About the Author
Meet Oholomo.
Ever since I was a child, I have had a number of different kinds of mystical experiences. I can remember regularly speaking to spirits when I was a kid, and I apprenticed with a Lakota medicine man when I was in high school. Inexorably pulled toward spirituality, I began studying indigenous and Asian traditions in college. I practiced vipassana meditation intensively in my late 20s, and I also experienced a heart opening brought on by Buddhist practice. In my 30s, I became a scholar and researcher of Asian religions, and had a few notable experiences with practice of these traditions. I have also maintained a daily yoga practice for over 25 years.
Eventually, this all culminated in my 40s, when I had a series of profound awakening experiences that revealed to me a feminine embodiment of non-duality, which I write about on this website. It began in late 2018, when I started having bouts of severe anxiety. I hadn’t practiced vipassana intensively for over two decades, but I began again to practice body scans for 15 to 20 minutes per day. I’d say I probably succeeded in actually meditating 4–5 days out of the week. I’d sit in a comfy chair, so as to avoid the back pain I used to get from the cushion on the floor. Most of the time I was just lost in thought, and it didn’t do anything for my anxiety, which only got worse over time.
Around the same time, I also started doing a bit of qigong — really just 10 or 15 min of breathing and moving after sitting meditation and before going about my day. A few months after starting that practice, I began experiencing something that was so subtle I didn’t realize it could be related to awakening until much later. Whenever I’d start a qigong session, I’d get a sensation of rising energy from my feet to my head. A few times I noticed it rising when I was doing the meditation before even standing up for qigong. It felt like mildly cold shivers, that was somehow connected with sexual energy, breathing, and movement. It was interesting and fun to observe, but I didn’t think it meant too much at the time.
Just about two months after those energy flows began to become noticeable, a sudden and profound awakening experience took place, which kicked off the cycle of transformation I talk about on this website. This process wound up taking about four years to complete.
As you will read, my awakening has involved many diverse kinds of openings. I have had experiences and have gained insights into Buddhism, Advaita, Daoism, yoga, tantra, kundalini, shamanism, and frameworks from both my pagan European and indigenous Amerindian ancestors. I wove these strands together through a self-designed set of practices that include meditation, qigong, ancestral work, writing, and “just being.”
This series of posts is a journal of the awakening experiences that brought me to these realizations, and how I became “Oholomo.” I started keeping this journal shortly after the process began. These posts were first located on my Facebook page, but I have moved them here to provide a more stable permanent record. I have edited them for public reading, and have also clumped them into three different phases in order to provide some organization and coherence.
My hope is that readers might find some inspiration, clarity, solidarity, or enjoyment in reading these posts. If you’d like to talk with me more about nonduality, nonself, kundalini, the goddess, awakening more generally, or anything else, subscribe below so you can message me in the members-only chat… or come find me on Facebook.