Before
In the “before” section of all this, it was probably the period right after finishing university in England, where I had studied architecture and then philosophy, before returning to Greece, where I grew up.
That first year back in Greece, my father — who had been struggling with depression for many years — was getting quite old, and dementia was starting to develop. It was just me and him at home, and I was taking care of him. But his health deteriorated quickly that year, and in October 2010, he passed away.
After that, there were many phases of grief. At the same time, I was trying to figure out what to do with my life after university. I was also in a relationship with a woman, and I started working as a freelance filmmaker in various roles and productions.
But the situation in Greece was difficult — financially, because of the crisis and the economy, and also professionally, because I didn’t really fit in. As the years passed, I became increasingly depressed and lost. Something inside me just wasn’t landing right on a subconscious level, and I knew I had to make a change.
Without really knowing what that would be, I took a leap of faith: I ended the relationship I had been in for about seven years, took the 300 euros I had in my hand, and went to the U.S.
I’m also half-American, and I had some connections on weed farms in California, so I went there to trim weed and figure out what to do with my life. After that first season was over, I thought about going down to Los Angeles to try to get into the film business there. That was in 2016.
Crisis
Just before I moved to Los Angeles, I went to Death Valley and ended up spending ten days there by myself in the desert. There was this deep sense of communion with something greater than me — a feeling of freedom, as if my new life was waiting for me.
As soon as I got to Los Angeles, I felt that sense of a new beginning. I knew a few people in town, and after a couple of months of networking and trying to find a job, I finally landed my first film gig.
But on the very first day of that job, an old injury from a snowboard accident came back to haunt me. I hadn’t known that I had ruptured my spleen years earlier, and apparently there was a cyst that decided to burst that day. It sent me straight to the ER — I remember crawling on all fours when I got inside.
I spent three or four days in the hospital while they ran all kinds of tests, trying to figure out what was wrong. During that time, the doctors mentioned the possibility of cancer — and then took it back. They did that three times, which was extremely difficult to process psychologically.
I was new in town, completely alone in the hospital, and they still couldn’t figure out exactly what was going on. That whole experience set me back a lot — mentally, emotionally, and financially. I lost that first job in L.A. and eventually went back to Greece to figure out my next move.
The only thing on the horizon was going back to the weed farms in Northern California, which I really didn’t want to do. I fell into a deep depression, was diagnosed, and started taking prescribed medication. I went back to Northern California anyway, and that period became one of my lowest points — being depressed, on pharmaceuticals, smoking a lot of weed, working on the farms, and feeling completely lost about what to do next. I truly had no idea where to go from there.
Chase
As soon as the season on the farms ended, one day I just decided to take all the pharmaceuticals I’d been prescribed and throw them in the garbage. They weren’t helping me think my way out of anything — they just numbed my feelings. I also stopped smoking weed.
After that, I got a job in Idaho at a ski resort. I thought that being up in the mountains and surrounded by nature would help everything clear itself out. But the living and working conditions there were, for lack of a better word, exploitative. So after some time, I realized that wasn’t for me either.
I decided to drive cross-country to my mother’s farm in Virginia to figure out my next step. There, I started working at a local Italian restaurant as a waiter — not as a career, but just something to make some money. Eventually, I left that job and started driving for Uber for about eight months.
I was living kind of in the middle of nowhere and spending a lot of time alone. My mantra during that period became “the only way out is in.” I began meditating every morning for at least half an hour.
Meanwhile, I was sending out resumes, trying to find a job in a production company — and eventually, I did. It wasn’t easy back then; I was still struggling with depression and this persistent feeling that something was deeply wrong with society in general. There was a voice inside me that couldn’t just fit into the norm or take things for granted.
I remember a quote from Krishnamurti that became like a compass for me: “It is no measure of good health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
Conflict
Slowly, I started getting more gigs in the film business and eventually began working for a production company in Richmond, Virginia. I worked my way up in the company, and after some time, they gave me my first directing project — a commercial for one of their big clients, a cruise line company. The first one went well, so they gave me a second.
On the surface, things seemed to be falling into place — I was making decent money and establishing myself professionally. But just before a big project I was set to direct, I ended up in the hospital again, this time from a spontaneous collapsed lung. Because I went to the hospital late, I nearly died.
When they operated on me, I had an out-of-body experience — I popped out of my body for a moment and saw the whole procedure from above. Then something told me, “It’s not your time,” and I went back into my body. I didn’t know what to make of that experience, so I didn’t tell anyone for a long time.
I had to go through more surgeries afterward, and because of all that, I lost my job at the production company. It took a while to recover, both physically and emotionally.
Once I was able to, I decided once again to head west. I drove cross-country and returned to Los Angeles because there was an opportunity with another production company that liked an idea I had for a Netflix documentary series.
But after that hospital experience, I had really been forced to face mortality — to ask what my life was truly about. Even though, on the surface, things seemed to be going well, I was getting panic attacks almost every day. Deep down, I knew Los Angeles, under those circumstances, wasn’t for me. I couldn’t just force myself to accept it.
So after working there for a while, I eventually went back to Greece to take care of my physical and mental health — and to finally stop chasing my tail in circles.
Breakthrough
When I came back to Greece, COVID had just started, and everything went into lockdown. Around that time, my involvement with cryptocurrencies — which I’d been into since 2015 — started going really well. Financially, I could finally take a big breath. I paid off my hospital bills and got some stability again.
Surprisingly, I actually enjoyed the lockdowns. It gave me time just to be with myself — no pressure to chase anything, no distractions, just space to let everything settle. For me, it turned out to be a great period of pause and reflection.
One of the first major breakthroughs during that time came from an intense ayahuasca experience I had on the exact anniversary of my father’s passing — ten years later. During that journey, I got to speak with him and resolve some of the unresolved issues between us.
Not long after that, I went on a trip with a friend to Egypt, while lockdowns were still in place. We ended up in the Great Pyramid, and we had it all to ourselves — it was incredible. While meditating in the King’s Chamber, I had an experience that was beyond words.
A few months later, I returned to Egypt again, this time with a group. We had a private visit to the Great Pyramid under the full moon during Scorpio season in 2021. Something happened again in the King’s Chamber — it felt like an activation of some kind. From those experiences, things began opening up for me in profound ways.
I’d always been scientifically minded, and while I’d heard people talk about metaphysical and spiritual experiences, I had never truly understood them — until I started having my own. Those direct experiences cracked something open in me.
Sometime after that, I met someone in Greece who works with the Akashic Records. I went to him for a reading and started connecting with other lives. He also runs a three-year course, which I began attending, practicing the meditations regularly. I kept up my daily meditation and added breathwork, which really helped after everything my body had been through in the hospitals.
Little by little, more things started to unfold — through dreams, meditations, and even spontaneous awakenings and memories of other lifetimes and information. Throughout all of it, I remained careful with the doors I was opening — not fearful, but approaching everything with respect.
After
From all of these experiences, I began drawing Sacred Geometry as a way of co-defining and grounding some of the philosophical and spiritual ideas that would come through dreams and meditations. The very first drawing I ever made came right after that first trip to Egypt — it was inspired by a vivid dream I had.
Since then, I’ve been creating these drawings for years, along with making land art using stones that I would collect from both natural and man-made sacred sites across Greece, Egypt, Belgium, and France. Whenever I collected stones, I would always leave some behind, arranging them into small altars as a kind of offering or balance.
At first, I didn’t even realize that what I was doing is something people call grid work. Over time, I started noticing that sometimes the stones themselves would seem to “tell” me where they wanted to go and when. I’ve continued doing this mostly on my own, in nature, following the guidance that comes through dreams, meditations, and synchronicities — without always needing to know why. Often, the meaning of it would reveal itself much later, on its own.
So I’ve kept going — with the stones and the drawings — and I’ll probably continue doing this for the rest of my life. It’s become my own way, my personal modality of navigating all of this.
After a third trip to Egypt, which happened just last year, I was invited again to the pyramids — someone had booked a private tour and asked me to come film promotional material for him. While inside the King’s Chamber, lying in the sarcophagus, something opened up in me even more deeply. I came out of that experience with a renewed certainty that I need to follow the ideas that come to me, even when I don’t fully understand them intellectually.
One of those ideas — which first came to me three years ago — is something I’ve recently begun developing more fully: a 13-month calendar based on the equinoxes and solstices, as a more natural framework for measuring time compared to what I see as the distorted structure of the Gregorian calendar.
I’ve named it The Solar Cross Calendar, and I plan to formally release it on the Spring Equinox of 2026. Working on this project has opened up a deeper inner dialogue about the things we, as a society, take for granted — the assumptions we rarely question, or excuse with phrases like “that’s just how the world has always been.”
But to be honest, even as a kid, it never made sense to me. I always felt that the world we know carries some fundamental distortions — distortions that have separated us from each other, and from the natural world itself.