Pissed Off. Literally.

There are many paths to achieving Flow. Catheters are among the least pleasant.

Shortly after the session with the past life / Akashic Record / soul agreement session I decided to experience a plant medicine called “Kambo” to see if it could help with the pain. It is not a psychedelic, per se. Rather it is a powerful purgative – a bit like Ayahuasca but without the fun of the trip. Prior to ingesting the Kambo, the practitioner (with my blessing) put “Sananga” drops in my eyes. This medicine is used by indigenous tribes in the Amazon to improve visual acuity before hunting. Now, I’ve never been a hunter (at least not in this life), but I’ve always been of the mindset - in for a penny, in for a pound. Holy sweet mother of God, did that hurt! For the 30 minutes before I could open my eyes again I thought she may have confused her bottle of Sananga with hydrochloric acid! Wowsa. So, I drank the Kambo. It was not pleasant. I think I vomited. I know I pooped for at least an hour. It is hard to explain, yet with the practitioner’s prompting, I did get present to the fear and anger buried deep within me and the medicine helped me energetically shed some of that fear. It also became even more clear that fear was lurking behind the anger.

Cruising along the SF Bay in an America’s Cup sailboat | San Francisco, California, October 2019

On a Saturday evening in mid-September after taking some photos for a client at Navy Pier I felt like dancing – by myself. The urge to move just overcame me. My upstairs neighbors were gone so I took some MDMA with the intention to have some fun (set and setting are critical), put on some great music and waited for the medicine to come on. It was absolutely amazing! I must have moved and grooved for close to four hours. One of the few pieces of property I took with me during the divorce was an incredible stereo system I purchased at the height of my successful run at the photo lab. My brother described the sound of the music coming through the bespoke Italian speakers as that of angels making love (albeit in coarser terms). The thing has a sub-bass designed by a former Royal Navy sonar engineer that shakes the frame of the sofa along with most of the house. It is truly epic. I had a blast getting completely out of my head and into my body as I danced around my apartment and opened to the energy coursing through my body. Now I knew what everybody was doing at those raves I so blithely dismissed in the 90s as I scrambled to make ALL the money!

I took an edible or two when I landed to help take the edge off and went to bed. The next morning, I woke around 5:00am and had to urinate. I couldn’t. It was really painful and I couldn’t push hard enough to start the flow. I took a NSAID called Etodolac and went back to bed. An hour later, I tried again. No go. Thinking maybe I just needed to relax, I took an Ativan. I went back to bed and waited. Nada. Popped a valium suppository in, figuring that would relax things. Nope. By 9:00am I was in serious distress. I REALLY had to pee. I called my former wife, Amy. “I think I need to go to the ER.”

She arrived to pick me up and I could barely walk. The pain was excrutiatingly agonizing. I’m not sure how I actually got into the ER. Fortunately they saw me almost right away. I got a shot of morphine - BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY! - and a Foley catheter to drain my bladder, which I was told was more than 2.5x full. I went home and spent the next two days in bed with the catheter. I returned to the hospital to have it removed and they scheduled me for some urological tests. Now, you might be thinking, “Serves you right for messing with those dangerous drugs!” As it turned out, this was something of a turning point.

The beach, as seen from my converted garage B&B | Muir Beach, California, October 2019

After I got the catheter out, everything was amazing! I was in the FLOW, baby! I already had a few solid photo jobs on the calendar, one of which was a four day shoot for a client in San Francisco. Another client called and had a last minute commercial job up in Milwaukee and in early October, I was scheduled to be the digital tech for eight photographers covering the three day opening ceremonies for Tyler Perry’s new studio in Atlanta. I felt like I was floating on clouds. I remember driving to the Milwaukee gig and listening to music by the African musician Fela Kuti. The music felt next level. I was singing along at the top of my lungs and absolutely bawling my eyes out at the power of it. It was truly sublime. Later, when discussing with my therapist, they said, “Well, of course you were in FLOW. They basically forced it on you with the catheter.”

While in San Francisco, after an invigorating four hour adventure on a 1990’s America’s Cup sailboat, I was walking down the street one evening, feeling amazing. There wasn’t much pain. I was reflecting on the fact I had good, profitable work. And I suddenly from the recesses of my brain I noticed this tiny little thought. It was basically along the lines of “You don’t deserve this. You’re not good enough.” Something like that. It was fear and it directly contravened the experience I was having. And there was a subtle shift. Suddenly things weren’t so crisp and clear. I had booked a great little B&B right off Muir Beach and went to Muir Woods for the first time, where I burst into tears upon walking into the forest canopy (are you sensing a theme here?). The beauty, the energy, the smell; it was overwhelming in the best way.

I was barely home a day from San Francisco and I departed for Atlanta. I arrived fairly late on a Friday and stayed up until nearly midnight with the group figuring out the photo plan for the coverage. I met Tyler Perry’s girlfriend. Wow. The next four days were absolutely brutal. I ended up color correcting nearly 4,000 images from eight photographers. I was pulling 20 hour days and gorging myself on some kind of trail mix crack with peanut M&Ms in a large barrel from Costco. I had been so good about my incredibly restrictive diet, but the stress and the fatigue just destroyed my defenses. By the end of the trip, I was shattered. I limped through the airport, the pain searing through the core of my being and into my dick.

The talented crew covering the grand opening | Atlanta, Georgia, October 2019

The next weekend I headed to New York City for a MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) fundraiser. It was because of the underground work these people had been doing with psychedelics for 35 years that I had been able to crack through and truly begin my healing. I also visited my aunt & uncle in Connecticut, where I continued gorging on chocolate and being generally miserable. A couple weeks later, the pain was a bit better and I took my youngest daughter to California for the first time. We went to LA, toured the Warner Brothers lot, stayed a block from Venice Beach and drove to Joshua Tree for two nights in the desert. She went rock climbing and we drove through the park in a convertible with the U2 album blasting as I tried to explain to her the impact that album had in 1987. I don’t think I succeeded. One night we did a beautiful meditation with a young woman in a tiny house she had built herself. It was magical.

Back in Chicago, I went in for two separate sessions of urodynamic testing at the urologist’s office. This is hopefully as close as I’ll ever get to the pain of being wounded in battle. At one of the appointments, they inserted another catheter, along with a probe in my ass and some other electrodes stuck inside my butt cheeks while they proceeded to FILL my bladder with cold water. After that, I had to pee it out. This took about twenty excruciating minutes, during which time I nearly passed out from the pain. At one point, leaning against the wall, I flipped the emergency call button. Fun times, indeed. I recall having to fill out a questionnaire before each appointment. On it I was asked if I had any thoughts about taking my life. I answered truthfully (yes). I can’t imagine there are too many people who don’t at least consider this as an option after having a tube stuck in their already burning urethra and their bladder filled with cold water. In the appointment I was asked if I had considered a method. I hadn’t. Their concern seemed to wane. Ah! Now I knew how to level up when it came to suicidal ideation.

My youngest scaling a wall | Joshua Tree National Park, October 2109

The result of these tests were, guess what! They wanted to run MORE TESTS with a neurologist; something, something, muscle and nerve biopsies from my leg. I asked what they expected to find and what we would do if they found these things. They demurred. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” At this point, I was tired of doctors and even more tired of spending money to meet my umpteen thousand dollar deductible. Fuck. That. Noise. I was DONE with doctors. It became abundantly clear to me that I needed to take things into my own hands. I had gotten glimpses of what was possible and none of them came from traditional medical methods. It was beginning to dawn on me that maybe I didn’t have a medical problem. I did agree to a colonoscopy a month later. I was 50, it was covered by insurance and there was a lot of pain down there. It came back perfectly clean. Because of course it did.

I limped through the rest of the year. I went back to Vicky for a few pelvic floor PT appointments. I made an appointment with a high school friend of my sister’s who helped people with autoimmune disorders. She did some testing and recommended a reading with a medical medium. I scheduled it. She also recommended the practice of Ho‘oponopno. It is a traditional Hawaiin practice of reconciliation and forgiveness. I did a second Akashic / Soul reading with Therese. Each of these added to the overall picture. The medical medium told me my problem was muscular. Ok. She also said I needed to “break the system of control that my brother had over me.” Ok. Whatever that meant. I promptly forgot about this.

The tiny house where we did a meditation and cacao ceremony | Joshua Tree National Park, October 2019

I was so frustrated and angry. In addition to all the traditional medical work, hadn’t I done ALL THE THINGS? Meditation, therapy, therapeutic MDMA, Ayahuasca, Mescaline and more! And here I was, still in pain, still angry, still depressed. The brief forays into flow states almost made it worse. I had seen the promised land! And it was ever more elusive than ever. It seemed, the harder I tried, the further away it went. I felt like Luke in the swamp with Yoda.

In November, I had an appointment with the financial/spiritual advisor who was a childhood friend of my pelvic PT. The first appointment with her had been very helpful. She too, was on a deeply spiritual path. At this meeting, in response to my complaints about my continued condition, she reminded me, “You have angels, guides and helpers with you always. But you have to ASK for help. You also have free will. They aren’t just going to step in. Get quiet and ask for assistance. Out loud.” At some point in the next several weeks I did just that after meditating one day. Within a week or two my friend Danielle said she had just signed up for the website Gaia.com and it turned out she could invite a guest for free. Would I be interested? As it happened I had looked at the site a few times over the past year and was interested in the content but I was reluctant to sign up for a membership because of the cost. It wasn’t a ton of money but I’d let the recurring subscription costs build up in the past without managing them well and feared the same. I told her I’d love a guest account. A couple days later, I logged in and on the very first page was a link “Recommended for You”. That linked to a video with Dr. Sue Morter interviewing a guy named Jonathan Tripodi about his body work modality called Body Memory Recall, a myofascial unwinding technique. I’m not exactly sure how long the interview was, but in the first five minutes, I knew I needed to go to Sedona for an “intensive” session with him. I emailed him and within days I was booked for five days in Sedona in early March 2020. It was to be a prophetic week.