The Demonisation of Ascension Teachings.

Uranus in Gemini — integrating the opposites; a new era of spirituality

I remember finishing my studies in Yoga Therapy in my early 20’s. The feeling of bliss as my feet graced the footpaths, on my walk home to my accommodation every day after study. I felt light, like a feather, treading gently in the world. My face glowing. Life was simple, back then.

Integrating back into my life back home, after living in a monastery and spending an extensive time in India studying — not so simple. That is where the real work began.

Over the past decade and a half, I have found myself moving between worlds.
The Non-Dual teachings of the Lam Rim and the Gelugpa tradition of Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism; I studied in "Yellow Hat" schools, which emphasizes strict monastic discipline, the study of Buddhist philosophy (Sutra), and advanced esoteric practices (Tantra).

I have also studied and dived deep into the world of feminine embodiment and movement arts. A background in Martial Arts as a black belt in Shotokhan Karate, a teacher of the feminine tantric arts and the path of Red Tantra and practitioner of the daoist arts.

The dance between these seemingly different worlds, has meant that I have been able to create integrated practises, that converge the dual and the non-dual, in a way that seemingly does not polarise or conflict, but rather, converges opposite schools of thought.

Just this week, teaching a week long Spinal Attunement practitioner training in The Netherlands, I was sitting with the seeds of this article — The Demonisation of Ascension Teachings. It was inspired by something I noticed in some of my participants.

Sometimes, when you work with the body and somatics, without the counterpart of having the ability to sit back in non-attachment and the non-dual or spiritual space of witnessing, you can become seriously weighed down and heavy. This is what was happening with some of my clients. One of them even mentioned that since she has been practising emotional release work with clients, she has lost her connection to spirit / the divine.

This is why I do not practise bodywork alone. I cannot. It is exhausting to my spirit.

Any practise that works with the denser bodies — the physical, the emotional, even the mental — that is devoid of the work with the soul and spirit bodies, is limiting and can keep you stuck. Not only that, but it is tiring.

Having access to the higher realms and being able to lift up and out into a space of ascension and ultimately, lightness, helps to regenerate the spirit.

The Pendulum Swing

Over the last several years, I’ve watched the language of ascension — light, expansion, higher self, 5D, awakening — become almost shameful in certain circles. Spaces that once spoke fluently in this vocabulary now flinch from it. “Embodiment,” “somatic,” “grounded,” “nervous system” have become the new currency of legitimacy. To speak of ascension now, in many wellness and spiritual spaces, is to risk being filed under naive, dissociated, or worse — spiritually narcissistic.

And I understand why.

For decades, transcendence-oriented teachings often did exactly what their critics now accuse them of. They taught people to rise above the body, to transcend emotion, to bypass grief, anger, and unprocessed trauma in favour of “staying positive” or “holding a higher vibration.” I have sat with people — and been that person — who used spiritual language as a sophisticated form of avoidance. Who floated so far from their own bodies that they couldn’t feel the ground beneath them, couldn’t feel their own anger, couldn’t feel the people they were hurting.

So when the somatic, trauma-informed wave arrived — and it arrived with a level of intensity in recent times — it landed like medicine. Suddenly there was permission to feel. To be in the body. To stop performing transcendence and start metabolising what was actually there.

This wasn’t a fad. It was a correction the culture needed.

But like most corrections, it has a shadow of its own — and I think we’re starting to see it.

When the Body Becomes the New Ceiling

Here is what I notice now, working with practitioners and clients across the world: there’s a way of being “in the body” that has become its own kind of trap. A subtle orthodoxy where anything that points beyond immediate sensation, beyond personal narrative, beyond the felt experience of this moment in this body, gets quietly suspicious. As though the only legitimate spiritual currency left is what can be located somatically, here, now.

I want to be careful here, because this isn't a return to "the body is an illusion, only spirit matters." That pendulum swing got us into trouble in the first place. But I think there's a real risk of over-correction — of becoming so identified with density, with sensation, with the endless project of regulation and embodiment, that we lose the very thing that gives the body its meaning: its relationship to something larger than itself.

The body without the vertical axis becomes a closed loop. A place to live, but not a place to be moved through. And I’ve seen people get stuck there — endlessly processing, endlessly regulating, endlessly “doing the work” on the nervous system, without ever arriving anywhere. Density without direction.

This is the part of the conversation I rarely hear named: that pure somatic focus, without something to orient toward, can become its own bypass. A bypass of meaning. A bypass of the sacred. A bypass, ironically, of the very transcendence that gave embodiment practices their original context in every lineage that ever held them — Tantra, Daoist internal alchemy, the contemplative traditions that never separated body from spirit in the first place.

The Era We Just Lived Through

I don’t think this arc was incidental. From 2018 to 2025, Uranus — the planet of sudden awakening, disruption, revolution — moved through Taurus: the sign of the body, the senses, the earth, matter, the felt and physical world. We have just come out of that era.

Of course this was when “embodiment” became the watchword. Of course this was when the body demanded to be reckoned with — through a pandemic that forced the entire world into a confrontation with breath, illness, mortality, and physical isolation; through the explosion of somatic and trauma-informed language into everyday vocabulary; through a cultural insistence that nothing could be trusted unless it could be felt, regulated, located in the nervous system. Uranus in Taurus was a revolution in matter. A shock to the body. A forced descent into density, after decades of teachings that had floated above it.

And it needed to happen. I don’t think the culture could have metabolised the bypasses of the ascension era any other way. Sometimes a planet has to crash through a sign to make a point the soft way never could.

But that era is over. Uranus has moved into Gemini — and Gemini is dual by nature. The twins. The bridge. The sign that holds two things at once without collapsing them into one. And what I’m sensing now — in myself, in the people I work with, in the wider field — is a hunger for non-dual teaching again. Not non-dual as an escape from the body (that was the old trap), but non-dual as the capacity to hold spirit and matter, ascension and embodiment, transcendence and density, simultaneously — without needing one to dominate or correct the other.

I have even started my meditation practise again, which I have been avoiding for some time now.

The Taurus era taught us to come down, to land, to feel, to inhabit. That was necessary and real. But an era that asks everything to resolve into density alone is, in its own way, just as partial as an era that asked everything to resolve into light. Gemini doesn’t ask us to choose. It asks us to hold both wires live at once — which is, I think, exactly where this conversation needs to go next.

Integration, Not Another Pole

What I’m not interested in is trading one orthodoxy for another. The answer to “ascension teachings bypass the body” is not “therefore only the body matters.” Both of these, taken as endpoints, are traps. Both can become identities people hide inside.

What I’m interested in is integration. The body not as a prison to escape, and not as a shrine to worship, but as the instrument through which something larger moves. The vessel, not the destination. This is what the old traditions actually taught, before the West split them into “spiritual” and “somatic” camps and then pitted those camps against each other.

Ascension was never the problem. Bypassing the body in service of ascension was the problem. And now, embodiment risks becoming its own kind of ceiling if it forgets what it's for.

I think of my early twenties self, walking home from yoga therapy training, feeling light as a feather. That lightness wasn’t a bypass. It was what becomes possible when the body is finally clear enough, settled enough, safe enough, to let something move through it. Ascension, rightly understood, isn’t a departure from the body. It’s what the body becomes capable of holding, once it’s no longer in defence.

That’s the integration I feel is needed, now. Not body or spirit. Not grounded or expanded. The body as the place where the sacred actually happens — not despite matter, but through it.