This is a true story--part 3 and part 4

Part 3:

“Wani wachiyelo Ate omakiyayo (Father help me I want to live)
Oshiya chichiyelo (Humbly have pity on me)
Wani wachiyelo Atay omakiyayo (Father help me I want to live)
Wani wachiyelo Atay (Father I want to live)”
--“Peyote Healing” By Robbie Robertson


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Everything goes quiet. Silent. I am awake, and aware, but I feel as if I am not the same as before. There is this stillness. My body no longer twitches. There is no fear, no anger, no judgement. I want to laugh. I want to smile. I feel like I have just been reborn. I want to give myself a new name. I feel like I can remember who I am again. Who am I again?

I open my eyes. The world looks different. Sharper, crisper, more real. I see the people around me. I want to make a few jokes. Tell everybody I’m all right. But the truth is, I feel like this strange wonderful truck has just run over me. “What the hell was that all about?” I mean really, what the hell.

I sit up. I feel a bit self conscious. Just a bit. Everybody laughs. “You’ve just had you’re your first psychic surgery.” I’m all bandaged up. Xel-ha, K2’s daughter, has just put first aid tape on my shoulder and on my head. They take pictures of me. Everybody is laughing. I laugh too.

I have heard it said that on this plane of existence, it is a miracle if our heart is truly open for even the briefest period at all. I felt like a new born. Like I had my life back again. I looked at the faces around me and they were so warm so welcoming. I felt like I belonged, like I was part of a community, part of a group, and that I was wanted around.

These seem like small things. Shouldn’t we all have that? Shouldn’t we all live our lives like that? But how many of us do? How many of us can let others see us, just as we are, with no filters, no walls, and feel truly accepted. It is rarer than rare, my friends. And to be honest, to my ego, it was a bit terrifying. But as I sat there, it felt o.k. I felt o.k. I spoke and the voice really seemed like my own. I felt as if there was something to live for in life, that there was a purpose. The lightness in my heart had returned. The fear had, for the moment, vanished. The walls, for the moment, had been breached. What peace. What freedom.

And so I watched as my heart opened. I watched as I was able to let the love that surrounds me in. I watched as these people who cared about me took the time to love me. And then I watched as I started closing down around this openness. How long can one stay open in this world? It can be so painful.

And so, as the night was about over, I began to pick back up the remnants of my life. I began the process of putting back together the coating that surrounds me. Don Miguel Ruiz once told the story of Prometheus, the primordial thief of fire, in an interesting way. He said that Prometheus, while chained to the rock for stealing fire from the immortals, was not being punished as the eagle dismemberbed him day after day. Rather, the eagle was trying to free him from the bondage of his self, his ego, which kept him from being one with the immortal Gods. Every day the eagle would dismember him. Every night Prometheus would put himself back together again. He would begin the process of separation again. And so Prometheus lived. And so we live. To have a self image is to be in pain.

I imagine that our greatest hope lies in a refusal to completely surrender to our own hard heartedness, our own walls.

And so, that night, after I left K2’s, with a friend driving my home. I began the process of reassembling my ego.

This is no tragedy, in my opinion, it just is what it is. I believe that what we can do is when we begin to close down, work to open up just a little bit more, close down a little bit less. When we are seeing that we are closing, that our doors to the world are closing, we can reach out to another, extend into the world. Go past our walls.

Part 4:

The next day I return to K2’s. It is another achingly beautiful day in New Mexico. The morning sun is echoing off the grass. What was dark and invisible is now flooded in the clear light of day.

The other apprentices are there. I’m a bit sheepish around them. I feel lighter, but the walls have closed me off somewhat. I tell a few jokes. Do the little tap dance routine that is pretending to be someone.

We have class.

Afterwards, K2 call my aside. “What got you into this situation?” they ask. “Why were you easy prey for an entity?” They always ask good question. Being the good student I am, I look for the right answer. This one is pretty easy. I had lost my will to live. It wasn’t complete. It wasn’t total. But lately I had been feeling like “what is the point, where am I going? Why am I here?” That’s rarely a good place to be.

I have heard it said that we do not have suicidal thoughts out of a desire to die, rather it is a desire to live, a deep strong will towards a life that seemingly does not exist now. There I was with this aching desire to live a fuller deeper life. Unfortunately, at every turn I was blocked. At every turn the walls of ego would close in.

I dance, in my imagination. I sing, in my imagination. I am free, in my imagination. But in my life, I am quiet, silent, sometimes barely existing. And no matter how hard I have tried to free myself from my patterns and walls, they still are there. Don Juan says that “We do not break through our walls, we leap over them.” Kris says that it is just a simple choice. You choose Self, you choose your life, or you choose your pattern. In all of us there is a longing for life so deep, so profound, a longing to awake, to be free, to live our lives as our Selves. And yet, how many of us can and do live from that place?

So there I am, in the meditation room of my spiritual guides, with this longing to awaken, but feeling blocked at every turn. I am feeling self conscious and exposed as if they can see right through me.

Kalyn says, “So, you lost the will to live, eh, Joe. Where is your joy? Where is the search for meaning in your life? What happened to that?” I shake my head and feel pitiable. I don’t know where I lost it, or how I lost it. It just happened. There was no great tragedy in my life. By all accounts, my life was going well. But for me there was this vast emptiness that I could not fill. It was a sense of frustration with myself that I could not be more, that I could not do more. And my life felt hollow. I felt so separate from everybody and everything. Like I was just a ghost floating through the world.

Kris and Kalyn watch with me, as I look within to find the core of my sorrow. “Why do you hold yourself back?” Kalyn says. “What is within you that is so dark and horrible? Are you out there molesting children.” “No,” I say. “Are you out there butt raping men” This almost makes me laugh. “No.” “So what is so horrible within you? What is so dark?“ “I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know.” “Well, bring it all forth, bring it here now.”

I fragmented at an early age. There was so much anger and resentment in my household. My parents constantly fought throughout the first years of my life. When I was 3 years old my mother lost a set of twins. They were still born. The were choked by each others umbilical chords. In a sense, they strangled each other. At least that’s how my parents saw it. My parents decided that they were to blame, that it was the atmosphere of the house, the tension, like teeth gritting, grinding, breaking you down, that caused these two children to die.

My two younger sisters were named and buried. My mom went into a profound, pronounced depression. She would cry for hours and days at a time. My Dad developed an intense fear of closed spaces and of heights. He was simply terrified that God would come down and judge him. That God would send him to hell.

When Kalyn asks me to bring forth all that is dark and horrible within me, I am three years old. And my mother is crying. She has just lost the twins and the sorrow in the house in unfathomable. I go to comfort her, and she yells at me, she tells me to go away, and I am so hurt and so ashamed, and so angry, and so confused. It’s too much for me. I feel like my heart will explode. And as I see this I start crying. I hate crying in front of people. I hate showing my emotions, but at a certain point there they are, and until you can accept them as they are, you will never be able to accept yourself. So there I am crying on the floor of K2’s living room about something that happened to me more than 25 years ago. And I look at it, and that is my first memory. That is the foundation for my understanding of the world. And it is a shadow memory, not clear, not complete, but the feeling and the intensity of it live within me.

“Joe, it’s o.k. to let people see you.” Kalyn says. “Open your heart and comfort that child that you are. Give that child what it needs, what was missing in that moment.”