Bridging Brain Science and Ancient Wisdom: My Journey from the OR to the Spirit World (Part 2)

How Neurosurgery Became an Initiatory Path to Spiritual Awakening‬

‭— and a Time-Tested Way of Healing‬

‭In our medical training, we are taught to recognize patterns — patterns of disease, diagnostic‬ criteria, treatment algorithms. As I reflect on my neurosurgical career and the transition I’ve‬ made into a new chapter of integrating modern science with timeless, multidimensional spiritual‬ practices as a whole human health coach, I recognize another pattern: the shape of an initiatory path I didn’t know I was walking‬ at the time.‬

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What I once understood purely as clinical training, I now see as a demanding and clarifying‬ gateway — one that ultimately led to a deep spiritual inquiry. The questions that arose in me‬ throughout my years as a neurosurgeon were not answered in medical textbooks. They‬ belonged to a different domain altogether.‬

● Who am I, really?‬

● What is consciousness?‬

● Why is it that a surgery can go perfectly by technical standards, and yet the outcome can‬ still unfold unpredictably?‬

● What happens to a patient’s awareness while they are under anesthesia, and what part‬ of their being is still “present” when the body appears still?‬

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I recall a particular middle-aged patient who later shared with me a vivid account of a‬ near-death experience they had while I performed an emergent mechanical thrombectomy for a‬ large vessel occlusion ischemic stroke. Their story, told after having made a complete‬ neurological recovery, didn’t align with any clinical explanation I could offer. And yet, I could not‬ deny the coherence and specificity of what they described. It stayed with me.‬

‭ Recognizing the Pattern‬

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“Healing comes only from that which leads the patient beyond himself and beyond his‬

‭ entanglements with ego.” – C.G. Jung‬

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‭Having completed shamanic training, I’ve reflected on both paths and recognized a pattern — one that overlaps with ancient healing traditions more than I would have expected.‬

‭Before modern medicine was formalized into institutions, it was the shamans who tended to the‬ physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual well-being of their communities. Unlike‬ organized religion, shamanic traditions are not based in dogma, but in direct, lived experience‬ with the unseen realm — often considered to predate and transcend religious frameworks.‬

‭They didn’t treat symptoms in isolation — they engaged with the person across dimensions.‬ Healing wasn’t something done‬‭ to‬‭ someone; it was something supported‬‭ within‬‭ them. It was an‬ intuitive, personalized, empowering, sacred journey.

Traditionally, the shamanic path was‬ entered through a calling, and involved rigorous training, confrontation with mortality, and deep‬ questioning of ego and self — often through an apprenticeship model.‬

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In retrospect, I now see how this draws many parallels with my time in neurosurgery. The more‬ I reflected, the more I began to see striking parallels — not metaphorical, but structural. Though‬ shaped by different tools and language, the two paths mirror one another in many ways:‬

These parallels didn’t make me abandon one path for another — they revealed that I had been walking both, long before I knew of the shamanic path.

In modern times, with the division of the shaman from the physician, shamanic, spiritual, and energy healing are often stereotyped as performative or ungrounded. Without clear structures or rigorous standards for the intangibility of these modalities, there is understandable suspicion around its truth and efficacy. Living in Sedona, I’ve heard the common joke: “Everyone here claims to be a shaman or a healer.”

At the same time, much of modern medicine has also drifted from the orientation that healing is something facilitated within an individual.

Compounded by increasing pressures from corporatized systems to reduce patients to diagnostic codes and productivity metrics, these systems often ask us — implicitly or explicitly — to lose sight of the human being in front of us. In that process, we also risk losing connection with our own internal compass as physicians. 

This brings forward a core question: do we allow ourselves to be shaped by the metrics of corporatized healthcare, or do we become protectors of the deeper original architecture of healing? 

When we allow medicine to become mechanical — driven solely by numbers — we risk losing the intuitive art of medicine and the intuitive art of healing. The relationship between doctor and patient shifts from one of care and connection to one of transaction.

Two Languages

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” – Albert Einstein

There are, I’ve come to understand, two distinct languages for medicine and healing. 

One is the modern, Newtonian-based scientific language we have been classically trained in through medical education — based on data, systems, and evidence. It is essential, and I continue to respect its rigor.

But there is another language — the language of the intangible, heart, soul, intuition, emotions, and subtle awareness — that is rarely acknowledged or cultivated in medical training.

This second language can be studied. It has a structure. It requires attention, humility, and time. It cannot be learned through shortcuts or bypassed by altered states alone or psychedelics. It must be integrated through practice, discipline, observation, reflection, and direct experience with full cognitive awareness.

In the writings of Carl Jung, Nikola Tesla, and Albert Einstein, I began to notice reflections of this second language — not in opposition to science, but embedded within it. These thinkers pointed toward something we often overlook in the dependency on certainty: 

True understanding requires more than intellect. It requires inner alignment, a willingness to question dogma, attunement to subtle listening, and the capacity to evolve in response to what we learn.

A Wider Frame

“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.” – Nikola Tesla

This journey has not been about rejecting modern medicine. It has been about widening the frame — remembering that to truly heal, we must be willing to work at the intersection of the physical and non-physical, the measurable and the intangible. Not everything that matters can be captured in data and statistics. Not everything that changes a person shows up on a scan.

What I practiced in the operating room was precise and technical. What I carry now is both expansive and nuanced — a way of seeing patterns not only in disease, but in the larger unfolding of a human life. To witness not only the brain, but the complex reality of a person navigating loss, transition, decision, and meaning — and how all of this not only affects the human spirit, their physical health but also how these dimensions are so intricately woven.  

This wider frame sets the foundation for health and human flourishing that current trends in the mainstream wellness industry miss.

This shift in perspective didn’t happen all at once. It unfolded gradually — through questions I couldn’t ignore and moments that didn’t fit into the models I’d been taught.

And over time, I realized I was no longer walking the same path I started on.

Something had changed and called for an expansion within me — a calling to bring integrity and excellence into the shamanic, spiritual, and energy healing world so that a bridge can be built across the divide between modern medicine and timeless, multidimensional practices, in service of whole human health and well-being.

Moving Forward

I realized that the shamanic path, for me, is not something entirely new. Much of the training had felt like a remembering — not of concepts, but of ways of seeing and sensing that were always there, just unnamed. For some of you, this reflection may feel familiar.

The shamanic path may already be present within you — expressed unconsciously in the ways you hold space, listen deeply, desire to relieve suffering, or respond to what isn’t visible on diagnostic tools. Bringing this into conscious practice doesn’t mean abandoning science. It means honoring and refining a dimension of healing that may already be active — just waiting to be consciously experienced, cultivated, and integrated.

I share this not as a conclusion, but as a continuation. 

Many of us who have been trained to serve through modern science may be sensing there’s more to remember and know — not to replace what we have been taught and practice clinically, but to explore and perhaps integrate what’s been left out.

At its core, medicine is a sacred responsibility — whether that is as a doctor, surgeon, coach, healer, therapist. And we serve best when we are willing to meet the full spectrum of what it means to be human — in ourselves, and in those we are called to serve.

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