Prologue

I’ve begun to own my voice this year. It’s been a long time coming. I had a strong desire to write and teach in my late teens and early twenties, and friends would ask me to guide them, but I hardly knew what I had to talk about, let alone that I had very little idea what I didn’t know. This website, what I offer as a guide, and this blog, are an attempt to offer some of the things I’ve learned in nearly 30 years of seeking to know and express myself more kindly and truth-fully, and in figuring out how to get out of my own way.

I read an article the other day about how the smartest people have the worst handwriting. The theory goes that their hands can’t keep up with everything going on in their brains, and in trying to express it all at once it just comes out a jumbled mess. I don’t know if it’s just the smartest people, I feel anyone can have bad handwriting. It might be from shear impatience, anxiety or exuberance. Whatever the cause, sitting at the keyboard I feel I can relate to the tendency to want to get it all out at once and make a jumbled mess.

There are many ways I might organize this blog. Could be through themes of lessons learned or teachings I’ve absorbed… could also be through stages of my life or different relationships I’ve been in. I could organize it by trying to show a clear line between my life experience, what I’ve learned and what I feel I have to offer the world now. I could discuss the various roles and identities I’ve played.That could all be in straight, chronological order or it could be organized by topic. So many choices.

The most important thing I’ve learned and the central value of my life to this point is that I do my best at being a human, and by extension a writer and a guide, when I stay close to the sense of Spirit, Presence, or Being. I will use these words interchangeably throughout, as to me they are different words indicating the same Source. In my view everything is an expression of this one Source, and the dumbfounding complexity of it all is only rightly ordered by this recognition. I have the most access to creativity, generosity, compassion, courage, joy and any good quality only when the real, true, visceral sense of Presence is leading the way. For those who have this experience consciously, it is glaringly obvious that it is deeper, more profound and more capable than the singular human brain alone. In fact the sense of Presence is such that it becomes clear without it, that no Life at all, let alone brains would even exist. It’s always here for all of us, more or less consciously, making everything possible. It might even be considered Possibility itself.

The path of integrating Spirit into my daily life has been this decades long one. It has encompassed my whole life when I really look at it, as I think it can for all of us if we choose. Everything makes sense in relation to this process, even as it did not always make sense along the way. Looking back now I can see there was a path and each role played its part. From a transcendent perspective, everything has always been perfectly ordered.

I believe this blog will have a similar aesthetic. I intend to follow inspiration where it leads. It may not always be perfectly clear in one post how this part of the puzzle fits in just yet. I may revise posts along the way to make the overall effect more cohesive. This is just as my life has been. We learn as we go and understand things from new perspectives all the time.

In reading my first 6 posts, my wife informs me that I may come across for some folks as a kind of raving Christian. In service of some orientation I will mention that my path to an initial spiritual awakening in my youth was through a very intense period of devotion led by figures in the Catholic mystical traditions. This part of my path culminated in receiving a sort of energetic grace that entered through the top of the head during prayer. It filled my body and I have never been without access to it since, even if there were years when I wished it away. After receiving this grace my devotion to the church immediately subsided. The church and its teachings faded from importance while my living relationship to Spirit became all. Still, in my writing I’ve so far been revisited and inspired at times by the wisdom in teachings from the Christian traditions and that is expressed in this blog. My experience in working with others is that suspending disbelief in spiritual reality is necessary for the most profound of changes and healing to occur, but these changes do not require Christian dogma, and some healing can take place with faith only in oneself.

I have taken a meandering path to understanding my living relationship to Spirit. In the world of books, teachers and therapists I have moved through somatic psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, some ancient and post-modern philosophy. I’ve studied Sufism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism, and the non-dual paths related to these. I also dove into the western occult, and the history of psychology, including the transpersonal. I have deeply studied the history of psychedelics and experienced a chaotic spiritual emergence through their mis-guided use at 20 years old. I also experienced the profound personal healing of generational trauma, addiction and anxiety through their therapeutic use more recently. I have grown through several long term relationships into my current marriage and have raised a wonderful daughter (now 23) as a working class dude. This is a general background from which the various pieces of this blog will be written. Through it I hope to convey how I arrived at what I see as possible for us in our healing journeys, and some of my own mistakes along the way.