Awakening the Spiritual Mind — Navigating Life Transitions Through Transpersonal Psychology

Thank you, everyone, to come tonight just to hear me, or this morning for some of you, of the Canadian people, to hear me. It's a real joy to be here and to present my work. In fact, just to give you some words about the context, I have a book which will be released in November or December 2026. So, but instead of presenting the book, it's— I would like to present you the process process, which at the end will be the release of the book, but it's essentially about the process. I'm very pleased, it's my first presentation on the Aleph Trust community, it's, it's very important to have your feedback. So thank you, Francesca, also to give me the opportunity to speak about my work and my creative process. So when I wrote this presentation, I realized The fact the program, because I was an alumna in an MSc program on transpersonal psychology and consciousness, but the program changed my trajectory of my life and it opened doors to a deeper dimension of reality, a dimension I am still exploring today. I mean, so my talk is called Awakening the Spiritual Mind, like my book, and it's navigating life transitions through transpersonal psychology. So I will share with you some pieces of my personal journey, but not for autobiographical reasons. My intention here is to use my own experience as a living laboratory. What I think life is, and I think life, just to summarize, is evolution. Just to illustrate what we study at Aleph Trust, the dynamics of spiritual emergence, the architecture of transitions, and the intelligence of life cycles. I will talk also how personal crises may become portals to expanded consciousness. From my own experience, I will show the connection between symbolism, which is usually viewed theorized by researchers, and symbolism in real life. All we embody the spiritual intelligence. So I hope this journey, because it's a journey I propose to you, I hope this journey will resonate with your own path and support you in your next steps, wherever you are in your process. But first of all, I would like to start with some questions. And you can answer in the chat or by raising your hand, but in the chat perhaps. So let's start by the first— I have only one question with 4 different elements. So since you are studying or graduating from Aleph Trust, how many of you have experienced a major life transition or threshold? How many of you experience Moments where your research became lived experience? How many of you have experienced the challenge of integrating transpersonal concepts into daily life? And how many of you experienced synchronicities that felt like guidance? So you can answer in the chat, and at the end of the session, we can discuss on this, about your experience, because this is what this session is about, is your own experience. How do you embody the transpersonal concept, the transpersonal psychology? So, because even now, now in this community, something is happening in this moment in time, in the way consciousness itself seems to be shifting. That's what today is about, is exploring how we navigate these thresholds, not just theoretically, but in the mess and the beauty of actual lived experience. But before to talk about my study case, I would like to set up a theoretical framework. We all know the first one, I think. We've studied these concepts, written about them, discussed them in seminars. It's about Grof's distinction between spiritual emergency and emergency. That breakdowns that look like psychological crisis can actually be breakthrough moments. Spiritual emergence. The psyche reorganizing at higher level. In theory, it's clear. In practice, when you are in the middle of an existential collapse, how do you tell the difference? How do you know if you are having a spiritual emergency or just an emergency? The second one is Bridges' model of transition and the 3 phases: ending, Entering in a neutral zone and a new beginning. That liminal space, the neutral zone where you are no longer who you were, but not yet who you are becoming. We understand this intellectually, but when you are in that space, when there is no ground beneath your feet, it's terrifying in a way the books do not quite capture. And third, then, Tarnas' work on archetypal astrology. I use it a lot. This beautiful idea that we are living cosmically embedded lives, that there are rhythms and patterns, that the universe is ensouled, that our individual journeys participate in something much larger. But in real time, how do we recognize those patterns? How do we trust them when everything feels chaotic? And then the last reference, it's about Jung and Polly's work on synchronicity. Meaningful coincidence, you know, a causal guidance. But here's the honest question is, when is it truly synchronicity? And when is it our pattern-seeking brain trying to make sense of randomness? How do we discern these two? These are the maps we all carry. We know them well. But what does it actually feel like to navigate the territory? Let me show you from my own experience what it looked like for me. So we have different periods. This is my last transition period. So my dissertation was in 2023, and the subject was transpersonal effects of self-initiated expatriation on retirees. So I was fascinated by the question, of course, because of my age. So I wonder what happens psychologically, spiritually, when someone in the second half of life chooses to uproot everything. To leave their language, their culture, their familiar ground. So I researched it, I interviewed people, I analyzed it through the lens of rites of passage, archetypal psychology, individuation, and then I did it myself. So it was a direct experience. So this is what I call the sense of humor of the universe. So this is the summary of what I went through. 2022 was what I can only call a psycho— psychological— sorry, psycho-spiritual collapse. You remember, it was COVID period, serious— I got a serious illness, I sold my house, everything what had given my life a structure and meaning just Dissolved. If I were describing this in a dissertation, I would say, I quote, participants experienced a spiritual emergency defined by Grof as a non-ordinary state of consciousness that was deeply disruptive, yet potentially transformative. This is an academic approach. Real life, 2023. I decided to leave France. Or maybe the decision was made for me. I'm still not entirely sure. Was I choosing? Was I being called? Was I running? Probably the 3. Listening to the call. Bridges neutral zone in full effect. 23 to 24. I did this pilgrimage through— though I didn't call it that. At the time, I went to California trying to trace the roots of transpersonal psychology, walking where the thinkers walked. Then I went to Europe, Spain, trying to find my ancestors. Back to France, living in the liminal, not yet American, no longer quite French, not who I was, not yet who I was becoming. 24, 25, I started writing. not as an academic exercise, but as integration, as a way to make sense of what had happened, as a soul work. And now, 2026, I'm going back to California, but this time, and this is the key difference, with clarity, with purpose, knowing why I am going, what I am bringing, what I am becoming. The research question became my existential question. Theory had become flesh. The map became the territory. But let me go deeper into what actually it meant. My dissertation built somehow on Van Gennep and Turner's classic anthropological work on rites of passage. The 3 phases, you know, separation from the old, going through a liminal space, reintegration into the new. Turner's concept of liminality being betwixt and between, no longer one thing, not yet another. On paper, it's perfect. It's clear. It maps onto so many experiences. But here's what living it revealed that research could not capture, the terror of the neutral zone when there is no going back. When you have sold your whole house, when you have said goodbye, when the bridges are burned, not metaphorically but actually. There is no, oh, this is not working, I'll just return to how things were. That neutral zone is not just conceptual discomfort, It is identity dissolution, a reconstruction of identity. Who am I when I am not French, when I don't have a home, when I am not the person I was for 60 and something some years? So I think there is a relationship between archetypal forces and individual choice. Tarnas writes about planetary transits as archetypal activations. In my chart, everything was aligned for this rupture. The archetypes were saying it's time. But there is what I learned in the living. I was not just pushed. I was not a passive recipient of archetypal forces. I had to activate actively participate in my own unmaking. There was choice and being choice, agency and surrender, both simultaneously, and you cannot understand that from the outside. I also realized the role of spiritual emergency as a catalyst. The collapse was not separate from the expatriation. It was the initiating moment. Ralph's right, these are not bugs, they are features. The psyche knows that it needs to dissolve before something new can emerge. But when you are in it, you are not thinking, oh yes, this is a spiritual emergency, oh, transformative. No, no, no. You are thinking, I am dying. This is the end of me, of my identity. And in a way, you are. The old self does die. Theory became flesh, and flesh is so much more ambiguous, more terrifying, and somehow more sacred than theory ever suggests. But I have another important fact. In 2022, in the middle of this collapse, I did a psilocybin ceremony in a prepared container with a clear intention, legal, in a setting where this work is held with respect. And I lived everything Grof describes, the perinatal matrices, the death and rebirth cycle. I lived it viscerally, not as a metaphor, but as a phenomenological reality. And Christopher Bache writes about the dark night of the species, this idea that in deep Psychedelic work, we are not just processing your personal shadow. You are encountering the collective shadow of humanity. I saw the wars, the genocides, the ecological devastation, the suffering of consciousness itself, but also the unconditional love and the relationship between all of us. I understood what it meant. It was overwhelming and sacred. It was a catalyst for my new life. But here's— here is what integration actually required, and this is what I don't think we talk about enough. First, the processing, not just cognitive integration but somatic integration. The body holds things the mind cannot yet I needed bodywork, movement, literally shaking things out. Integration required also symbolic language, poetry, art, symbols, because conceptual language just fails. You need metaphor, image, dreams, ways to hold the ineffable without crushing it with analysis. You need also time. Time is about months, not days, not rushing to insights, staying in the liminal space, letting meaning emerge slowly, resisting the urge to package it neatly. And 4, what you need is community witness like this one, people who could hold the space without trying to fix it. rationalize it, or make it comfortable. Here is what I tell to people now. The medicine or psilocybin experience opened doors, doors I could not have opened myself, but integration built the house. Without integration, it's just tourism, psychedelic tourism. You have something profound, you have seen something profound, but you haven't become anything different. So what actually helped me hold all of this? So this is what I understood afterwards. These authors helped me to understand. And we know all these theoretical frameworks, we study them, we've wrote about them, we discuss them very often. But which ones actually serve when you are in the territory, not reading the map? For me, the 6th one was essential, were essential. First of one was growth cartography. After the psilocybin experience, I needed these maps. They helped me understand that what I experiencing, I was experiencing as a structure, a logic, even if it felt chaotic. I was not going crazy. I was moving through known territory, just territory I had never personally been before. His work gave me permission to trust the process. It was important. Then Tarnas' archetypal astrology, understanding the timing. I know this is controversial for some, but for me, his work answered the question, Why now? Why is all of this happening now? It was not random. There was an intelligence in the timing. My personal cycles were aligned with collective cycles that gave me not control, but context, understanding. The third bridges, 3 faces. So simple, so helpful, just knowing, okay, I am in the neutral zone. This is supposed to be disorienting. This is part of the structure of a transformation. This sentence, that alone reduced my panic by half. It gave me a sense of where I was in the process. Very important. And then Campbell, as you probably know, The monomyth, the hero's journey, not as a formula to follow, but as recognition. I am not the first person to go through this. This is an ancient universal pattern, you know, the call, the refusal, the threshold, the abyss, the return, that gave me kinship with every human who's ever been through Transformation. If of course Jung, Jung works on synchronicity, learning to pay attention to meaningful coincidence, not with credulity. I'm not saying every coincidence is cosmic guidance, but with openness. The right book appearing, for example, the right person I met, the visa coming through at exactly the moment I needed it. The housing opportunity in California. An intelligence in how things unfold. And writing. Writing is not journaling as a therapy. Writing is for me a soul work, giving form to the formless, making narrative out of the chaos, not to package it neatly, but to allow meaning to emerge through the act of writing itself. So the book I'm going to talk about in a moment came from this. These theories became lanterns in the dark, not answers, not solutions, but orientation, light to see by. And it is from that experience that the book emerged. So this is the book, it's a guide for meaning, purpose, and transformation in unknown times. It was not planned. I didn't sit down one day and think, oh yes, I should write a book about transpersonal transitions. It emerged organically from a question that haunted me. How do we develop spiritual intelligence during major life transitions? Not spiritual bypassing, not everything happens for a reason platitude, not spiritual materialism, collecting peak experiences like trophies. But actual intelligence, the capacity to discern, to navigate liminal space, to trust the process while also taking responsibility, to hold paradox, to integrate the non-ordinary into the ordinary without losing either. The book tries to bridge 4 things. First, the transpersonal frameworks we all know, Well, of Dana's bridges, Campbell, and so forth, but not as an abstract theory, but as living tools. Second, it bridges lived experience of threshold crossing. It's a lived experience. It's a mess, usually, the terror and the beauty of actually walking through these passages. This book also provides practical tools for integration because that's the gap. We have lots of books about peak experiences, about breakthroughs, much less about what happens on Tuesday when you have to buy groceries and talk to your neighbors and somehow hold what you have experienced. And fourth is about recognition. Recognition that is not just personal. There is something collective happening, a shift in consciousness itself. We are not just individually going through transitions. We are part of a species navigating a threshold. Another integration challenge. I insist a lot about this integration challenge. You all know this. The hardest part is the hardest part. It's not the breakthrough, it's not the peak experience, it's not this mystical moment, even if it's important, or the crisis that opens you. It's what comes after. It's the return. How do you translate a peak experience into daily wisdom? We have touched something profound unity consciousness, ego dissolution, cosmic love, whatever language you use. And then you come back in real life and you have to buy, as I told you, groceries, pay bills, have conversations with people who have no context for what you have just experienced. And you wonder, was it real? Did I make it up? How do I honor what happened without clinging to it? How do I let change me without trying to recreate it? How do you bridge transpersonal insights with normal life? You have seen the interconnection of all things, the illusion of separation, and then you are back in a world that operates as if we are all isolated individuals competing for resources. How do you not become cynical? How do you not isolate yourself with, they just don't understand? Third is finding language for the ineffable. And this is huge. I don't have the answer to this because I saw that words fail, concepts sometimes fail. You cannot quite explain what happened, But without language, you cannot integrate it fully. You cannot share it, of course. You cannot make meaning of it. But the language you need doesn't exist in ordinary discourse. You need poetry, art, myth, symbol, and even those only point toward it, never capture it. Fourth, maintaining the connection When the intensity fades, because it does fade, intensity, the clarity, the sense of presence, it recedes, and you are left with a memory of grace. How do you stay connected to what you touched when the felt sense of it is gone? Finally, it's about trusting the timing of transformation. Not forcing insights, not pushing for meaning too quickly, not packaging it neatly for Instagram or dinner parties, I don't know. Letting it unfold in its own time, trusting that integration has its own intelligence, and it can take time. This gap between experience and integration, between heaven and earth, between the transpersonal and the personal, This is what nobody really prepared me for. This is what most books don't address, and this is what the book I wrote tries to hold space for, not to solve it, but to witness it, to say this is real, this is hard, and here are some things that help me navigate it. So if you are in transition, And who isn't? Here is what I hope the book can offer. So, maps for understanding crisis as an initiation, not pathology, not failure, but a threshold, a doorway, necessary death before rebirth. Also a framework for recognizing archetypal patterns in your own life, so you can see, as this is the descent, This is the dark night. This is Saturn return. This is the meeting with the Kabbalistic threshold, for example. Context. That's what archetypal understanding gives, is context. Integration practices, of course, for non-ordinary experiences. Concrete, practical things, not just meditate and journal, but somatic practices, symbolic work, ways to process with body and image, not just mind. It offers you understanding of synchronicity as a guidance, how to pay attention without becoming superstitious, how to discern between projection and a cause or otherness. It provides also tools for developing spiritual intelligence, that discernment capacity I talked about, how to hold paradox, how to trust and question simultaneously. And perhaps more importantly, recognition that you are not alone in this, that you are going through as we've gone through before, that there is a community like this one tonight holding space for these questions, that the struggle to integrate is part of the path, not a failure of the path. So I hope it will be a companion for your own threshold crossing, not a guru, not a manual, not a map that says you are here, go this direction, but a fellow traveler saying, I have been in similar territory. Here's what I found. Here's what helped. Here's what I'm still learning, because I'm still learning. So in conclusion, I would like to say that life transitions open doors to new dimensions of consciousness. We are all navigating thresholds individually And collectively. And what the transpersonal field gave us are maps to understand the journey, not to control it, but to orient ourselves. It gave us also tools to navigate the passage. That means practices that actually serve in the dark moments. Community to hold the process like this one. People who understand the territory and trust in the unfolding, trust that there is an intelligence at work in the crisis, in the descent, in the liminal space. Trust they do not have to figure it all out. Trust that transformation has its own timing. So I can— I brought in addition to the book I wrote a free journal because I try to collect all my questions, experiences in a free book. And you can find this, you can download this free book with this QR code, or you can find it on my website, or Francesca can also send it to you if you are interested by this. It's full of exercise. And I would like to give you the floor because probably it's the most interesting part of this presentation. presentation because I've shared my journey, but really I want to hear yours. This is, of course, you know, an alumni gathering, so this is us exploring together. I don't have the answers to everything. I am in the middle of the questions with you. So I have prepared this question to explore together. So it's, uh, as you're transforming Transpersonal education unfolding since you studied transpersonal psychology and consciousness. Not what have you accomplished, but how has it lived in you? How has it changed you? Have you— what have you learned what was not in the curriculum, in other words? Second question, what thresholds are you currently navigating, personal professional, spiritual, collective? Where are you in transition right now? Because we are all in transition. Third question, how do you integrate non-ordinary experiences if you have some? This is a big question. I am still living. What practices help you? What does not work? What's the gap between your peak experiences and your Tuesday morning we talked about. And 4, what roles do synchronicities play in your path? How do you discern it? How do you trust it? How do you not make it into magical thinking? So let's open this up and let's open the discussion. So Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you so much, Elizabeth. That was a wonderful presentation and some really excellent insights.