From My Heart
Estimated reading time: 11 min
This book wasn’t born from comfort.
I spent much of my life trying to hold together what had broken early. I carried the ways I learned to survive into love until the life I had built around them collapsed.
My roots are Icelandic stone and sea: Westfjords blood, Reykjavík weather, volcanic ground, cold water, hard light. The tics were named Tourette’s when I was seven. At nine, home disappeared as I had known it. Other ruptures stayed private, but they shaped the same lesson: I learned vigilance before trust.
I reached for patterns, systems, and structure because they held when people did not. My body often felt foreign, loud, or unreliable. Safety became prediction: know the room before anyone spoke, brace before pain arrived, survive by noticing everything.
Weightlifting steadied my nervous system. Music spoke truths my mouth could not shape. Dungeons & Dragons, science fiction, and fantasy gave me structured worlds where imagination, danger, wonder, and belonging could breathe. These were not hobbies. They were lifelines.
My sons arrived one after the other through the passage of time. I loved them from the beginning, and becoming more whole has deepened how I love them. Fatherhood made responsibility less negotiable and my own fragmentation harder to hide.
For years, I tried to make attachment into home. I performed security through the identities of boyfriend and white-picket-fence husband, shaping myself into what I thought love required. Their mother and I separated in 2017, after thirteen years together. Other relationships followed.
Searching for love and belonging, I became a seeker without realizing it. By 2021, another relationship had ended, leaving me depleted. As buried grief and desire rose, I reached toward altered states, eros, and spiritual practice for meaning.
The search brought me into high-intensity initiatory and relational rooms, looking for community and language to understand what was breaking open in me.
Some of it was real. Some of it was hunger. Some of the work accelerated charge faster than I could integrate it, letting intensity masquerade as growth.
In January 2022, I learned that calcification in my coronary arteries placed me at the extreme end of cardiac risk for my age. My body had given me a warning. I kept going. That year, an ADHD diagnosis opened another door, but the help that came later gave more drive to a system already running hot.
In January 2023, I began carrying the name Ater Draco Borealis. At first, I grew inflated around it. Ater held the descent; Draco, raw power learning wisdom; Borealis, the northern light and an echo of my mother’s name, Áróra.
Neither I nor the rooms around me recognized how old wounding was driving me past capacity. Overwhelm was too easily mistaken for depth, character, or spiritual significance.
What I needed first was quieter and harder: ordinary days, self-presence, and enough ground to stay.
Those blind spots cost me most in intimacy.
In relationships, transcendent language made accountability easier to evade and raw erotic charge blurred boundaries. I tried to rescue, overfunctioned, and lost my own ground. My largest Shadow was people-pleasing. I abandoned myself and, often without knowing it, became what I thought others wanted. It was still manipulative: I hid my needs and limits, and they related to a version of me shaped around them.
I held on to the love I believed was there and to the belonging I projected onto people I loved. I was hurt inside those bonds. I also caused harm.
Some rooms promised healing while making grief, rage, or rupture feel like threats to the fantasy. That is where my ethics hardened: consent, accountability, and non-harm had to be the ground, or the fire would simply burn everyone.
By early 2024, I was crashing. Sleep thinned into scraps. My jaw stayed tight. Health faltered. Medication, coping, and spiritual overdrive tightened around one another. By February, I could no longer work.
That month exposed a collapse already underway. In March, during the final relational rupture, acute chest pain and physical alarm were treated as emotional failure. I stayed in the tension while my body screamed for me to stop. The architecture of my life could not keep going as it was.
An autism diagnosis that same month opened the door my childhood Tourette’s diagnosis had never reached. I could finally see autistic burnout: decades of masking, overfunctioning, sensory strain, and social translation pushing my system past capacity. Some of what I called seeking was overdrive wearing spiritual language.
The body was not failing in isolation. It was reporting a life built past capacity. I had mistaken vigilance for devotion and overfunctioning for love.
I hurt people. Intention did not spare impact. For months I could not regulate or sleep. That state matters; I remain responsible for what I did. During the crash and its aftermath, I was abandoned, and I abandoned others.
Distance let me see why every relational rupture had felt like a threshold. A younger part of me was losing home and family again, without knowing why and without being held. The more I feared losing connection to others, the more readily I abandoned myself. Endings meant ground disappearing, so I scrambled to rescue what was already gone and sabotaged the ground I was trying to save.
Grieving rage burned bridges. Some burns carried truth. Some were not clean. Some connections needed to end because staying required self-betrayal. Some were already failing. Some I helped break. I had to stop telling myself that sincerity exempted me from consequence.
By late summer 2024, I stepped into sobering silence and began rebuilding the bare structure of my life: body, boundaries, sanity, speech, work, and the simple ability to sit still without fleeing myself. The life of charge and escalation was still coming apart. I had to strip everything back to the studs until I could feel what would actually hold. Writing this book required more honesty than self-protection could survive. What was left after the burning did not scatter. It packed down, went dark, and held: the kind of cocoon only ash can make.
Through 2023 and 2024, my relationship with Ater Draco Borealis began to change. The name became a tuning fork: was I speaking from the ground I claimed, or wearing a costume?
I began writing this book at the end of December 2024, after the most unusual years of my life.
My motivation was practical. I had moved through fields shaped by psychedelics, neo-shamanic practice, tantra, Jungian thought, and psychology. I was drawn to them, but I never felt native to the culture around them. I came through another door: science, software, Western philosophy, and Nordic roots. The skepticism never fully left me.
Some astrological predictions and other signs have matched periods of my life with a closeness I still find uncanny. Saturn crossing my Midheaven near the height of the 2024 collapse is one example. My grounding in statistics and natural science makes me question the apparent fit. Yet these rhymes, together with what my Sun–Chiron relationship has meant for me, have kept me open to mystery beyond rational thinking. I try to convey and explore that openness in these pages.
Before co-creating with others, especially in retreats and facilitation, I needed to sort out what I trusted, what belonged to evidence, what belonged to myth, and what I could responsibly stand behind.
The child in me carried more than wounds. He carried a deep curiosity that never left, and three questions kept returning:
- How do I become whole?
- What is the fundamental nature of this reality?
- Why do I exist?
I built the book as I built myself—through reading, rewriting, looping ideas through AI tools, writing my own code to support the process, reflecting, iterating, recursing.
Gradually, the project changed. It stopped being only a framework for facilitation and became a mirror in which I faced and integrated those years. As I wrote, I began to learn to live alone without reaching for a partner simply to hide from aloneness. The pattern I had carried from one relationship into the next began to loosen.
Some nights I lay awake with my pulse hammering in my throat, waiting for morning. At other times, I kept returning to the keyboard, trying to write my way toward understanding. By then, the book was no longer an idea. It was pressure looking for language.
Some mornings it was just cold floor under my feet, winter dark at the window, and the work of staying in the chair until the sentence stopped lying.
As life grew quieter and I found stillness through writing, my own voice began to return. It did not descend from elsewhere; it came back the way feeling returns to a numb hand: painful, precise, impossible to fake.
Eventually, I put the name down. I am Jóhann. The Dragon matured in this book, and here it stays.
How This Book Took Shape
I live between technical and poetic, scientific and symbolic worlds. Studying neural networks and machine learning at the University of Iceland taught me a plain lesson: pattern recognition can reveal structure and reproduce distortion. What a system notices depends on its data, objectives, and feedback, and correlation is not causation. I carry that lesson here: every framework in this book is a lens, not a verdict.
I brought the habits of a programmer to the work of finding an honest sentence. AI, version control, tests, and an editorial system I built as the book grew help me surface patterns, catch drift, and revise. The choices, wounds, claims, and responsibility remain mine.
This is a living text, more like software than scripture. Test it against your own experience. Keep what holds. Patch what breaks.
My mind makes connections quickly, often between things usually kept apart. In this book, I have tried to slow those connections down and put them into words.
Reality exceeds every single language we have for it. What, if anything, survives translation across myth, science, philosophy, psychology, and lived experience? I follow a connection far enough to ask where it holds, where it breaks, and what it brings into view.
I keep returning to this relation:
Through ceaseless flow, what takes form affects the flow around it and can become part of the conditions through which further form becomes possible.
An insight takes form in a sentence. That sentence can change what I notice or how I respond. The next encounter can make me revise it.
The question of what holds together through change is personal too. What has remained of me as I have moved through such wildly different lives within this one? My bodily needs, desires, memories, and convictions have not always pulled in the same direction.
Wholeness is not completion. It is increasingly coherent relation between inner multiplicity, local boundary, and outer belonging.
For me, that means learning to bring these inner parts into relation, hold boundaries that give my life shape, and belong without abandoning myself. The work begins in how I listen, choose, and live with others, long before I understand everything moving within or around me.
You do not need to take in the whole map at once. The central image is simple:
- The Serpent is raw power awakening within.
- The Dragon is that power integrated—ethically held, acknowledged, embodied, and relational.
- We don’t chase or slay the Dragon; through practice, we learn to embody it.
I treat reality as a deeply connected field: the Entangled Firmament. In that field, impact outruns self-story. No awakening that refuses impact deserves trust. Whatever clarity lives in this book was learned in relationship, and often at cost.
A Reckoning, Not Redemption
I lost friends, reputation, health, work, masks I had mistaken for self, and the direction I thought I was walking. Some losses came from what happened around me. Some came from what I did. Some came from what I could no longer keep pretending to be.
Writing this book helped me integrate what had fragmented. It did not restore what was lost or undo what I had done. I still live with the cost of what happened and what I did. I am also more whole than I was.
I lived through the rage that erupted while I was still inside those wounds. I can forgive where forgiveness is real, including myself. Some wounds needed to be cauterized. Writing this book brought me back through the fire again and again. Each return changed what I could see, and some bleeding stopped.
Letting go did not happen all at once. I revisited, revised, and chose again. The process continues, but the commitment holds: I am done carrying what was never mine to keep. I am finished obeying the patterns that made belonging depend on abandoning myself. I am free to keep living my life.
This book grew from lived cost and a lifelong curiosity about wholeness, myth, and the nature of reality. I offer it to those who share that curiosity and want to follow it into the way they live.
May it help you hold paradox, listen to your body, and carry your fire with ethical clarity.
Before the path opens, we set the ground: your pace, your consent, and your right to stop.