About Jo
Lessons from a Life of Resilience
“My life had always been a puzzle, in very challenging but extraordinary ways. The pursuit of answers has brought richness and awakening. If there’s a medal for growth when I get to ‘the other side’, I’m pretty sure earned it.”
Learning What Love Is Through What It’s Not
My life has been about learning what love really is through living what love is not. My experience of family was learning to fit in, to please other people in order to get my basic needs met. Failure resulted in punishment or the threat of abandonment. Further trauma came from my struggle to conform as was required.
Learning What God Is Through experiencing what God is Not
Aged 14 I became a committed Christian. Christianity is interpreted and experienced in as many ways as there are Christians, however the version I learned taught me more about conditional love: God loved me but only if I conformed and worshipped perfectly, with eternal punishment for failure. Aged 22, I realised I had no idea who I really was. Was I really this person or was I just following all the rules set for me? I left my religion risking damnation in the name of freedom which was a pretty bold step.
Losing Myself in 'safety'
Art was my passion and my outlet, but societal expectations and fear steered me toward primary school teaching which was supposed to be a “safe” choice. For me, going to work was about endurance and stress.
Being Different
Eventually it became clear why I had always struggled to conform. The constant effort to fit into narrow expectations had quite literally been impossible. Aged 54, I was diagnosed with severe ADHD. This explained so much. For me, ADHD is all about heightened and strong emotions or ‘Emotional Dysregulation’. This was the reason I was unable to stay quiet and perfect as a child. It was just too painful. I was also bored because my inability to focus on anything that didn’t fascinate me, and my hyperactivity, left my needs unmet by my intellectual and sedentary family.
Women with ADHD are easily overwhelmed. Marriage and Motherhood had been no exception. As I fell apart, I failed to fulfil my expected roles, and I got divorced. Another societal expectation I had not fulfilled.
Awakening
After a lifetime of fear based and supposedly ‘risk free,’ choices, I reached a point of despair, unable to function in the life I’d chosen. I was lost and stuck, in a very dark and painful place. As a divorced, single parent, I had no choice but to keep going, and I really wanted to provide a good life for my children.
As I made new relationships I had no trust in love or kindness, gravitating instead toward difficult, more predictable people. These patterns repeated in my life.
The desire for change and relief from pain made me search for answers. There began my spiritual quest and a gradual awakening.
New Possibilities
In the darkest night of my soul, I learned that when I cried out to the universe for help, it arrived… this time through meeting the right person at the right time.
I met someone on a dating site while searching for love in all the wrong places. Though not a romantic match, he shared his story of his spontaneous awakening. He described a shift where his sense of self dissolved, and he felt deeply connected to everything. He introduced me to the idea of “non-duality.” His experience ignited hope in me: the idea that life could work differently.
I opened myself to new possibilities, setting aside everything I thought I knew. I began attending talks by Roger Linden, a non-duality teacher, who spoke of awakening as liberation:
"Liberation is the complete and permanent evaporation of any sense of a separate self. It‘s not an intellectual appreciation or an intuitive insight into the nature of reality. It’s like the breaking of a vacuum seal or the bursting of a bubble. It is the end of seeking and the realisation that there is only wholeness. What remains is silent, spacious awakeness, consciousness, within which the wondrous, translucent immediacy of life is appearing. And the experience is tender, peaceful joy, it’s love’.
Freedom!
Whilst the ‘bubble’ Roger spoke of never burst in that way for me, my spiritual quest became my comfort and my focus. Over time I addressed each area of my life. My sense of self gradually shifted and my relationship to life itself. I grew new trust and took brave steps. I left my teaching job and learnt that I was supported in uncertain times. I learnt to actively practice self love and self worth and grew new boundaries. I let go of toxic people who controlled me and learnt to value those who treated me well. I learnt to accept who I am rather than trying to fit in.
I never found my soulmate or that perfect relationship but learnt the value of being in community rather than in co-dependence. I learnt to celebrate who I am with all my differences and uniqueness.
Mindfulness and Breathwork were the key to unlocking so many areas of my life that had left me stuck.
My understanding of ‘non duality’ gave me a new sense of the divine. Rather than a judgemental and distant God, I experience the inherent divine in everything.
"When the denial of the Divine is no longer present, when you are no longer enacting that fear or the historical bias about what can be; the demonstration of good, the manifestation of good, be it love, be it economic source, will reveal itself because it must"
Unity Consciousness
Trauma comes from the need to survive as a separate individual. We make fear based decisions and move away from expressing as our true selves. We control others to meet our needs in the name of love.
I believe the answers lie in awakening to our greater Self. ‘Unity consciousness’ is the profound awareness that all beings are interconnected as part of an infinite and harmonious whole. We realise that other people ARE us. If we fight with others we are fighting ourselves. If we push at life, it will only push back harder. As we embrace self-love we use it as the foundation for loving others. We feel safer in the world and we allow others to be free. This understanding dissolves the illusion of separation, revealing that the needs of the self and others are not in opposition but deeply interwoven. When we act from love and compassion, we create a ripple effect, meeting our own needs while uplifting others in the same breath.