We Woke Up Like This

Soul Riding: Finding Divine Partnership with Your Soul when Crisis Pens the Ego

Rev. Joya Sosnowski // Vibolgie Season 5 Episode 116

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The moment my son transitioned beyond physical form, my entire spiritual practice was put to the ultimate test. That night, sitting before my altar, drowning in grief, I witnessed something extraordinary—points of white light shooting upward across the planet. Through my son's consciousness, I realized I was seeing prayers rising for our family, an experience that would launch me into a profound spiritual awakening.

This episode explores the metaphor of the ego as a wild horse trapped in the pen of grief. When crisis strikes—whether through death, diagnosis, or devastating betrayal—our ego thrashes against unchangeable reality, desperate to escape what cannot be undone. But what if the purpose isn't to break free? What if instead, these moments of confinement are opportunities for the deepest spiritual growth?

Through my journey of connecting with my son's consciousness on the other side, I discovered that the relationship between soul and ego isn't meant to be one of dominance but partnership. Traditional spiritual practices often approach the ego with masculine discipline, forcefully bringing it under control. Yet there exists another path—loving the ego into surrender rather than whipping it into submission.

When we fully accept what cannot be changed—including our own eventual transition beyond physical form—something remarkable happens. We begin to "wake up in the game" of life while still playing it. Our presence becomes more sacred, our actions more purposeful, as we move through the world with the understanding that we are souls having a temporary human experience.

For those navigating grief or spiritual awakening, this episode offers a roadmap for reconciling the human experience with spiritual truth. By creating coherence between our soul and our "wild horse" ego, we can live from an expanded perspective that transforms even our most painful experiences into catalysts for growth. The way, as my son told me from beyond, "is not complicated, but it's not easy."

Ready to deepen your own awakening? Visit vibologie.com to learn about my upcoming Mystery School, meditation processes, and free spiritual sessions beginning in May.

Joya:

Hello, beloved souls, reverend Joya, with Vibologie here and this is the we Woke Up, like this podcast and YouTube because I'm going to make this a YouTube video today, because I want to talk about awakening, a deeper, deeper awakening, and what the point of awakening is, since Weston vibrationally transformed into another dimension, which is what I call death, because we only leave this physical body, but we certainly do not leave our consciousness. And when I first began to feel him, which was on the second night after he passed and I was just sitting in front of my altar, sobbing, and the only place I could find any kind of smidge of peace was sitting in front of my altar, and I had this experience that I was just crying, sobbing, deeply sobbing, and all of a sudden I saw these points of light start shooting up. I could see like this bird's eye view of the planet and I could see these points of white light shooting up everywhere. And then I had this feeling flood through my body. That was later I identified it as the feeling of being honored, like when you're just like humbled and being honored, and it felt like that. And I heard him say to me wow, mom, I didn't know you had such a big community and I realized through his awareness that I was seeing and witnessing all of the people that were praying for him and for our family.

Joya:

Because just as much as I was brokenhearted in my own brokenheartedness, I was also concerned about his soul on the other side, because I could sense that the accident had happened so fast and that his energy before the accident was so low, so down, so negative, that when he immediately was transitioned into the other side, that he was confused on the other side and he was trying to get back into his body. And I could just feel his confusion. I could feel the heaviness of his sadness and his confusion and and this, oh shit, I can't go back, I can't undo what just happened, this can't be undone. And I could feel that. And so the first time that I experienced his vibration of consciousness was when I saw this prayer light for lack of a better word through his eyes and this feeling of feeling honored. In this experience time I would go sit in front of my altar in that sobbing grief and heaviness of losing him. I would be flooded with peace when I would say his name. I would just say Weston, in that sobbing, crying, I'd say his name, and then I would feel this melting feeling of warm peace descend upon my heart from the inside of my body. This would happen.

Joya:

So, of course, being the mystic that I am and that I always have been, I'm experiencing his transition energetically. And this sought me asking questions. This sought me seeking answers to these questions I was then asking, and as I sought the answers and found bits of the parts of the questions that I was seeking, I would find new questions would arrive and evolve inside of me. And so when I came to meditation, maybe three, four weeks afterwards, and I was praying and crying and asking how can I make this consistent, how can I reach you on a consistent basis? And the answer dropped in quick, as a wink, and he said come with a calm mind.

Joya:

And so I began that work of really calming my mind, really going into deeper meditation, deeper practices of my meditation, where now I spend probably between not probably, I do spend between two to three hours a day in meditation. I do it in the morning and I do it again in the evening, and it's not now just to find peace, it's to get myself into a coherent field state, and I have found that now, since I started having these interesting experiences in my meditations recently, within the last couple of weeks, where I slip into this vast formlessness and there's just light and energy moving and sacred geometry appears and disappears and it's just light and color and energy moving around in my field and my body vanishes and I feel myself as being formless. And so I started measuring my brainwave states to find out what was going on in that, and I found that I was in a gamma brainwave state. In my meditations I was maintaining constant gamma, which, of course, is the highest state of meditation that connects you to those mystical experiences of the divine, that formlessness that I was experiencing and have been experiencing still, and so this morning, lately, this catches us up to today. I mean, there's so much more to this story, but what I want to share I've been having this feeling, and I couldn't quite put my finger on what it was. It's preventing me from having a deeper contact with the other side.

Joya:

I knew that, and so I really started asking what is this feeling? What is this feeling? What is this feeling I'm feeling? And this visual completely dropped in, and this just happened this morning, and it was this vision of a horse being in a pen and it's a wild horse that's now been corralled in a small, tight pen and it's kicking and it's whacking its head against the walls and it's biting anybody who comes near it and it's rearing up. It's just like throwing a massive fit in this pen.

Joya:

And I experienced myself as this horse in the pen, this wild, crazed feeling of being penned. And when I dropped into my meditative state about this, I quickly realized that this wild horse is the ego and this pen that I'm in is the pen of grief, that this pen that pens the wild horse that pens the ego, is the crisis that inadvertently reaches all people, who really just catapult into a much more awakened space, that there's this major before and after, there's this major crisis that undoes everything in your life that you think is real, everything in your life that you feel is solid, everything in your life that you feel like you have the illusion of control over is gone and it throws the ego into quite the fit as it will. And so, when I sat in this feeling of being the wild horse, which is what I've been experiencing, because in these midst of peace, in these midst of tremendous peace and meditation, in the midst of all of the mystical experiences I've had since my son transitioned in the midst of being spiritually prepared for it in 2024, which I know I was. Despite all that, in the midst of all of that, there was still something in me that's clinging to doubt. Clinging to doubt, questioning my own inner experiences. And so when I went into this meditation and I saw this wild horse being penned, immediately the message came through and it said you don't trust yourself, you don't trust yourself, you don't trust your higher self, you're not trusting your soul, you're being the wild horse caged, throwing a fit and trying to find a way out, except there is no way out. There is no way out. There is no undoing my son's departure from this planet and for other people, there's no undoing the death of a parent or a sibling, or a spouse or a loved one. There's no undoing a diagnosis, there's no undoing a massive betrayal that happens in our life. There's a before and there's an after, and it cages the ego. And so, depending on how we handle these kinds of situations, our fight, flight or freeze responses of the ego, how it's coped with life up until this point it's gotten caught, is what we're going to try to do on a massively tight scale. And I want to show you something, because just the notes that I took this morning in my meditation are these. This is the notes that I took this morning in my meditation are these? This is the notes.

Joya:

The ego is the survival program of the body. The ego is the survival program of the body that says I am my story, I am my experiences, I am what happened to me, I am my possessions, I am my success, I am my looks, my age, my sex, my religion, my relationships. I am what I value myself to be. This is the story of the ego. But here's the kicker with the ego. The ego is not a thing, it is a process, and it's either grasping to things, which is what the ego loves to do grasp and attach, grasp and attach or it resists things. The ego is always grasping or resisting. And in the case of being stuck in the pen, now that you're the wild horse, you resist being in the pen. We want to undo what's been done, we want to wrestle with it, we want to fight with it. I want to change it.

Joya:

And so I found myself slipping back into these old habits of self-soothing, of numbing, except when you numb yourself with one thing, you numb yourself with everything, and I already knew this was a path I didn't want to go down. And in my case it's with sugar. I found myself just wanting to have cake, wanting to have cookies, wanting to have candy, wanting to have sugar, because sugar is addictive, sugar changes your felt state and sugar numbs you out because it's a drug. And I didn't want to go down that path. And so, when I stopped doing this to myself, I found that the wild horse was kicking up again really crazily inside of me. And so it's in this resistance that the struggle was happening.

Joya:

And so, in this moment, when I felt myself being the wild horse, when I realized that the ego is not a thing, it's a process that's grasping or it's resisting all the time, I said well then, why do we have an ego? Why would we come to this planet as a soul, take on this bodily identity with an ego? That we know we have an ego, we know we're going to have an ego. Why take that on? And the answer dropped in so clearly, and it was your ego is meant to be your companion through life, your soul's companion. There's a companionship there with this wild horse and the soul, that the soul is supposed to ride the wild horse through life and direct it and tell it where to go and how to express and what to do and how to use this power. But we don't do that because we have what I've always called the ow, which is the original wound and I've talked about it before on other podcast episodes and also on other YouTube shows. We have this ow that happened, the original wound within our tribe, within our family, that taught us it's not safe to be who we are. Except I had a realization about this recently that it wasn't the external thing, wasn't the people, wasn't the situation, it wasn't the externals that were the cause of the ow. It was your agreement that there is something wrong with you, that it's not safe to be yourself.

Joya:

We judged ourselves as little, tiny beings. We judged ourselves and we didn't do the judging. The soul didn't do the judging. The ego did the judging. That wild horse did the judging. The soul didn't do the judging. The ego did the judging. That wild horse did the judging and it's like, oh, it's not safe for you to be in control of me because we're just not fitting in, we're getting in trouble, and so it judges you, the wild soul, the little baby soul, the little soul self, as being what's wrong with it, and so it takes off on its own, and this is what the ego does, and there's such a beautiful story here.

Joya:

So as the ego takes off and it leaves behind the truest part of ourselves, we spend our whole lives then either projecting or protecting our pain and our woundedness out into the world. We start to recreate these cycles that we've lived in. We recreate the cycles of our parents and the cycles of our communities and the cycles of our society wherever we live, our culture, our religion, whatever that tiny belief system is that we were born into. That we might have resisted at first, because we're standing out. We're born to stand out. We're born to be who we are. We're born to express authentically, from our soul's light, through the lens of this wild ego that we've been given, which is in alignment with our astrology, our human design, our gene keys, whatever path you want to look at it through, to distill who am I, what's my design. It's no different than understanding how your car operates or how your phone works. Beyond just. You know, we have this phone in my hands that I can use to either just make phone calls and text people, or I can really dive into what this thing can do. Same thing with a car these new cars do all kinds of things besides just put in the key and drive from point A to point B. There's all kinds of other things that your car can do. And so it's no different with us, with our operating system, with our ego the wild horse, if you will.

Joya:

And so, as I was sitting in this feeling, I realized that I didn't have to be the wild horse, I could be the witnessing observer of the wild horse. And so I suddenly saw myself sitting on a fence just watching the wild horse, which led me to another question. And I said to myself you know, I've spent 10 years plus in meditation. I've spent 10 years plus negating or like self-deprivation through force, making myself have discipline through force. And I saw that there's different ways to tame this wild horse. There's different ways to tame the ego, and the old school way is the masculine energy way, which is through that force, through that discipline. And I asked myself you know, I have this wild horse. I have this wild horse, this beautiful wild horse that came with me, it's mine, this is my wild horse.

Joya:

And how do you tame a wild horse? Does it have to be that you discipline it into submission or can I love it into surrender? And I saw, like this whip right, that you have this whip with this horse and, yes, you can tame a horse that way, but you're always going to have to ride the horse with a bit and the reins and the saddle and the whip in your hand, because the wild horse is going to get out of control any chance. It senses that you're not paying attention. And this is like the traditional path that we've all been taught and we've all gone down I have, with meditation and doing the branch of yoga that I practiced. It was very masculine, it's very much. You notice it and you whip yourself back into shape. You notice it and you whip yourself back into shape, and it doesn't have to be violent, but it's still a controlling aspect of the self versus. There's a feminine flow. There's a feminine energy I could feel into of flow. There's a feminine energy I could feel into.

Joya:

What if I just loved this part of myself so much that it surrenders to me? What if we became partners again? What if, instead of having to whip my wild horse into submission, I could love it, into surrender, and it could surrender to the divine will that is the will of my soul, because the will of my soul is connected to the will of the creator. There's no separation there. All separation is an illusion. And I could really feel the softness of that. I could feel the softness of just loving this part of myself so much that I just need to sit still and not identify with the wild horse anymore. Not identify as the wild horse anymore, but identify as fully as the soul that's just witnessing it, in its pain, in its temper tantrums, in its woundedness, in its stories. It wants to tell itself but this happened, but that happened. Just witness it and love it through all of it.

Joya:

This is the path of the divine feminine. This is the path of the divine feminine to fully embody all of ourselves. This is the path of the divine feminine to bring this horse, if you will, not under your control, but into your partnership, into your co-operation, into your soul, companionship. That I have, this ego, I have this vessel, I have this vehicle called me, but how do I not let it? Its wounded self, its wounded nature that's always seeking, forever and ever seeking. How do I not let that the wounded horse and the pen run the show, and I realize I can't let it out of the pen to wander with me in the wild until I can trust it and it can trust me.

Joya:

And this is a mutual trusting because, remember, at the point of the separation, the fall inside of us, the ow, the original wound, I'm the one, you're the one, who made the decision to not honor this relationship between the ego and the soul. We are the ones who said, oh, this is wrong, because nobody else is doing this in our family. My wildness is too much, my light is too bright, my voice is too loud, my energy is too high. Whatever it is, it's too much for the people who feel like they themselves are not enough because they too have cut off this connection between their ego and their soul. And this is the fall and the divine union happens inside of us when we can reclaim this relationship, happens inside of us when we can reclaim this relationship and undoing these paradigms of the, whipping it into shape, this harsh discipline of I'm going to make myself and, yes, we can make ourselves all day long, but when you're not looking, when you're not on your awareness, when you're not in your awareness, when you're not in your hyper attention, assuming you have that and you're not just letting the ego run the show.

Joya:

The ego takes over again All the time. It takes over again all the time, and we always have to bring it back, bring it back, bring it back, whip it back into submission. And so I'm, in this new practice of softening toward my whole experience, as the soul who is witnessing this life happening, as the soul who is witnessing the grief, this physical self-feels, this heartbreak and the feeling of no control. But deeper than that, as I dove into the feelings of what this is, that the horse that this ego self is feeling, there's this fear of knowing I too am going to leave this planet. I too will no longer be this vessel and vehicle. I too will dissolve back into my soul, back into the oneness of all it is. And that feeling, that thought, actually conjured up terror inside of me. I could feel it and I was like does it mean that I don't matter? Does it mean that I'm nothing? Does it mean that Weston is now nothing? And of course no. That is not what it means. Energy doesn't get destroyed, but it means that it's absorbed back into the sea this drop of water Think of it as one drop of water being absorbed back into the sea that it is now identified as the sea. It can feel the vastness, the expansiveness of what it really is and its consciousness of itself as a separate but not separate identified point of light drop of water in the sea.

Joya:

And I've had so many conversations with Weston about life, the soul, what happens after we die, all of these things which I'm not going to share yet because it's not time to share it yet. It's not time to share it yet because it's all unfolding. And what I realized in this experience this morning, with this metaphor of the horse as the wild horse, is my ego and my soul as being my ego's companion, my ego's rider, for lack of a better word. I'm supposed to ride this horse through life. Right, this body that, when I soften into that love that I can feel for this body, it's beautiful. It's beautiful and it takes away that fear and instead it instills in me this feeling of there's just no time to waste, because life here is so short. It's the blink of an eye, which is one of the beautiful gifts of getting to come here as a soul is that we know it's not forever.

Joya:

We're playing a game, and Weston literally told me it's a game and our work is to wake up in the game. That's why we're here. We came to say can I wake up in the game? And what happens? When we wake up in the game? We change our life. We're not the same person anymore. We're now reunited with our soul and our ego, and that means we change how we live our life. That means that the ego is not running the show. This part of us that's resisting or grasping all the time is now instead in service. What do we want to do today? Where do we want to go?

Joya:

And, as the way of mastery says, it's to create the good, the holy and the beautiful, which I absolutely believe. Those are the creations and emanations of source, and we are creators. We are creative beings, and when people say they're not creative, I'm like you do nothing but create. We just have been misidentified and mis. What's the word here I'm looking for? Misidentified and mis. What's the word here I'm looking for misdefined about what creativity means, what creation means. It doesn't mean being able to paint that painting back there, even though I did that. It doesn't mean being able to draw something that looks realistic. It doesn't mean being able to play a perfect concerto on the piano. We're all always creating perfect concerto on the piano. We're all always creating. We are all always creators. We are never not creating, and the thing we are creating is our life.

Joya:

What is the point of your life? What is the point of all of it? What is the point of this? And as I went through this experience this morning, with this awareness and this deeper awakening into this divine union inside of myself, not with my masculine and my feminine, feminine counterparts, but with oh I'm just feeling this right now, as I draw this, as I see this, to the left, I have the feminine. To the right, I have my masculine energy, which is also the hemispheres of the brain right, except it's opposite in the brain. In the brain, the left is the masculine and the right is the feminine. It's crisscrossing like this. But then there's also the above and the below, my ego and my soul. It's all a paradox. And we're here to be unified beings, which is that reunion of the soul self and the ego self. We're not here to kill our ego, to squash our ego, to dismantle our ego, to control our ego. Our ego is our companion, it's our soul's companion, and when you awaken truly to your soul's expression inside of you, then that's when your aura changes. You become lighter, you move slower through the world, more present and much more sacred, like treating life like it is your sacred altar because it is and asking what am I serving here? Who am I serving here? What am I serving here? What am I serving here Doing these check-ins?

Joya:

And what I'm super blown away about is going through this experience myself is that I realized that I had been having these downloads nonstop since probably September, october, and I've shared a little bit about a Magdalene Mystery School that I've just been dropping in, dropping in, dropping in. I knew a threshold was coming in 2025. I could feel it with every fiber of my being. I just didn't know it was going to be the loss of my son in his physical presence, but I've gained a soul guide. On the other side. I had a soul guide, but he's my new one and he told me he's my new guide and that I am guided and it's my job to use my will to surrender and trust. And that's ultimately what this boils back down to.

Joya:

Is that trust in the relationship between your own ego and your own soul. Do you trust yourself? Do you trust yourself not to betray yourself? Do you trust yourself not to hurt yourself? Do you trust yourself to speak up when you know it's time to speak up and to be quiet when it's time to be quiet? Do you trust yourself to stay when it's time to stay and to go when it's time to go? Do you trust yourself to let your yes be yes and your no be no, and to keep it that simple? And Weston told me, the way is not complicated, but it's not easy. And that is so true, because when we're letting our ego run amok, when we're letting the wild horse run the show, boy, do we make a mess of our lives.

Joya:

I know I have, and even still and right now, at this point, that I'm recording this talk, I'm not on my wild horse yet, I'm not on my ego, riding it out into the wilderness of the world. I would say that I'm still sitting in the pen, learning to trust more fully, learning to more fully trust my soul and my experiences inside of myself, these vibrational and energetic connections that I have with Weston, with the other side, with my own intuition that it's safe to trust inside, it's safe to listen inside and it's safe to show up as that, in that full, aligned presence, without the mask, without the show, without the pretense, without all the stuff that the ego puts on the show pony. I'm not a show pony, I'm a wild horse. This work in me has been unfolding really over my life and I've shared so many times about the consciousness asking me what vibration of consciousness do you want animating your body. And as I went to work to answer that question, the answer has come full circle.

Joya:

As I've gone through this initiation, as I stepped across this threshold, as my ego was put in a pen of no return. There's no getting out of this. And to know that fully and to accept that fully is to stop fighting with it, to stop resisting it. And when I wasn't resisting the death of Weston anymore, his vibrational transformation, I didn't resist that, I accepted that. But what I wasn't accepting was my own. Accepting was my own. What I wasn't accepting was my own eventual demise myself in this physical vessel. And when we really sit with that, when we really feel into that energy, when we can really sit in that, you can realize and feel just how scary that is, for your ego, absolutely terrifying. We all say we're not afraid of death, but we gloss over it like we don't mean it, because we're not sitting in the energy of it until someone we love is gone, and then we're confronted with it and there's no getting out of the pen. We're experiencing it firsthand.

Joya:

And what does it mean for you? What does it mean for your life? Not only the absence, the physical absence of this person's physical space, which is so hard to explain, this feeling of someone not being there, and just how much space they're not taking up and how much you miss it, and the fear that you're going to be that same missing space. It's intense. It's intense, but it also should light the fire of purpose under you. Then it's like okay, so what's the purpose? Why did my soul come here? Why did my soul decide to play this game of life? How do I wake up in the game and live the game consciously, in cooperation with my own self? That's the whole work. That's the whole game. That's the whole path. That's the whole work. That's the whole game. That's the whole path. That's the whole point.

Joya:

And it's not easy. It's not easy, and most people have to have this major crisis in order to shift who they are, in order to do this kind of transformation. Because, as Yeshua said to the man, the wealthy man, who said I want to follow you, I want to have what you have. What do I need to do? And he said give up everything you own and come walk with me. And he said I'm not going to do that. Most of us won't do that. The Buddha did it, yeshua did it, but there are masters on this planet who still do it.

Joya:

It's not easy. So how do we do that as householders? How do we do that in our daily life? How do we be unattached but so involved? How do we be unattached but dedicated? And that's the trick right there. Complicated, and that's the. That's the trick right there.

Joya:

So how do we align and ride our horse in cooperation, rather than letting the horse ride us? And I think it was frank st francis assisi who called it the donkey. Same thing I want to ride the donkey. I will not let the donkey ride me. But most people are just blindfolded and asleep on this wild horse that's just running them through life and they're completely unaware of the mess and what they're creating and that they have a choice in that.

Joya:

So I just wanted to share this talk with you today, and this is the deep work. This is the deep work that our soul came here to do. This is my passion. I'm grateful to have woken up in the game. I wish it could have been easier. I wish I didn't have to wake up the way that I woke up, and I'm sure you do too. It hurts, it hurts the human a lot, but the soul is unfettered and unfazed. The soul is nothing but love. The soul is connected to the divine source eternally and we have that choice. And as a soul, as a vibrational being, when I can get myself into that coherent gamma state, that heart-brain coherence, that soul-horse coherence, then I can be in contact and live a life that is so much bigger than the tiny little view I was living it through before. If you've listened this far, thank you. This is the beautiful work we're here to do.

Joya:

I am releasing a mystery school, my mystery school that's been not mine, sorry spirits mystery school that's been downloaded through me from the magdalene sisterhood. That involves this process just as much as everything else. So, with that dear beloved soul, I invite you to visit my website, vibologycom V-I-B-O-L-O-G-I-Ecom, where I am releasing lots of classes, my mystery school, 31-day continual soluminous meditation processes with me and, of course, starting in May, I'm going to be doing free, as a honor of my ministry, as a reverend, to do talks and readings from the way of mastery, followed by sound sessions that I would love to invite you to. They're free and that's my service to contribute to the awakening, to contribute to the waking up in the game and helping everybody else do the same, because when you wake up in the game, yes, it still hurts to be a human, yes, it's still challenging to be a human, and it feels more purposeful, it feels more light, there's a disentangling that happens. That's really freedom, and it's the frequency of freedom that I'm here to transmit. And with that I'm going to complete this talk and offer you a little sound bath for just a minute. I could feel how much energy moved through in that transmission because I have a headache.

Joya:

Thank you, the. Thank you the. I'm going to take a deep breath. Shhh, shhh, shhh, sh, sh, sh. Shemaiah, thank you for listening to. We Woke Up Like this. I would appreciate a like, a subscribe and a follow wherever you listen to this podcast and if you would like to be a guest on the show. Send me an email, joya at vibologycom. Thank you so much.