From My Heart

“Love the hand that fate deals you and play it as your own.”
— Marcus Aurelius

This book wasn’t born from comfort.

It rose from a long hunt for wholeness—through love, loss, betrayal, and at last, a fire that burned away everything but the truth. I died in every way but the physical to write it.

What remained wasn’t the self I’d defended, but the truth I’d been avoiding.

From the silence that followed came clarity—and from that clarity, this map: my reckoning, my offering, and my refusal to let anyone else hold the pen of my story.

I did not begin this journey from stable ground.

Very early, before I had language for experience, my reality fractured. A story I depended on broke apart beneath my feet, and the world I trusted collapsed into something I could not understand.

It wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was simply the shape my fate took—a wound without a villain.

But the impact of that wound split something in me that would take decades to repair: the ability to trust my own perception, my own innocence, my own worth.

I carried that fracture into adolescence and adulthood—not as memory, but as architecture: a nervous system braced for misunderstanding, a heart trained to expect exile, a mind convinced that truth could be taken from me with a single sentence.

This book is the long, spiraled path back through that break.

A name arrived to me in 2022, during a period of intense immersion in spiritual and shamanic containers. I heard it as a mythic phrase more than a title: Ater Draco Borealis.

When it first surfaced, I was wary. I recognized the shimmering trap of the “spiritual ego”—the part of us that wants a Latin phrase to feel special, separate, or powerful. I knew that for 99% of my life, I am just Jóhann.

But I also noticed something else. The name wasn’t a label for my personality; it was a frequency for my nervous system. It only felt “true” when I was completely anchored in my Serene Center—open, fully present, and integrated. The moment I slipped into fear or posturing, the name felt like a costume.

I realized the name wasn’t a crown I had earned; it was a tuning fork—something I could use as a private calibration rather than a public title.

Ater: the descent into darkness that cannot be bypassed.
Draco: the serpentine force weaving shadow into wisdom.
Borealis: the northern lights—echoing my mother’s name, Áróra.

I held onto it as a private metric.

That name led me to the realization that birthed this book: that the work is not to chase the Dragon or slay it, but to inhabit that rare state of integration where the Dragon is simply what you are.

This name serves not as a doctrine, but as a guidepost, aimed at three questions that have tracked me all my life:

My roots are Icelandic stone and sea—golden sands, volcanic earth, and fjords carved by time. My blood runs from the Westfjords; Reykjavík raised me, shaped me, and held the first fractures in my becoming.

Diagnosed with Tourette’s at seven, I learned systems early—patterns, logic, structure—while my own body felt foreign, unpredictable, and often unsafe. Bullied, abused, abandoned, I internalized the lesson too young: that to survive, I must abandon myself first. It took decades to understand the cost of that fracture in integrity.

Yet lifelines appeared: weightlifting, which steadied my nervous system; music, which spoke truths my mouth could not shape; and Dungeons & Dragons, which became medicine for imagination, connection, and belonging. These were not hobbies. They were survival strategies—portals into worlds where I could breathe.

Fatherhood opened a deeper portal still.

A thirteen-year partnership ended in 2017, and the years that followed (2018–2024) became a forge: psychedelics and spiritual openings, flawed forays into kink and tantra, profound truths and equally profound blind spots.

Many spaces promised healing yet subtly forbade grief, rage, or rupture. Naming the shadow threatened the fantasy—and taught me why consent, accountability, and non-harm must be the ground of any genuine awakening.

Late in the spiral, language arrived for the pattern: ADHD in 2022, autism in 2024. But the breaking had been building quietly for years—a decade of overextension masked by competence, where coping and prescription blurred into one another.

Post-COVID heart issues in 2022 led to surgeries ranging from abdominal to cardiac catheterization. Yet I kept pushing. A high-stakes promotion in October 2023 became a final grasp for external validation. Weeks later, while still recovering, a prescription for Elvanse (stimulants) destabilized what little biological reserve I had left.

In February 2024, unrelenting pressure converged, tipping me into a complete breakdown—a shimmering psychosis braided with rage, grief, and betrayal. For those who read the stars, this collapse occurred exactly as Saturn crossed my Midheaven—the mythic point of public standing—symbolically forcing me to confront the unsustainable architecture of my life. I made mistakes. I hurt people. Intention did not spare impact.

By late summer I stepped into sobering silence to rebuild my life, my mind, my body, my boundaries, my sanity, my sovereignty from the ground up—piece by piece.

I stripped everything back to the studs to understand how to stand again.

The writing began in the dark of winter, scratching out pages while in transit—from the silence of Austria to the heat of Portugal, from the cliffs of Mallorca to the volcanic soil of Tenerife. I built the book as I built myself: recursing, returning to old places to heal old layers, and editing by breath.

What started as a facilitation framework became an account of turning toward truth—less a system than a mirror; less a teaching than a reckoning. And eventually, it became something more: a narrative inversion that healed me even as I wrote it.

A mirror. A fire. A path carved from fracture and flame.

In its own way, this book is my love letter to those who ripped open my wounds.

While the details are mine, the patterns are not. Most of us will, at some point, face the breaking of a story we believed was ours to protect.

I am still healing. Messy. Fallible. Human. Like the Dragon woven through these pages, I’ve been forged where wound meets wisdom, where fracture meets fire—a single filament in the vast weave that binds us all. This is a living text, more like software than scripture; it will keep evolving through iterative cycles of release and refinement, incorporating the feedback loop between author, content, and community. Treat it as open-source spirituality—something to test, patch, and “fork” with your own experience.

How I Work: Tools, Skepticism, and the Ethical Frame

I live between worlds: technical and poetic, scientific and symbolic—lenses that sometimes contradict and often complete each other.

My grounding in these worlds is not casual. It began at the University of Iceland in 2005, studying neural networks and the architecture of machine learning. I learned early that if you do not reset and reflect during training, you reinforce the distortions you are trying to understand. This is true in code, and it is true in the soul.

I’m skeptical of astrology, yet I notice the strange accuracy of certain transits in my own life; my background in machine learning taught me that patterns both illuminate and deceive, so I treat them as hints, not verdicts.

I use modern tools—including AI—as scaffolding for clarity; the insights and responsibility remain human. Bias is not only a machine’s flaw—it is a human condition I work to surface and correct.

At the heart, the map is simple:

I treat reality as a deeply connected field—what this book later names the Entangled Firmament. Nothing happens “to me, alone.”

Actions ripple through bodies, relationships, and culture; those ripples, not our self-story, define consequence. That is why ethics and consent are not decorative add-ons but part of how reality works.

Throughout the book I return to questions of impact, accountability, and repair; you’ll meet clearer frameworks and checklists in the guidance and ethics chapters.

This is not a final word. It is a spiral map—a mirror and a fire; a guide I once needed, now offered to you.

Map of the Five Energetic Bodies—Form, Eros, Soul, Archetypal, and Void—arrayed along a luminous central axis.
Visual anchor for the Five Energetic Bodies introduced throughout the book.

To Those Along the Way

To those I’ve hurt, and those who’ve hurt me:

Thank you. I love you.

It could not have unfolded any other way.
May our scars heal together.

To My Sons

My noble primary stones of the sea.
My helpers. My deepest treasures.
My dragon-blooded kin.

I love you infinitely. I am always here.
As the pattern within my heart
beats within the light of yours.

A Reckoning, Not Redemption

This is more than my story; it is a map drawn from wounds for anyone navigating the complex terrain of spiritual and alternative communities, unregulated power, and the hidden dynamics of relational trauma. This book is not my redemption. It is my reckoning—and my offering.

May it help you hold paradox, listen to your body, and awaken the Dragon within—living that power with ethical clarity.