The Quiet Discomfort of Staying
There are parts of my experience I don’t speak about to most people, not because they are dramatic, but because I already know how they will be received.
I learned fairly quickly that sharing my out-of-the-norm experiences didn’t bring understanding; it created distance. Family didn’t know what to do with it, and friends, well, that became something else entirely, a playground for energy feeding that I had no interest in participating in.
The social systems that were meant to help had a quick answer: medication. Psychotherapy was also suggested. At one point, an angry medical doctor told me I had PTSD, that I needed both therapy and medication.
She never saw me again.
I’m not dismissing this approach; I can see where it has its place. But my inner knowing was louder than anything being offered, and it wasn’t negotiating, so I stopped looking outward for help. There was simply nowhere else to go that made any sense to me.
Tobias, Kuthumi, and Adamus had all proclaimed over many years that this is the lifetime. Let me say this clearly: There is no fucking way I am coming back to do this all over again.
What followed that realisation wasn’t graceful.
There was emotional battling, physical pain, and a kind of mental seesawing that was relentless at times. There were days when it became so intense that my own mind, the same mind that creates, constructs and solves, would quietly begin mapping ways for me not to be here at all. Then something that resembled hope would arise, not loudly or heroically, but just enough. The cycle would reset, and I would still be here. For reasons I couldn’t explain then, leaving never became the answer.
At the same time, my body was doing its own thing.
There were days when my skin became itchy and inflamed, my scalp flaked, and I was dizzy enough that I had to steady myself against the wall, especially challenging in a home with stairs. Sinus infections came and went, and sharp, stabbing pains arrived without warning and left just as suddenly. My joints and lower back became unreliable, and weeks went by when I couldn’t stand up straight. Walking brought so much pain that I had to stop and breathe, just to get from one place to the next.
There were also what Adamus calls “bump and fill” moments. I fell down, and up, the stairs a couple of times, and shoulder surgery followed. I managed to trip over my vacuum cleaner and cracked the back of my head on the paving bricks. I lay there for a while, checked for blood and damage, and laughed. Fuck you, Adamus.
While I could have treated the whole experience as something to fix or manage, I didn’t. Not because I was certain of anything, but because something in me knew that interference wasn’t the answer. And I stayed.
From the outside, it could easily have been mistaken for something else entirely, something that needed to be diagnosed, managed, or corrected. But it wasn’t dysfunction that was unfolding; it was remembering, and the real tension came from the mind. Having been in charge for so long, it was rejecting what it could not direct.
That was the battle. Not the unfolding itself, but the disquiet of the mind, and having to live in that discomfort while holding a knowing that didn’t yet bring any relief, didn’t resolve anything, and didn’t offer any kind of reassurance. Gnost may know, but it is one thing to be told that the new stool has four legs instead of three, and quite another to integrate that knowing while the mind is still trying to sit on the stool it remembers.
There was no reward in it, no immediate clarity, no sense of progress in the way I had been taught to recognise it. Just this ongoing experience of both staying on the planet and remaining present with myself, when everything in me had been conditioned to reach outward for an answer.
There was nothing strong or certain about staying. It offered no peace, no clarity and no indication that I was doing the right thing. Most unsettling was the sense that nothing was happening. I had always measured progress, insight and change; here, there was nothing to measure.
The mind did not like that. It circled, looking for an explanation that would make staying sensible and return it to control. When nothing came, it questioned harder and turned the whole experience back on me, as though I had made a mistake.
There were moments when leaving seemed the easier, entirely reasonable choice. Not dramatic moments or decisions made in crisis, just the thought of stepping away from something that offered nothing in return.
Still, I didn’t leave.
It took me some time to recognise what that space actually was, because it didn’t present itself as anything meaningful at the time. It wasn’t resolution. It wasn’t clarity. It wasn’t even what I would have called progress. It was the point before any of that, a kind of threshold that didn’t feel like one while I was in it, because there was nothing to mark it, nothing to indicate that anything was about to change.
It has been described as “the void” in some of the Crimson Circle material, and that used to irritate me, because from where I was standing it didn’t feel like some elegant, spacious, colourful, floaty “void” that I had seen on Star Trek. It felt uncomfortable, unresolved, and at times completely pointless.
There were moments when I remember thinking, How the fuck would you and your Ascended Master mates even know what this feels like, especially when by your own admission you had your own difficulties getting through it? That didn’t bring me any comfort, and it didn’t make it easier.
Being told by a spacious non-entity from a void that they were waiting for me at the non-physical club became a bit of a conundrum, especially when they admitted their current experiences involve popping in to taste real earthly wine. That may have been the turning point for me. “Wine.”
It was just a word, and I was still in it. “Find your passion,” they said. “You are not on a mission,” they said, and then, “Find your massion.” At the time, that didn’t offer much. Real things like chocolate cake, New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and movies seemed a more reliable option.
I can’t say when it changed because it wasn’t marked by anything obvious. There was no revelation, no dramatic breakthrough, no moment where I suddenly knew I had arrived somewhere different. Looking back, I can see that the discomfort of staying had slowly exhausted my mind’s need to keep reaching for answers. The more I allowed what was, the less there was for it to fix, understand or control. Without ever announcing its departure, the urgency simply began to fade.
What changed wasn’t my life. That continued to present challenges, relationships remained complicated, and my body still had its opinions. What changed was the way I met those experiences. The emotional reactiveness gradually softened. I found myself acting more often than reacting. The constant need to understand everything, to resolve everything, or to force life into making sense slowly lost its grip.
Looking back, I realised my mind had never been my enemy. It is a remarkably capable mind and has served me well throughout my life. The difficulty was that it had quietly assumed responsibility for experiences that could never be resolved through thinking alone. As allowing deepened, there was simply less for it to reach for. Without problems to constantly solve or futures to predict, it gradually settled back into the role it had always been meant to play – simply navigating the practicalities of being human.
Years later, when Adamus introduced what he calls the Ænd, I smiled. Instead of learning something new, I was hearing words that described an experience I had already been living. What had once felt like an uncomfortable, directionless space was no longer something to escape. It had quietly become part of the way I experienced life, not as an achievement, but as an absence of the constant need to achieve.
Looking back, I probably do owe Adamus an apology. Earlier in this story I rather bluntly said, “Fuck you, Adamus.” In fairness, I should probably also say, “Thank you.” Not because he removed the discomfort, but because I eventually recognised what he had been pointing to long before I was ready to recognise it myself. Respectfully, the first non-existent round in the heavenly non-existent vineyard is on me.
In hindsight, I also realised the discomfort of staying wasn’t occurring in isolation. It followed a lifetime of searching, questioning, resisting and, at times, profound rage. By the time I found myself simply staying, there was very little left to fight. Perhaps that was the quiet gift of it. Exhaustion had finally made space for allowing.
— Saint Parousia
Originally published in the August 2026 edition of Crimson Circle Magazine.
This reflection is shared here with gratitude to the editorial team at Crimson Circle Magazine, and especially Jean Tinder, whose thoughtful editorial guidance helped this piece find its final form.
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