01 / Behind the curtain
My understanding of connection and balance is deeply personal.
Seven years ago, I experienced a one-week episode of psychosis that left me completely disconnected from our shared reality and ultimately led to hospitalization.
The experience began while I was watching One Strange Rock, a series about the interconnectedness of life on Earth and how a change in one place, such as a desert, can affect a rainforest thousands of kilometres away. Something about that idea of total interdependence opened a door in my mind.
I entered what felt like a magical alternate reality. It seemed as though I had been taken behind the curtain and shown the hidden connections between love, energy, humanity, balance, and the structure of life itself.
Time slowed almost to a standstill. Every minute felt nearly frozen, yet within it I seemed able to have thousands of thoughts. They all connected with perfect internal logic. I believed I could see the hidden patterns behind human existence and that, for the first time, everything made complete sense.
Two realities
Inside my mind, everything made complete sense.
Outside of it, I was no longer communicating coherently.
02 / Shared reality
The sense-making existed only inside my mind.
To my partner at the time, now my husband, I was speaking disconnected words, moving around aimlessly, and appearing intensely joyful. While I felt as though I had discovered something profound, the people around me could see that I was no longer grounded in the reality we shared.
The episode was not caused by recreational drugs. It arose from my own brain. That distinction matters to me, not because one cause of psychosis is more legitimate than another, but because people often assume that such an altered state must have been produced by an outside substance. Mine was not.
Psychosis was destabilizing, frightening, and serious enough to require hospital care. At the same time, living through it left me with enduring questions about the mind, meaning, connection, spirituality, and how we help people navigate experiences that can feel deeply significant while also placing them in genuine danger.
03 / Meaning and integration
Holding insight
with care.
I do not present my experience as a hidden truth about the world, and I do not want to romanticize psychosis. I share it because it profoundly shaped the way I think about balance and became part of the foundation of the Balance Matrix.
The experience eventually led me to participate in Exploring Spiritual Emergency and the Navigation of Psychological Crises, a University of Alberta research study led by Aaron Munson. Contributing my experience to that research gave me another way to examine the difficult territory between spiritual meaning and psychological crisis.
Today, I understand balance not as permanent calm or certainty, but as an ongoing relationship between our inner experience, our shared reality, our bodies, our environments, and the people who help us find our way back.