When Love Breaks Open

How utter psychological collapse taught me what transformation really means (Breaking Open: Part 1)

This series emerges from conversations with friends and Claude AI, drawing deeply from the wisdom of David J Temple's CosmoErotic Humanism, Rob Burbea's Soulmaking Dharma, Steve March's Aletheia Unfolding, Daniel P Brown's attachment theory work, John Churchill's Planetary Dharma, and many insights from Jill Nephew. While their teachings light the path, any limitations in expressing their ideas are my own.

My opening was breaking through the conditioned mind and seeing that love is the most real thing - everything is born from and dies into love.

My breakdown was all my deepest insecurities reaching out for connection as if to test & affirm the reality of that love, as if all my most outrageous pain rose up into consciousness to say, "oh yeah? prove it." My breakdown measured the distance between love's infinite reality and my conditioned mind's starved capacity to trust in it. It was a big gap.

For six months, I've been deep in a transformative psycho-spiritual process that has often left me incapacitated. The first months brought complete paralysis - I lost my ability to speak, my familiar sense of agency vanishing entirely. Having always thought of myself as someone who could take decisive action, I found myself utterly immobilized, unable to make even the simplest choices.

Then the floodgates burst open. My consciousness was inundated with material that felt unbearable - my familiar tools and practices, once so reliable, now seemed laughably inadequate against the rising tide of deep shame and primal insecurities. I lost my bearings completely, pulling away from almost every relationship in my life as suicidal thoughts began to circle. My days became a desperate pendulum swing between facing overwhelming waves of insecurity, shame, and fear, and seeking any possible escape through distraction.

I now understand that I was finally confronting the toxic shame living in the root structure of my identity. After years of practice and training, my system had decided it was time to face what it had always most deeply feared - to look directly at the profound wounds left by love's deepest failures in my life, with all their devastating pain, grief, and disorientation.

This collapse revealed how early experiences had set the boundaries of my capacity to love. Unable to face the overwhelming pain of those original failures of love, I had turned to addictive compensations - years lost to video games, mindless entertainment, emotional eating, and flirting with substance abuse, all attempts to numb and distance myself from that unbearable core of pain. Growing up in a family where I never felt truly secure or welcome, I learned to retreat into mechanical strategies - automaticity, manipulation, self-deception, ulterior motives - each an attempt to manage the unmanageable. When love fails us and we lack the faith or safety to face that devastating reality, we naturally turn to managing, fixing, and optimizing what is, at its root, a fundamental rupture in the moral fabric of our world.

Over these six months, healing has followed an uneven path. My spiritual aspirations of awakening fell away, replaced by the raw imperative to simply survive. Though later I realized a deeper truth: survival had always been my true aspiration - I was only now being honest enough to admit it. Even as my money ran out and I couldn't work, the world somehow held me. Through a mysterious weaving of luck, generosity, and divine timing, I was supported through this process - a kind of grace I hadn't known was possible.

And then - gradually, until suddenly - everything shifted. My system found its way to deep self-trust, a relief that ripples through every dimension of my being. My body softens, my mind naturally unfolds, old pains surface to be fully felt, and I'm discovering a creativity and desire for connection that feels entirely new. For the first time, I sense that my true life can finally begin.

I feel called to share this story of breakdown and how it has transformed my understanding of human transformation. While intensely painful and seemingly catastrophic at the local level, I believe that such passages are systemically necessary - perhaps even vital for our collective future.

This series of writings is my attempt to make that case – both to you and to myself.

The Breaking Open Series

1. "When Love Breaks Open" A personal account of breakdown and breakthrough, setting up the themes of transformation, safety, and the need for cultural support of these processes.

2. "Spirituality is Secure Attachment with Reality" Exploring how our relationship with reality itself mirrors our early attachment patterns, and how spiritual development can be understood as the movement toward secure attachment with existence.

3. "Facing the Truth of Your Desire" Examining how our deepest longings become tangled with compensatory patterns, and how spiritual practice helps us rediscover authentic desire.

4. "The Living Dead" Looking at how trauma creates frozen territory within the psyche and how the technological mindset leads to a kind of living death that only true connection can heal.

5. "Dangerous Safety" Exploring how transformation naturally unfolds in the presence of safety, and what it means to create containers strong enough to hold genuine change.

6. "The Future Breaking Through" Revealing how facing our civilizational crisis breaks us open to new ways of being, and why this personal transformation serves our collective future.

Work with me: I offer one-on-one guidance helping people develop secure attachment with reality through deep unfoldment work. If this resonates, explore working together