In this article I share an experience that changed my consciousness forever, known as an STE: Spiritually Transformative Experience. I write about how it left me to figure out a completely new way to live, and how we as a collective can make sense of these spiritual quantum leaps.
My husband and I were only a few days back to living in Germany after a very rough year and a half in Toronto, Canada.
We’d barely landed, when I had a dream that bears led me through a series of underground tunnels.
In the dream, I went to my family’s storehouse of outdoor gear, and outfitted myself for a long wilderness journey. I woke up with the sense that this was a significant dream, that I was being asked to do something meaningful about it, and quickly, because the window of time was urgent.
So I did. I performed a four-day fast in a place underground, hundreds of kilometers away from home, in the dead of Winter. I had my spiritual mentor, who helped me plan this fast, and a person onsite looking out for my safety and well being, without disrupting my space but ready in case anything happened.
I spent the days and nights in communion, singing and drumming. I was asking to know my own spirit in its fullness: in the form of song, vibration, symbols, stories, archetypes. I asked to see how this greater self connected with the Earth’s spirit, with the Cosmos, and the elements of creation.
As someone rather experienced in earth-based ritual, what I was expecting was what had always happened: Spirit willing, I’d receive guidance, healing, spiritual renewal; I’d gain some maturity, reaffirm my reciprocal relationship with the sacred.
I’d perform my ritual, nourish that bond, be expanded by it, and then return to my regular life, a bit wiser and more whole, but still essentially the same. I couldn’t begin to imagine how wrong I was.
In those unbroken, dark days and nights underground — something else happened to me. A dawning, impossibly subtle at first, and then like a flood of light, of feeling and knowing. In the midst of communing, singing, praying, I suddenly realized I was perceiving “the World behind the World”
I’d been in altered states many times before. It had never been this real, this immersive, this clear, this world-shattering-yet-simple.
I could see clearly, in high definition, how this greater reality had always been there, like the scenery in a theater play, that you don’t pay attention to as much as to the actors, but it’s there in the background of your awareness.
I’d never looked at this dimension as fully and directly as I did now. It seemed almost too obvious — and quite funny: the Cosmic Web, right there all along, hidden in plain sight. I was drowning in awe. I felt saturated by a glowing stream of aliveness that seemed to enhance the very colors around me. My every sense lit up.
What followed was a non-verbal process of Revelation, in which I knew the perfection of my spirit, and that of every human and every non-human being. Dichotomies such as “human vs nature”, and “sacred vs mundane”, poofed out of existence.
These weren’t casual distinctions for me, either. I’d strived from such an early age to be an irreproachably good person — constantly “working on myself”, constantly seeking the next point of healing and the next spiritual horizon on the quest. Certainly, in my efforts to always do the right thing, the question of living a life in alignment with nature, to act against the destruction of our culture’s extractive ways were essential to my being and identity. While I’m not trying to indicate that these are bad ways to live, I had many rules and shoulds in my young life, and my actions and decisions came from a place of guilt and shame.
In my underground burrow, all those moral structures of guilt and not-doing-enough were rendered basically pointless. As I became flooded with pure Divine Love and pure acceptance, experiencing the sublime Mystery in high definition, every single one of the categories and boxes I’d learned to divide reality into my whole life made no sense anymore. The message was, clearly, “you don’t need to strive to earn this level of connectedness — it’s here for you, all the time and in every place”.
As I mentioned above, at this point in my life, I was no stranger to the altered states that we can experience during these kinds of ceremonies. While I welcomed the floodgates opening to the ineffable transcendent reality I was experiencing, I was fully expecting the glowing, immersive “download” to gradually fade as it integrated into, perhaps, a more whole, but still quite my old ordinary life when I got back home.
I came out of my fast. I went home.
The shift in perception did not go away.
Yes, it morphed, reflecting the fact that I wasn’t in a ceremonial space anymore, but actually hitting up against everything in my day-to-day that no longer worked with my transformed way of processing the world. But the feelings and the awareness, the seeing behind the facade of the material realm, the constant feeling of inner glow in myself and in all beings — all stayed with me. The process continued over the coming weeks and months, rippling into a whole restructuring of life as I knew it.
Spiritually Transformative Experiences
Dr. Yvonne Kason, a medical doctor and psychotherapist, coined the term “Spiritually Transformative Experience” (STE for short) in 1994, in her book, “A Farther Shore”. In this and her subsequent books, she shares her own multiple transformative experiences, which include Near-death Experiences and a Kundalini Awakening. As someone who has since supported countless other individuals undergoing radical spiritual metamorphosis, Dr. Kason writes about how she found herself wanting an umbrella term that gives us language to discuss, research, process and integrate extraordinary peak experiences of multiple varieties without pathologizing them. This overarching category also gives us a lens through which to see the underlying similarities between otherwise seemingly disparate experiences.
From her book, “Soul Lessons from the Light: How Spiritually Transformative Experiences Changed my Life”:
“I intended the term to be positive in meaning and to reflect how STEs all tend to change people’s lives, transforming them, and causing a spiritual awakening.
I intended Spiritually Transformative Experiences to be a contemporary umbrella term, easily understood, which would encompass the broad range of spiritual and paranormal experiences I had been studying and experiencing. Finally, by creating an umbrella term, I wanted to indicate that I thought all these STE experiences of consciousness were related in some way, all part of a gradual expansion of the range of normal human consciousness.”
STEs— in Dr. Kason’s model —can be grouped into mystical experiences; psychic/intuitive experiences; Kundalini awakenings; near-death experiences; other death-related phenomena (such as shared death experiences and after-death communications); and inspired creativity and genius. Each of these categories further subdivides to include a great variety of extraordinary, paranormal or numinous occurrences.
What’s also interesting about this framework is that it is inclusive of events of varying levels of intensity. For instance, flashes of intuition or energy sensations in the body, all the way to dramatic spiritual awakening events, “count” as STEs. This allows us to understand STEs as a continuum of human experience which catalyzes our collective expansion in Consciousness—whether gradual and cumulative, or sudden and shocking.
I was twenty-eight at the time of the dramatic consciousness shift I related above, which I now call an STE. I’d never come across Dr. Kason’s terminology, and it certainly would have helped me then! As far as my understanding of spontaneous spiritual phenomena went, I was in completely uncharted waters.
One reason for this was that I was always an intuitive, creative kid. Ever since I could remember, I was living with one foot in a magical world where I tapped into unseen energies; and with the other foot in what we like to call “reality”. I had practically an obsession for the mysterious and the miraculous, and that obsession made it so that I chose a very unconventional life path as an adult. In my 20’s in the midst of being an art student, I was devoted to learning ceremonial magic, earth-based spirituality, energy healing and more. I longed to live out my soul’s mission and to help others find theirs. At the time of my story, I’d of course heard about “spiritual awakenings”. But because of my background, I didn’t believe this counted as an “awakening” — how could it be, if I’d been “awake” to the spiritual realms since birth?
Then there was another complicating factor. This desire for a magical, epic quest of a life — together with what I now know to be my neurodivergent asynchronous development, which made me socially “younger” than my age in many ways—made me vulnerable to control by spiritual authority figures. I ended up being part of a high control group for some years prior to this event. Part of the decision to move countries, just prior to my STE, was to put distance between myself and that whole scene, and reclaim my life. (Through this link you can read a bit more about that chapter in my life, with a tie-in to this story).
The strict, hierarchical worldview of the spiritual community I was in led me to believe that consciousness breakthroughs of the kind I’ve just recounted could only be expected way, wayyy further down the journey, to be attained only by following their exact protocols. If that was true, then what had happened to me? Was I delusional?
I was forced to trust my experience. It was too undeniable. This would lead to me breaking out of the high control paradigm, as I integrated this STE in all other aspects of my life. At first though, right after the STE, my sense of what counted as reality, and my rules for life, were absolutely shaken. I didn’t know quite how to talk about what happened to me, and I didn’t know how to live anymore.
Perception, blasted wide open
Back to the time of my STE: life got very weird, as several things began to take place downstream of this seismic change in my awareness. I needed to learn a new way to live with this new awareness, and a new way to be me.
Though I couldn’t deny that I was utterly changed, I had no real maps and very little guidance — neither philosophical nor practical. Ironic, for someone who had spent their whole adult life surrounded by individuals who identified as spiritual. What I didn’t know then was that this complete falling apart of our sense of real and normal is par for the course with intense STEs.
Thanks to my mentor pointing me in his direction, I was able to have a single, valuable conversation with another, very sought-after teacher. He encouraged me to trust my experience and assured me that life on the other side of the threshold I’d just crossed was going to be magical. While I was grateful for this reassurance, that was the extent of my social orientation at the time!
A seamless re-entry into the world of work was impossible. For the previous four years, I’d been making a precarious living as a freelance graphic designer — while I trained, and volunteered the equivalent of another full-time job, to become a spiritual teacher and healer. I was burned out. Luckily, I had already planned to take a sabbatical on returning to Germany. My husband and I had a bare minimum of financial support that allowed me not to have to rush myself too hard to figure out my next steps work-wise.
I felt especially lucky to have that extra buffer of free time and space to myself, because I found myself questioning and deconstructing all the ways I’d been taught to “get stuff done”: to be unfailingly available and endlessly productive. But as the planned sabbatical came to an end, I still wasn’t ready.
I had returned from my ceremonial fast orders of magnitude more sensitive, physically, emotionally and psychically. On one hand, this meant that left to my own devices, I would slip into a state of contemplative ecstasy with barely any prompting. Even a plain white wall, or the way objects piled on a chair were cause for exuberant bliss. I could spend hours writing and sketching on my journal, trying to put on paper the torrent of inspiration that poured through me.
On the other hand, discomforts I could put up with or ignore before, were amplified to the point of agony. I’d been highly sensitive all my life and had known for years that my sensory integration system was definitely not “normal”, so embracing sensitivity was nothing new to me. But the theme repeats: whatever out-of-the-norm-ness I’d managed to accommodate in my life before, that was then. “Now” was “more” in every way, and my body had lost any sense of tolerance.
My extrasensory perception, too, became more intense and felt much less under control. As with my physical senses, the aperture of my psychic senses had been blown wide open.
I would, for instance, casually touch an object, and then get flashes in my mind about its provenance. I have a vivid memory of touching a quartz crystal and having these immersive images of layers of square grids stacked over each other. Later I learned that’s what the crystalline structure of quartz looks like! Moments like these became commonplace.
Being around others, however, became exponentially bewildering and confusing. I felt like I was in a whirlwind of their energy: inner unresolved tensions, incoherent signals, and all the ways they were out of alignment with themselves made me feel like I was on a bad psychedelic trip. My psychic empathy had skyrocketed, although it would be a very long time before I would come to acknowledge that I was “absorbing” feelings and energies from people and places. Like many of the puzzle pieces on the proverbial table, I didn’t know where to place this information. In the subsequent integration process, as I learned to differentiate my own soul signature in a stronger way, I understood how to release energies that didn’t belong to me and weren’t for my highest good to have around me. This made for a sustainable upgrade in my wellbeing in comparison to those early days.
As a result of all the above, at the time I had to gradually redesign all of my normal day-to-day, from what products I could stand to wash my hair with, to what schedule I could handle, and how much time I could spend with people.
At the same time that my physical, emotional and energetic sensitivity were so heightened, I was having spiritual encounters I couldn’t quite make sense of at first.
Once again, this wasn’t because of a lack of previous experience in meeting spirits. But thus far it had always been me seeking them out — asking for guidance, teachings, or protection, for instance — and each time the process required time and preparation. Now, the encounters happened quickly and spontaneously, and sometimes they repeated insistently. There were plant, animal, elemental and light or divine beings approaching me in dreams and visions, who seemed to call me toward some kind of shared purpose. Because it seemed as though spirits were now actively seeking me out, I doubted — it felt arrogant to assume that suddenly entities from other planes of existence wanted me specifically.
However, with time, evidence led me to assume I was truly meeting ontologically distinct beings, from outside my own consciousness, rather than imagining them.
I don’t ever ask people to believe this categorically, because there’s so much we still don’t know about how the Cosmos works. But learning to trust these encounters in the subtle realms as real has, over the years, taught me much about cultivating reciprocity and skillful relationality with the ecologies of spirit. I began building faith in them as I was able, often, to verify information they gave me. Or, I found myself inside a stream of synchronistic connections following an encounter, which were so uncanny that I could only start to surrender to the intersubjective truth of those encounters, even if at first they only appeared to be taking place only in my mind.
The See-saw of Integration
Learning to trust that the increased volume of sensory and energetic signals I was receiving wasn’t an error or “all in my head” — to rely on them as real, and to make sense of what I was perceiving, took me several years.
I became so reliant on my psychic intuition to light the very confusing path, that in time it became evident at a visceral level how essential it is, when we’re lost in life, to have access to our psychic GPS.
The process, however, was this constant back-and-forth between doubt and acceptance.
When I was at peace and in acceptance of my new spiritual perception, I felt a deep rightness within me. I felt luminous, blissful, with a persistent sense that a warm, glowing ball of light in my core was guiding me without words to my destiny. I had no idea what that destiny was, mind you! But the sense of full-body rightness was overpowering. During these periods, I used my newfound inner reference points to break with many culturally oppressive systems that I had internalized as normal and necessary.
This included the fallacies of the high control environment I’d been in, which I would come to learn are very prevalent in many self-development spaces, secular as well as spiritual. For instance, tropes like “transcending one’s ego”, “being of service”, and “being all in on one’s personal development” had been used in my life as ways to bypass healthy boundaries of self — energy, money and resources. The promise was that the payoff would be nothing less than one’s attainment of full superhuman potential. But in my new state, it was just too obvious to see that this carrot-and-stick framing of spirituality was the antithesis of the loving, connected, numinous reality, which I now could access at all times, if I just went still for a moment.
In turn, as I unraveled these mental cages, other extractive and punitive life rules, such as needing to have a job, not as a practical need but as as a core moral identity, as a necessity to be considered a good, upstanding person; or the ways we often relate with each other through top-down control and unwitting, normalized hurtfulness — all of it showed itself clearly as severed from the sacred flow I now knew intimately. Everything that didn’t foster an expression of intrinsic life force and wholeness-based relationality could no longer be part of my new life.
My life-long urgent, demanding pull toward living out a soul-level mission without compromise was louder than ever. I wanted to bring the healing I was experiencing to others as well. I felt compelled to craft a lifepath that expressed not only the clear values that now were emerging as obvious to my heart, but that also, somehow, managed to communicate the ineffable truth of what I was experiencing at a body level. I needed the rhythms of my existence to reflect Earth and Cosmic rhythms, and not those of a life-divorced social order.
Yet parts of me didn’t feel safe to follow these newfound imperatives. These parts, having taken onboard so many spoken and unspoken cultural agreements, were afraid of who I was becoming.
When I was in this inner space of doubt, I’d try to make myself go back, even for a tiny bit, to my old level of tolerance for incoherent or inharmonious signals – and fail, hard.
In my mind’s eye I gazed at my new state: a soft wisp of light, delicate and fragile. Good for absolutely nothing.
Was I going to be someone who just stares into space and communes with the invisible, forever and ever? With no job, no schedule, no tolerance for tasks and demands or anything “unpleasant”?
Was I truly experiencing some kind of spiritual breakthrough or a mental breakdown?
Luckily, the expanded access that I now felt to the Universe and to spiritual intelligences partnering with me, helped me lean into my doubtful, fearful and self-disdainful parts with more gentleness and curiosity than I had ever could have before.
From this supported vantage point, “good for nothing” actually became something desirable; a koan, a thread to follow through the woods of my inner world. What would the world look like if all of us stopped rendering our life-force and competence to systems that aren’t built for thriving?
The philosophy of life that now guides me was forged in those moments of imagining a life where we can thrive as fully participating members of a vibrant ecosystem, both physically and in spirit.
The Aftermath
My STE was not a neatly packaged, linear journey of transcending ordinary perception and finding a deeper spiritual purpose. After my initial, luminous, bewildered time, I was stripped down much further, to a point of feeling like living death, for reasons I outline below. A true sense of re-entering life wouldn’t emerge for a long time.
My intention for recounting this story now is to offer a mirror of solidarity with the many people in my broader community who also have undergone an STE, perhaps more recently, and are trying to figure it all out. I wanted to add my voice to the growing chorus advocating for the realities of spiritual leaps in consciousness, and for their safe and wise integration. I am also writing about this because the years in my holistic practice with neurodivergent, intuitive, spiritually-connected clients have shown me that we have a real gap in our understanding of neurodivergent individuals who are also experiencers of mystical, paranormal, and psychic phenomena.
It’s been roughly twelve years since this story took place. The astrologer in me notes that that’s one Jupiter cycle — Jupiter, who gives us gifts greater than our imaginings, but also leaves us to figure out how to sustain those gifts over time. I am immensely grateful for my STE, and it’s in many ways the best thing that ever happened to me. And, the rebuilding process afterward was hard, lonely, isolating and disorienting. “Coming back” from a major expansion in consciousness is its own kind of magical, and its own kind of hellish, and we don’t have a lot of social support around it all.
Near-death researcher P.M.H. Atwater has noted that it takes adult near-death experiencers about seven to ten years on average, before fully integrating their process of dying and coming back to life. It feels a little presumptuous to compare my story to an NDE, which I imagine to be an even more intense and complex event — bodily death one of, if not THE most potent mystery, after all— though the parallels are very real.
I now think my own aftermath didn’t need to be as hard. Some parts of the integration, yes, are legitimately difficult. Some others are only a struggle because our social world does not widely account for spiritual peak experiences, “spiritual emergencies”, awakenings or sudden transformations.
We have mainly a pathologizing model to fall back to (at the level of care), while our prevailing metaphysics, which inform everything else in our culture’s systems and structures, assume that we’re nothing more than a collection of chemical reactions. That leaves many mystical, psychic and paranormal experiencers to fend for ourselves, unless we can find helpful communities that give us both validation and workable tools to come out of the closet and embody the changes we’ve been through in generative ways.
Over time, I have shared parts of my tale often, while not spotlighting it much. My work with clients undergoing their own spiritual transformation presents moments in which it’s helpful to their process to have someone by their side who “gets it”. Usually this involves disclosing bits and pieces or a version in a nutshell. I mention my STE story, too, on my online bio, as it’s been a major force that propelled my life in the direction of service I offer today. Socially, though, I don’t share about it that often or in detail. Even with close loved ones, for years I didn’t know what I could say to represent the metamorphosis I’d been through and do it justice.
Until now, I’d never put all of this narrative together publicly, with this level of detail, in one place.
While writing this narrative, I came face to face with all the ways that I’d actively avoided talking about this side of me. Part of it has been that the story has always been messy, tangled with other big-deal narratives in my inner world. What I’ve related above describes roughly the first nine months to a year of my life after the STE. Toward the end of that period I discovered my own neurodivergence for the first time, in fact directly fueled by the immense inner tensions the STE brought up.
As my sensory and energetic buffers decreased and my sensitivity increased, and while I felt disoriented in the world as my newly expanded self, I had no resources left within me to cope with my anguish about “feeling like an alien”. I was forced to confront agonizing feelings of not belonging my whole life. Synchronicity then revealed that I was neurodivergent, and that realization became its own brand new process of having to integrate a new identity and figure out what it all meant.
I became chronically ill around that same time as well, and my body failing due to mystery symptoms no medical professional could explain consumed my awareness and my remaining energy. I was severely disabled for about a year, and moderately disabled for the following eight. Even now, I am not someone who can take their spoons budget lightly, though I am healthier than I have been in all of the past decade. I’m often indistinguishable from an able-bodied person, as long as I heed all my energetic and sensory guardrails.
Today, I don’t doubt that these processes — illness and neurodivergent integration — were the next phase of the spiritual wave that first hit my life during that winter ceremonial fast twelve years ago. For instance, I now know that many who are very connected to spirit or go through an awakening can have their bodies go haywire in the process.
But at the time, all of what was happening to me was a chaotic jumble, and honestly it felt like I’d glimpsed the ineffable Mystery only to come crashing down into a hellscape. I wondered — again, because I was lost and unsupported and uninformed — if I’d “made this happen”, if I’d taken a wrong turn somewhere.
That brings me to the final hurdle in sharing my story fully before now. I feared being a target of projections ranging from disparagement to being put on a pedestal. I worried that I’d be perceived as claiming a (delusional), unidimensional, static perfection which erases the messy humanity of it all.
But humanity is exactly at the core of why I write about this and other related subjects: because they’re natural human experiences. Most of us have had some kind of contact with extra-physical reality. (What’s bizarre is how we’ve edited this aspect of life out of our everyday, and fenced it off as “crazy”).
I believe that a wide diversity of lived-experience narratives creates the right, “democratic” context, if you will, for the extraordinary chapters in an STE experiencer’s life to be held with dignity and without sensationalism. With the right amount of gravitas, yes. But minus the grandiosity that can overshadow the truth and substance of their journey — and even become their whole persona, ironically, when STEs are seen as such an impossibility as our mainstream holds them to be.
Let’s keep encouraging a cultural shift where spiritual emergence is supported and celebrated, and where many experiencers, messengers and ambassadors for the non-physical dimensions can help us carve a future both literate and wise in the myriad ways of the Unseen.
Thank you, as always for reading. If you know someone else who would find this story helpful or comforting, please go ahead and share!
If you’ve had an STE that you’d like to put words to, feel free to comment below (if you feel open to doing so here), or email me at hello@karineglinton.com if you’d like to do so privately.
If you’re looking for professional support in your integration process, I’m available for 1:1 sessions as well. Reach out and we can discuss if working together would be a good next step for where you’re at. You can also learn more about my intuitive, astrology and coaching services here.
