The Field Has a Life of Its Own

This inaugural entry of Group Field Notes reflects a throughline in my work—from childhood, through science and lived experience, to a growing recognition of the group field.

I stubbornly learned to read at five years old solely so that I could finally experience The Hobbit, which my father had been reading inconsistently at bedtime for months. My efforts ushered me into magical realms where children’s hopes and naïve determination could save a greed-poisoned world. Worlds where humans and animals converse, where fairies are your neighbors (for good or ill), and where trees can become allies in a war if you take the time to listen. It seemed obvious to my young mind that every world - including this one - was imbued with magic.

That knowing did not disappear all at once. It was eroded.

When I was eight, a friend told me while he was reading a book on astronomy, that “I wouldn’t be interested because girls don’t do astronomy”. There was no malice in it - just an observation made in a world with very little representation of female scientists. I didn’t consciously choose a path in that moment. I simply fell onto it.

Being raised in the Catholic Church alongside a scientific education further narrowed what I understood to be possible. I was told animals have no souls, despite the unmistakable experience of encountering another presence in my cat’s eyes. I found myself defending science before I fully understood what I was defending, learning terms like creationism only when challenged. Bit by bit, the world became less alive.

At nineteen, while crunching data at one of the world’s largest radio telescopes, I realized that the life I had stumbled into wasn’t the life I wanted. I finished my degree in physics - loved the strange beauty of quantum mechanics along the way - but my desire to find something more “down to earth” led me to study the brain.

Ironically, what pulled me in was biology - a subject I had hated in high school. A cell physiology course introduced me to G-protein coupled receptors, elegant molecular systems that bind to the interesting molecules: nicotine, cannabis, opiates, and psychedelics. These receptors revealed a way the human body could interact intimately with the plant world. That doorway led me directly into neuroscience, and into the long-standing question that motivated my work: consciousness.

As a neuroscientist, I was fascinated by the “you” that is distinct from the meatsack we travel this physical plane in. For years, I believed we would eventually locate the neural correlates of consciousness - the specific neurons, layers, or networks that produced the self I experienced. The longer I worked in the field, watching us not find them, the more it became clear that our assumptions might be incomplete.

That realization didn’t immediately change how I lived. My work was intellectually stimulating, but my life felt increasingly misaligned. I didn’t yet recognize how much of my dissatisfaction came from mistaking understanding for transformation.

That changed when I encountered experiential transformational education in my mid-twenties. For the first time, I didn’t just grasp intellectually that my worldview wasn’t ground truth - I experienced it in my body. In that space, I repaired my marriage after an affair, dismantled the belief that I couldn’t be both a mother and a scientist, and went on to have two of my three children while completing my PhD.

My first spiritually transformative experience came during that period, though I didn’t name it as such at the time. I was in labor with my first child when I realized I could no longer claw my way to the top of each contraction. I remember telling myself very clearly that I wasn’t getting off this train, and that the only way out was through.

I surrendered to the next contraction, certain at some level that it would kill me. I felt myself sinking under black, oily water, crushed by pain and fear. After what felt like an eternity, the pain and brackish water receded. In front of me was a brilliant golden sunrise and the realization that while the experience was brutal, it did not last forever - and that I was strong enough to withstand it.

I surrendered to labor for four and a half hours before my child was born. I became a mother in that experience - not only literally, but in a way that permanently changed how I understood surrender and endurance.

For the next twenty years, I integrated the distinctions of that educational modality into my life and led seminars teaching others to do the same. I often referred to it as practical neuroscience. It was as close to magic as I had come in a long time.

Meanwhile, my spiritual life moved in fits and starts. I left organized religion, returned briefly to the Catholic Church for its mysticism, then left again when reconciliation became impossible. I found meaning singing Gregorian chant, and later singing with the Threshold Choir at the bedside of the dying. My career moved from the research bench into scientific communication, education, and eventually data science and graph databases.

It was during this period that I was introduced to intentional psychedelic journeys. Four years ago, I embarked - without realizing it - on a sustained psychedelic inquiry (to quote Christopher Bache). Non-ordinary states of consciousness proved to be an intense methodology for uncovering deeply held beliefs that had eluded decades of work.

My first journey revealed how little regard I had for myself. I rejected the message and blamed the container. My second journey delivered the same insight, and this time I listened. I was moved enough by the spirituality of the guides to undertake two years of shamanic healing training. During that same journey, the facilitator casually said, “You have faeries in your hedge.” The comment grounded me and made my heart soar.

I began listening more closely to intuition and to coincidence. I attended The Science of Consciousness conference after wanting to go for twenty years, and two years later returned to present research using AI and machine-learning methods to analyze narratives of extraordinary experiences: near-death experiences, mystical states, spiritually transformative experiences, and shared death communications.

Over time, I realized I was being called to carry mushroom medicine, and to do that responsibly, I knew I needed to deepen my capacity to hold space. That is what brought me to the Psychedelics Today Vital community.

What became clear there - and what had been quietly organizing my work for decades - was that insight does not arise only within individuals. It arises between us.

Long before I had language for it, I had been working with the group field. In early transformational education, I noticed that when vulnerability and integrity were present, something larger than any one person began to organize the space. Beliefs shifted. Trust deepened. Breakthroughs occurred that could not be attributed to any single individual.

This understanding crystallized for me during a retreat with my Vital study group. Many of us had been in relationship for months before we ever met in person, connected through shared inquiry and deep conversation. Still, none of that prepared us for what happened when we finally gathered together. The moment we were in the same physical space, something shifted. Our connection itself became the first medicine.

Throughout the retreat, it was clear that the group was organizing in ways no individual was directing. At one point, a participant moved from laughter into profound grief. As the facilitator worked with them energetically, the rest of us could feel the density moving through the space. When the journeyer later apologized for “changing the mood,” my body moved toward them without thought. Physical support felt more accurate than words. It wasn’t a decision; it was a response.

Later, another group member silently called all of us to lay hands on him. No one spoke. We simply moved together. He later shared that doors that had been closed to him for fifteen years had opened. What stood out was not any particular action, but the way the field itself seemed to coordinate what was needed.

My own journey that weekend was quieter, and initially disappointing. Others described vivid visions and encounters. I asked for those experiences and was told they weren’t for me. My role, apparently, was to hold space. I reacted petulantly - it sounded boring, secondary. 

It took time to realize that holding space was not a consolation prize.

In witnessing others’ healing, I found access to a form of medicine that bypasses the personal and moves directly into the collective. Since then, I have declared myself a steward of the group field, and my life has begun aligning accordingly.

I entered this work seeking the self at the center of experience. What I now attend to is emergent - woven through connection, trust, and relationship. The field has a life of its own.

These notes are an attempt to learn its language.