Willoughby Britton
Cultivating Intuition: Practical Protocols for Upgrading the Intuitive Antenna
You already have intuition. You have always had it.
The Neurochemistry of the Dark Night of the Soul: Why the Path Through Darkness Has a Biological Basis
Every contemplative tradition describes it. Every serious practitioner encounters it.
Ego Death and Spiritual Emergence
Before anything can die, it must first be alive. The ego — your sense of being a separate, continuous "I" with a name, a history, a personality, and preferences — is not a mistake.
Meditation as Medicine: A Deep Dive
Meditation is not one thing. It is a family of practices as diverse as the cultures that produced them — spanning continents, millennia, and radically different models of what the mind is, what consciousness is, and what liberation means.
The Dark Night Across Contemplative Traditions: When the System Crashes Before the Upgrade Installs
Every major contemplative tradition — Christian mysticism, Theravada Buddhism, Zen, Yoga, Sufism, Kabbalah — describes a stage of practice where everything falls apart. Not the pleasant falling-apart of relaxation, not the gentle dissolution of meditation bliss, but a comprehensive, devastating...
Stanislav Grof's Spiritual Emergency Framework: When Awakening Becomes Crisis
In the standard medical model, a person who hears voices, sees visions, experiences the dissolution of their identity, believes they are connected to a cosmic intelligence, or feels that reality has fundamentally shifted is mentally ill. The diagnosis is psychosis, the treatment is antipsychotic...
Integration and Crisis Support: What to Do When Awakening Destabilizes
The preceding articles in this series have mapped the territory of spiritual emergency — the varieties of crisis (Grof), the specific syndrome of kundalini activation (Sannella, Greenwell), the adverse effects of meditation (Britton), the distinction between depersonalization and awakening, the...
Meditation's Adverse Effects: Willoughby Britton and the Study That Changed Everything
For two decades, the Western mindfulness movement sold meditation as a universal good — a practice with no side effects, no contraindications, and no risks. The marketing was relentless: meditation reduces stress, lowers blood pressure, improves focus, boosts immunity, increases empathy,...
The Buddhist Paths and Stages of Enlightenment: Stream-Entry to Arahant
If the jhanas are the engineering manual for producing specific consciousness states, the Theravada model of awakening is the quality assurance framework — the specification document that defines what "done" looks like. The Buddhist path to liberation is mapped with a precision that puts most...
Cook-Greuter's Ego Development Framework: The Most Empirically Validated Map of Adult Consciousness
If Ken Wilber built the most comprehensive architecture diagram of consciousness and Spiral Dynamics mapped the cultural operating systems of human civilizations, then Susanne Cook-Greuter produced the most rigorously validated firmware diagnostic tool for individual ego development. Her...
The Dark Night: The Debugging Phase That Modern Mindfulness Marketing Ignores
Every major contemplative tradition, without exception, includes a stage of profound difficulty in the awakening process — a period of darkness, disorientation, suffering, and apparent regression that occurs not because something has gone wrong but because something is going right. St.