For most of my adult life, I was driven, capable, and successful, and I felt at home in the relentless pursuit of more achievement.
I spent nearly two decades building a career in the tech industry, most of it based in Silicon Valley. I was an early employee at several generation-defining companies, where I held various roles in growth, product, and marketing. I went on to hold senior leadership roles at one of the most recognizable names in financial technology, eventually serving as President of Wealthfront, which is now a publicly traded company on a US stock exchange.
Later in my career, I was a founding partner of an early-stage venture capital firm, where I invested in companies such as Robinhood and Webflow. I was also an advisor to several large technology companies and spent time as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Greylock Partners, a top-tier venture capital firm led by Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn.
From the outside, it looked like exactly the kind of life a person builds toward. The proximity to power, professional recognition, and the potential for great wealth are what others in the tech industry and I worked relentlessly toward. What I didn't know then was that the identity driving all of it had been built a long time before Silicon Valley, and it had its roots in several difficult childhood experiences, including the death of my mom from mental illness when I was ten.
When I was young, I was struggling emotionally and relationally, but succeeding made me feel good. So, without realizing it, achievement became my drug and my purpose.
For decades, it worked remarkably well.
But somewhere in my late 30s, something shifted. The professional achievements kept coming, yet they felt less and less resonant and meaningful each time. I tried taking on greater responsibilities to counter the waning enthusiasm for the life and career I was living, yet my inner discontent swelled.
What I know now is that I was in the early stages of an identity transformation and that I needed to resolve old traumas that I had been silently carrying for decades. I left Silicon Valley not because I had a plan, but because something in me refused to stay and urged me through a silent voice that kept repeating: "Your time here is done. It's time to let go. You don't need to push yourself like this anymore."
It was one of the most disorienting and frightening decisions of my life. I was walking away from everything I had built, everything I knew how to be, and a large amount of wealth I was on the verge of obtaining. Yet I listened to the relentless inner voice that was begging me to move on.
And that's when everything fell apart. I fell into depression and deeper into numbing out, eventually leading to my decision to spend 45 days in an addiction recovery center. My career was over, my old friendships were drifting apart, I was lonely, and a deluge of childhood trauma was coming to the surface. So, I committed to doing the work to repair myself.
That work meant learning to decondition my mind from destructive patterns and from parts of my old identity that no longer served me. It was slow and often disorienting. And it was necessary.
Then, in early 2021, something opened. I was in my home office when I began having visions of beams of light breaking through clouds and moving toward me — followed by a wave of emotional catharsis unlike anything I had previously experienced. I felt as though I was under the direction of something beyond myself, something that was guiding me where to stand, where to move, and eventually to kneel and surrender. When it passed, I was in what I can only describe as a nearly egoless state that lasted for about a month. There was a quality of deep inner equanimity — not happiness exactly, but stillness — that I had never accessed before. And almost immediately, most of my prior interests and beliefs reorganized themselves: the drive for professional achievement, the desire for financial recognition, my fundamental understanding of what reality was — all of it shifted at once, irreversibly, as if a large portion of my former identity had been quietly but permanently dissolved.
What followed was not a single event but a sustained and often destabilizing period of non-ordinary experience that lasted years and continues to this day. For four years, I had dozens of highly vivid dreams — not ordinary dreams, but layered, symbol-dense experiences that drew from the same archetypal and mythological imagery I later found described in Jung's Red Book and in the writings of depth psychologists: biblical floods, global catastrophes, scenes of trying to save others and dying in the attempt. These dreams produced physiological aftereffects that would persist for days or weeks — disequilibrium, dramatic swings in energy, heightened sensitivity to sound and environment. I did not choose them, and I could not have manufactured them. They arrived and I navigated them as best I could.
During this same period, I entered what can only be called a sustained spiritual crisis. On a Good Friday — the day marking the death of Jesus in the Christian calendar — I walked into a church and was overwhelmed by waves of pure grief and suffering that had no biographical source. My body went into full tremors, uncontrollable shaking, followed by sobbing and screaming that came from somewhere impersonal — releasing something that felt ancient and collective rather than personal. This happened nearly every day for ten consecutive months. It was punctuated occasionally by periods of profound peace, but mostly it was harrowing. The closest parallels I found were in the accounts of Christian mystics — Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross — people who described experiences my former self would have dismissed as religious theater, and that I was now living through directly.
And then there were the visionary states. In these experiences, my consciousness seemed to move through time — entering what appeared to be a vast film strip laid out across space, each frame a different scene from human history. When I entered a scene, I was a pure observer: no body, only awareness, with the felt experience of every person in that scene accessible to me across vastly different times and places. I have no framework that fully accounts for what these were. I am not making a claim about what they mean metaphysically. I am simply reporting what happened.
I spent a long time not talking about any of this. It is difficult to describe experiences that most language wasn't built to hold, and it is not lost on me that this territory — spontaneous awakening, sustained spiritual emergency, archetypal dreaming, visionary states — sits at the edges of what mainstream culture is willing to take seriously. But these experiences have been the most formative of my life. They are the direct reason I study non-ordinary states of consciousness, and the reason I take seriously what people report when they undergo them. They left me with little desire for the things I had spent two decades pursuing, and with a strong pull toward simpler, quieter work in service of others. They gave me a direct, embodied understanding of why people throughout human history have reached for the language of the sacred — because nothing else is adequate. And they are why I now do the work I do.
I've spent the years since learning to understand what happened, studying the alchemy of personal transformation, and finding language for it. I trained as a coach and a spiritual guide. I deepened my knowledge of the contemplative traditions that understood how to guide each other through life's major transitions. And I spent several years researching tools and methods for healing mind, body, and spirit.
I began writing about my experiences and working with organizations at the intersection of mental health and spirituality. I also began working with others who were standing at the same threshold I had once stood at: successful on the outside, undone on the inside, and undergoing a major identity transformation.
I know this territory from direct lived experience.
If you're in the middle of it — the uncertainty of leaving behind who you've been and the slow and disorienting emergence of who you're becoming — I'm here to help.