Joe Macnab

Joe grew up in Bath. He lost his father when he was nine. That early loss laid an underlying ground of instability, which he has since integrated into a philosophy rather than carried as a wound: nothing is stable, everything is in flux, and the work is to walk that paradox.

He came into practice young. Meditation and Raj Yoga in his teens. Formal yoga and massage during his years in London. A working classical actor by day, with a training instrument honed at Drama Centre London and a voice that came from years of formal voice and text work layered onto decades of mantra.

The three warning shots

For roughly ten months in his late twenties, during night meditation, Joe's third eye pulsed and throbbed so intensely that it kept him up for hours before suddenly stopping. Something was building.

Three preparatory experiences came in sequence. First, a bookshelf out-of-body: consciousness on the ceiling, body holding the book. Second, the sliced-open universe: as if the back of his head had been sliced off and the entire universe sat behind him, peering through his eyes into the world. Third, the daffodils at Archway tube: walking home through a small park in early spring, looking at the flowers, and snap — he became the daffodils, the trees, the sky, the ground, everything and everyone.

The event, and the two years of hell

The Kundalini awakening came in his late twenties. The switch had been turned on, and the switch had been broken off. Joe could not reconcile what he had received. For two years afterwards, every day felt like hell. Existential dread. Every breath conscious. Light too bright. Colours too vivid. Sounds too loud. Friends felt like strangers. His wife felt like someone he did not know.

"Like waking up in a movie and you're realising all the people in your life are just pretending. I was not the person from this dimension."

He was going to auditions, teaching, hiding the pain. Some days on set were terrifying. He could not talk about it. When he tried, it felt like a torrent about to sweep him away. The plant-medicine work and meditation he had done previously gave him the capacity to endure the anguish, but he held it all inwards. The inner voice said: when we get through this, it's going to be incredible, just hold tight.

Yoga as the way in

A friend who had newly trained as a yoga teacher invited Joe to her classes. Once a week, then twice. Initially horrible: shaking, sweating, exhausted afterwards despite having always been in good shape, which itself signalled how shattered his nervous system had become. The yoga slowly reset it. He attributes the first part of his healing to those classes. He built up to once daily, twice daily, sometimes three or four times a day. He practised with every teacher he could find.

Yogi Ashokananda and the integration

The first Prana Kriya class with Yogi Ashokananda left Joe feeling as though someone had shot him in the chest with a shotgun. A two-foot circular hole of unprocessed grief. The recognition that landed: most yoga practitioners are building up to awakening and integrating it as they go. Joe had already gone to the end of the rainbow and was completely disembodied. What Prana Kriya did for him was to ground his experience, embody him again, and integrate him back into reality.

Multiple visits to Tiruvannamalai followed. Himalayan Hatha first, as Yogi directed. Then Prana Kriya. Then Meditation and Mindfulness. India was, in Joe's words, the perfect mirror — the sublime and the ridiculous all wrapped in one.

Five years to rebuild

"It took five years total to be fully integrated from my awakening experience. But I was doing the work, desperately and frantically to start with. It felt like I was on a fast track. It was sink or swim time. I had to integrate all the medicine work, all the meditation. I was playing catch up to apply everything I'd ever known into my life. It had to now all be lived and authentic. My life was burned to the ground, everything I was, just a husk remaining. I had to rebuild everything from the ground up, brick by brick with a solid foundation, rooted in practice, experience and truth, raw and beautiful."

His first marriage ended during that rebuild. It landed on top of a reconstruction already long underway, and the void it left was the space into which Joe poured himself into Well Bath.

Tui Na and the shoulder

Alongside the yoga arc, a debilitating shoulder injury that had persisted for years finally rehabilitated fully through Tui Na therapy. This inspired Joe to study the practice under Errol Lynch in London: three years of clinical apprenticeship, including two years assisting and treating in Errol's clinic before practising independently. Joe has now been offering Tui Na for over fifteen years. It is the practice that resolves the injuries other approaches leave open.

The place he needed and could not find

Well Bath exists, in part, because it is what Joe needed when he was in the awakening crisis and could not find. What he needed most then, but did not have, was someone who had been through it. Someone who could reassure him it was going to be okay, encourage him that everything happening was for his betterment, and help reframe the whole thing.

That, in his own words, is what he is doing now. Helping to accept and integrate. Walking side by side with people through their crisis. A candle into a dark room.