Mystical Mountain Lake Retreat by Astrrid and AI
14th September 2026
Exploring why spiritual expansion also requires grounding, discernment, and safe places to land
We speak a great deal in spiritual circles about awakening. We talk about opening, expansion, activation, heightened intuition, synchronicity, energetic sensitivity, and becoming aware of dimensions of experience that previously sat outside our understanding of reality. Much of the language is naturally positive, because these experiences can be profound, meaningful, and transformative. Yet there is another side to spiritual awakening that receives far less attention. Opening to a wider reality can also be confusing, destabilising, and at times, really quite frightening. The frameworks through which we previously understood ourselves and the world can begin to loosen before anything sufficiently coherent has arrived to replace them. There is an associated issue that I have been thinking about over recent years, which perhaps has a growing need to be seriously discussed in a reawakening culture. This is the matter of containment.
What has really struck me over recent years is how interested we have become in opening consciousness – yet at the same time, perhaps we have not been paying enough attention to what happens after it opens. There are endless invitations to open ourselves to other states of awareness. To develop intuition, activate energetic centres, notice synchronicities, explore altered states, work with divination, and become more receptive to the unseen. Yet expansion is not automatically the same thing as integration. Sometimes a person does not need another experience, another activation, or another explanation of how spiritually significant everything around them might be. Sometimes they actually need somewhere to stand whilst they make sense of what is already happening. The risk is opening without containment can become flooding and overwhelm.
This is not something I approach purely as an intellectual question. I have experienced periods in my own life when opening to wider spiritual perspectives was not simply beautiful or exciting, but profoundly disorientating when happening without containment. In fact I found my early experiences during younger days to be incredibly destabilising, and at times, very scary. So much so that I put a lid on those aspects of myself for many years. (Which incidentally many I’ve spoken to have mirrored this experience - which is pretty tragic when one considers how much spiritual service we could have provided in those ‘lost’ years.) It was only thanks to a renewed search for meaning to my life during fairly recent years which attracted me to explore this side of things again. And obviously I was really primed as I literally ‘cracked wide open’ spiritually during the very first healing circle I took part in. It was an utterly amazing spiritual experience that I can’t really give justice to in written form, and I imagine I will probably never experience anything like that again. Yet it was so exhilarating and enlightening that I literally couldn’t sleep. For three nights! I did reach out for some support (which was actually incredibly difficult for me to do at that time), but was kind of brushed off, and ‘we can chat at the weekend’. It was only Wednesday morning..! Either the person had just never experienced such an event, or they had forgotten what it was actually like. As I was growing incredibly concerned and slightly frantic, I used my trusty old search engine to try to figure out what had happened and what I could do to ‘come down’. And found all I actually needed was really good grounding.
Just to put more context around this theme, another experience springs to mind. As I started really exploring the more spiritual path, I became aware of a lovely, warm guide I have called ‘Granny’. I don’t ‘sense’ her to the same extent now, yet at that time this very safe, protective and nurturing energy was what I needed to help me through my various experiences and esoteric explorations. I would literally sense her presence, and then welcome her in via the back of my head (which I have since learnt is ones Alta Major chakra, or “Mouth of God”). At the time, I sometimes visited a Spiritualist centre - less interested in communications with ‘loved ones in Spirit’, yet loved the community feel. That Sunday I felt particularly bright, full of energy, and happy. I had thought I’d heard someone call ‘Jennifer’ from behind at the start of the service – which was my firstname before I changed to Astrrid - and one very infrequently used (with ‘Jen’ or ‘Jenny’ being the norm). There were only two people sitting behind and neither had spoken to me, so I brushed it aside – even though it definitely felt slightly unnerving. But I was having such a good vibe I ignored my instincts. At one point during the service I was really open and enjoying singing. I thought I felt Granny behind my head and said, “come in”…
Clunk…
My immediate thought was, “shit, that’s not Granny.” I immediately felt incredibly flat and heavy, and feeling slightly scared, I was glad when the service ended and I could just get home. I just knew I had allowed some sort of energetic male presence into my being – and not a particularly pleasant feeling one, though thankfully not at all sinister. Indeed, I was more scared whilst wondering how on earth I would get ‘him’ back out. So I got home, and despite feeling incredibly flat and depressed, dived straight into research. Looking into hungry ghosts. Lost souls. Relatively newly awakened being like a beacon to these. They just want to feel alive again. They don’t mean to harm. Etc, etc. Let’s just say I eventually worked out how to remove this energy (in a gentle way for both parties), and apart from having fingers burnt, there wasn’t any lasting effects, and I had gained a great deal of knowledge.
I have had number of strange experiences over the years, but tend to learn through lived experience (rather than just purely theory - although I adore the research side). So perhaps part of my own path is to learn this way, then use what I have learnt to help others? I do not wish to scare people off their own spiritual path, but there are obvious risks involved. I have gone through some dark times with health issues and don’t really like to contemplate the impact that these types of experiences might have had on me back then, when I felt less stable and grounded.
So the wider potential issue here is that at such times, the ordinary structures through which we understand reality may no longer feel sufficient, while the spiritual explanations we encounter can sometimes move far too quickly in the opposite direction. Even when an experience is not deeply unsettling like some of what I have experienced, we can almost over-tune into what is happening to us. Things can ramp up to such a high level that literally every coincidence becomes a sign, every dream becomes a message, every difficult relationship becomes karmic, and literally every bodily sensation becomes evidence of energetic transformation. When you are already struggling to work out what is happening, more interpretation is not necessarily the same thing as more clarity. It can become incredibly overwhelming.
That is one reason I have become increasingly interested in Symbolic Intelligence not simply as a means of expanding perception, but as a means of grounding it. For me, astrology, numerology, tarot, mythology, and the multitude of other symbolic systems give me languages through which unusual, transitional or deeply meaningful experiences can be explored. At their best, they provide structure. They remind us that human beings have always used symbols, cycles, archetypes, and stories to orient themselves during periods of change. They can help us place an experience within a larger pattern without requiring us to immediately convert that pattern into objective fact. For me, symbolic systems have become something like an anchor - not because they provide certainty about everything that is happening, but because they give us a framework within which we can begin asking better questions.
This distinction matters enormously to me. Symbolic intelligence is not the ability to find meaning everywhere. It is the ability to engage meaning without losing discernment. A symbolic interpretation can illuminate an experience without becoming the only possible explanation for it. For example, an astrological transit might provide a useful description of the themes through which someone is moving without telling us exactly what must happen. Or a tarot card may open an unexpectedly helpful line of enquiry without proving that an external spiritual intelligence has issued an instruction. Or perhaps repeating numbers may cause us to stop and reflect without requiring us to organise our lives around every recurrence. The deeper skill is not simply learning how to read symbols, but learning how to remain in relationship with uncertainty.
This is particularly important during periods of spiritual opening because overwhelm is a real risk, and discernment can then become more difficult precisely when everything begins to feel unusually meaningful. The boundaries between intuition, projection, imagination, pattern recognition, and genuine insight are not always obvious. Perhaps they are not meant to be? Developing symbolic intelligence therefore involves learning to hold several possibilities at once. What actually happened? What am I experiencing? What interpretation am I placing upon it? What other interpretations might be available? Is there anything I need to act upon, or is this something I can simply observe for a while? Sometimes the most mature response to a symbol is not to decode it immediately. Or sometimes we just need someone more experienced to guide us.
A safe place to not know
I increasingly wonder whether we need more spaces where people can say, something is happening to me and I do not yet know what it means, without being either dismissed or immediately given an elaborate metaphysical explanation. There is a great deal of territory between those two extremes. Someone may be having experiences they understand as spiritual and may in fact be getting completely blind-sided by what is actually happening. Yet they may just need ordinary grounding, rest, routine, and someone to talk to. Or they may in fact need someone to spot that they would actually benefit from professional medical or psychological support. One form of support does not have to invalidate the other. A genuinely safe spiritual environment should be capable of respecting someone's experience without insisting upon a particular explanation for it.
For me, that is where the idea of sanctuary begins to become important. I do not necessarily mean sanctuary in the sense of retreating indefinitely from the world, nor somewhere that promises protection from every difficulty. I mean a sufficiently stable container in which transformation does not have to be hurried. Somewhere a person can regain orientation, learn to discriminate between experience and interpretation, and gradually discover what their emerging worldview means in the context of ordinary life. Ideally, they would leave such a space with more sovereignty rather than greater dependency upon the teacher, practitioner, or community that received them. I firmly believe that good containment should ultimately strengthen someone's capacity to contain themselves.
Interestingly, the impulse to create something along these lines appeared in my own life several years ago. I had an idea called Sacred Sundays, based around opening my home as a safe community space for people exploring spirituality and related experiences. I received some excellent help in getting physical preparations ready, yet it never properly developed. At the time I interpreted that largely in practical terms - my health was significantly poorer, my available energy was limited, and the responsibility of holding such a space from my own home would definitely have become too burdensome. Especially as I had not yet undertaken sufficient work around boundary setting. Looking back, I wonder whether the impulse itself was premature rather than mistaken. Perhaps I had recognised a function before I understood the scale or architecture through which that function might eventually be expressed.
There is also an important lesson in that for me because, contrary to how I would have set Sacred Sundays up, I no longer believe that being called to create a container means becoming the container personally. Much of my explorations around my own Virgo Ascendant which asks for discernment between ‘service’ and ‘sacred service’ has helped me with this. I now recognise that there is a substantial difference between building an environment that can safely hold people, and attempting to absorb everybody's needs through one's own nervous system, home, or personal availability. If I eventually create something of this kind, I would want appropriate boundaries, other practitioners and facilitators, clear areas of responsibility, and referral routes for people who need specialist support rather than—or alongside—spiritual exploration. I am not particularly drawn to becoming the person who personally manages those in acute crisis. Nor am I the best person for it. Instead I am much more interested in helping create the conditions within which people can be received responsibly.
From business to School to Sanctuary
This question is beginning to connect with a much wider vision I have been developing around my work. At present, that work begins very practically through strategic astrology, Chaldean numerology, business numerology, identity work, and consultancy. But I have never intended the consultancy to be the final destination. The wider Astrrid ecosystem is gradually being structured around a body of work in which consultancy provides real-world application, research and writing develop the intellectual property, and education eventually allows those ideas to be shared through publications, courses, community, and practitioner development.
At the centre of that longer-term vision is the development of a Mystery School. The word school matters because this is not simply about collecting spiritual techniques. I am interested in teaching people how to think within symbolic systems. How different languages of symbolism illuminate different aspects of experience, how apparently separate patterns can be integrated, where interpretation becomes speculation, and how symbolic understanding can be brought back into practical life. My existing ecosystem already places Symbolic Intelligence as the wider field of enquiry, with astrology and Chaldean numerology contributing to an integrated methodology rather than remaining isolated disciplines. The School would eventually provide somewhere for that work to deepen.
But I am beginning to see that there may be something that sits beside—or perhaps even before—the School.
The Sanctuary.
The School asks: How do we understand?
The Sanctuary asks: Where can we safely stand while understanding is still emerging?
I do not yet know whether the first expression of this will be physical or digital. An online group may provide accessibility, connection and support to people who would otherwise be geographically isolated. A physical space offers something different - embodiment, place, landscape, human presence, and the feeling of literally entering an environment designed to hold a particular quality of experience. Perhaps both will eventually have a role. I feel more strongly drawn towards the idea of a physical place, but this is one of those parts of the vision that I would rather allow to reveal itself than force prematurely.
Dharma and The Hearthkeeper
There is another symbolic layer to all of this that I have been exploring through my own numerology. Within Chaldean numerology, Dharma represents something close to the highest organising principle of a person's chart. It is the underlying contribution towards which the other parts of the life can gradually orient themselves. I sometimes think of it as a guiding star. Astrology gives extraordinary detail about the person incarnating at a particular time and place, together with the cycles through which that life unfolds. Numerology, in the way I currently work with it, can operate at a more archetypal level above that temporal detail. Dharma sits very high within that architecture - not as a job description or predetermined destiny, but as an organising principle to which our capacities may eventually be devoted.
My own Dharma is 42/6, which I have come to describe through the archetype of The Hearthkeeper. Its themes include sanctuary, coherence, cultivation, and stewardship - creating and maintaining the conditions within which people, communities, systems, or traditions can flourish. What fascinates me is that this description existed before I consciously connected it with the old Sacred Sundays impulse, or the increasingly persistent vision of a future physical space. I do not take that as proof that a particular building must one day exist. (That would defeat the discernment I have spent much of this article arguing for.) But it does provide a symbolic framework through which I can recognise a thread that has been appearing repeatedly across different periods of my life.
Astrology adds another layer to this for me. My South Node in Cancer in the 11th house speaks to a familiar pull towards community, belonging, and the emotional holding of groups, whilst my actual developmental movement is towards a North Node in Capricorn in the 5th increasingly feels like a call to create something more defined, authored, and enduring. That does not necessarily mean being the person who tends every aspect of a community on a day-to-day basis. It may be more about giving form to the vision, establishing the structure and allowing others to participate in sustaining what has been created. My Moon and Saturn in the 10th house, together with Vesta there, add another interesting resonance - public responsibility, devotion to a body of work, and the long-term stewardship of something that needs both care and structure.
This Hearthkeeper title also gives me a different way of understanding my role. Perhaps I do not have to construct every part of the eventual physical expression myself. I can very much imagine a future partner being much more involved in the land, buildings, and practical creation of the place, whilst my role is closer to that of visionary, priestess, teacher, and guardian of its underlying ethos. So someone else might build the hearth. The Hearthkeeper understands what the fire is for, yet the visible architecture and invisible architecture do not necessarily need to be created by the same person.
And perhaps that is the larger ecosystem I am actually moving towards. The consultancy works with individuals and businesses in the realities of their present lives. The writing and research gradually build the body of knowledge. The School develops symbolic literacy and teaches people how to work intelligently with these systems. The Sanctuary provides something more elemental - a place of containment, orientation and integration. They are not necessarily separate projects and may simply be different expressions of the same underlying work.
Containment before expansion
So after giving this more thought whilst creating this article, I am probably inclined to think that spiritual awakening is something we do not necessarily need to seek to accelerate. I also do not think that every unusual experience needs to be spiritualised, yet at the same time, when it does, spiritual awakening can genuinely open a person to their true calling and to deeper layers within themselves. I do believe that people will continue to encounter experiences that challenge the boundaries of the worldview through which they previously understood their lives. Perhaps increasingly so as younger generations become more receptive to wider levels of consciousness. When that happens, the quality of the environment around them matters. Expansion needs grounding. Meaning needs discernment, and transformation needs somewhere to land.
Perhaps some of the most useful spiritual spaces of the future will therefore be places that are less concerned with producing extraordinary experiences and more concerned with helping people integrate the experiences they are already having. Places where uncertainty is permissible. Places where symbolic frameworks are available without becoming dogma. Places where the mystical and the ordinary are not regarded as enemies, and where someone can explore a wider reality while remaining firmly connected to embodied life.
I am still discovering what my own contribution to that might eventually look like. It may begin online. It may eventually become physical. It may develop through people I have not yet met and skills I do not personally possess. For now, it is enough to recognise the direction and to keep giving it language.
Because perhaps awakening does not always need another doorway opened…
…Sometimes it just needs a room in which we can safely sit whilst our eyes adjust to the light.
~ Astrrid
Continuing the Conversation…
If you are moving through a period of transition, questioning or reorientation, my work uses advanced astrology and Chaldean numerology to help bring greater clarity to the patterns, timing, and deeper themes at work in your life. My consultations are designed to support reflection, discernment and practical integration rather than provide fixed answers. You can find out more about the services I provide here.
You can also subscribe to The Astrrid Journal (below), where I write about Symbolic Intelligence, astrology, numerology, identity, timing, transformation, and the wider ideas gradually shaping my work.
Continue the Journey
When Everything Becomes Too Interesting: A Virgo Lesson in Discernment
This Symbolic Life - For more personal essays, reflections, and shorter explorations of the ideas behind my work, visit This Symbolic Life on Substack.