A History of Me

Part of this will post will be my spiritual history. The rest will be musings about where I am now. This will be my "whoo-hoo" out-there post, so if you're faint-of-heart, or will think I'm crazy should you read this, I'd appreciate your clicking out now.

Years ago, I made a very deliberate and conscious decision to "not go there" where issues of spirituality or anything beyond the material world beckoned. And, they had beckoned. Last year, I decided to let those doors open. As the year unfolded, I more and more decided to push at the doors. At times it's a scary business. Because I frankly have no idea what I'm going to find.

I remember thinking about the "big issues" when I was very young. How young, I really don't remember. Six? Seven? I remember believing in reincarnation at an age when I don't even know how I would have been known about it (although I realize that someone obviously had told me about it). I remember my father flying into a rage (and he's a very calm guy) when as an elementary age kid I told him I didn't believe in God (interestingly, he's the one who doesn't believe now and I'm the one who does - although I don't believe in the God I was taught about through my religion). I remember middle-of-the-night spiritual conversations with my cousin Jani when we had sleep-overs.

Then I stopped for a while. Perhaps my boring and dogmatic religious education beat it out of me. We had lots of history, some prayer, but I don't remember anything that actually encouraged us to feel God's presence - indeed, I suspect that in the time and structure of my religion then, had any of us felt God, we'd have been judged crazy.

As a late teen, I got curious about the unseen world. I read Carlos Castenda's Don Juan books, Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", some stuff about Edgar Cayce, and other books about what may lie beyond the little world I spent my days in which were filled with shopping, hanging out with my friends, and arguing with my mother. These books obviously had a big influence on me as I decided to become a philosophy major in college to continue to explore the bigger issues. Unfortunately, my studies for my degree proved disappointing: it was just more history, and only of Western thought. It left me cold, just like Sunday School had. I left college and joined the working world.

But, I still searched a bit in my early twenties. I remember taking classes in T'ai Chi, dream analysis, and astrology. I once went to a psychic. I met a man (where? how?) who told me to get married as soon as possible. I seem to remember he was an astrologist. His prediction freaked me out. Shortly after this time, I took a rafting trip down the Grand Canyon. It was an amazing trip - I was in my early twenties and went to Arizona alone. I met up with a group there, but everything was a new experience for me. A few nights after I returned home, I awoke to see that a beach at the Canyon, with our camping and rafting gear had been superimposed into the space of my bedroom. I'd been transported. The few people I've told this to (except for one person who had a similar experience and knew what I was talking about) have told me I must have been sleeping - I just thought I was awake. I've never thought so. I've been in half-sleep often enough to recognize it - this was something different. A year of so later, I lived for a while at the Grand Canyon. There I had a friend who said he was psychic. We'd sit in my dorm room and he'd tell me about the spirits that were all around us. I liked this man very much and believed him (except for some tiny questioning bit), but it freaked me out to think of these spirits and that they could be watching or listening to us. I didn't want an audience I couldn't see. Sometime later, I dated a guy who had studied Silva Mind Control. He taught me a relaxation technique through which, even nervous me, was able to achieve a very deep state of relaxation. One day, when I was with him, I grabbed an iron I thought had been turned off, by the plate. The iron was still on and was very hot. The whole palm of my hand burned intensely. He took my hand in his and within a couple of minutes, the pain was gone, there was no redness, my hand never blistered (I knew from previous experience that I blistered from iron burns). I wanted to learn to do what he could, but more than that I wanted to be normal. I wanted my life to be normal.

And that's when I decided that it was hard enough to get through life paying attention only to what is of the material world, that it was just too hard, too scary, and too weird to let in all these other things. I made a pact with life: I would be a material girl. No delving into any esoteric studies, no hanging out with the psychic, etc. Those experiences remained in the back of my mind, but when they bubbled up, I pushed them back down with an emphatic, "I have enough to do and deal with, with just this world, I don't need more."

Little by little, the push-back began. First with my pregnancies because the creation of life is miraculous and from the time that I saw my first child's heartbeat when he was just a two week old embryo, there was no denying the miracle for me (especially after the fertility nurse had, in detail, outlined all the many, many things that had to happen for a pregnancy to occur!) This child was pretty sickly as a toddler - we finally resorted to alternative medicine, which put him on the road to health. Little by little the doors became ajar.

If you've read the blog, you know the rest: reading "Eat, Pray, Love", studying Yoga philosophy, my reading, my meditation practice, etc.

Hmm, I haven't gotten to the "whoo-hoo" part, but it's time to meditate. So, to be continued.....