On What Authority?

On Blurred Lines and Self Reflection

Painting by Andy Denzler

“Is it ok to share such personal things from a professional practice point of view?” I mused this morning after I had finally finished writing about suicide and assited dying on SULMUM. Not exactly the subjects of casual dinner conversation, but inignorably relevant to both my life and my practice. And because they matter to me “in stereo” I am aware of the risks when writing about, partially from a personal perspective, but for a professional purpose. Lines can get blurred easily.

I have decided yes, I can approach it from various angles, including personal experiences, and blend those in my writing. Discernment is key, and here I count as much on myself as I do on my audience to make sure I stay on the right side of that line.

TO WHAT PURPOSE

My sharing and sometimes explicit self exposure is not for the purpose of raw disclosure for catharsis alone. I am using my personal experience for reflection, meaning-making, and relational understanding. I hope that the difference between this and emotional oversharing is clear. I am not asking anyone to hold or rescue me.

A valid sidenote to be added here: the personal notes I share on my dark days do veer into that more intimate, reciprocal space of memoir, journal, that a social medium like Substack helps cultivate. I have to be aware of that distinction.

This awareness is in part implied by my decision to publish this particular piece here, and not on SULMUM. From a professional practice perspective, the key question that is usually asked about personal disclosure is something like this:

“Does the disclosure foster trust, clarity, and humanity? (yes)

Or does it shift any emotional responsibility onto the reader/client? (no).”

My hope and intention is of course that my writing (mostly) does the first. I disclose how I have experienced or still live with cancer, suicidal ideation, profound grief, witnessing death, and spiritual struggle. I would not go there in a one on one session. Why is writing different then?

Subjecting myself to this line of question is not just fuelled by the personal/professional tension. When listening to the interview with Alain de Botton from the School of Life on writing, it reminded me to think about the reader. Not that writers can control how their work is received or interpreted, but it does help if while writing we consider what we are asking the reader to engage with, contain and reflect on. What are the words meant to do?

I try to contextualise my experiences carefully. I want the work I am building through SULMUM to be rooted in presence, mortality, meaning, witnessing, and relational depth. To that end I feel that some level of carefully metabolised personal disclosure may be integral to the integrity of the practice, not diminish it. I would rather risk being too personally present than risk sounding abstract while I am talking about profoundly embodied realities.

I cannot escape, deny or brush over what life has brought me, but I can put it in service of something beyond myself. That is the entire motivation for creating SULMUM. To be of service and use whatever tool life has thrown in my box, where appropriate.

THE BOUNDARIES AND RISKS

There are risks worth being conscious of. I can’t prevent someone from projecting savior/healer archetypes. I feel this is closely connected to the personal performance that can be required from people to transform through suffering or inspire by “bravely” handling experiences deemed unimaginable. I am no Frodo running around with a possessed ring. I am a flawed and often flailing human being and I don’t owe anyone a performance. I also can’t magically or mythically save anything or anyone. Being a counsellor means I do take on a role. A role that is subject to “rules”.

From a personal boundary point of view, I could create a situation where people assume I am always emotionally available for discussions about suicide or grief. I have already seen this happen in my personal relationships and I have to be very mindful not to become a default container. Professionally I make myself available in clear time slots. Personally I would like to be checked in with. That’s not a client’s job, but it is my friends’ responsibility.

The clearest “risk” professionally is the reality that there are spaces in the counselling, personal development, and healing domains that still heavily privilege distance, neutrality, and emotional opacity. I am unlikely to fit in there. I have to carve out my own space, on my terms and trust my integrity as well as ability to reflect and be aware.

Maybe the question I started with, “Is this too personal?”, doesn’t cover it, and it is more a case of “Am I sharing from grounded integration or from active emotional need?”. It makes me question where I am in my own process, before putting it out there in writing. Have I done enough of the work myself before sharing it? And if I am not done with something, does me being honest about that still make it worth sharing?

What’s my job in this? I am asking sincerely, as I believe that as an evolving human being, we are likely never really done. It will always be a sliding scale where I decide to jump in. And however well considered the jump, I will in some cases have to circle back and self correct.

AUTO CHECKLIST

To keep myself in check I have to consistently question my own perspectives, acknowledge uncertainty, avoid absolutism, and resist drawing and imposing any moral conclusions. I tend to be wired that way anyway, but I have crossed the line before bringing SULMUM into this space.

Which brings me to the following “dilemma”. How do I continue from here on? The way I spend the end of the world was and is a deeply personal puzzle. I am becoming more mindful of “cumulative exposure” over time. How do I combine my multiple interests here: to write, be present, be professional? Do I now scroll back and delete parts of myself shared here?

The odd personal essay here and there can aid human connection and feel empowering. But if every public piece I hit publish on centres my suffering or existential explorations, you may end up primarily relating to me through vulnerability and crisis. I do not underestimate the value even that in itself offers. But balance matters, especially when my presence here goes beyond “me” and now includes my practice.

There are some key ingredients that I think help writing stay professionally credible despite its intimacy. For me those include:

Inquiry: Am I carrying questions beyond me and towards something more universal?

Ethics: Sometimes philosophically anchored, legally explored at others

Witnessing: A practice of both being present and composting (composting is a term I am borrowing from Ancestral Medicine, which I sometimes prefer to “metabolizing”)

Collective human experience: As a writer I subscribe to the school of “the more specific the more universal”, but this needs a double check when it comes to the very personal sharing.

Let me know when I screw up on any of those and if there are more core “self checks” you feel I can incorporate.

THE OTHER WAY AROUND

When I turn the tables, I think of people who have inspired me through their work and look at what I know about them on a personal level. No, I don’t know the names of their pets or whether they make a mean apple pie. But they are not exactly obscure either.

Dain Heer for example openly talks about having been suicidal and I trust him. It is directly related to his discovery of Access Consciousness (yes, I am aware it’s controversial work) and a crucial pivotal point in his life. He is not advocating that AC will save you from suicide, but he does share how he experienced it.

Part of why we often trust people like Dain Heer when they disclose experiences like suicidality, is because the disclosure feels integrated into a broader body of work rather than performed for shock or emotional extraction (I could argue that someone like Teal Swan, just to name another controversial figure in the space, does lean too heavily on the shock effect of her history of abuse).

For me: When someone can speak about suicidal despair from personal experience while demonstrating reflection, perspective, containment, and continued engagement with life, it offers me a level of recognition and relief that stems from both knowing what it is like and having somehow found a way through. I feel acknowledged, less alone, and a bit more hopeful.

Most importantly, it also challenges the false divide between “healthy people” and “people who have struggled.” I felt somewhat insecure about how ready I needed to be to step back into the space. Was I steady enough again, after all I went through? Have I arrived at that place where all that actually gives me more to work with? Because I have gone deeper into the work again myself.

Many people who become finely attuned practitioners, writers, caregivers, therapists and/or spiritual teachers have encountered profound despair themselves. Pema Chodron, Gabor Mate, and Tara Brach also bring their experiences into their work.

Sometimes that encounter becomes part of their capacity for presence. Whether it resonates and is effective depends on how their disclosure is framed, whether mutual boundaries remain intact, and whether the person is still visibly grounded in discernment and responsibility. I think they all are.

I have to also trust readers to feel the difference, like I do, between “I have walked through this and reflected on it,” and “I am unconsciously asking you to carry this with me.”

My instinct toward transparency makes sense to me, especially given the themes of SULMUM. A practice centred on radical presence, mortality, witnessing, and meaning would probably feel less trustworthy if I pretended I have distanced myself from suffering personally. I just have to make sure that all of it is shared in a context built on clarity, steadiness, thoughtfulness, ethical awareness, and my ability to hold complexity without letting it plummet into certainty on one hand, or chaos on the other.

I love Jeff Foster and have done for years. He was one of the first I engaged with when I started exploring notions of non duality. His evolution towards more human encompassed and less “enlightened” or abstract explorations aligns with my own way of shifting perspectives. I appreciate him as much today as I did at the beginning. All changes included. I believe him and I trust him because of the process he went through himself.

Jeff Foster has spoken very openly for years about his experiences with depression and despair, struggling with depression from childhood into his twenties.The way he describes feelings of being fundamentally damaged and exhausted by life are not theoretic, intellectual, clinical observations. It’s part of life, his life too.

He also did not present awakening as a permanent transcendence of pain. Over time, his work became increasingly grounded in vulnerability, embodiment, illness, grief. I have shared the video before where he acknowledges the difficulty of being human rather than idealised spirituality. Foster also later addressed how simplistic “just accept what is” spirituality can fail people in real suffering.

I don’t expect everyone to agree with his framing, especially around nonduality and suffering. But I trust him because he did not try to maintain the image of an untouchable enlightened teacher. He brought confusion, collapse, tenderness, and contradiction into the conversation, to enrich it, nuance it and make it real.

I am also thinking of Joe Dispenza and Niraj Naik from Soma Breathwork, but I don’t want to go there in my practice. I am not a neuroscientist nor a somatic breathwork trainer. But lacking that is not the reason. It’s the grey area of what is possible in terms of healing, what can be “promised” in a way that prioritises one preferred outcome: healed. I am not a healer. I am a guide to remembering your wholeness.

Let me explain: Even though I believe in self healing and know how amazing the body is. Even though my oncologist back in 2011 when he was challenged by my weird and very rare cancer for which there is no cure said to me: You don’t have to believe in miracles to believe in the strength of your own body.

I learned it is as resilient as it is fragile. Often capable of much more than we give it credit for. But…

My spontaneous remission turned into a cancer recurrence, diagnosed in October 2024. And I have no idea where I stand now. Literally as my last scan was just over a year ago and I am not planning on having one any time soon.

To me this is an ethically important distinction.

I can believe all of it. How the body has extraordinary capacities. Nervous system states matter, which is underlined by the extensive scientific research being done in this specific area. I won’t ever deny how meaning and emotion affect physiology, even though I am not a medical doctor and have to rely on the research of others to prove this. I know my healing experiences are real and spontaneous remission can happen. But in my case none of this came with a warranty for longevity and health.

So the last thing I want to do is misrepresent my experiences and build a practice around implied guarantees of recovery or transcendence over illness. It is about believing we are capable of living wholly, with illness. Whatever that looks like for you.

I have lived through the instability and unpredictability of disease firsthand. And an unexpected recurrence radically changed my emotional and ethical terrain. It complicates narratives that frame healing primarily as mindset, frequency, nervous system mastery, or spiritual alignment. People like Joe Dispenza or Niraj Naik, whose work I greatly appreciate, often speak from frameworks that are centered on transformation, neuroplasticity, breath, possibility, and self-healing potential. Many people genuinely benefit from aspects of that work, the way I did and still do.

Of course all things like hope, agency, embodiment, stress reduction, meditation, autonomic regulation, behavioural change, are a constant in both my daily rhythm and my reflections. They are all part of how I live. But I am not comfortable when these frameworks move toward implied causality.

Because I do not see my recurrence as a failure on my part. Cancer did not come back because I had insufficient belief. It was the opposite. The recurrence confused me because I fully believed I was healed and healthy for all those years, while I was unknowingly carrying cancer cells in my body.

The first time I had cancer I felt a clear indication of root causes that may have eroded my immune system through persistent emotional stress. With the changes I made in my life post cancer I am not sure if unresolved trauma is still part of the equation, and if so, to what extent. My vibes have been up and down and yes, the three years leading up to the new diagnosis I did not feel in sync with life. But to say cancer came back because of a wrong frequency, that’s a bridge too far for me. Besides, reality is so much messier than that.

I asked a friend for feedback on my writing and reflections for SULMUM. Besides commenting on the addition of audio being a plus because they find my voice comforting, they told me that my presence and sharing how I process has more integrity and strength than promising rapid transformation outcomes.

Whatever I write or share, whether or not I explicitly include details from personal experience, I am never coming at it from untouched optimism. Life has simply not given me that, so that’s not mine to share. What I can do, is speak from uncertainty without surrendering aliveness. And yes that aliveness or my commitment to it is not always unwavering. I regularly fall flat on my ass. I just keep coming back.

I am not interested in polished healing narratives myself, so I am not going to turn myself into one and hand it to you. I am exploring whatever existential truth I think I may be stumbling upon. Because that’s where life brought me.