Chapter 31: Where the old self breaks open

“The only journey is the one within.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

The M3's engine roared its final song as Alex guided it through Caerphilly's misty valley roads. Each curve brought him closer to the Victorian hideout—equal parts fortress and prison, his salvation. This would be the last time he'd drive this machine, a symbol of his former life, through these ancient hills. His head slightly shaken in disbelief of a treason and realization that nobody could be trusted, not out from fear but from the severity of what he was about to do. "There's no going back after this," he whispered to himself.

Alex was learning that necessary changes often lie precisely within such contradictions—like hidden treasures on a deserted island. In the Zen tradition, this paradox is called a ‘kōan’: paradoxical statements or questions meant to jolt the mind and reveal the truth. For Alex, this was embodied in the question: how could his current place be both a prison and a liberation?

The Victorian era cover loomed before him, its weathered facade both welcoming and warning. Inside, the musty air carried whispers of age and secrets, while ventilators hummed their mechanical mantras through rooms thick with growing things. This wasn't just a safehouse—it was an incubator for transformation. Each creaking floorboard, each shadow-filled corner, each fog-filtered ray of light through century-old windows spoke of metamorphosis, Alexe’s animal mind alchemy. The ground floor would become his zendo (meditation hall), the greenhouse his laboratory and the empty room his future to be unfolded.  As he strode into the dimming darkness, Alex muttered, "Welcome to your dark side."  The darkness of his new home wasn't just physical—it was psychological, spiritual. Each evening, instead of fighting the darkness with artificial light, he'd sit in zazen (sitting meditation), watching his fears materialize like shadows on the wall. His Zen teacher's words echoed: “Your demons are just angels in disguise.” This wasn't mere poetic language—neuroscience had shown how meditation actually reduces activity in the amygdala, the brain's fear center, while strengthening the prefrontal cortex, responsible for awareness and decision-making.

Alex felt that this was his last chance to redeem himself here, in the United Kingdom: discipline your mind or die. He realized that this new greenhouse wouldn’t last forever, no matter what his new partners tried to convince him of. Alex was resolute and unshakable—this step was necessary: cut all ties with old gang members as well as new friends, change his number, and disappear off their radar forever. No one, except his slippery friend Ray, knew where he was—thanks to intuition, he had preserved this Victorian-era hideout. Selling his BMW felt like an unspoken sentiment he had to honour.

He began using public trains and buses. At Cardiff Queen Street Central Station, he bought a monthly pass—a small, plastic rectangle that felt strangely significant; it represented his new life more than a roll of cash ever could. The cashier's bored expression was refreshing; she had no idea who he was, what he'd done, or what he was running from. To her, he was just another commuter.

The new rhythm of ordinary life felt like a foreign heartbeat—unfamiliar and relentless. Lying on a worn-out mattress in the dim corner of the room, next to a foggy window that stubbornly refused to open, panic clawed at his chest like a dull blade scraping raw nerves. His mind, forged in the flames of hypervigilance, darted restlessly—scanning for ghosts of past threats, leaping between imagined dangers and the hollow echoes of memory. The silence wasn’t empty; it buzzed like a merciless psychological ringing in his ears, deafening in contrast to the drug-fueled chaos he used to call home.

"Is this what recovery feels like?" he wondered. "Or am I just trading one prison for another?"

           Uninvited, his thoughts slipped back to the lived code and its lingering grip—a rigid psychology etched into him like a tattoo on the soul. Control was the ultimate armor; emotion, a fatal weakness; trust, a fool’s wager. In this faded existence, abstinence mirrored the old discipline: another regime of denial, another oath to invisible masters. Healing, like the grip of the underworld, demanded total submission to secret laws. He hadn’t escaped—he’d merely swapped one doctrine for another, one empire of shadows for the next.

           The house itself became a living metaphor for his transformation. The ground floor, where he practiced meditation, represented his foundation—basic awareness and presence. The greenhouse upstairs, where he cultivated both plants and mushrooms, symbolized growth and potential. And one room, still dusty and untouched, was waiting for new plants, like the part of his consciousness yet to be explored. In Zen tradition, this mindful arrangement of space is called 'nagomi'—the natural flow of energy through environment and self.  He had more time, no drug runs, and no other houses to visit at first—it was like learning to walk again after years of running.

       5:05 AM., while most of Cearphilly slept, Alex rolled out his yoga mat in the only clear corner of the equipment filled room. The ventilators' steady drone mixed with Wim Hof's guided breathing instructions: "Fully in... fully out..." Each exhale splintered fragments of his former self into the pre-dawn darkness. The meditation timer chimed—a gentle bell marking the transition from inner work to physical purification. The shower's first blast hit like Antarctic winter, shocking his system into full awareness. Two minutes under water so cold it made his bones sing with pain and possibility. No more running from discomfort—this was about running toward truth, discipline, one icy second at a time. By six, his running shoes hit empty streets. Past the baker's first lights, through valley mist that clung to his skin like memories, while David Goggins' voice in his earbuds matched his footfalls: "Stay hard! Who's going to carry the boats?" The irony wasn't lost on him remembering his days at Amazon once he'd run these streets delivering something very different.

Eight o'clock found him at Queen Street Café, Jung's book "Man and His Symbols" open beside a steaming black coffee, his journal now filling with questions about consciousness rather than drug calculations or planting schedules. This wasn't just a morning routine—it was an exorcism of old habits, a daily promise to one self, resurrection performed through breath, cold, sweat, and contemplation.  His journal lay open, pages filling with questions, quotes, and random ideas instead of numbers: 'What if the real high isn't in escaping reality, but in facing it?' It was during one of these morning reading sessions that he first stumbled upon the research paper. His coffee had gone cold as he absorbed the scientific language about psilocybin's effects on treatment- chronic depression.

In the soft glow of his laptop screen, Alex traced the molecular structure of psilocybin—a key-shaped compound that promised to unlock doors in his mind, rejuvenate cells and break sealed traumas. Topics ranging from McKenna's ethnobotanical studies, J. Narby's "The Cosmic Serpent," and scientific papers on DMT's effects on the brains default mode network—enchanted him.  The insightful barista started keeping his coffee hot, recognizing the look of someone mining for truth. The science fascinated Alex: DMT, the active compound in ayahuasca, didn't just bind to serotonin receptors like psilocybin—it opened doorways in consciousness that modern neuroscience was just beginning to map out. But it was the traditional knowledge that really caught him: how the Shipibo shamans spoke of the brew as a teacher, the divine wine of the jungle, not a drug. The possibility of inner alchemy, the inner knowing deeply resonated, this might be it.

The greenhouse became his laboratory of change. Among his legal plants, Golden Teacher mushrooms now grew with intention. Each 0.2 - 0.5 milligram of dried powder capsules measured with the same precision he once used for cocaine, but this time in service of healing rather than escape. The irony wasn't lost on him—using a dealer's tools to break free from the addict’s life.

Soon, like a master key opening long-forgotten rooms in an abandoned mansion, each microdose revealed another chamber of his consciousness. The dusty corridors of old thought patterns gave way to sun-filled spaces of possibility. His journal entries shifted from desperate escape plans to maps of inner territory. But as clarity sharpened, so did the recognition that psilocybin was just the beginning. Late one late afternoon, as rain tapped against the hideout windows, a documentary about Ayahuasca ceremonies caught his attention. Where the mushrooms had been keys to locked rooms, Ayahuasca summoned like an architect offering to rebuild the entire house with a new door to his being.

Metamorphosis was the documentary’s name.  The synchronicity almost felt too perfect. A 4:44 PM YouTube notification flashed on his phone, a time his old self would have dismissed as coincidence. But here he was, watching shamans guide seekers through ancient ceremonies. He saw this documentary before… The Ayahuasca sequences in the documentary hit differently this time. The jungle scenes called to him like a forgotten homeland, the Icaros (the sacred songs of the plant) awakening something that psilocybin had only whispered about.  Where once he'd seen only exotic ritual, he now recognized a map to something he'd been circling his whole life. His journal entry that night revealed the shift: Psilocybin showed me the door, but Ayahuasca was calling me home. There's a difference between healing wounds and complete rebirth—like choosing between repairing a broken house and building a new house discovering that you're actually the architect of your life.

As his research became obsessive and methodical, the Victorian house itself seemed to respond to his inner transformation.

Each day brought new understanding, as if the building itself was teaching him. The space evolved alongside his consciousness, room by room, thought by thought. His spiritual transformation unfolded in three natural phases, each mirrored in the house's metamorphosis: First came the stripping away—removing unnecessary possessions became a physical meditation on the Zen principle of non-attachment. Fear dissolved with each discarded item and cleared surface. Then emerged the cultivation phase, where the greenhouse work became a living metaphor for inner growth. Every seedling tended reflected patience learned, every plant thriving spoke of discipline earned.  Finally came integration, where the distinction between inner and outer space dissolved. The whole house transformed into a meditation hall, every action becoming prayer. The space that once felt like a prison had become a monastery, each room holding a different aspect of his practice. The ventilators' steady hum transformed into his meditation symphony—and after harvest empty rooms became teachers, and the greenhouse evolved into his altar.

During their Thursday walks, Jenny's intuition cut through his careful explanations. "Your voice has that tone again," she said, her unseeing eyes somehow finding his face. "Like when you first started talking about the mushrooms and ayahuasca. But different this time." "It's like..."  Alex searched for words she would understand, finding them rising from somewhere deeper than thought. "What if the real journey isn't about fixing what's broken, but about discovering what was whole all along? What if the Ayahuasca calling isn't an escape but a return home, to myself?"

As clarity crystallized into purpose, the outside world seemed determined to test his conviction. Like ripples disturbing still water, rumors began trickling in through concerned friends and half-whispered conversations at meetups in the greenhouse. Ray, always the worrier, had started spreading word about supposed gang movements, new prison orders, and formed search parties—none of which Alex could verify because he stopped trusting anyone within the circle and outside of it. Inside he knew the time had come to move on. Even as he built his new life, the echoes of his old one wouldn't fade completely. Each text from Ray about gang movements felt like a magnet tug back toward chaos. But where once he might have responded with panic or aggression, he now found himself responding with something new: compassion and stoic peace. "They're still looking where I was," he wrote in his journal. "Fighting shadows with more shadows." True or not, he had to take extra care when traveling on buses or trains— and conclude his next moves.

Now appearing as a total stranger on a public train, blending among other commuters like a ghost. His new colleagues, who'd grown protective and nervous of their reformed teammate, kept urging him to lay low, their well-meaning advice tinged with an anxiety he hadn't asked for. But Alex knew better than to let unconfirmed stories dictate his path. The occasional black Range Rover that caught Ray's attention was probably just that—a car, nothing more. 

The decision struck him the morning after his daily ritual—Alex opened his laptop and bought a one-way ticket to South America, Peru—a decision that felt right. The transaction realized less like planning a trip and more like accepting an invitation he'd been holding for eleven years. With the ticket purchased, Alex spent the next three month preparing for two final commitments— leave the house in Cearphily in the shape he had received it, while dodging his so-called partners; and create a farewell for blind community members that would bridge his past and future in the most unlikely of places.

It was Alex’s idea to organize an unusual dinner party at The Clink Restaurant, a stylish fine dining place run by prison inmates.  Oh, the irony of it all—a stark institutional architecture softened by candlelight and crisp linens, much like Alex's own metamorphosis.

That unforgettable night guard towers loomed against twilight while inside, wine glasses clinked in an unlikely sanctuary where members of the Royal Blind Society gathered for a fun night out, not to bid him farewell; no one knew it was Alex's last time with them.  In this space where inmates learned culinary artistry, Alex saw his own story reflected in every carefully plated dish—raw life elements transformed through dedication into something extraordinary. When his eyes met those of a young server whose hands shook while pouring wine, Alex recognized his former self, that thin line between confinement and freedom crystallized in a moment of shared understanding.

"While planning my escape, I attended Toastmasters every Thursday," Alex admitted to Jenny in a quiet voice, as her silver hair caught the candlelight. "Trembling through speeches about Welsh cakes and life lessons. The heart has its own logic, doesn’t it?"

Jenny replied in a voice that saw nothing but felt everything: "Like an anxious man choosing to guide the blind, while he himself needed to be led."

Alex never forgot her wise smile after those words, as if she had known all along.

The prison restaurant was more than a posh kitchen; it was a crucible where society’s discarded men learned to create beauty from scraps. Here, limitations weren’t barriers but invitations—to reimagine and rebuild. Alex had shared his own descent, tracing his fall from boardrooms to backstreets, from business plans to drug runs, his soul pawned off in increments until redemption arrived, unannounced and undeniable.

Evening approaching to the end, the final security gate's buzz cut through his reverie. Behind him, The Clink's windows cast purple-amber light into the Welsh night skies, carrying fragments of laughter and clinking glasses—sounds of redemption in progress. Through a barred window reflection, he caught a glimpse of a same young server wiping down a table—his hands steadier now than when he’d first poured the wine.

Suddenly Alex reached into his jacket and tightened his grip on the flight ticket printout, like he subtly wanted to confirm to himself that he is not staying here behind the bars. By this time tomorrow, he’d be somewhere over the Atlantic, leaving one life behind to chase the unknown. Outside a searchlight from the guard tower swept the lot, catching his reflection in the gate’s reinforced glass. For a breath, he saw himself doubled—past and present, superimposed like a misaligned photograph. Then the light shifted, and only one image remained.

The guard's "Goodnight, Mr. Alex" would be the last words he'd hear in this chapter of his life.  Alex nodded, stepped forward, and let the heavy iron bar door swing shut behind him. Jenny’s parting words echoed in his mind:

"The bravest thing isn’t starting the journey, Alex. It’s continuing when every rational voice tells you to stop and turn back."

The night air carried hints of rain, distant mountains—scents of freedom and possibility intertwined.

NEXT WEEK! Chapter 32 : Quantum Jump into Authenticity

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