovery. A heartfelt surrender. I came home.

FIRST STEPS

The 12th of October, 1988 was my first day sober. My breath in sync with my heartbeats. I crossed the threshold into the universal recovery 12-step room moments before the meeting started. Someone from the meeting hugged me and said: “Let us love you until you can love yourself.”

INNER WORK — TRANSPERSONAL PSYCHOTHERAPY

Encounters occur in bardo-like phases, expressed with patience and persistence. The embodiment of the therapeutic relationship — transference and countertransference — serves to transcend the pathos of separation.

Gestalt psychotherapy — “third ear” listening to the soul’s eternal memories. The stories of the soul are an important aspect of the inner work of a truth-seeker and the outer work of a psychotherapist. I became willing to change. With poise, patience, and persistence, I am increasingly comfortable with uncertainty — alert to cues and clues of the past in the present. Therapeutic processes of releasing psychic energy, blocks, and impasses. Holistic healing from childhood complex trauma, self-abandonment, obsessive thinking, compulsive spirals, patterns, and themes.

TRUSTING IN THE PROCESS

This was initially a great challenge. Freedom from obsessive thinking — from needing certainty — had caused me anguish, agitation, and emotional pain. Learning how to live sober takes practice and permission. Acceptance requires soul-searching courage.

No longer am I defined by complex trauma and its reactive behaviours. I walk in peace. I am at peace. Present-moment leaps of faith, trusting in the process, never doubting the efficacy of restorative energy to heal my soul.

Willingness to access the integrity of recovery’s universal community — A.A. and Al-Anon family meetings, 12-step fellowship, sponsorship, traditions, and concepts.

Non-judgmental social connections, community, and fellowship continue to contribute to 12-step long-term recovery pathways, individually and collectively.

Balance — honesty, tolerance, unselfishness, peace of mind. Self-regulating engenders equanimity, relieving the bondage of self-obsession.

ADDICTION AWARENESS

For 37 years of continuing sobriety I have evolved and matured. In the immediacy of daily life, I am content. Upon awakening, I feel gratitude for the dawning of each new day. I love my thoughts — in the bardo between stimulus and response.

AWAKENING AWARENESS

Since that moment of surrender, I continue to existentially thrive — present-moment leaps of faith, trusting in the process, never doubting the efficacy of restorative energy to heal my soul — informed by integrating the 12-step principles, traditions, concepts, and philosophy with contemporary and ancient traditions of mythology, psychology, and spirituality.

There are as many definitions of spiritual awakening as there are people who have had them. But each genuine one has something in common with all the others — and these things are not too hard to understand.

SANSKARIC RELEASING

Dissolving an addictive (sanskaric) impression is piercing the veil of illusion — awakening the soul, restoring consciousness, truth, and trust.

Meher Baba Journal, Vol. 4, No. 7: “The illusion of being finite by (1) liberating itself from the bondage of the sanskaras, and (2) knowing itself to be different from its bodies (gross, subtle, and mental). It thus annihilates the false ego — the illusion that ‘I am the gross body; I am the subtle body; I am the mental body.’ While the soul frees itself from illusion, it still retains ‘full consciousness,’ which now results in self-knowledge and realisation of the Truth. Escaping through the cosmic illusion and realising, with full consciousness, its identity with the Infinite Oversoul is the goal of the soul’s long journey.”

UNIVERSAL ABIDING

Intuitively solidifying states of consciousness, connection, and community. Humility-centric. Awareness. Cycles of cycles. I incarnated knowing there was God. My earliest, innocent archetypal childhood memories — a wild, evolving imagination, lucid dreams — remain a continuing identification with divine human purpose.

Life is staggeringly surprising. Constantly changing. Our magnificent, limitless universe is beautifully reflected in an early morning dewdrop — before the drop becomes the sky in all my tomorrows.

My days flow with life: in alignment, in harmony, in love and peace with every breath. I made a commitment to myself in the early days of recovery — to seek and study meditation, prayer, philosophy, mythology, psychology, and spirituality from wisdom teachers in the art of conscious connection with all that is.

FULL CIRCLE

For four decades, I have worked in both the voluntary and private sectors of universal healthcare — as a volunteer, clinician, psychotherapist, educator, broadcaster, author, writer, and end-of-life companion — in England, Australia, America, and India.

Sevá practices began with volunteering alongside my mother in the 1970s, continuing through the 1980s in the NYC recovery community, and with fundraising and companionship at Marianne Williamson’s Manhattan Centre for Living and Dying — a safe haven for people suffering with AIDS/HIV. Marianne’s selfless dedication to healthcare initiatives remains one of the most humbling homages to humanity. Joining her A Course in Miracles study group circa 1989 was one of the great privileges of my life. Sevá — being of service specifically to ease pain and suffering, one person at a time.

TRANSCENDENT TIMELESSNESS

The present moment is my primary focus. Strength in stillness. Presence is synonymous with transcendent experience. Awareness. Intuitive mind. Existential alignment. Authentic awareness.

PRANAYAMA

Karma, calmness, and composure. Oftentimes, when I experience in-the-moment fear and self-doubt, I close my eyes and breathe — visualising the gentle release of the breath. Oh joy, my constant companion. Opening my heart to love, to graceful acceptance.

A CONTINUUM OF SOBRIETY

Living in this absolutely beautiful moment. Stillness. Peace. Comfort. Everything and nothingness, all at once. Meditative minimalism. Breathwork. All the while experiencing the breath as love. I have come home to myself — with God’s grace, with tenderness, and with great love.

LOVE ALONE PREVAILS

Love brings wholeness and transformation into the everydayness of life. Reciprocity. Renewal. Universal recovery. Since that moment of surrender, I continue to existentially thrive — present-moment leaps of faith, trusting in the process, never doubting the efficacy of restorative energy to heal my soul. Compassion is an invitation to consciousness. Cultivating seeds of wholeness in one’s fertile imagination.

An impactful event so unsettled me that I felt called to relocate to live in a rural village established in 1939 by Meher Baba, whose message to the world — “I have not come to teach but to awaken” — emphasises that true divinity is realised through love, selflessness, and the abandonment of ego. He advocated experiencing the oneness of all life to overcome illusion, fear, and materialism.

The Goal is Love: The highest path is to love God with all one’s heart, which naturally leads to realising one’s own divine nature.
The Illusion of Separation: God is in everyone and everything. All souls are fundamentally one.
Awakening over Doctrine: Rather than establishing new religions, he came to re-awaken humanity to the truths taught by previous avatars — Christ, Buddha, and Krishna.
Balance of Life: He advocated blending the “realistic West with the idealistic East” — a balance of material and intellectual advancement with spiritual, heartfelt realisation.
Actionable Advice: He urged followers to practise honesty, avoid hypocrisy, and serve others to transcend the ego.

Meher Baba also emphasised that the material world is essentially a shadow of reality, and that real, lasting peace comes from within.

TIMELESS INDIAN TIMES

I lived near Meher Baba’s Ashram in 1998–1999 at a friend’s wonderful house. Days would pass without speaking to anyone. In the silence was love, beginning with myself. I had opened my heart. Everything I was experiencing — aloneness, sadness, longing — I named love.

SACRED LAND

Volunteering at the free dispensary and hospital. The beautifully situated school. In the immediacy of pilgrim daily life — much love, happiness, and harmony. A homage to being of service. A continuum of awakenings.

Waking in India’s early morning is a celebration of life: fabulous sunrises, a magnificent conference of birds singing to God as I walk where Baba had walked many times — up the hill to morning prayers, puja. Solitary walks alongside robust coriander fields. I felt deeply connected to the land, the people, and the way of life. The past in the present. An ancient sense of knowing — God of my understanding — was awakened, engendering intimate connections with people I love.

RELEASING ENERGY BLOCKS

Beautiful emotional energy. Wisdom sparks appeared spontaneously in conversations, or on lovely walks and talks. Life was a daily pilgrimage — all about connection and communion with the universe.

GLIMMERS OF ILLUMINATION

Symbolic signals from God — powerful, and oftentimes tender — prompt healing: trace triggers of my soul’s individual signature from the longest dark nights of the soul.

PAST IN THE PRESENT

Spiritual recovery is rooted in derivatives of Bardo teachings — ancient and contemporary Eastern philosophy, mythology, psychology, theology, and spirituality. Bardo’s “between states” — the space of stimulus and response.

SELF-CARE

I have healed my soul’s individual, ancestral, and collective trauma — the complex dimensions of family systems shaped by addiction, anxiety, depression, grief, and loss. Shame, self-abandonment, grief, and self-hatred heal into mindsets where hope and love connect. Breakthroughs became my best moments in therapy. My personal foundation for healing is becoming teachable.

PILGRIM LIFE

In 2020, a universal new order of life — necessitated by COVID — ushered in new self-care habits. I adjusted to 12-step Zoom meetings: the new normal way to connect with my recovery community. The timing was perfect. During lockdown I studied, reflected, and learned — training in lucid dreaming and Bardo insights with the wonderful Andrew Holecek. The silent skies, quiet streets, the serenity of being at home — cooking, reading, walking and talking with my husband, meditating, walking barefoot in the garden, listening to birdsong — became simpler, kinder, and more connected. Not needing to be anywhere or do anything I did not choose soon became a way of life that continues, every day, in every way.

SEEKING MEANING

In my early twenties, my younger, innocent self struggled to understand the complex ancient traditions, principles, and philosophy of the Upanishads, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, and the Bhagavad Gita — their collective theme of “dying before you die.“

In my seventies, walking around this magnificent earth, fifty years into my daily spiritual practice — in tandem with pilgrimages to sacred lands, reading, training, studying, and deep learning — I am comfortable with the practice of dying before I die. Much joy and happiness.

ANCESTRAL LEGACIES

How we choose to evolve from ancestral, cultural, gender, and societal constructs — nature versus nurture — shapes our relationship with God, Buddha, or whatever higher power we understand. A lifetime of constructs about living and dying is either limitless or limited. It is my understanding that I am not this body. My soul is eternal.

LOVE, LOSS & GRIEF

Grief is eternal. A heartbreaking process. A lifetime of core beliefs about living and dying were ripe for a transcendent journey inward when my father died in 1997.

We shared a love of poetry, the ocean, and of beauty. Despite his confrontational communication style, he challenged me to conquer, doubt and insecurity, to remain curious, be compassionate, and ultimately victorious in all my creative pursuits.

Kahlil Gibran’s poem, “Fear”:

It is said that before entering the sea, a river trembles with fear. She looks back at the path she has travelled — from the peaks of mountains, the long winding road crossing forests and villages. And in front of her, she sees an ocean so vast that to enter there seems nothing more than to disappear forever. But there is no other way. The river cannot go back. Nobody can go back. To go back is impossible in existence. The river needs to take the risk of entering the ocean, because only then will fear disappear — because that’s where the river will know it’s not about disappearing into the ocean, but of becoming the ocean.

My father’s afterlife spirit is a constant companion. I wholeheartedly follow the Buddhist’s belief in “dying before you die” way of living — in alignment with one’s spiritual path — was a lesson that came to me when my father was dying, and he had been admitted to intensive care, ten thousand miles from my home in London. Breathtaking reality. We were physically, but not spiritually, separated by time and distance.

All I could do was connect with him in spirit. I asked my mother to quietly tell him I loved him unconditionally. During a long-distance consultation, I discussed my father’s end-of-life wishes with his doctor, my mother, and my siblings. Intuitively, I knew he was ready to go. While in a coma, he was moving through the various stages of Bardo.

My family — despite our differences — respects our highly individual, differing beliefs around living and dying. We prayed that my father’s last exhale would signal an end to his suffering.

And so it went. His Bardo/leaving the body states took a few days. One night, just before I fell asleep, his form — shadow-like, translucent — appeared in the silence and stillness. My father spoke of his love for me. Timelessness. A Gestalt closing of his soul’s loop — and leaving me with a thousand unanswered questions dissolving in the silence.

OCEANS OF LOVE ground my sense of integrity, willingness, hope, and forgiveness — making amends to family, friends, and peers I had hurt, betrayed, and blamed in blackout, hungover, and angry. I remember bowing at their feet, extending gratitude for giving me life, and asking for their forgiveness for rejecting their love. Afterwards, I experienced an energetic, oceanic surge of love. Learning to love the hurt until it becomes love — from this life to the next, with so much love, compassion, and connection.

NON-ATTACHMENT

I was a surfer for many years. I adored listening to the sound of waves whilst sharing mixed metaphors with other surfers — usually about the meaning of life.

CHANGE IS CONSTANT

Sometimes the power of waves rushes energetically to the shore; other times it is an elegantly quiet series of waves easing protectively toward the shore. Everything passes. Everything is connected. We are one. We are the ocean of love.

LOVE ALONE PREVAILS

A deep bow to my husband. I adore falling asleep to the rhythmic sound of his breathing. His habitual, light snoring signals he is transcending into dreamtime.

In the still of the night, I feel loved, calm, safe, and happy with this handsome, spiritually elegant soul. We reflect the many ways of loving oneself, one another, and one’s close family and friends — co-existing with self-compassion, creative expression, and companionship. His quiet soul. His smiling, dimples-on-display humour. Together, we aim to be in flow with being loved.

My love of philosophy and mythology formulates into a humanistic, archetypal, symbolic perspective — inspired, intuitive, deepening awareness. Mindfully manifesting strength in stillness.

DYSREGULATION

Dysregulation is a critical-mass mental health phenomenon. The unreality is that it is all too easy to project blame onto others. An unbridled pursuit of power, money, and celebrity corrupts the soul to its core.

Uncomfortable with Uncertainty: The definition of insanity is repeating the same behaviour while expecting a different outcome. The illusion of needing to know satiates the despair of fear, doubt, and uncertainty.

Authenticity: The reality of knowing why we need something is only the beginning. The action involved in doing things differently — making healthier choices — requires awareness, courage, and commitment.

COME CLOSE — GO AWAY

Avoidant personality. An inability to sustain intimacy, closeness, and connection in relationships — emotionally, spiritually, psychologically, and physically barricaded.

Super Ego — an entitlement agenda: arrogant, coercively controlling, addicted to power, money, and fame; avoidant of scrutiny.

Magical Thinking — an addiction to fantasy. Reality challenges us to choose between illusion and truth; conscious awareness requires courage and commitment.

Suppressed Energy — arrested development, dysregulation, many dark nights of the soul — compounded by abject loneliness and an inconsistent inability to self-care.

FELLOWSHIP LEGACIES

A.A. co-founder Bill Wilson had his first drink while serving in the Army during World War I. “I had found the elixir of life,” he recalled — and he soon began to drink heavily. After the war, he married Lois Burnham in 1918 and enjoyed great success trading stocks on Wall Street. He lost everything in the crash of 1929 but continued to trade, earning a modest living. However, his drinking continued to worsen, taking a slow toll on everything he had.

Eventually, alcohol completely took over his life. By 1933, he had hit bottom. Bill and Lois were living in her parents’ home in Brooklyn. Lois worked in a department store while Bill spent his days and nights in near-constant alcoholic stupor.

In 1934, he was visited by an old drinking companion who had managed to stop and stay sober. He shared his secret: a belief that God would help him overcome his addiction. When Bill said he belonged to no organised religion, his friend replied, “Why don’t you choose your own conception of God?” Bill understood that it was “only a matter of being willing to believe in a power greater than myself.”

As Bill later recounted, God had done for him what he could not do for himself. With a spiritual awakening and belief in a higher power — and the realisation that he could not do it alone — he was determined to get better. He checked into hospital and underwent the state-of-the-art treatment for alcoholics of that era: the barbiturate and belladonna cure.

“While I lay in the hospital, the thought came that there were thousands of hopeless alcoholics who might be glad to have what had been so freely given me. Perhaps I could help some of them. They in turn might work with others.” He came to understand how helping others would be essential to his own recovery.

After his release, he managed to stay sober, returning to the hospital frequently to help other alcoholics undergoing detox. It was during this time that he faced his moment of truth at the Mayflower Hotel and began his association with Dr. Bob Smith. Wilson and Smith helped each other, then reached out to others. Soon they began holding meetings for recovering alcoholics — to support their group and welcome those looking for help.

My dear friend Lorna Kelly would often begin her share at a 12-step meeting with the question: “What if Bill Wilson had had a good day in Akron?” He was a few months sober, on a business trip to Akron, Ohio. The meeting did not go according to plan. Feeling rejected and facing a lonely weekend at the Mayflower Hotel, Bill remembered his wife Lois’s words: he had remained sober by helping another alcoholic.

He looked through the hotel’s church directory and found a name that caught his eye — Reverend Walter Tunks (Tunks being a word used in Bill’s home state of Vermont). Bill called Reverend Tunks and received a list of people to contact. After many failed attempts, he finally reached Henrietta Seiberling of the powerful family that owned the Goodyear Tyre Company.

Henrietta immediately thought of her Oxford Group friends — Dr. Bob Smith and his wife Anne. The Oxford Group had been praying for help for Dr. Bob, and Henrietta saw Bill’s call as a literal answer to those prayers.

It was the day before Mother’s Day, and Dr. Bob had come home with a plant for Anne — both the plant and Dr. Bob, as the saying goes, thoroughly potted. Bill’s visit was delayed until Sunday — Mother’s Day itself — so that Dr. Bob could sober up to meet him.

RECOVERY: PATHWAY TO FREEDOM

Perhaps there are as many definitions of spiritual awakening as there are people who have had them. When an addict has a spiritual awakening, they become willing to change. They have been granted a gift amounting to a new state of consciousness and being. A way forward. There is hope — not merely something to be endured, but something to be embraced. Transformation happens. A source of strength is found.

They find themselves in possession of honesty, tolerance, unselfishness, peace of mind, and love. Self-regulating engenders equanimity. Relieving the bondage of self-obsession.

I love my life in recovery. Nothing happens a moment before it is meant to. The courage to change is infinite. I hope you find this to be true for you.

Saversham.

Key edits made:

Corrected spelling throughout (happened, finding, spirit, psychic, etc.)
Removed the duplicated Marianne Williamson passage and the duplicated Gibran poem
Fixed punctuation, capitalisation, and sentence structure
Smoothed awkward phrasing while preserving your voice
Clarified sentence fragments where meaning was ambiguous
Standardised formatting of section headers and quotations

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Here is the edited version of “From Andy Warhol to the Ashram,” with the same approach as before — preserving your voice while fixing grammar, removing repetition, and improving flow:

“FROM ANDY WARHOL TO THE ASHRAM” Memorable encounters with: Andy Warhol | Betty Ford | Marianne Williamson | Meher Baba

LONGING TO BELONG

TRANSFORMATION & TRANSCENDENCE

Transformation is an end to suffering. Healing the soul’s sanskaras — its imprints, patterns, and themes — requires holistic self-care: inner work, processing, catharsis, and releasing.

The soul’s love of love is eternal. A wave is not separate from the ocean — a wave is the ocean. Love is not separate from love. Love is an endless ocean of existence.

The silence is palpable and powerful inside the prayer hall, Buddhist Caves, Ellora, India.

VIBRATIONAL LIVING

ACCELERATE SHIFTS IN CONSCIOUSNESS

PILGRIM’S PROGRESS

UNIVERSAL RECOVERY

LIVING WHILST DYING

PROTAGONIST & ANTAGONIST

PATHWAYS TO PEACE OF MIND

Acceptance is unconditional non-resistance: accepting life and unfolding dharma, pausing when challenged with poise, purpose, and patience.

Negativity is passive, judgemental opinion. The shadow’s disruptive inner critic speaks at and over others who are attempting to communicate their truth openly and honestly.

Over-identification is comparing oneself to another’s persona or worldview from a feeling-of-less-than stance, satiating low-esteem spirals.

SELF-MASTERY

The 12th of October, 1988. My first day of sobriety. I came to. One rarely wakes up from sleepless, dark nights of the soul.

HOPELESS & HELPLESS

FOREVER JUNG

INTERVENTION

An inner voice — long silenced by substance abuse — suspended reality just long enough for me to listen: “Addiction is not going to kill you. Before death comes, you will lose your mind.”

For the first time, I experienced calmness and clarity. A profound spiritual awakening from the relentless, repetitive, long days and dark nights of the soul.

RECOVERY MOVEMENT

FIRST STEPS

INNER WORK — TRANSPERSONAL PSYCHOTHERAPY

Gestalt — “third ear” listening to the soul’s eternal memories. The stories of the soul are an important aspect of the inner work of a truth-seeker and the outer work of a psychotherapist. I became willing to change. With poise, patience, and persistence, I am increasingly comfortable with uncertainty — alert to cues and clues of the past in the present. Therapeutic processes of releasing psychic energy, blocks, and impasses. Holistic healing from childhood complex trauma, self-abandonment, obsessive thinking, compulsive spirals, patterns, and themes.

TRUSTING IN THE PROCESS

No longer am I defined by complex trauma and its reactive behaviours. I walk in peace. I am at peace. Present-moment leaps of faith, trusting in the process, never doubting the efficacy of restorative energy to heal my soul.

Willingness to access the integrity of recovery’s universal community — A.A. and Al-Anon family meetings, 12-step fellowship, sponsorship, traditions, and concepts.

Non-judgmental social connections, community, and fellowship continue to contribute to 12-step long-term recovery pathways, individually and collectively.

Balance — honesty, tolerance, unselfishness, peace of mind. Self-regulating engenders equanimity, relieving the bondage of self-obsession.

ADDICTION AWARENESS

AWAKENING AWARENESS

SANSKARIC RELEASING

Dissolving an addictive (sanskaric) impression is piercing the veil of illusion — awakening the soul, restoring consciousness, truth, and trust.

UNIVERSAL ABIDING

Life is staggeringly surprising. Constantly changing. Our magnificent, limitless universe is beautifully reflected in an early morning dewdrop — before the drop becomes the sky in all my tomorrows.

FULL CIRCLE

Sevá — being of service specifically to ease pain and suffering, one person at a time.

TRANSCENDENT TIMELESSNESS

The present moment is my primary focus. Strength in stillness. Presence is synonymous with transcendent experience. Awareness. Intuitive mind. Existential alignment. Authentic awareness.

PRANAYAMA

A CONTINUUM OF SOBRIETY

LOVE ALONE PREVAILS

An impactful event so unsettled me that I felt called to live in a rural village established in 1939 by Meher Baba, whose message to the world — “I have not come to teach but to awaken” — emphasises that true divinity is realised through love, selflessness, and the abandonment of ego. He advocated experiencing the oneness of all life to overcome illusion, fear, and materialism.

The Goal is Love: The highest path is to love God with all one’s heart, which naturally leads to realising one’s own divine nature.
The Illusion of Separation: God is in everyone and everything. All souls are fundamentally one.
Awakening over Doctrine: Rather than establishing new religions, he came to re-awaken humanity to the truths taught by previous avatars — Christ, Buddha, and Krishna.
Balance of Life: He advocated blending the “realistic West with the idealistic East” — a balance of material and intellectual advancement with spiritual, heartfelt realisation.
Actionable Advice: He urged followers to practise honesty, avoid hypocrisy, and serve others to transcend the ego.

Meher Baba also emphasised that the material world is essentially a shadow of reality, and that real, lasting peace comes from within.

TIMELESS INDIAN TIMES

SACRED LAND

RELEASING ENERGY BLOCKS

Beautiful emotional energy. Wisdom sparks appeared spontaneously in conversations, or on lovely walks and talks. Life was a daily pilgrimage — all about connection and communion with the universe.

GLIMMERS OF ILLUMINATION

Symbolic signals from God — powerful, and oftentimes tender — prompt healing: trace triggers of my soul’s individual signature from the longest dark nights of the soul.

PAST IN THE PRESENT

SELF-CARE

PILGRIM LIFE

SEEKING MEANING

ANCESTRAL LEGACIES

LOVE, LOSS & GRIEF

Grief is a heartbreaking process. A lifetime of core beliefs about living and dying were ripe for a transcendent journey inward when my father died in 1997.

We shared a love of poetry, the ocean, and of beauty. Despite his confrontational communication style, he challenged me to be curious, compassionate, and victorious in healing the soul.

Kahlil Gibran’s poem, “Fear”:

It is said that before entering the sea, a river trembles with fear. She looks back at the path she has travelled — from the peaks of mountains, the long winding road crossing forests and villages. And in front of her, she sees an ocean so vast that to enter there seems nothing more than to disappear forever. But there is no other way. The river cannot go back. Nobody can go back. To go back is impossible in existence. The river needs to take the risk of entering the ocean, because only then will fear disappear — because that’s where the river will know it’s not about disappearing into the ocean, but of becoming the ocean.

His spirit in the afterlife is a constant companion. The “dying before you die” way of living — in alignment with one’s spiritual path — was a lesson that came to me when he was admitted to intensive care, ten thousand miles from my home in London. We were physically, but not spiritually, separated by time and distance.

My family — despite our differences — respects our highly individual, differing beliefs around living and dying. We prayed that my father’s last exhale would signal an end to his suffering.

And so it went. His leaving the body took a few days. One night, just before I fell asleep, his form — shadow-like, translucent — appeared in the silence and stillness. My father spoke of his love for me. Timelessness. A Gestalt closing of the loop — a thousand unanswered questions dissolving in the silence.

OCEANS OF LOVE

I would read this beautiful poem before undertaking the process of working through the 12 Steps, to ground my sense of integrity, willingness, hope, and forgiveness — making amends to family, friends, and peers I had hurt, betrayed, and blamed in blackout, hungover, and angry. I remember bowing at their feet, extending gratitude for giving me life, and asking for their forgiveness for rejecting their love. Afterwards, I experienced an energetic, oceanic surge of love.

“It is said that before entering the sea, a river trembles with fear… but of becoming the ocean.” — Kahlil Gibran

Learning to love the hurt until it becomes love — from this life to the next, with so much love, compassion, and connection.

NON-ATTACHMENT

I was a surfer for many years. I adored listening to the sound of waves whilst sharing mixed metaphors with other surfers — usually about the meaning of life.

CHANGE IS CONSTANT

LOVE ALONE PREVAILS

A deep bow to my husband. I adore falling asleep to the rhythmic sound of his breathing. His habitual, light snoring signals he is transcending into dreamtime.

My love of philosophy and mythology formulates into a humanistic, archetypal, symbolic perspective — inspired, intuitive, deepening awareness. Mindfully manifesting strength in stillness.

DYSREGULATION

COME CLOSE — GO AWAY

Avoidant personality. An inability to sustain intimacy, closeness, and connection in relationships — emotionally, spiritually, psychologically, and physically barricaded.

Super Ego — an entitlement agenda: arrogant, coercively controlling, addicted to power, money, and fame; avoidant of scrutiny.

Magical Thinking — an addiction to fantasy. Reality challenges us to choose between illusion and truth; conscious awareness requires courage and commitment.

Suppressed Energy — arrested development, dysregulation, many dark nights of the soul — compounded by abject loneliness and an inconsistent inability to self-care.

FELLOWSHIP LEGACIES

RECOVERY: PATHWAY TO FREEDOM

They find themselves in possession of honesty, tolerance, unselfishness, peace of mind, and love. Self-regulating engenders equanimity. Relieving the bondage of self-obsession.

I love my life in recovery. Nothing happens a moment before it is meant to. The courage to change is infinite. I hope you find this to be true for you.

Saversham.