Awakening Chats: Worshipping the Door w/ Mark Vicente & Bonnie Piesse

This is Awakening Chats, a collaboration between Remember Your Greatness and my wife Bonnie Piesse's podcast, Your Quantum Life

In this conversation, Bonnie and I dig into an idea she's been sitting with for a while: getting stuck at the door. It's what happens when someone has a real, profound spiritual experience and then attaches that experience entirely to whatever triggered it. The practice, the teacher, the building, the place. And they mistake the doorway for what's actually on the other side of it.

We each bring our own stories into this. Bonnie talks about her first big awakening through Kriya Yoga at 25, and how convinced she was that everyone would feel what she felt if they just did the same practice. I talk about a childhood experience in the bush outside Johannesburg that I spent years believing I could only access in that one place, and a moment as an altar server when a bishop put his hand on my head and I felt something enormous, something I later attached to that church for a long time.

From there we get into why this pattern is dangerous. Why finding "the thing" so often turns into everyone else being wrong. Why some people who go through a genuine awakening end up more constricted, more judgmental, more fearful than before, instead of more open. We talk about religious and spiritual bypassing, splitting into all good and all bad thinking, ego, safety, and what happens when people bury their own darkness instead of integrating it.

I also bring in a story about someone close to me who did real harm to our family, then found religion and acted like none of it happened. That connects directly to the cult work I do. It's the same underlying mechanism.

We land on a phrase that came out of one of our own conversations: worshipping the door. The idea that whatever gets you to a profound experience is not the experience itself, and mistaking the two is where people get stuck.

This is the start of what we hope is an ongoing series. No fixed schedule. We'll show up when we've got something worth talking through. Let us know what you think, and whether you've had your own experience of getting stuck at a door.