The Awakened Journey

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Why I Wrote the Awakened Journey Journal

On turning mystical experiences at rehab, an archive of photographs, and an unfinished memoir into something I could hold in my hands.

03 July 2026

A few weeks ago, I picked up a box addressed to me at the post office. Inside it were six copies of a book with my name on the cover, an ISBN on the back, and pages I had written, photographed, and bled into over the better part of a year.

I sat in my car in silent joy.

Not because I hadn't expected it to be real — I'd done all of the editing, created and saved the files, watched the Lulu order status change from "processing" to "shipped." But there's a difference between knowing something is happening and holding it. And holding the Awakened Journey Journal for the first time, ISBN and all, was the kind of moment I want to remember exactly as it was.

So this post is for that box. For how it came to exist. For the years of my body falling apart that, somehow, became the raw material for something whole.

The decision I almost didn't make

I want to be honest about where this started, because it wasn't with a business plan or a five-year vision. It started with a genetic connective tissue disorder called Marfan Syndrome.

By 2021, my body had been through more than most bodies go through in a lifetime. Chronic back pain. Chronic headaches. Digestive issues that have never fully resolved. On top of the cardiac side of things, I was barely keeping up at my day job. I applied for Berufsunfähigkeit — Austria's disability pension for people who can no longer reasonably work — convinced that anyone reviewing my file would see what I was living with. I went through round after round of medical evaluations. I waited. I was rejected. I contested it. I went to court, sat through more evaluations, waited again — and the judge ruled against me anyway. I'm still at that job today, doing what I can to manage it all alongside everything else.

That process didn't just cost me time. It confirmed something I'd been afraid of: that no one outside my own body was going to validate what I have been carrying, or hand me back control over my time and my energy. If I wanted that control, I was going to have to build it myself.

I didn't know what that meant yet. I just knew I wanted out of a life where my health dictated everything and I had no say in how my hours were spent.

Then, on Mother's Day last year, I woke up and made a decision. Not for anyone else — for myself, as a gift to myself. I was going to invest in building something of my own, even if it scared me financially. Even if I had no idea yet what that something was.

The pivot

I'd seen an ad on Instagram for an online business accelerator program. I'm not someone who usually signs up for things like that. But I joined the free webinar anyway, and somewhere in it, I was convinced. I made the investment. It was a big one, and not an easy one, but it felt like the first time in a long time I was choosing my own direction instead of waiting for a system to choose it for me.

My first idea was to build a meditation app. I sat with that for a while before admitting it was beyond what I could realistically pull off — not because the idea was bad, but because I was trying to build something from nothing, when I already had something sitting right in front of me.

I was at home one afternoon in my reading chair when it happened. I said to myself, almost out loud: No, I can't build an app. And then, just as quickly: What do I already have that I could turn into something?

The answer arrived within seconds. Not after weeks of brainstorming — within seconds, like it had been waiting just behind a door for me to finally ask the right question. I had a partially written memoir. I had hundreds of photographs from my time at rehab. And somewhere in that instant, the idea of weaving them together into a journal was simply there, fully formed, like it had been waiting to jump out of me.

That's the part I still find strange, looking back. It wasn't a long, deliberate process. It was a domino effect — one quiet realization knocking the next one into place.

Where the memoir actually began

People might assume the memoir started after my aortic dissection, since that's the event most associated with my awakening. It didn't. The decision to write it came earlier, and from just as hard.

Between 2019 and 2020, my body went through one crisis after another. An endometrial cancer diagnosis led to a complete hysterectomy. The fallout from that surgery — combined with dural ectasia, a Marfan-related condition — left me with headaches severe enough that I underwent a spinal cord surgery in September 2020 to try to relieve the pressure. That surgery failed; I knew it had failed within days, still in the hospital bed. Two weeks later, I was back in for emergency surgery — my intestines had become completely blocked, the likely result of adhesions that had tightened during that brutal recovery.

It was after that second surgery, lying in a hospital bed for the second time in two weeks, that I decided my story was worth putting on paper. Not the aortic dissection. Not the awakening. This. I enrolled in a memoir and publishing course to learn how to actually do it.

The aortic dissection came in August 2021 — almost a year later. By the time it happened, and by the time the spiritual awakening that followed it began to unfold, I was already a person who had decided her story mattered enough to write down. The surgery didn't start the memoir. It walked into a story that was already underway and changed what that story was about.

I've written elsewhere about the signs and synchronicities that found me during that rehab stay — the coin, the feather, the three oak leaves suspended on a single strand of spider silk. If you haven't read that one, it's worth knowing before you read this: those images weren't just memories I was fond of. They became the literal seed of what the Journal grew into.

From memoir to journal

The Journal isn't simply my memoir with some journaling pages stapled on. The structure matters to me, so I want to walk through it honestly.

It opens with the memoir chapters — the day everything changed, and the long, strange cocoon of recovery that followed, where I trace my body's history back further than most people know: a childhood scoliosis surgery that fused much of my spine with metal rods, a first open-heart surgery in 2009 after my Marfan diagnosis, and then the brutal 2019–2020 stretch that led to the decision to write in the first place.

There's a section near the beginning of the book that I almost didn't write. It's the most honest thing I've ever put on paper, and I'm not going to repeat it here — but it's there, in the pages, if you're ready for it when you get there.

From the memoir, the Journal moves into the signs and synchronicities that started arriving at the rehab clinic, the slow recognition of what was happening to me, and a chapter I call "Becoming the Oracle" — the story of how those rehab photographs stopped being just photographs and became the foundation of the Awakened Journey Self-reflection Cards.

Then come the prompts themselves: 162 of them, three for each of the 54 cards, each one paired with a photograph I took while at rehab, going through the very beginning of my awakening.

And woven through all of it is something I cared about as much as the memoir: a section grounded in actual research. I spend my working life around scientists, in an environment built on evidence and rigor, and I didn't want to write a journal that asked people to take things on faith alone. So you'll find real research in these pages — Dr. James Pennebaker's work on expressive writing and its measurable effects on stress and immune function, Dr. Kristin Neff's research on self-compassion, and a deeper look at the heart-brain connection, including findings from the HeartMath Institute on how heart-rhythm patterns influence cognition and emotional regulation. None of it is there to "prove" the spiritual side of the book. It's there because I wanted a companion that could hold both — the felt experience and the evidence — without asking you to choose.

What I want you to know

I'm not a guide, and I never set out to be one. I'm someone who has been in so much pain, both physical and otherwise, that I built something just to gracefully walk through it — and I'm offering it to other people who may need the same thing.

If any part of this resonates — the exhaustion of fighting a system that doesn't see you, the strange grace of finding meaning in a body that's failed you again and again, the slow, undramatic process of a life rebuilding itself one quiet realization at a time — I'd love for you to hold this book in your hands too.

The Awakened Journey Journal is currently available on Lulu — memoir, research, and 162 reflective prompts, in one place.

And if you're looking for more than a book — if you want a place to bring what comes up as you move through these pages, alongside others who are doing the same kind of inner work — the Awakened Journey Collective is open. You're welcome to share there, or simply observe. Either way, you don't have to do any of this alone.

If you have questions about the Journal, the Collective, or anything in this post, I'd love to hear from you — just use the contact form below.