Tahnee's Journey Through The Continuum Of Terrains
Tahnee's Personal Journey Has Had Two Main Drivers:
1. to understand people
2. to heal her body
2. to heal her body
Tahnee's Fascination With Human Dynamics
Tahnee’s urge to understand what makes people tick started early. Growing up in Melbourne, Australia, Tahnee had a ‘set-up’ with lots of contrast in it, which caused her to become very curious about human nature. Tahnee grew up in a very close, loving family, yet all four members had very different personalty types and were at different Terrains, which caused lots of misunderstandings and conflicts. As a child Tahnee was at the Reflection-Based Terrain (Diamond), as was her sister. Yet her father was a very stable, kindly practical man at the Order-Based Terrain (Square), and her mother was an intuitive, abstract visionary who expanded from Diamond entrepreneur to Circle raw-foodist to Spiral energy-worker over the course of her childhood. Her parents weren't able to really understand each other and Tahnee found herself mediating between them at a very young age.
The environment outside the home also provided young Tahnee with lots of contrasts. Tahnee lived within a traditional Square neighborhood and extended family, yet her home family culture was ‘new age’ and vegetarian. Her parents became involved with a Personal Development centre, where Tahnee was exposed very early to many ideas from the Connection-based Terrain (Circle). Tahnee also had contrast in her schooling, starting her life at a strict religious primary school run by Square Traditionals, then moving at the age of 12 to a secular high school run by Square Moderns. All of these contrasts in her childhood world meant that Tahnee had people in her life—family, relatives, neighbors, friends and teachers—who each saw the world from radically different perspectives and often did not understand each other at all. And being at Diamond herself in a largely Square world, she always questioned the mainstream thinking around her and felt like she didn't fit in. As Tahnee grew up, she was able to see the subtle dynamics playing out within her family and school environment. Sometimes she felt like she could see situations unfolding in slow motion, like Keanu Reeves in ‘The Matrix’, and could pinpoint the exact moment when a particular word or action would trigger off an argument. As her innate understanding of human dynamics became more obvious, she was often called upon to mediate between people and to play the role of peacemaker, and this only deepened her yearning to understand how people ticked.
Tahnee’s fascination with the differences in people was also stimulated by the larger world around her. As a child, Tahnee devoured books, television and movies and spent a great deal of time writing stories. She was always fascinated by the characters in these stories, by the way they saw the world and the values and beliefs that drove their behavior. This love of stories and writing has continued throughout her life.
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Tahnee has entered in many different worlds over the course of her life, observing the different people and perspectives in each. She has spent time in the fast-paced corporate world while working as a lawyer; in the refined world of high academia while studying her Masters in law at Oxford University; in the creative world of filmmaking while chasing a career as a screenwriter; in the entrepreneurial world while working as a global public speaking mentor; in the self-help world of personal development while running workshops for women; in the change-maker world while facilitating environmentalist programs; in the quiet world of healers and bodywork while working as a Feldenkrais Practitioner; in the inner spiritual world while organizing workshops for spiritual teachers and running spiritual groups; in the tantric and shamanic world while exploring her own embodiment, and indeed in many other worlds. She has always been struck by the profound differences between people in all these environments and has always sought to understand what drove these differences.
Later in life Tahnee hosted her own global online radio show, ‘Tahnee Talk’, where she interviewed conscious awakened people from around the world. The fascination with people and their stories that Tahnee had enjoyed her whole life now blossomed into full expression. In her interviews, Tahnee focussed not on her guests’ dramas and hard-done-by stories, but on their deepest personal awakenings, the realizations that had changed their lives, and the processes by which they developed their awareness. This work fed Tahnee's deep interest in people's personal spiritual evolution.
Over the years, Tahnee has immersed herself in many different systems that seek to explain the differences between people - such as Myers Briggs, the Enneagram, Wealth Dynamics, Astrology, Human Design, the Gene Keys, and many more - seeking to understand herself, to figure out why the people she knew were so different from each other and to work out why people in our world don’t seem to be able to get along. Yet, for all she learned from these profound systems, she came to realize that there was something deeper going on here. As the Model of the Ten Terrains of Consciousness began to be revealed to Tahnee and her colleague Allen, she found that it explained everything she had ever experienced in her family environment, in her schooling, in the wide range of experiences she had enjoyed around the world and in the human stories she had seen and heard throughout her life.
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Tahnee's Personal Healing Journey
Tahnee’s path through the Terrains came from her own healing journey of bringing herself from disconnection back to wholeness. As a child at the Reflection-Based Terrain (Diamond), Tahnee had struggled against the constraining dogma of her Square Traditional religious primary school, not fitting in with the conservative children there. As a teenager she moved to a more modern Square high school, where she was able to throw herself into creative pursuits such as music, theatre, debating and learning languages, and had a small circle of close friends. But she never felt comfortable in the very mainstream social fabric of the school, and was sometimes bullied. She also struggled inside her complex family dynamics, where she was the one to hold everything together. These childhood pressures caused her to become overweight, out of touch with her body, and to escape into the world of books and stories and other mental pursuits.
Tahnee spent the first 26 years of her life at the Reflection-Based Terrain (Diamond) and throughout these years she strove to find her own unique identity. Being at Diamond among mostly Square Moderns at her high school and university meant that Tahnee always felt a little on the outer. Throughout her teenage years at Diamond, she was a true spiritual seeker. She became vegetarian, started doing cleanses, went on yoga retreats and enjoyed chanting and kirtan. All the while, she was firmly in the 'artsy' subculture at her school with the few Diamond kids she could find, excelling in all things creative as well as having great academic success. During these years she dreamed of becoming a famous novelist. She longed to study at Oxford University in the UK, where her hero Oscar Wilde had gone. To that end she studied Arts/Law at University, majoring in English Literature.
Tahnee had a very slow transition into the Connection-Based Terrain (Circle) which spanned a number of years. It started when she severely injured her back at age 26 and had to spend several months in bed. At the time, she was a high-powered lawyer at a top Australian law firm, and had been living a sophisticated social life like a 'Sex And The City' character! She had spent many months striving to win a scholarship to Oxford to study a masters in law there, and she was poised to head off on this adventure. During her long months unable to walk, Tahnee was forced to completely reassess her life. Yet, she was still on the trajectory she had set up for herself before her shift, therefore she took up the scholarship to Oxford, despite being in this state of physical pain and spiritual confusion. At Oxford, while living with constant back pain, she faced the challenge of hovering between the Diamond Terrain of intellect and the Circle Terrain of heart, all the while living in this most traditional of Square environments.
Tahnee's back pain continued while she was at Oxford, until it became a chronic 24/7 reality for her, a relentless cattle prod pushing her to shift from Diamond to Circle. She struggled on with her studies despite the pain, yet she started to wonder if her pain might go if she just followed her heart. So she decided to pour her energy into her first love, creative writing. She spent the remainder of her years at Oxford spending most of her time writing plays, pantomimes and film scripts, instead of focussing on her law studies. After completing her Oxford studies (with surprisingly good results), she decided to leave the law altogether and jump full time into her childhood dream of being a writer. She moved to London and started down the long road of becoming a screenwriter. Despite continuing to have debilitating back pain, she soon found herself living the glamorous life of a writer, traveling around Europe to film festivals, having adventures and shmoozing amongst the film industry. Yet because she was shifting further and further towards Circle, this very Diamond lifestyle was no longer in alignment with her. Tahnee's Spirit did not allow this state of disconnect to go on for long. Her dreams of success as a screenwriter came crashing down when her body finally gave out completely and she found herself bedridden with severe chronic pain, unable to walk or even to write. One again, she found herself in bed for months, barely able to move.
Defeated by the agonizing pain, Tahnee returned to Australia at age 30 where she commenced a two year period of being mainly bedridden, trying everything she could to get well. She tried treatment after treatment, even spending six months in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber for four hours a day. It was during this period that Tahnee completed the transition into the Connnection-Based Terrain (Circle). She started to realize that when leaving the law to become a writer, she had changed what she was ‘doing’ but had not changed who she was ‘being’. She realized that the time had come to live completely from her heart and to let go of all goals, dreams or other mental intentions. She set aside her identity as a 'brilliant international lawyer and glamorous creative writer' and allowed herself just to BE. This completed her full transition to Circle.
Now at Circle, Tahnee spent the next two years in a full time healing journey. She let go of all "doing" and "work" and gave in to the fact that she was essentiallly crippled. She explored many different healing and medical modalities during that time, always believing that someone would help her get better. After two years of this, Tahnee realized that there was no one who could 'fix' her, it was up to her to heal herself. This moment of Self-Responsiblity was the start of Tahnee's next long Terrain journey: from Circle to Spiral. She decided to investigate for herself how her body was moving and to discover exactly what was causing her body pain. This led her to find the Feldenkrais Method, an ingenious modality where people deeply investigate their own movement patterns and discover more efficient, effortless and painless ways to move. Being stunned at how much her pain was improving, Tahnee threw herself into the four-year Feldenkrais Practitioner Training Program, which was a profoundly life-changing journey for her on every level.
Through her Feldenkrais training, Tahnee became aware of a great many dysfunctional patterns in her life–patterns of moving, thinking, sensing, and behaving. As her stiff body freed up and she rediscovered her own authentic way of moving, she also found herself changing how she was reacting to her family and how she was embodying her life in general. This was the start of Tahnee’s commitment to what she now calls "Awareness-Based Living", which is now the guiding principle for how she lives her life. Now in her thirties and feeling much better in her body, she began a practice as a Feldenkrais Practitioner, working with clients 1:1 and running classes and workshops. After all her years as a ‘mental’ person at Diamond, spending these years at Circle working deeply with her own body and with other people’s bodies was a profound healing for Tahnee.
These years at Circle were all about living from the Heart. Whilst at Diamond, Tahnee had learned to live from her head as a coping mechanism, and this had caused her many health problems and a sense of disconnection with herself. Now at Circle en route to Spiral, she finally started to let herself be guided by her heart in each moment. She realized that she had been living in her 'masculine', in ‘doing’ mode, trying to ‘get things done’ and ‘achieve’ and ‘make things happen’, as many of us are conditioned to do in our society. Now, as part of her recovery from chronic pain, Tahnee realized that she needed to live more in her feminine, to allow things to come to her, to allow life to flow, to come from response rather than initiation, and to spend much more time simply ‘Being’ rather than doing.
This shift from head to heart and from masculine to feminine affected every single part of Tahnee’s life. It changed the way she connected with her friends; instead of always being the funny entertaining one she started listening deeply and holding space for others to shine. It changed the way she dated men; she started magnetizing them to her by her radiance rather than chasing them. It changed the way she ran her business: she started trusting that the right clients would come to her if she stayed true to her Self, rather than pursuing new clients.
Tahnee has moved in many different worlds over the course of her life, observing the different people and perspectives in each. She has spent time in the fast-paced corporate world while working as a lawyer; in the refined world of high academia while studying her Masters in law at Oxford University; in the creative world of filmmaking while chasing a career as a screenwriter; in the entrepreneurial world while working as a global public speaking mentor; in the self-help world of personal development while running workshops for women; in the change-maker world while facilitating environmentalist programs; in the quiet world of healers and bodywork while working as a Feldenkrais Practitioner; in the inner spiritual world while organizing workshops for spiritual teachers and running spiritual groups; in the tantric and shamanic world while exploring her own embodiment, and indeed in many other worlds. She has always been struck by the profound differences between people in all these environments and has always sought to understand what drove these differences.
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The next evolution in Tahnee’s journey was when she realized that she was finally well enough to begin contributing to the world in larger ways. She became a volunteer facilitator for the ‘Awakening The Dreamer, Changing The Dream Symposium' in her spare time, a global Circle movement committed to bringing about “an environmentally sustainable, socially just and spiritually fulfilling human presence on this planet”. She found that she enjoyed doing this kind of inspirational public speaking, and that she loved holding space for the personal transformation of large groups of people. As a result of her involvement with the Symposium, Tahnee’s own Awareness-Based Living deepened, from an awareness of her body, her mind, her behaviors, her heart and her deeper feelings, to now a deep connection with the Earth itself, with indigenous peoples, with the ancestors and with future generations.
At this point, Tahnee's Infinite Self was preparing her to make the jump to Spiral. Now in her mid 30s, Tahnee was in Bali at a conference of social entrepreneurs, when she met her next great teacher: Keith Mason, a Consciousness Trainer from New Zealand who was himself at the Coherence-Based Terrain (Spiral). Keith opened up a whole new world for Tahnee, teaching her all about Self Responsibility and truly embodied Self Love. Tahnee learned how to take even greater responsibility for the life that she was creating and for the situations and dynamics that were showing up in her life. Keith also helped Tahnee to remember that she was truly a Spiritual Being and that she had telepathic and intuitive abilities that she had been denying her whole life.
Having spent so much of her teenage years in the personal development ‘new age’ community of the 1980s and also having had a highly intuitive and spiritual mother, since childhood Tahnee had held a lot of judgments about ‘spiritual’ people and she had been running from them for much of her life. This had been part of what had driven her to hide in the corporate world. Keith showed Tahnee a very grounded, practical kind of spirituality, and this allowed her a way back to her innate energetic abilities that felt less scary to her. He taught her how to sense energy and how to work with energetic boundaries; how to discern between different frequencies in the spirit world; and how to connect to higher guidance beyond her thinking mind.
At this point, Tahnee started to really embrace her own Cosmic nature. She went on to learn from other teachers at Spiral and Toroid, who taught her even more about spirit beings, about connecting to different levels of light in the spirit world, about past lives, about the holographic nature of reality and dimensions etc. She began to bring information through from the subtle realms and to connect regularly to her own Higher Self. Over time, her view of life expanded in ways she had never imagined when she was younger, and eventually she crossed the Event Horizon from Circle into Spiral and this new multidimensional life became her daily reality.
This internal shift to Spiral started to spill over into the work Tahnee was doing. Over the years of her personal healing journey, Tahnee had been surprised to see that her public speaking style had shifted from the kind of witty, mentally-driven charisma of her Diamond lawyer days to a much more fluid, heart-centered Circle warmth, as a result of the body freedom gained from her Feldenkrais Training and the heart-opening from her Symposium training. After her jump to Spiral, she saw her style shift yet again, to a very inspiring, spontaneous style of speaking drawn from her experiences of bringing information through from her Higher Self. She started teaching other women how to do public speaking from the heart, without planning, letting their higher knowing come through them spontaneously. She went on to run online trainings around the world, teaching women how to speak with ‘feminine power’. She brought her Feldenkrais expertise into this work, teaching women how to speak with their whole body, in a graceful, fluid, feminine way. This work led naturally into Tahnee running her own radio show, using her charismatic, warm and authentic personality to hold space for her conscious guests to shine.
At this point, Tahnee was now fully embodying the Coherence-Based Terrain (Spiral). She was taking responsibility for the reality she was creating moment to moment, was managing her energy and her energetic boundaries, was listening to her own Inner Authority and her own higher guidance when making decisions, and was working on forgiveness and compassion so that she could let go of her childhood stories. She had realized her own value as a woman and as a person and was finally in a place of true Self Love. Now at age 37, she was finally ready to meet Allen David Reed, who became her life partner for the next 6 years.
Meeting Allen was life changing for Tahnee, as his love for her allowed her to blossom even more deeply into her true Self. Tahnee met Allen only a few months after her Spirit started her on the evolutionary journey from Spiral towards the Fractal-Based Terrain (Toroid), the very Terrain that Allen was at then. His incredible insight and expanded Toroid awareness allowed her to see aspects of her patterns and filters that she had not seen before, and to shift these. The challenging crucible of their interpersonal relationship dynamics forged even greater personal growth and expansion for her, requiring her to work through much of her deepest childhood and past-life trauma.
The development of the Ten Terrains of Consciousness Model flowed naturally out of Tahnee and Allen's conversations and from their joint quest to understand our world. The combination of their two perspectives, their two genders, their two skill-sets, their two vastly different life histories and their two completely different personalities laid the stage for a very fecund meeting of minds and profound meeting of hearts. The field of love and deep inquiry between them created a space for Truth to flow. Yet the Ten Terrains Model was creating Tahnee and Allen as much as they were creating it, for it required them to clear everything within themselves that was blocking its spreading out into the world and it required them to be constantly connected to Truth. This very project was preparing Tahnee for her jump to Toroid.
As Tahnee's Infinite Self slowly transitioned her towards Toroid, she had various Toroid teachers show up in her life. She spend several years doing very frequent clearings using a Toroid modality called 'Holographic Kinetics', using it to dramatically recreate her personal timeline and to shift so many dimensions of time that her reality started showing up completely differently. She became much more fractal in her awareness, and her innate understanding of human nature and the workings of our universe dramatically deepened.
In her early forties, Tahnee fully shifted into the Fractal-Based Terrain (Toroid). She stopped believing the reality around her and came to experience the world around her as a hologram that is recreated in every moment. She was finally able to discern Truth clearly enough that could see that her relationship with Allen was truly a Spiritual Partnership rather than a romantic, earthly relationship. Tahnee and Allen chose to allow their relationship to transition into a friendship and to love each other through this transition. This letting go drew on everything Tahnee had learned thus far in her life: to fully face and feel her deepest emotions; to ignore the fictions her mind was telling her; to listen to the truths that her body was telling her; to notice when traumas were activated and bring herself back to her center; to clear any holographic dimensions that were no longer serving her; and to deepen into full trust, and to show up every day in Service to Life.
This is where Tahnee finds herself now in her journey; in a place of peace, joy, understanding and inner harmony; deepening daily in her capacity to surrender to the Infinite. |
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Now read Allen's journey!