I didn't come to this
as a teacher.
I came to it as someone trying to survive.

Nigeria · Age 0–11

I was the child who couldn't stop asking why.

Long before I knew what spirituality was, before I'd heard the word "awakening" or "meditation" or "consciousness," there was a quiet question that followed me everywhere I went as a child in Nigeria.

Why are we here? What is this? What am I? Where is here, actually? Not the kind of questions children are supposed to ask. The kind that hung over me like weather, every day, while the other kids played and laughed and went about their small lives without a trace of what I was carrying inside.

I remember watching them and feeling like I was a different species. Not better — just unable to be normal the way they seemed able to be. The questions disabled me. They wouldn't let me rest inside the ordinary things. I couldn't enjoy what they enjoyed because something in me was already asking what it all actually was, and no one around me seemed to be asking that at all.

That's the earliest version of me I can remember. A kid in Nigeria who was already, somewhere deep down, looking for something. I just had no idea yet what I was looking for — or how many years it would take to find it.

New Jersey · Age 11

I spent two years in America without speaking a word.

In 1992, my father brought my sister and me to New Jersey. The rest of our family stayed behind in Nigeria until 1997. I was eleven years old, and the culture shock broke something open in me that had already been cracked.

I didn't speak English. Not a word. For the first two years of my life in America, I mostly just stared. I watched people talk, watched classrooms unfold, watched American life happen around me — and I understood none of it. I have a memory of myself from that time, just standing there, observing everyone, completely silent.

When you can't speak, you go deeper inside. That's what happened to me. The questions I'd carried as a boy in Nigeria found more room to grow. There was no one to talk to. No one who would have understood even if I could have found the words. So I lived inside my own head — thinking, worrying, looping through thoughts that had no answers.

Meanwhile, back in Nigeria, the rest of my family continued their lives. My mother. My siblings. Their identities formed in a household I wasn't in, through years I wasn't part of. When they finally moved to America in 1997, the family I met wasn't the family I had been imagining all those years. That wasn't anyone's fault. I just wasn't there for the years that would have made us close.

That silence between us is still there, in some ways, to this day. It's one of the things I've had to make peace with — not by fixing it, but by understanding why it is what it is.

1995–1998

My father got sick. And then I lost both of them on the same day.

In 1995, my father became ill. From the moment I understood what was happening, a new fear moved in. What happens if he dies? Who takes care of me? I'm a child in a country whose language I still barely speak, whose culture I still don't understand. What happens to me?

For three years, that fear sat inside me like a second heartbeat. A low-grade, constant depression that became the texture of my daily life. I didn't know to call it depression then. I just knew something was wrong and getting heavier.

The only thing that lifted it — and this is strange to look back on now — was a girl I fell in love with. Puppy love, you could call it, but it was more than that to me at the time. When I was with her, the noise in my head went quiet. I felt peace. I felt time stop. Looking back, that experience of timelessness around her was a glimpse of what I would one day touch through meditation. I just didn't know it then.

Then in 1998, my father died.

And the same day, I lost her too. We'd been drifting apart — different schools, different worlds — but the breaking came the same day as my father's death. Both people who had anchored me, gone in a single twenty-four hours. I have never been able to fully describe what that felt like. Devastation is the closest word, and it still doesn't touch it.

What followed was a decade. A full ten years of depression so deep I struggle now to remember the person who lived through it. Nightmares about my father, every night — dreams where he was still alive, where I woke up having to remember all over again that he wasn't. Anxiety that never turned off. Anger I didn't know what to do with. Grief that didn't move. Regret. Fear. A complete emotional collapse that had no bottom.

I didn't know how I was still alive. Honestly. I didn't.

2002–2003

A federal charge I didn't deserve. And the night I typed "how to meditate" into Google.

Suicide crossed my mind more than once in those years. What kept me from it was the Christian background I was raised in — I believed, at the time, that I'd be condemned for eternity if I did it. That fear was the only thing standing between me and actually going through with it. I'm not religious anymore, but I'll never downplay what that belief did for me in that period. It kept me alive.

Then, around 2002, the ground gave out again. Some people I trusted — "friends" — used my bank account to scam the bank. By the time I understood what had happened, I was facing five years and a day in federal prison.

I paid the money back as soon as I realized what had been done in my name. I had no criminal record. The judge saw it, took leniency, and gave me a year of probation, expunged my record, and sixty hours of community service. I walked out with my freedom still intact.

But here's the thing — before I knew the outcome, I spent a period of time genuinely believing I was going to prison for five years. And in that stretch, I felt what losing my freedom would actually feel like. Not abstractly. Viscerally. Something broke in that feeling. I understood, for the first time clearly, that all the darkness I was carrying inside me was pulling darkness toward me from the outside. The negative emotions weren't just destroying me internally — they were bending my life into shapes that mirrored them.

Something had to give. That was the moment I knew.

I went home, sat down at a computer, and typed four words into Google: how to meditate.

I found a program. I started practicing. And I have meditated every single day since — for over twenty years now. Nothing in my life has been more consistent than that.

The First Years of Practice

Something in me started to crack open.

The early days of meditation weren't dramatic. They were strange. I started noticing light entering my awareness in a way I couldn't explain. Sensations. Openings. Kundalini experiences I had no framework for and no interest in naming.

I wasn't a spiritual person, so when the experiences started happening, I didn't know what to do with them. I just kept going. And slowly, something shifted. I started to feel things again. Not happiness exactly — I'd forgotten what happiness actually was by that point — but something adjacent to it. A lightness I hadn't known was possible. A stillness that hadn't been there before.

It was enough to convince me that something was working. So I committed. Every day. No breaks. No negotiation. Meditation became the one non-negotiable thing in my life, and it still is.

Early on, I was taught something crucial: when the experiences start happening — and they will — don't chase them. Don't get attached to the visions, the energy, the openings, the altered states. Stay steady. Keep moving. Don't let the phenomena distract you from the ground underneath them. That teaching saved me from years of spiritual detours. I never became someone hunting experiences. I was just hunting healing.

2008 · The Morning Everything Changed

I woke up with tears in my eyes. And the grief was gone.

For ten years after my father's death, I had nightmares about him almost every night. Dreams where he was sick but still alive. I'd wake up disoriented, then remember — he's dead. He's been dead. Over and over, that same brutal re-entry into reality, every morning.

Then one morning in 2008, I woke up with tears in my eyes after another dream about him. But something was different. I noticed immediately. The emotional heaviness that had been living in my chest for ten years — the grief, the weight, the unresolved ache of his death — was gone.

Not reduced. Not softer. Gone. As if it had never been there.

That was the real turning point. Not a dramatic awakening. Not a lightning strike of insight. Just a quiet morning where I realized the weight was gone, and it never came back. From that point on, the healing accelerated. The depression began to lift in ways I'd stopped believing were possible. The anxiety eased. The anger softened. The fear quieted.

I moved through what the spiritual traditions describe as levels of consciousness — from grief, to peace, to something resembling joy, to a kind of quiet awakeness, and eventually to the territory people call enlightenment. But I want to be careful with that word, because it's not what most people think it is.

The Self Dropping Away

Then the "me" wasn't there anymore.

I wasn't chasing enlightenment. I never was. I was trying to heal. That was the whole point. But something happens when you sit with yourself long enough — something I didn't expect and couldn't have prepared for.

The sense of being a "me" started to thin out. Not in a frightening way. Just — noticeably. The solid character named Hubert, with his history and his pain and his story, began to feel less like who I was and more like something I was watching happen.

And then at some point, the self dropped off entirely.

I don't know how else to describe it. The "me" that had been the center of every experience for my entire life — the one who had suffered, the one who had grieved, the one who had been scared of losing his father as a boy — was simply no longer there. What remained was awareness. Just the knowing itself. The isness of what is, without anyone inside it claiming to be its witness.

This is the territory the spiritual traditions point at when they talk about non-duality. No time. No space. No me, no you. Just isness. I could describe it for hours and you still wouldn't understand it unless you've touched it yourself. That's not a criticism — it's just the nature of what it is. Words point in its direction and then fall short.

That's where I live now. Not as an experience I'm chasing. As the ground itself.

Why I'm Doing This Now

Because I know exactly what it's like to not know if you'll make it through the night.

I didn't create Still Ground because I had a business idea. I created it because I spent over two decades in the kind of darkness most people don't talk about — and I came out the other side through something so quiet and so real that I can't keep it to myself anymore.

I know what it feels like to ask the biggest questions as a child and find no one who understands. I know what it feels like to be in a country you don't belong to, unable to speak the language, watching everyone else function while something inside you is coming apart. I know what it feels like to lose the people who ground you in the same day. I know what a decade of unrelenting depression actually does to a person. I know what it feels like to look at suicide as a real option. I know what it feels like to be facing federal time for something you didn't even understand was happening. And I know what it feels like to type four desperate words into a search bar because you have nowhere else to go.

I also know what it feels like on the other side. The stillness. The awareness that doesn't move. The strange, unshakeable peace that isn't the absence of pain — it's something deeper than pain could ever reach.

Still Ground exists because I've been quietly working with people behind the scenes for years, and I finally understood that this is what I'm here to do. Not to teach a system. Not to sell a program. Just to sit with people, one at a time, and offer what I've earned — the presence of someone who has actually walked through the fire and found what's underneath.

If you're in any part of the story I just told — the lostness, the grief, the confusion, the silent questions no one around you seems to be asking — you're not broken. You're waking up. And you don't have to do it alone.