I used to think doing it alone was the point.

That was the programme running me. Figure it out yourself, don't ask, don't need anybody, and if you do need somebody, at the very least don't let them see it. I built an entire career on that setting and I was very good at it.

So here's the honest audit. I've gone back over every threshold I actually crossed, every genuine turn in the road, and there's a human standing at every single one.

Not one of those doors opened by itself.

The one who told me to hold the tree

The night my whole worldview came apart in the jungle behind Playa del Carmen, I was about seven hours in, I'd walked through a fire, and I was in no condition to be making decisions about anything.

What I wanted to do was go home.

Hailey told me to lie down and hold onto a tree instead.

That's the entire intervention. Lie down, hold the tree, stay here, this is the right call. And I'm so grateful I listened, because everything that mattered most about that night happened after the moment I wanted to leave. The cenote. The staircase. The clean lens.

She gave me none of that. She just kept me in the room.

The one who handed me humans

Yong Nieva handed me humans. That was his modality.

He'd look at me and say, "I need to introduce you to someone," and then pass a soul across the way another man passes you a tool he knows you're about to need. That's how I met Jeannie Javelosa, who said "we need shamans" and pulled a whole mission out of a single conversation. That's how I met Juma, an anthropologist Yong knew from his time in Bolivia, who later gave me the cleanest argument I've ever heard for why what we call common sense is a collective agreement we all signed without reading.

He corrected me, too. Constantly, and gently. He told me once that I was conversing to respond rather than conversing to listen, that while the other soul was still talking I was already loading my answer, already rehearsing, already waiting for the gap so I could fire.

I've thought about that sentence nearly every day since.

The one who caught me showing off

One of my mentors asked me, slightly cheeky, "Cameron, have you even meditated?"

Being who I was, I sat down defiantly and did a full hour to prove a point. Then found out afterwards he'd meant a journalling practice the whole time.

That's what a good teacher does with an ego like mine. He asked one question and let me go away and win an argument nobody was having, for an hour, on entirely the wrong subject. He's also the one who told me I have two ears and one mouth for a reason, and that I might try talking half as much as I listen.

The one I didn't tell

This is the one I want you to hold onto, because it's the reason I trust any of this at all.

I was living in Chiang Mai and my road rage was climbing. Riding the scooter around town, destructive thoughts about other humans spiking in a way that wasn't me. I noticed it. I remember thinking, why am I so angry right now?

Then I was at a shamanic dinner and Frances Carrington, my craniosacral therapist, looked across at me and said, I can't look at you, you've got an entity attached on the right side of your face. I got defensive about it, which I'd say is fair.

Now, I check things. I don't take one soul's word for anything. So I turned to Isao Kato, sitting at the same table, and said, mate, turn on your intuition and tell me what you see. I gave him nothing of what Frances had said.

He named the same spot.

I cancelled every meeting I had the following day and went and sat with him properly, and he went in to speak with my higher self. It turned out not to be a dead soul at all. It was anger personified, a part of me I'd been resisting so hard that it had nowhere healthy left to go, so it kept turning up louder and louder until I had to look at it. With my permission, he reintegrated it.

What he explained afterwards is one of the cleanest teachings I've ever received.

"There is no bad emotion per se. We feel uncomfortable, but every emotion is justified. Every emotion has its place in us. And when a certain emotion is rejected, the only way for that emotion to express itself is to be more of that emotion."

That's how I actually work. I triangulate. Never one source, ever. I want two humans landing in the same place when one of them has no idea what the other one said, then I look at the depth of the answers, then I look at whether they'll shoot straight with me.

Two practitioners, two modalities, one of them working blind, same spot on the same face.

Five years ago that would have been way too woo-woo for my brain. However, I didn't have to believe anything. I just had to count.

What I look for now

I've sat with a lot of guides. Here's what the good ones have in common.

They send you back to yourself. Frances trained through the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, and what separates that work from most therapy is that the practitioner doesn't interpret your experience for you. She hands you the framework, she holds the space, and you do the journeying. You walk out trusting your own inner wisdom instead of hers.

They can afford to lose you. Frances says of the helping spirits that they're like good friends who only have your best intention, and that the moment greed enters the equation they very quickly back off. Same with humans. A guide who needs you to keep coming back is walking you in circles.

They point at your body first. Isao spent an entire session with me on the unseen, and when I asked him for the single takeaway he said forget spirituality first, make sure you have a healthy body and a habit that works for you, because everything by design starts from a physical body. The most credible ones in this field are the least precious about it.

They know where their work stops. The ones I trust will tell you plainly when something sits outside their scope, and hand you on to whoever it belongs to. Yong never once pretended to be the last stop.

They receive as well as give. After that second Reiki session in Mexico, the clearest instruction I got was to give Coralie everything in my wallet. Two hundred and fifty, three hundred US dollars, far more than the session cost, because she needed the resources more than I did right then and it was my job to provide them. It runs both ways, this work.

Why it's a network

I got to every one of these humans by accident. A WhatsApp message from a friend I'd met at a sound bath, a restaurateur on an island in the Philippines, a Reiki session a friend gifted me and a second one I'd forgotten I'd booked.

It took me years and a small fortune to work out who was genuine and who was performing, and I don't believe anybody should have to pay that tuition twice.

So that's all Henosis actually is. It's Yong's move, formalised. Someone who knows the work vouches. Someone assesses. And then somebody gets to say to you what Yong said to me.

Nobody I've ever met who woke up did it on their own. Not one of us. There was always a human standing at the door.

So if there's a soul you keep meaning to go and sit with, go and sit with them.