Break on Through to the Other Side
(Present Day) I originally began writing this blog / journal in an effort to tell the story of my transformation from mental and physical pain to living happily, powerfully and in good health. I realize it is really really detailed. Originally my intention to write at this level of detail was to make sure people know that it might not be a simple task to heal. There’s an overarching oversimplification in society, perpetuated by the medical-industrial complex that purports to have a pill or a treatment for whatever ails you. This often results in a quest to find the Magic Pill which can be a very frustrating experience. What I recently realized however, is that there’s been a shadow side around providing this level of detail - I also wanted everybody to know just how hard I worked at this healing business. I have been creating with a “seeking” energy - seeking approval, seeking praise, seeking adoration. While there is nothing “wrong” with this per se, I simply want to acknowledge that it has colored my writing. I think it may also be the reason it has gotten more difficult to write over the couple years. (I found myself quite blocked in telling my story.) Healing doesn’t have to be difficult. Miracles do happen regularly. In my case, much of my early programming told me that things have to be difficult. In the past, I’ve often unnecessarily overcomplicated things in my work life simply so there would be more work to do!
(March 2020) Significant flotsam was jettisoned from my tortured body during the five days in Sedona during my Body Memory Recall Intensive with Jonathan Tripodi. I wasn’t “fixed” yet I felt as though something substantial had shifted and stuff had been released. I did very little sightseeing while there, unfortunately. The day I left I finally went to visit the Amitabh Stupa at the base of Thunder Mountain, a powerful vortex in Sedona. What an incredible spot! A Stupa represents the body of the Buddha. In addition to the Stupa, there are prayer wheels, a large mahogany carving of Shakyamuni Buddha and a Native American medicine wheel (I didn’t find this until my second trip).
I flew home from the Body Memory Recall retreat in Sedona on March 17, 2020. Over the course of the next week, the world went into a state of suspended animation. My friend Johnny and I chatted while I was in Sedona. I was pretty out of the loop on the news. “This is going to be a big deal,” he said. Prophetic.
There’s no reason to go into how fucked up everything was during Covid. We all lived it. I was definitely living in the vibration of fear. It really felt as though it could be the end of the world for a period of time. My photography business evaporated. I had been frequently late paying my rent over the four plus years I lived in my apartment. At the beginning of April, I told my landlord my rent was going to be late. Three days later I got notice that they were not renewing my lease at the end of June. Fun times, indeed! I basically told them to get bent. The anger consumed me. I was doing all that I could to put my life together and move forward. With every step forward, there seemed to be three back.
Filming Maggie doing a segment of “Maggie’s ProjectLand” a series on craft projects for kids that she tried out during Covid. | River Forest, Illinois, May 2020
At some point I began to look at the upside of the lockdown - nobody wanted anything from me! My whole adult life had been spent either working or creating work in an effort to feed my addiction to work and to feeling needed. It occurred to me that I could just rest without the internal pressure and negative self-talk that normally accompanied a decision to sleep in, lay around or otherwise do something “non-productive”. I also realize that I was incredibly privileged to be in this situation. My heart goes out to those of you who had young children or elderly parents that needed care during Covid times.
On the psychedelic front, I did several solo journeys with my favorite molecule - MDMA - over the course of 2020. I was also taking cannabis edibles pretty regularly for pain and to sleep. I would regularly question whether this was helping or hurting. It would help me sleep through the night, but the sleep would be dreamless and relatively unfulfilling. My doctor had recommended CBD for “inflammation” so I took around 70mg/daily. I found cannabis to be useful to slightly loosen up the ego’s reins and regularly uncovered some nuggets of wisdom, which I would dutifully write down in my journal. For about 30 days in the summer, I wrote the “Morning Pages” as recommended by Julia Cameron in the Artist’s Way. The instruction is to fill three pages with writing - can be anything.
In early June, I was cranking along on some work for my new website, which had been scheduled to launch in March. I was in the flow. It was just me, notifications off, music playing, fingers flying on the keyboard, when my phone rang. It was my brother. He had been “doored” riding his bike and was in the emergency room and needed me to come and get him. This indescribable feeling that something much bigger than a bike accident was afoot came over me. I yelled so fucking loud. I was so so so angry. Why me? Why did I always have to be the one to attend to his problems. You may recall in a prior post about my reading with a Medical Medium. She told me I needed to “break the cycle of control my brother had over me”. I wrote this down at the time and promptly forgot about it. As it would happen, this incident was the catalyst for that break. After retrieving his busted bicycle, I was off to the emergency room to spend the day with him in the ER as he yelled and screamed at the doctors and nurses trying to help him. It was decidedly NOT FUN.
At just about the same time our mother, who had not been feeling well for weeks, went to an appointment with a new pulmonologist. My dad dropped her off and parked the car. By the time he got inside, she’d been admitted to the hospital with an infection between her lungs and ribcage. The prognosis did not sound good. Despite all my spiritual / emotional progress, I was still very angry with her. I had zero interest in getting on the zoom calls with her. There was a gaping chasm between us. I was so so so angry with her behavior over the years. I knew she wasn’t going to make it, yet I still couldn’t bring myself to speak with her. A couple days later, she left her body. I wrote a blog post about her Celebration of Life service and the eulogy I gave.
I’m not sure I even knew how I felt. I was profoundly sad. Yet, she and I had endured such a fucked up 20 years that I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to feeling a sense of relief. Time after time when I had transformative experiences over the years and found some light, I allowed myself to get pulled back into the darkness by her. It wasn’t her fault per se, but man, it was a nasty cycle. I wanted so badly for her to see that there was an option to the pain she was enduring and I never could. After her passing, I cried unexpectedly at times as grief would suddenly overtake me. The emotion was thick, tortured and exceedingly difficult to release. The idea of vomiting molasses comes to mind. The conflict between the sadness and relief of her passing, coupled with years of programming around NOT expressing emotion (especially those viewed as “negative”) did not make for an easing mourning process. On top of that, due to Covid, there would be no closure in the form of a memorial service for the foreseeable future.
A week or so later, my brother and I had a big blowout fight and things haven’t been the same since. He told me to fuck off and have a nice life. So, I did my best on that front.
The transition to the carnivore way of eating (as recommended by two practitioners in Sedona) was, uh, very messy. While I felt quite good overall, my GI system didn’t get the memo, the email or the telegram. Basically, I had diarrhea for the better part of nine months. I tried everything - probiotics, ox bile, Lipo Gold and who knows what else. While trips to the bathroom weren’t pleasant, I had more strength than I’d had in years and my mind was more clear and sharp than any time in recent memory. In spite of eating “carnivore”, chocolate retained it’s place at the top of my personal food pyramid.
Cooking up a tasty, nutritious ribeye for breakfast | River Forest, Illinois, June 2020
In spite of the BMR intensive, I still had pelvic pain. This was the source of immense frustration and anger. One day in the bathroom I screamed so loud, I actually broke a small capillary in my upper cheek. For years, I’d been telling my doctor that I didn’t feel like I was getting energy from my food. I still felt this way. And there remained a sharp pain deep in the center of my abdomen just below my belt line.
Ok, buckle your seatbelts, because we are now going to move into some seriously metaphysical shit (as if the Ayahuasca wasn’t enough). On the first of August, a friend sent me a link to an interview with a Conscious Channel named Paul Selig. I watched it and was absolutely, positively gobsmacked. I nearly fell off the sofa. Up until that moment, I didn’t know what a conscious channel was, but after watching one for just a few minutes, I knew I needed to read and see more. My daughters were with me at the time. “I need to go to a bookstore. Who’s coming along?” I said. We jumped in the car, drove 25 minutes to the Oak Brook Mall and I bought three of his books. The first is called, “I Am the Word.”
A Conscious Channel is somebody who is used as a conduit or radio for intelligence that exists outside of our physical world. The Channel is able to tune into the being(s), much like tuning a radio, and bring through messages. The way Paul does this is he “hears” the information, whispers what he hears softly and then repeats it in a speaking voice. I was instantly taken with the whole thing - the process, the clarity and depth of the messages and Paul’s sincere and forthright nature. I dove into the first book with nearly reckless abandon. There were times when I would drift off into a liminal state and I could feel energy buzzing through my body, much like during my acupuncture appointment in Sedona. This felt big; really big. My daughters pretty much thought I’d lost my mind. More on this later….
On July 27, I had one of my regular calls with my amazing financial advisor. Once again, I was bitching about the unrelenting pain in my pee pee and once again she reminded to ask the Universe for assistance, which I did. A week or so after discovering Paul Selig, I was hunting for more of his readings on line and I found myself back on Gaia.com, the site where I had found Jonathan and the BMR work. As if on cue, in steps the Universe by way of the “Recommended for You” link. A movie called “Root Cause” was being suggested. Of course I watched it.
Photographing construction of a 900,000 sf tilt-wall building in the south suburbs of Chicago. | August 2020
Long story short - the movie is about a guy who had gotten a tooth knocked out by a bully. A couple years later his health, and his life went to shit. Eerily similar symptoms to mine - chronic fatigue, brain fog, chronic pain. He went to countless doctors. Finally somebody asked him if he’d had a root canal before. He had. They recommended he see a “biologic” dentist and have it extracted and a ceramic implant put in place. He did. Two months later, his symptoms began to vanish.
I had a root canal in my mouth that I knew was going bad. We’d been tracking it for a couple years and I kept putting off doing something about it because 1.) who likes dental work? 2.) I got conflicting opinions on what to do about and 3.) I didn’t have the money to pay for it. Immediately after watching this, I let my fingers do the walking and found a biologic dentist about 45 minutes away. Not really sure how I was going to pay for it, I scheduled an appointment to have it extracted.
The so-called “biologic” dentistry model, drawing from Traditional Chinese Medicine, holds that the energetic pathways in our body pass through our teeth. Problems with teeth will manifest elsewhere in the body. Western medicine honors this to some degree as some surgeries will not be performed in the presence of significant dental issues. When I had my root canal-ed molar removed, there was a large cyst beneath it that was attempting to keep the infection from spreading. It was 4mm from my mandibular nerve - a major nerve. The surgeon blasted my jaw bone with ozone gas to kill any infection and put in a bone graft complete with my own platelets, which had been drawn prior to the procedure.
The doc said some people literally feel transformed getting up from the chair. I wasn’t so lucky. Two months later, however, the pain at the center of my being dissipated and I began feeling more energetic. When I looked at the diagram, one of the places in the body that the tooth I had pulled affects is the ileum - the part of the large intestine responsible for extracting / creating the majority of vitamin B12! It also happens to be located pretty much right where I was experiencing one of my remaining pains. Maybe there was more to the body than we’ve been lead to believe?
Item by item I was knocking out the causes of my physical and emotional distress. Yet, I still found myself deeply and profoundly depressed. I was still in considerable pain much of the time. Covid was not particularly nice to my bank account. I felt profoundly alone and, in spite of all that I had done, I really couldn’t see a light at the end of the tunnel. I found myself flirting with the idea of suicide now and again. At one point, I called my MDMA therapist and told them I wanted to end my life. I didn’t know what to expect. Would I get 5150’d?
