2025 was the year I deconstructed the Matrix, tearing apart how we run our businesses and our lives, how our brains process reality, and why most of us feel like we’re running on a treadmill that someone else built, and how to get out of the Matrix. It’s also the year Platonic philosophy finally clicked for me.
If you only read the first five, you'll likely achieve more goals and make more money. But if you make it to Point 19 and 25, you'll finally understand why years of therapies and 'thinking' your way out of the problems have never been enough to solve your deepest unconscious patterns.
Here are my 25 lessons & discoveries:
1.The Being/Doing Loop
Being before doing is more likely to help you focus on the 20% effort that generates 80% of the results.
2. Finding 10,000 Ways That Don’t Work
“I have not failed 10,000 times; I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.” - Thomas Edison. Don’t be afraid to fail more. Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger invested in 400 to 500 stocks; they made most of their money from about 10 of them. Amazon launched loads of experiments that failed; only a few projects like Amazon Prime and AWS generate most of its revenue. Be ok with failing more often. Finding hundreds and thousands of ways of things not working means you are closer to finding the way that will work.
3. Fear Setting Over Goal Setting
Rather than set your goals, list all of your fears. It's usually our fears that prevent us from reaching the goals that we truly desire. Also, see if stepping into a new identity resolves most of the fears listed. For example, I had listed 30 fears and realised 28 of them were just minor ones if I fully own my new identity. The “meta-fear” was simply fully stepping into a new identity.
4. Input Goals vs. Output Goals
Output goals (like “generate 50k revenue in the next 3 months”) are less controllable than input goals (like “create one thing that generates demand for my product every day for the next 90 days”). Most output driven goals aren’t met. But input goals can be met easily and compound into outcomes.
5. Vocation and the Art of Surrender
Vocation comes from the Latin vocatio, meaning “a call,” do what you’ve been called to do. This is what surrender means and what Michael A. Singer, a yogi turned ex-CEO of a billion dollar company, explains in his book The Surrender Experiment. Instead of forcing your will to manifest a clear idea of what you think you want and need to do, you surrender to the flow (Explained later in point 25). I spent a lot of time trying different frameworks for finding my purpose and soul searching, but I ultimately understood that surrendering to the flow of things and learning how to listen to what calls me saves me both time and energy.
I think Joe Hudson framed this really well in this video:
6. In Silence and Stillness We Hear
In silence and stillness is when you can hear the call. It’s also where all possibilities are born. You have to quiet down the mental noise to be able to hear it.
7. AI as Your Spiritual Guide
Something I was called to do this year was to write an article, “How to Use AI as Your Spiritual Guide,” which was published in Watkins Mind Body Spirit Magazine (October 2025). It features a ghost story and fun AI prompts you can use for spiritual guidance. Watkins Mind Body Spirit Magazine is a publication featuring the world’s top spiritual teachers like Eckhart Tolle, Deepak Chopra, and Ram Dass, David Lynch, Louise Hay, etc.
You can read the full story here or pick up a physical copy by visiting Watkins Bookshop in London. It is one of the world's oldest esoteric bookshop, established by John M. Watkins who's closely affiliated with the Theosophical Movement. It is a place steeped in esoteric history: they published Carl Jung’s 1925 edition of Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, and legend has it the infamous occultist Aleister Crowley made all the books there disappear and re-appear. Visiting Watkins is like stepping into Diagon Alley in Harry Potter: magical and surreal.
8. Communicating with the Dead
If you’ve recently lost someone dear to you (a friend, a family member or an animal companion), and want to communicate with them, Oxford-trained neuroscientist and psychiatrist Dr Tara Swart explains how to do so. I tried, it works eerily well.
9. The Ayahuasca Call and the Preparation
Ayahuasca is the most powerful and effective plant medicine I’ve tried, but don’t try it until you are called to do it. Last year, when I booked a retreat in Peru, the airline didn’t let me board the plane. Ayahuasca is what shamans call the “Grandmother spirit”; she calls you. For me, she appeared in a dream, and the next day while walking my dog in real life, I met another dog called Aya. Then I knew I was being called.
Tim Ferriss listed 6 things to do before trying ayahuasca:
1)Watch 6-Part Series The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers (Agree and highly recommend)
2) Read Awareness by Anthony de Mello (Agree and highly recommend)
3) At least 30 days of meditation (Slightly disagree, I would recommend at least 2+ year of experience)
4) MDMA-assisted psychotherapy (Don’t agree.)
5) Guided psilocybin session (Agree.)
6) 2+ sessions of Holotropic Breathwork (Somewhat Agree.)
My advice: It is vital to develop the ability to ‘control’ or to be comfortable with your awareness before you try Aya. Mastering meditation, breathwork, NLP, and hypnosis techniques provide you the tools you need to navigate a multidimensional world that can lead you simultaneously toward infinity and nothingness.
10. The Neuroscience of the “Empty Self”
Research from September 2025 by Dr. Christopher Timmermann from UCL Centre for Consciousness Research found a significant brainwave overlap between taking low-dose 5MEO-DMT, a natural hallucinogen component of ayahuasca but extracted and more powerful than Aya, and practicing 17 years of Non-dualistic meditation from the Mahamudra tradition. Both show a decrease in gamma brainwaves. In most meditations, gamma increases because the self is still present. In non-dual states, gamma decreases as the subject experiences an “Empty self” where the ego dissolves.
11. Being Headless
Look for yourself right now: without a mirror, you can never see your own head. You are a headless being who cannot see a “self” at the centre of your experience. This is the Headless Way: the realisation that from your own point of view, you are not a person in a room, but a vast “space” or “capacity” in which the room is happening.
This work was pioneered by Douglas E. Harding and his student Richard Lang. Harding, an architect and mystic, spent 10 years mapping the architecture of the universe and our place in it in his book The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth. C.S. Lewis called his work “a genius” for how it systematically bridges mysticism and science.
12. Mental Models of the Greats
Learn how the world’s greatest operate from different mental models. Best podcast resource is Founders from David Senra.
13. The Three Ways Your Mental Model Keeps You Miserable
As Richard Bandler (co-founder of NLP) identified, we make ourselves miserable by reacting to our insistence that our mental model is the “truth” rather than reality. Your mind filters reality in three predictable ways.
Generalisation: Taking specific experiences and making them universal. You have had 2-3 toxic relationships, so your mind concludes: “All relationships are toxic.”
Deletion: Filtering out parts of reality that don’t fit your story. You think: “I HAVE TO work weekends.” But you’ve deleted the rest of the sentence: “…or else I’ll feel guilty.” -
Distortion: Misinterpreting neutral events through a fear lens. A friend doesn’t text back, and you interpret it as: “They hate me.” You assign motives without evidence and then live as if that meaning were fact.
Your unconscious distorts reality to scan for danger and keep you safe based on your past experiences, but these stories protect you from dangers that may not even exist.
Source: Richard Bandler’s book Patterns for Problem Solving: The New Structure of Magic. It’s technical but a must-read for lovers of linguistics, philosophy of language, and psychology.
14. The Best Mentors
Some of the best coaches, teachers, and mentors I’ve met don’t hand you the answers; they ask the right questions to help you uncover the wisdom within yourself and break through your own mental models. They empower you to find the answers within.
15. The Quality of Your Questions
The quality of your questions determines the quality of your life.” - Tony Robbins
16. The Pathology of Separation
“Separation theology creates separation cosmology creates separation philosophy creates separation psychology creates separation sociology creates separation pathology.” - Neale Donald Walsch
17. The Four Levels of Consciousness
Cosmic: Life happens as me.
Channeler: Life happens through me.
Manifestor: Life happens by me.
Victim: Life happens to me.
Victim to Manifestor consciousness requires taking responsibility.
Manifestor to Channeler consciousness requires Surrender.
Channeler to Cosmic consciousness requires dissolving the Ego: Non-duality.
18. Plato's Allegory of the Cave, The Modern Interpretation
The human brain processes 11 million bits of information per second, but our conscious mind only handles 40 to 50 bits (Zimmerman, 1989). The rest—the other 10,999,950 bits—are processed by the unconscious before they ever reach our awareness.
By gatekeeping consciousness expansion, the “Matrix” keeps us focused on the shadows: that tiny fraction of reality we perceive with our conscious mind and the “only 5 senses” we think we have. (Dr Tara Swart suggests we actually have at least 34 human senses.) We are conditioned to ignore the rest of our unconscious intelligence.
We are taught that rationality, logic, and science—the products of our 40-bit conscious mind—are the sole dictators of truth. Meanwhile, anything emerging from the 11-million-bit unconscious is dismissed as “madness” or “woo.”
Our screens serve as “Black Mirrors” on the modern cave walls, designed to externalise our attention so we never investigate and listen to the unconscious wisdom within.
It is a controversial stance, but the more I experience what’s behind the veil in altered states, the more I believe this is what systematic control looks like. It explains why hypnotherapies and practices to expand individual and collective consciousness are outlawed in many countries.
19. Why Years of Therapies Don't Fully Resolve Unconscious Patterns
Most mental health interventions and talk therapies operate at the conscious level in an ordinary state of consciousness: the Beta brainwave state and occasionally the relaxed Alpha brainwave. They suggest “thinking” your way out of problems.
But most of our unconscious blocks weren't encoded using logic, language, or experiences we can verbalise in ordinary state of consciousness. Our ability for logical thinking and filtering only came online at the age of 12.
Most of our core unconscious patterns were formed before the age of 7, when we were naturally in altered states of consciousness.
When you were a child from birth to 7 years old, you lived naturally in the low, slow rhythms of Delta and Theta in waking states. These are deep hypnotic, dream-like states where you downloaded information directly into the unconscious without a filter. You learned behaviours, beliefs, social cues, cultural norms and emotional patterns by observation and feeling rather than through explicit teaching. Most of these patterns were encoded as emotional experiences and body sensations stored directly in the subconscious and the unconscious, not as experiences we rationalise or verbalise. Our adulthood attachment patterns are formed and predicted by the time we are just 18 months old.
This is the most mind-blowing discovery of this year because it explains why years of talk therapies rarely solve the unconscious patterns programmed into us as children before the age 12.
Consciousness expansion technologies like hypnosis, breathwork, psychedelics, drumming, and Ayahuasca, etc., are powerful because they mute the Beta mind and allow us to access Alpha, Theta, and Delta states and rewire the patterns where they were formed.
20. "All Learning is Remembering" - Plato
In this context, Plato's famous quote makes total sense. Learning is essentially "unlearning" what the conscious Beta mind thinks is true. It is about descending into Alpha, Theta, and Delta states to access and remember the intelligence of the individual and collective unconscious. You aren't acquiring new information; you are removing all the unconscious programming conditioned by society and culture upbringing that prevents you from remembering and listening to the wisdom that was already there.
21. "Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
22. As Above the Mind, So Below the Body
The mind can lie, but the body cannot. The wisdom you are looking for is always within, but you have to know how to read it.
Try this: Bring a joyful or abundant memory into your mind, close your eyes, and take three breaths. Feel how your breath naturally expands.
Now, bring a fearful memory or a scarcity mindset into your mind, take three breaths again, and feel how your breath immediately contracts.
Your breath and your body are compasses that reliably predict the state you are in. When your breath is shallow and your chest is tight, you are in contraction. When you are relaxed and deep, you are in expansion. Never make a big decision or take a major action from a state of contraction. Always wait until you can shift your state back into abundance and act from expansion
23. The Elephant in the Room
Most perspectives are like the "blind men touching an elephant" metaphor—one feels the trunk and thinks it’s a snake, another feels the leg and thinks it's a tree. Most healing practices fail because they only touch one part of the elephant. To truly heal, we must move past these fragmented views and look at the whole system: mind, body, and spirit.
The danger is when people don't realise that a perspective is merely a perspective. This is how wisdom is turned into organised cults and religions that exert control over the masses. I see this happening a lot in spiritual and esoteric circles.
When people ask me about specific organisations or "one true way," I tell them that curiosity is a better approach than conviction. Instead of saying "this religion is the best," explore different views to find the underlying patterns. Understand that every approach is just one person touching one part of the animal. If you mistake the part for the whole, you stop being a seeker and start being a follower.
24. Becoming Supernatural by Dr. Joe Dispenza
If you want to understand in a grounded and scientific way, how mystical experiences actually work, read Becoming Supernatural by Dr. Joe Dispenza.
25. What is Flow?
Neuroscience maps flow as a gradual entrance into the Alpha state, followed by the Theta state.
But I think it’s simpler than that: Flow is being in alignment with your energy.
Energy 'seems' invisible. Most of us only feel it subtly when we say a certain person "drains" us or a project "fuels" us. Because we can't see it with our eyes, it’s easy to dismiss it as "woo" or magical thinking, even though physicists like Einstein formulated its reality long ago.
I used to hold that same view until I experienced it for myself through altered states and somatic practices. I realised then that energy isn't an idea; it’s a physical force. We have some of the most powerful energetic forces, like Kundalini, lying dormant within us, awaiting to be activated. This is the source of ultimate creativity.
Flow is the moment you stop resisting, get out of your own way, and let that energy move you.
Lots of love xx
Ginny
