Apprenticeship through interference: On learning how navigate healing without collapsing into dogma
I would be 18 years old when I first became exposed to sinister entities — yet it wouldn’t be until 5 years later that I would have the language to diagnose my experience. I used to love watching horror movies and tel-e(a)-vision series. The adrenaline rush that would flood my body with feeling; even if that feeling was fear. That ‘sitting on the edge of your seat’ voltage that keeps you hooked, entangled, entranced. Suspense colonising your bloodstream. It fed me. And, what I slowly began to realise, fed on me too.
Many of you will be familiar with the infamous Tv series American Horror Story. A beloved fix of mine for some time. Roanoke, season 6. The beginning of a psychosis felt perception on the lived experience I inhabited. This season felt frequentually different than all of the others. Denser. Ritual-soaked. Embedded in invocation, sacrifice, possession, and black magic. Something resonated. There was an acknowledging of truth being present, even if I didn’t understand what that truth was at the time. Each episode left my body starving for more, whilst never being satiated. Whilst I fed on fear; my life force was fed on. The exchange felt reciprocal, though not equal. The storytelling was potent. Incantatory. The lines were blurred between narrative and reenactment. It did not feel like I was simply watching something; it felt like I was participating in it. Like attention itself was an offering at an unseen alter. And still, no matter how many times my body communicated with me, enough - I went back for more.
Through one lens, I was entrained; through another, entranced.
It would be 2 years before I inhabited my sovereignty again.
Within days of being immersed in this series - keeping in mind, it was binge watched within 1 week - I was completely debilitated by terror. It no longer became safe to fall asleep. It was not safe to switch off. The space that once felt empty felt inhabited. My once independent thought forms became hijacked by intrusive currents. It felt like sitting in an old pickup truck where the driver and passenger fight over the radio…except I was supposed to be driving, and something else kept twisting the dial. My senses were perceiving things that hadn’t been perceived before. My vision, feeling, and hearing could no longer be trusted. A new texture was gained. There was temperature. Weight. Personality. Intent. Paranoia became me. I began experiencing frequent panic attacks daily. Strong sensations of feeling foreign in my own body. It felt like being wrapped in an invisible film; something clinging, something that would not wash off. Displaced from the interior of myself.
It would be months before I would discover that I had developed PTSD; three months before I could live within my own home again; and 2 years before I could be physically alone in my own company without being overrun by fear.
There was a constant sensation of being followed, tracked, and watched. I began finding myself saying things like “I cannot talk about them or they will punish me,” without even knowing what them referred to. Without knowing what was even possible, I felt the presence of something external and autonomous that was existing within my field. Distorting my reality. Entraining my frequency to that of something that did not belong to me.
I remember the concerned, vacant gaze I would receive from people when I tried to articulate my experience; a polite confusion and subtle distancing that left any part of me still pulsing with warmth, frozen. To this day, it remains one of the most isolating sensations that I have ever known. You feel unhinged. Alone. Disbelieved. Gaslit by consensus reality.
The dark intrusive thoughts grew louder. The triggers became more debilitating. I could no longer drive in the evening; the darkness swallowed me. I was unable to be out in nature alone without scanning the tree line. Blood stained shades of red, a saturated crimson, would activate my nervous system and send me into internal frenzy. Strobe lights, scarlet signage, even the flush of brake lights at dusk felt like threat signals. Silence became dangerous. Spaciousness became an acoustic chamber where I would strain to hear voices that were not there. There were many associations that possessed my life, and I believed that I was in danger.
This was the longest process of Soul retrieval that I have ever undergone.
It would be 5 years later, in 2023, that I would realise I had begun my apprenticeship within Spirit work.
Entities or Entrainment?
Entrainment: Nervous system entrainment refers to the process by which repeated exposure to specific stimuli (particularly emotionally charged stimuli such as fear) conditions the autonomic nervous system to synchronise with that stimulus pattern. Nervous system entrainment can also be understood as the sustained attunement of the body’s regulatory systems to a particular emotional frequency.
Entity: Entities are energetic intelligences that can attach to or influence an individuals field, feeding off unresolved wounds, distortions, and unconscious agreements. They exist on a spectrum ranging from thought-forms created by one’s own unresolved emotions to external parasitic consciousnesses that feed on fear, addiction, or disempowerment.
I believe what we are missing within our modern world is the marrying of both the scientific and the shamanic. The acknowledgment of two models that allow us to relate to the world — one not being more valid than the other; but each illuminating a different layer of multi-dimensional, multi-disciplinary reality. We often fear contradiction when it comes to diagnosis because we assume it will undermine our credibility. But what if contradiction is not collapse — what if it is dimensionality? What if pathology and initiation can/does coexist? What if trauma response and energetic interference are not mutually exclusive, but interacting variables within a more complex ecology of consciousness? We have been conditioned to believe that legitimacy requires singularity. That if one framework is correct, the other must be illusion. Yet consciousness has never been that binary.
The question, therefore, that I am more interested in asking is can we hold multiple explanatory frameworks at once without collapsing into confusion or dogma?
The scientific model offers mechanism. It explains how the nervous system responds to prolonged stress, how neural pathways strengthen around threat, how perception becomes biased toward danger. It gives us language for regulation, treatment, and repair. It provides containment. The shamanic model offers relational context. It asks not only what is happening within the brain, but how the individual is interfacing with forces beyond what is visible or tangle. The shamanic/spiritual model acknowledges the unseen forces that are at play and addresses an issue, disease, fracturing from a different plane of experiencing. It addresses sovereignty, permeability, resonance, and the ethics of attention. It treats fear not only as chemistry, but as currency. Chronic fear states dysregulate the autonomic nervous system. This is measurable. They also alter perception, increase suggestibility, and heighten sensitivity to environmental cues. From a shamanic perspective, this same dysregulation can be understood as thinning the boundary between psyche and field — increasing permeability.
When we exile one in favour of the other, we fragment our understanding. Not only that, but our approach becomes somewhat dangerous. When we are blind or biased towards one model — we become enslaved to our own internal projections as opposed to the truth of what an individual may be needing in a moment. We may misdiagnose spiritual crisis as psychosis or misdiagnose trauma response as spiritual interference. The ability to hold multiple truths at once, despite what our conditioning or programming has told us, requires a deep level of humility, curiosity, and openness to the nature of existence. If we rely solely on science, we risk reducing profound existential and transpersonal experiences to malfunction. If we rely solely on mysticism, we risk bypassing the physiological realities of trauma and dysregulation. In both cases, something essential is missed.
The invitation? Integration.
My intuitive diagnosis in relation to my story
At the most foundational level, reality as we know it organises itself through vibration. Neural oscillations move in rhythmic waves across the brain. The steady pulse of a heartbeat marks time within the body. Sound travels as frequency. Electric light flickers across invisible spectrums. Fields interact with other fields in patterned exchange. Life coheres through frequency, and the natural balance of existence is rhythm. This rhythm is not abstract — it is mirrored everywhere in the architecture of nature. The waxing and waning of the moon. The turning of the seasons. The migration of birds. The tidal breath of the ocean. The shedding of leaves in autumn and the quiet germination beneath winter soil. Even the inhale and exhale that moves through our lungs is a cycle of expansion and contraction (return). Creation itself unfolds in pulses - birth, growth, decay, renewal - over and over and over again.
Over the last six years, my work has existed in the liminal space between the seen and the unseen, refusing to collapse into one or the other. Embodying the trunk of a tree between roots and branches; one reaching high into the cosmos, collecting hum and atmosphere, the other pressing deep into soil and darkness to gather nutrients that sustain what stretches upward. Time and time again, through my own lived experience and through the field of my work with others, I have encountered realities that extend beyond what is perceivable with the naked eye. I cannot dismiss the unseen, ineffable dimensions of existence. I cannot pretend there are not forces, intelligences, spirits, distortions, allies — energies that operate across planes of reality — interacting with us, influencing us, sometimes moving in harmony with us, sometimes feeding on us.
My self-diagnosis of what occurred when I was younger does not negate psychology or physiology. It acknowledges them fully, and then continues further. I was repeatedly exposing myself to fear. My nervous system was chronically activated, flooded again and again with adrenaline and cortisol, entrained to vigilance, primed for threat. I was terrified, and yet I returned for more. Each time I went back, each time I binged, each time I chose that adrenaline surge, I consented. I consented to fear. I consented to my attention being projected toward fear. I consented to a frequency that destabilised my coherence. And it is important to recognise that attention is not neutral…it is participatory.
Over time, it began to feel as though each act of sustained fear-focus subtly altered the integrity of my field. My baseline shifted. Fear began saturating my interior architecture. My system calibrated itself around that frequency, and when a system calibrates long enough around a particular bandwidth, it begins to attract and interface with what already exists within that same bandwidth. This is resonance. What began to open was what I now understand as a fear-feeding portal. Without the energetic literacy I now possess, without language, without mentorship or frameworks that could contextualise what was occurring, I opened myself. And something interfaced. And when I say portal, I do not mean a glowing doorway in the dark, nor something cinematic or supernatural in the way pop culture imagines. I mean a sustained alignment of my perceptual and energetic field with a frequency that did not belong to my sovereign baseline. Every system has a native coherence, a resting rhythm that reflects its integrity. I had drifted from mine. Through repetition, through addiction to the adrenaline of fear, through unconscious consent to that state. I had thinned something. I had become permeable. What terrified me most was not that it felt foreign, but that it felt familiar. I had been spiritually attuned since childhood. I had experienced astral projection and communicated with presences beyond the visible dimension of reality. The unseen was not new to me nor was the relationship with the ineffable. But this felt misaligned.
I did not have the vocabulary for this. I did not have elders or practitioners who could help me discern what was physiological dysregulation and what was something far more energetic and sinister. Which, in and of itself, poses a huge risk. The absence of conscious eldership within our modern world is a structural fracture. The absence of elders means we are often left to initiate ourselves. To fumble in the dark. It means many of us must become our own translators of the unseen before we have the nervous system stability to do so safely. And that is a precarious place to stand.
What I came to understand, through years of integration and study, is that what occurred was not simply anxiety, nor solely trauma dysregulation, but what I would now name as an experience of entity interference precipitated by chronic abandonment of the body. I was leaving my physiology faster than I could remain rooted within it. And when the body is not inhabited, the field destabilises. And when the field destabilises, permeability increases. Throughout many indigenous traditions, trained practitioners consciously leave the body to navigate Spirit realms; shamans and medicine carriers enter altered states with preparation, initiation, and energetic literacy. They know how to travel safely because they know how to return. But there is a profound difference between conscious departure and dissociative exit. I accessed unseen states without containment, without protection, without authorship. And in that permeability, I became susceptible to interference with forces far beyond anything that I could comprehend and that my system was not yet equipped to discern or withstand.
Healing required both regulation and retrieval; stabilising my physiology and restoring sovereignty within my field. Only when both were addressed, did coherence return.
And so I leave you, my dear readers, with the following questions to reflect on to potentially challenge your own resistance to paradoxical reality:
Can we cultivate nervous system literacy alongside energetic literacy?
Can we teach discernment without dismissing mystery?
Can we acknowledge that attention is participatory - neurologically and spiritually?