From Darkness To Light: My Complete Story

I’ve written bits and pieces of my spiritual journey down before, but never actually the full story. A friend was asking about it the other day, so here I am 4,700 words later with my testimony from the beginning of my spiritual seeking age 21 to where I have arrived at now.

At age 14 a lot of the pupils in my year at school started drinking. Alcohol was easy to get hold of as off licenses wouldn’t check our age, or we would ask university students or even a homeless man outside the shop to buy it for us. 

After that life was about friends, drinking, drugs, boyfriends, or casual encounters. It felt freeing after so many years at school being told what to do. Prior to this from the ages of 8-13 I’d been friends with a group of girls who were more like bullies towards me. I had low self-esteem, so when this ‘night time world’ opened up of older men, drink and drugs it felt like I could finally be one of the ‘cool’ people. 

When I was at university in my early twenties I developed chronic fatigue syndrome after a virus. I spent six months where I could barely leave the house and had to take a year out of my studies. I stopped drinking, as my system couldn’t handle it anymore. 

My life was simple and slow. I’d always loved writing and each morning I’d drink coffee and journal about my feelings. It helped me to feel good as I was so used to going out and seeing my friends, but now life felt empty. I had a couple friends who were unemployed who’d come over and spend time with me which helped a lot with the isolation. 

My mum had got into yoga and she recommended I try it. She told me that I could take 1-1 lessons and get a personalised yoga practise that could be designed to tackle certain health issues like low energy.

It was completely amazing, but after my first session I was filled with energy. I went out that night with friends without feeling tired, and felt hyper present and in the moment. There was also an accompanying feeling that was quite strange. I felt present, but also completely alone. For three days I was in an altered state. The only way I could describe it is it felt like I had set off on the path to enlightenment, and I was separate to everyone. It was so lonely and felt like some kind of drug trip. I talked about it with my boyfriend at the time, and he mentioned that my eyes looked glazed. 

From that first day onwards I did yoga every day, as it gave me energy. The strange altered state feeling faded, and everything was ‘normal’ again. Except now I was a spiritual seeker. I gradually shifted away from doing yoga towards Tai Chi, which had similar benefits. I also started doing meditation. 

I went back to university, and drank alcohol much more moderately and occassionally. In the third year of studies I developed a bad backache that made it hard to sit down for long periods. I tried going to a chiropractor, and while it helped put my back into alignment for a short while, the pain would always return. Then I made friends with someone who was off work with back pain. He was into meditation, and had been using a technique where he lay on his back and would focus on concentrating on relaxing the pain. 

I started trying it, and it worked for me. I now could sit for longer periods, and was able to control the muscles and relax them. Over the summer where I had more time I would meditate for really long sessions, sometimes twice a day. I got books out from the library to learn more. 

At the time I was in a casual relationship with someone, although I wanted it to be more serious, he was very non-committal. Like a lot of people of my generation, I had sex with my partners pretty early on in the relationship. One day I was having sex with him, and I had an orgasm that felt like a spiritual experience. It was like this feeling of bliss that came from outside of me into me. Like it didn’t come from my own body but the spiritual realm. It left me in an altered state for the rest of the day, like I was stoned. 

I’d had a similar experience once when my tai chi teacher gave me a hug. As he did so this energy went into me. On that occassion I also felt stoned for the rest of the day and when I asked him about it later, he said that he’d done it intentionally. 

I was fascinated by the spiritual realm, and after that sexual experience I went to the local spiritual bookshop and got a book about sex magic. The shop assistant was surprised to see it on the counter as she never knew there was such a thing. 

After the summer I moved to Scotland for a post-graduate degree. I continued doing a lot of meditation and tai chi. I also started a part time job, and can remember it feeling pretty tiring at first. I think looking back, while I’d been cured of chronic fatigue and was able to lead a normal life, ever since then I do have less energy than average, and tend to find it hard to shake off viruses. 

One winter, the dark days started to get to me a bit. I began to have a kind of mental breakdown where I struggled to think clearly, and began feeling stressed by tiny things. At Christmas I started crying when everyone opened their presents on Christmas day and had no idea why. 

I had always written to get through my mental upsets but this felt really different. I kept writing and writing, but my mood didn’t shift. I ended up taking three months off work as I couldn’t cope. 

During that period I met my now husband Tony. While I still felt mentally unstable, we were so happy and in love. Gradually I felt better. 

In April that year I had a gynecological procedure (called LEEP/LLETZ) for removing abnormal cells from the cervix. This is a very common procedure that happens after a smear test (pap smear) if they find abnormal cells that could turn to cancer in the future. 

I had been told that the procedure was safe and minor, but it all felt very confusing, and scary. When I look back now, I feel like my body knew this was a major big deal, but my conscious mind didn’t. 

After the procedure I developed major side effects. Physically my fatigue was back, and I could barely sit up without being in pain. I suffered major sexual dysfunction with complete loss of libido, pain during sex, and numbness, so if I had an orgasm I couldn’t actually feel anything anymore. There were other really strange side effects like feeling completely disconnected from my physical body, and feeling like I wasn’t a sexual being anymore. If a couple were having sex on a TV show I would look at them as if they were aliens.  

At the time I thought that I must be completely sexually ‘messed up’ to have major side effects from such a ‘minor’ procedure. I’ve since learnt however, that there are thousands of women dealing with these major issues, and others including PTSD, early menopause, and many more. 

Through connecting with another woman who had this procedure, I realised that the doctors have never even studied the nerves in the cervix, so the procedure is causing major neurological damage while they still claim it’s safe. The other woman became a friend and we’ve tried to raise awareness in the media and started a support group as women are still being harmed to this day and not told the side effects. But that’s another story! 

I dove into learning about Tantra, and spiritual sexuality as I thought it could help heal me. I also continued meditating more and more to try and deal with the side effects. I went to a Tantra workshop with Tony and had some blissful experiences, that taught me it was still possible to feel pleasure, despite my broken body. 

Mostly meditation was me trying to count my breathing or just focus on relaxing tension. However occasionally I got glimpses into the spiritual realm that fascinated me. One time I sensed the presence of a being in the corner of the room. Another time for a split second I perceived that time and space disappeared. Another time I was very stressed and my husband’s deceased ‘father’ (who’d I’ve never met), spoke to me in a mediation and told me that I shouldn’t worry and Tony and I should just be happy. I was amazed as until that point I thought that when we died we were just a mass of indifferentiated energy that joined together with other energy. I had no idea that people continued in a personal form, as a spirit. (at least that’s what I thought at the time, as I had no other explanation for this phenomenon) 

That knowledge sent me deeper into learning about what happens after death but more from a new age perspective; reading aboutnear death experiences (which can show false depictions of the afterlife), and learning about past life experiences and reincarnation. 

While I was happy being with Tony, I was not so happy living in Scotland. Since that dark winter I felt that I needed to go somewhere with better weather. 

One evening I went to a meditation class. All my negative feelings about Scotland suddenly came to a head. I came home crying telling Tony that I didn’t want to live in Scotland. He was actually quite up for an adventure. Slowly a plan came together. Tony works as a teacher and he had a friend of a friend working for an international school in Vietnam. He wrote us an email about the rice paddies, and karaoke bars, and it sounded so much fun. I thought of it as an adventure and then we’d return home, after a year or two. But we never have, and I’ve often missed the UK in these past 18 years. 

In Vietnam I continued on my spiritual healing journey, going to yoga and meditation classes, writing about my feelings, and trying to learn about Tantra. However, that was nearly impossible to figure out just from books. I longed to go to more Tantra workshops, but that sort of thing does not happen in Vietnam! Through a writing class I taught I made friends with someone who was learning Theta Healing - a kind of spiritual healing. I was her willing guinea pig. I’d try anything spiritual, whether it was breathing workshops, crystal healing etc. 

One January I was low in energy after a virus, but I wanted to shake it off so I went to yoga. (I had gone back and forth between tai chi and yoga, but finally settled on doing yoga every day again). Something strange happened in the class. I ended up with really painful legs and one of my legs had a lump in it. When I went to the doctor I was shocked when he told me that I needed to go and see a cardiologist. The lump was actually in my vein. When I went I found that the valves in both legs that make the blood flow back up my legs had stopped working. I’ve dealt with leg pain, varicose veins and circulatory issues ever since. (I have heard about surgery to fix issues but due to my previous bad experiences with he medical system I only have medical treatment if it is absolutely essential). 

After four years we left Vietnam and moved to Switzerland. By this point I was feeling happier in myself, although not completely, physically healed. In Switzerland we decided to have a child as the fresh air, and healthy environment really made me feel a lot better. 

I had some health worries about the pregnancy but everything was okay. Apart from my decision to go to a pregnancy yoga class after which I couldn’t get out of bed for 24 hours. When I finally got out of bed, and looked at my leg, I was horrified to see another zigzaggy varicose vein on my leg. I got compression tights from my doctor and switched to pilates. 

During my pregnancy I began to learn about being psychic after a writer I’d always loved wrote a book about training to be a psychic medium. I tried out some of the techniques in the book and began to get little bits of psychic information. For example one evening falling asleep I got a picture of a tiny sliver of moon - I felt like this was to tell me my daughter would be born on the new moon, which she was. I had planned a home birth, but one night words came into my mind, ‘you will go to hospital but it will all be okay.’ And that’s exactly what happened. 

I loved being a mum, and pregnancy and birth, breastfeeding and that closeness, looking back did more for my physical healing after the LLETZ procedure, than any of the spiritual practises. I have since learnt that babies in the womb produce stem cells that help to heal the mother’s body so it’s in the best possible health for pregnancy, birth and motherhood. 

When my daughter was two my grandmother died, and I felt what I thought was her presence around me all the time for a year. The grief caused my physical exhuastion, and my daughter watched way too many episodes of Peppa Pig. I was started doing a lot of yoga nidra, (yogic sleep) which is lying on the floor focusing on different parts of the body. It felt quite amazing at the time but every time I started it, I could feel what I thought was the presence of my grandmother. I could ‘sense’ her in empty chairs, and when I walked in the forest. 

I started to visit psychics to see if my grandmother would speak to me. It was amazing how accurate she could be in some aspects, but some of the things she said didn’t seem quite right. I also went to a breathwork class which lasted two days, and I cried the whole time and saw a vision where my grandmother came out of a tunnel and stayed with me for the entire workshop. 

We ended up deciding to leave Switzerland when my husband’s contract came to an end. It was a huge source of anxiety for me about where we would move to. I used to talk to my grandmother so I asked her, where we would move to, and she said Florence. 

Two weeks later the job came up. My grandmother had always loved Florence, had renaissance art on her walls. It was pretty amazing. 

Six months after we moved, COVID happened. I struggled during this time, as I felt like I had all these tools but I couldn’t use them. I thought to myself that maybe if I wasn’t a mum and was completely alone I would just meditate my way through lockdown as I loved meditating for long periods. However I just couldn’t concentrate. 

It was like I needed a spiritual perspective on what was going on and Buddhists talking about being indifferent to circumstances just weren’t the answers I was looking for. 

I had concerns about the lockdown as if it felt so oppressive. As a writer about wellbeing I’d always been interested in the mind-body connection and health, and I knew that isolation and fear are major threats to a healthy immune system.

I knew that if I was struggling at home with my family, and all the space and freedom we had in the countryside, then how much worse would it be for people living alone stuck in small apartments? 

I always used to write articles about my own struggles to learn more, so I asked some friends on fb what gave them hope during this time. My friends started talking about the ‘great awakening’ and how we were all ascending into 5d consciousness. While the COVID times were dark, it was all part of the process of a greater spiritual awakening. 

I followed their recommendation of different psychics and astrologers to follow on YouTube. I was also hearing stuff online about end times, and the ‘the mark of the beast.’ 

I ended up reading the book of revelation, and although I couldn’t understand it, it started me asking questions. The 144,000 from the 12 tribes of Israel jumped out at me because one of the psychics I was following was talking about the 144,000 starseeds (a belief that some spiritual people are alien/human hybrids who are here to help humanity ‘ascend.’ 

So what was the truth? I began to ask a couple of the psychics, one of whom often shared Bible quotes, and was some kind of ‘Christian’ even though she did channelling.  They had various answers, about the Bible not being literal, and so I kept being open to it. I thought that the Bible was something I could incorporate into my own spiritual thinking. 

Then one day I decided to say the Lord’s prayer, and I instantly felt the presence of God. And in that moment I knew that I had never met God before. Though I’d had all sorts of blissful spiritual experiences, this was like a complete 180 degree turn.

In the new age ‘god’ is seen as just another word to describe the ‘universe,’ ‘source’ or ‘god consciousness.’ However I had spent thousands of hours connecting with the ‘universe’ and I had never ever met God. 

I instantly knew that the God of the Bible was real. 

I bought a Bible and tried to start reading it but I didn’t know what I was doing, and had a King James Bible and had started on page 1; the old testament. I fell asleep every time I tried to read it and found it boring (although I was quite amazed at how long people lived back then!). It was probably about six months of it sitting on my bedside table. 

Ever since my daughter was born I had always struggled to read at night as I didn’t have much energy and would fall asleep instantly. 

During this time I had friends online who were coming to similar confusions and looking into the ‘false light’ of the new age. We’d share resources, and videos as we tried to figure it all out. I watched many ‘new age to Jesus’ testimonies on youtube. I listened to Doreen Virtue’s testimony of being the no1 bestselling author in the new age and then coming to Christ. She recommend the New Living Testament version as being easier to read, and, at that point a Christian friend told me to start reading with the book of Matthew in the new testament. That was a lot easier! I started reading the whole of the new testament, and then the old testament but on audio to get through it quicker. 

At some point, I must have been saved, but I don’t remember an exact moment. At first I carried on doing yoga and meditation, as I wasn’t sure what was wrong with them. Then I listened to a few testimonies of yoga teachers. They were explaining how every pose is designed to worship Hindu gods. I think that was the point I stopped when I realised it was literally breaking the second commandment and worshipping other gods. 

Through listening to testimonies, and reading the Bible, I learnt that there are no other gods, and the spirits we connected with are actually demonic. Through a woman who used to be psychic, and came to Christ (ExPsychicSaved on YouTube) I realised that psychic mediums are not actually in communication with dead loved ones, but with demons ‘masquerading as an angel of light.’ This was a hard one to let go of for me, but as I read the Bible and understood how the spirit world worked I realised that it is Satan and demons luring people into spiritual experiences that feel good but are actually demonic in nature. Reported past life experiences also turned out to be deception by demons implanting false memories.

I continued with meditation for a while longer as I wasn’t sure what was wrong with sitting in silence concentrating on my breathing. Dealing with fatigue I felt I really needed that stillness and rest time. Another ex new age friend mentioned it might be okay as long as we didn’t open ourselves up as a ‘portal,’ trying to channel spirit entities.  However I remembered that time I’d been meditating and sensed a being in the corner of the room. I hadn’t been deliberately opening myself up as a portal then but it still happened. 

Eventually I gave up meditating too when I realised I could get all of the benefits of stillness and relaxation through prayer and reading the Bible. As I gave up these practises I started to realise how much they are like addictions. I’d done my yoga every morning without fail as otherwise my head wouldn’t feel clear for writing, and my body would feel tense, and desperate for exercise. 

However, after coming to Christ I could go a few days without exercise, and just have a walk and do some gardening and it was fine. 

I’ve switched to some non yoga stretches, step or dance workouts on youtube, and having a puppy! I still need to exercise of course, but it’s not like an addiction where I have to do it every day. 

Looking back I can see the spiritual bondage that these practises put me under. Yoga cured my chronic fatigue dramatically, but it slowly crept back in a minor form. It set me on a lifetime of spiritual seeking spending money on different workshops and courses, looking for a miracle I never found. 

What I’ve realised is with yoga and meditation we have a short term high, like a drug, but have to keep going back for more and more, often going deeper and deeper to continue to get the high. 

What is most deceptive about spiritual highs though, is we don’t see the side effects, the spiritual warfare that opens up in our lives, when we literally do a deal with the devil. Looking back I’ve realised the mental breakdown I had was likely caused by spending hours and hours meditating. It is dangerous exploring the spiritual realm outside of God. 

There was a psychiatrist who worked near a meditation retreat. She got so many patients coming from there, that she decided to investigate the effects of meditation on mental health. Contrary to what we are told, meditation had a negative effect on the mental health of all the participants. 

In another research study of school children who practised yoga and meditation, the children reported experiencing benefits that could not be objectively measured. I find this interesting as this is exactly what the new age does, give you short term spiritual highs to make you think you are feeling better, when actually long term it’s making you feel worse. 

The new age is a complex labyrinth, that leads you deeper and deeper, becoming more and more lost. There is always more inner work to be done, and more money to be spent. 

The Bible tells us to ‘be awake and sober minded,’ whereas meditation and yoga are designed to cultivate a trance state. The act of meditation, seeing yourself as a neutral viewer as your thoughts float by is actually I think a practise that severs us from the self, and causes a disconnection that can open ourselves up to demonic oppression.  

The devil can ‘heal’ as my experience with yoga shows but he will always demand a payment of some kind.

My body is a testimony of what that payment can look like.

It’s also worth noting that if I had been following God rather than drinking excessively I probably wouldn’t have got ill in the first place.

God still performs miracles today and I will continue to pray for my full and complete healing, but I also know that sometimes for the greater good that healing does not happen until heaven when believers will be fully restored with new bodies.

As I write these words I think of all the thousands of pounds I spent going down false avenues trying to heal self with self which will never work. We are born with a God-shaped hole inside of ourselves, separated from him by our sin, and the only way to truly find peace is to reconcile our relationship with God through Jesus. 

God came to me through prayer, and I do believe that anyone who seeks him with an open mind will find the truth. I believed because I felt his presence but now I love learning about how much evidence there is for the accuracy of the Bible and Jesus’s life, death and resurrection. 

I have a peace I never experienced before, and a weight has lifted from me. I never realised just how much unconscious guilt I carried with me because I rejected God and sinned against him.  

I still struggle with low energy from time time to time, but my energy is better than ever. I spent 10 years unable to read a book before bed, but now I  get excited to read my Bible every night, and actually stay awake! That is the power of God’s Holy Spirit to make us a new creation. 

One thing I’ve struggled with throughout my adult life is cooking, cleaning, having energy to keep a tidy house. I still do. But it is better than it has ever been because God is a God of order, and he’s helping me get my life organised. 

When I was in the new age, I was constantly looking around for something bigger, the next course, the next spiritual high. Now I am just happy with having a relationship with God through prayer and reading the Bible, and being with my family and church family and friends. 

On one occasion I spent 100 euros to be given life guidance by a ‘channeler.’ She told me that I would need a lot of ‘independence’ in my marriage, because my husband did not understand me. That I had never been properly understood by anyone. The channeler told me that I too had a gift to be a channeler. 

This is how Satan deceives, through flattery, he leads us to crave more, to want more. To think that what we have is not enough. I was left confused as I always felt my husband did understand me. Even so there was a strange seed of doubt as I trusted everything I heard from the spirit world. 

This is the problem in the new age is that there is no spiritual discernment. We believe everything we are told by people in touch with the spiritual realm because we do not realise that these are demonic spirits who lie. 

But the Bible tells us that ‘Satan is the father of lies.’ 

We are spiritual beings and deeply crave a relationship with our creator. The problem is I think for people like me is we see the church as something boring, and that it is just a controlling religion, rather than the truth. 

As I’ve grown my relationship with God, and with other believers I have been so excited to learn about the spiritual gifts that God still speaks to people today, through dreams, visions and prophecy. 

Some of the ‘new age to Jesus’ testimonies were very dramatic with intense spiritual experiences. One day I actually prayed to God about this. I can’t remember the prayer but God answered me later with an image in my mind of an overflowing cup. I thought to myself, I think I’ve heard a line what was it, ‘my cup floweth over?’ I googled it and realised it was from a Psalm. I’d never even realised at that point there were Psalms! 

While we aren’t meant to seek signs and wonders for the sake of it (that’s a whole other deception causing issues in the church today (the NAR)), it has been amazing to me to build this relationship as it says in the book of James, ‘draw near to God, and he will draw close to you.’ 

Ask and It Is Given, is the title of a best selling book on the law of attraction, a spiritual belief which is becoming more and more popular, as people believe they can ‘manifest’ what they want. 

And yet this is a paraphrase of the Bible verse -  Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. Matthew 7:7

Satan has a counterfeit for everything from God. 

To anyone reading this that thinks it sounds crazy and ridiculous, all I can say is just to ask yourself if you are open to the truth, to reach out and say a prayer to Jesus and to ask him to show you the truth. There are resources below if you’re open to learning more. 

Also a note about healing - if you read the Gospels in the Bible, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John you will see the Jesus performed many healing miracles. He still does to this day. Not everyone is healed, and God has his own timing when it comes to healing. But all prayers are answered in the way that is best for our ultimate good.

If you need prayers for healing or would like to know more feel free to get in touch.

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Links

A Case For Christ - Film about a legal journalist who sets out to disprove the Biblical story of Christ after his wife becomes a believer.

Metanoya - Resources For The Christ Curious

New Age To Jesus Testimonies

Christian Answers For The New Age

Documentaries from Caryl Matrisciana 

gods of the new age 

Yoga Uncoiled