WARNING – this book contains strong language. Because when you wake up to yourself after forty years “dear me” just isn’t going to cut it. I wrote this to express everything I felt on waking up and as a manual for myself on how it feels to be free (just in case I ever forget).

My practice, whatever it is on any given day, is to help people feel alive, to wake them up. The tragic part is that they often wake up for a moment; for one second, for a song, for an hour, for a day or a week, they wake up to themselves and then they disappear again.

I don’t want to live like that any more. So this book is for me and it is for you, because I want you to wake up too and stay awake. Maybe you are my beloved, maybe you are my sister, my friend, a stranger who I will never meet, but I want you to wake up. This world is too miraculous for you to miss it.