This interview is between Emma Bragdon, PhD, co-Executive Director of IMHU.org, and a former UN senior officer in international relations, born in Finland and now living in France, who shares how her spiritual awakening began during a 2005 yoga teacher training with unusual sensations, headaches, and seeing auras, then intensified in 2020 after increasing her yoga practice. She describes powerful kundalini-like energy surges, involuntary body movements, trance states, translucent “web” perceptions, and a vivid inner experience of a silvery thread and an explosive third-eye opening. Initially terrified and without a framework, she found support through her husband, a yoga teacher, a local healer trained in shamanism and yogic tradition, and an Ecuadorian shaman whose sweat lodge ritual helped her reframe the experiences as a gift. She recounts exploring multiple traditions—including Christian mysticism and Spiritism—concluding they point to the same “all and nothing,” leaving the UN to focus on healing, and advising others to be discerning, share with trusted people, and stay grounded in the body.

‍00:00 Meet the Guest

‍00:51 UN Career to Healing

‍01:51 First Kundalini Signs

‍02:49 2020 Energy Surge

‍04:33 Visions and Fear

‍07:22 The Big Awakening

‍09:02 Ecuador Shaman Breakthrough

‍10:16 Sweat Lodge Explained

‍12:50 Support and Integration

‍14:54 Many Traditions One Truth

‍17:38 Life After Awakening

‍20:57 Advice and Closing Grounding

One of the most striking themes in this interview is that spiritual awakening did not arise from a lifelong mystical identity or a deliberate search for transcendence. It emerged in the life of a highly educated, professionally accomplished woman whose background was grounded in international humanitarian work, not esoteric spirituality. Her experience began through yoga and later intensified in ways she neither expected nor understood. That matters because it challenges the common assumption that these experiences only happen to people already immersed in spiritual subcultures. The interview makes clear that awakening can arise in ordinary, rational, high-functioning people and can interrupt even the most structured and worldly lives.

Another major point is that spiritual awakening is not always serene, inspiring, or easy to integrate. In this case, it involved intense physical sensations, altered perception, fear, bodily shaking, trance states, visions, and periods of real confusion. The guest repeatedly emphasizes that while the experiences were ultimately meaningful, they were also terrifying when they first began because she had no framework for understanding them. This is an important corrective to romanticized ideas of awakening. The process can feel destabilizing, overwhelming, and even frightening, especially when it involves powerful energetic and somatic phenomena. The interview shows that spiritual opening is not just an expansion of consciousness. It can also be a crisis of orientation.

A central lesson from the interview is that the quality of support someone receives during these experiences can make an enormous difference. The guest was fortunate to have a deeply supportive husband, an honest yoga teacher, a healer in Europe, and a shaman in Ecuador who helped her make sense of what was happening. She also wisely warns that people in these states can become highly vulnerable and may be tempted to follow anyone who appears to have answers. That makes discernment essential. Her advice is not to isolate, but to speak with grounded people who know you well and to seek guidance from those with integrity and experience. Just as important, she emphasizes the need to stay connected to the body through grounding and somatic awareness, rather than getting lost in abstract spiritual interpretation.

A final key theme is the guest’s growing realization that many spiritual traditions may be pointing toward the same fundamental reality, even though they use different symbols, languages, and frameworks. Her experiences led her from yoga and Kundalini language into shamanic practice, Christian mysticism, Spiritism, and conversations with healers from multiple cultural traditions. Rather than ending in allegiance to one path, she came away with a broader understanding: that these traditions often converge at depth, even if they differ on the surface. This is one of the richest insights in the interview. It suggests that spiritual awakening may be a human phenomenon that cultures interpret through different mythologies and vocabularies, while the underlying experience remains recognizably similar across traditions.