A beautiful, never-ending story of love, suffering and awakening.

Summary:

I've suffered and loved deeply most of my life. Now, I find myself, living between the two, in the moment, most of the time, with very little desire for anything. Love flows through me as me, and to everyone equally. I do not believe I know anything, and therefore, am well qualified to teach nothing to anyone. I've been consciously living the life of my dreams for the past 8 years. Now I live beyond that.

Long version:

I've resisted sharing what I've come to believe as "my story" for years. And, I have often found that the inspiration others receive from hearing a story of someone who transcended suffering into peace has been more helpful than many of the tools I've used in the past. In that spirit, I share this story, embracing a beautiful ending and new beginnings for one and all.

I've always been a very sensitive person. This was quite challenging growing up and later in life finding myself unable to be in certain environments, with certain people, and even with myself without feeling super anxious while processing various energies and experiences I didn't have an understanding of, or tools and loving support to help me feel grounded and safe. I was often called names like idiot child or porcupine, someone even said I had something called hyper auditory sensitivity disorder and may be "on the spectrum" because I was so sensitive to sounds, lights, and feelings. I could feel everything and everyone as if they were me... This turned out to be an amazing gift and has become a profound tool for healing myself and others, and also a catalyst for awakening to higher states of being, nonbeing, compassion, and love.

At the age of 33, I had my first spontaneous kundalini opening after several months of intense hatha yoga practice and a breakup with a former girlfriend, which cracked my heart open, and allowed energy to flow in a way I will not get into the details of here. Suffice it to say, I slept less than an hour each night for 40 days, and the world as I knew it slowed down, as if I was in a slow-motion movie in which I was the witness, director and projector simultaneously. For months afterwards I found myself crying for apparently no reason than the sheer beauty of what I saw in and all around me. I had nobody to talk with about it and over time came to believe I had lost my mind and would not be able to return to my corporate career without shutting it all down somehow. The way I finally chose to reengage with "normal" life was by heading to McDonalds and eating a bunch of junk food. This at least enabled me to "ground" and feel like I was on the same planet everyone else was on. Later, my desire to numb all I felt led to drinking alcohol and spending time and money on things that were not necessary or healthy.

I met another beautiful young lady somewhere during this time and quickly started a family which I had no idea how to take care of. Having run away from home at 17, I was not in communication with my parents much, and had very little support in my personal life. I did know how to make money and supporting a wife and two kids in one of the wealthiest areas in the bay area CA, we needed a lot of it to pay for a house, new cars and all the things I wanted to provide, foremost of which was safety, which I believed would come once I had a few million dollars in the bank. That, and feeling unsafe, unappreciated and unsupported became my primary focus in life while I excelled in my career in consultative sales and eventually business partnership and ownership.

Meanwhile, my life, health and happiness were on hold, and my marriage and connection to myself and my family was on the rocks. Finally, after seeing things were about to fall apart, I decided to take a family vacation. This was the first vacation I'd taken after working 6 days a week almost every week usually 12–16-hour days for the previous 11 years. We went to Maui and booked a nice room at a very nice hotel. After a week in paradise, still not feeling connected to my family or anything, we decided to take a three-hour tour... a booze cruise. Needless to say, the giant catamaran we were on ended up capsized in high seas after the mast broke and fell down on me and another man. He died, and I almost did. Interestingly, everything appeared as if in slow motion again, like I experienced before after a heartbreak, but more intense. As I flew through the air after being hit squarely on the back of the neck by the boom, my legs got caught in the rigging and did a more than total split ripping both of my rear hamstrings. I landed with a severe blow to the head and left arm. Nonetheless, I crawled back to where my family was, feeling extremely present, and filled with what felt to be the purest love I'd ever felt as I did what I could to calm everyone on the boat down while thinking I might possibly die that evening. I also saw the possibility of saving my wife and daughters before that, so I negotiated with other men to get them onto the only life raft and then jumped in the water, swimming alongside it, pushing them and several other women and children beyond the reach of the whirlpool that would happen as the boat sank which could pull them and all of us into the depths with it. As it happens, we were rescued just before the sun went down and I lived through all that.

Apparently, I still hadn't learned the lesson my soul or God, or something was trying to show me. Since I'd almost died while in the midst of a deferred life program of workaholism, I decided after returning home, to quit my job at the company I only owned only part of and start a new one with my own money so I could hopefully make a whole lot more and retire after a few years of intense work. I was on heavy anti pain medication day and night and eventually switched to marijuana after I started to throw up blood from taking prescribed medications for so long. I became addicted to work and marijuana and was drinking alcohol most weekends and evenings. My wife and I had more money to spend and she was able to be a full time mom for our daughters while we lived a "good life" in a nice home and neighborhood, and I lived with increasing physical and emotional pain and a perceived state of victimization, even of my own career success, only finding solace in the fact I'd finally become a CEO and might get rich, and become something my father would be proud of.

Not long after starting the new company, my wife let me know she wanted a divorce and to take our daughters with her. That happened. I was at last free to work even more hours and scream in pain at night without feeling guilty about it. I was able to see my daughters on the weekend day I wasn't working which was by far the best times of my life then. Things seemed to be getting better until I found out my business partner had embezzled a whole lot of money from the company, and I had to shut it down. I was already in the midst of a lawsuit with my previous business partners who decided not to pay me for my shares in the company I helped them build before I resigned. I lost my life savings and spent another hundred and fifty grand or so in debt to pay for my employees to complete projects in the works, and transition to a company I paid to merge with my company during the height of the 2008 economic crash.

About a year after that, I went on a vacation alone, a ski trip. This was my next vacation after the "accident" in Maui. I went skiing, and on the last day of an amazing week of excellent skiing with seemingly not much pain in my neck albeit, I was jacked up on Vicodin, alcohol and marijuana, I crashed and suffered even more serious injuries to my neck. Again, I experienced an amazing sense of slow motion and awareness as I felt myself apparently near the verge of death. Turns out, my neck had suffered hairline fractures in the previous accident and when my head hit the concrete like snow at high speed, two pieces of vertebrae broke off and were now pinching against the spinal cord. The spinal surgeons strongly suggested a dissection and fusion surgery which they informed me also included the slight risk that I'd become paralyzed. Nonetheless, it would likely alleviate the pain and enable me to function in life.

Something didn't feel right about that surgery. It felt like taking bones out of the vertebrae would disconnect me from something somehow. I told the doctors I was putting off the surgery for 90 days, during which time I'd practice yoga and go to physical therapy every day and see if I could make the pain lessen and forgo the surgery all together. The pain at this time in my life was chronic and by far the worst I'd ever experienced. Nonetheless, I persevered through what became 13 years of dedicated practice, travel and study of various modalities to reduce my own pain and suffering. I never underwent that surgery, and now there's almost no pain.

Sometime after the second near deadly "accident", I was run over by a trash truck while driving my new low-profile sports coupe. This car was one of the last fancy things I still owned after going through what I had in the previous years. Again, as I saw the huge tire of the trash truck coming over the left side of the vehicle, next to where I was sitting, my vision and everything went into slow motion. This time, all was in even more than slow motion, as if a series of still frame images passing before a screen one after the other as I felt myself preparing to leave my body.

By this time, I'd already endured so much pain for so long, I was ready to die for real. I felt a sense of relief and laughed and leaned into it. How interesting that finally this was the day I'd get to die. The car spun round and round, and the trash truck came to a screaming halt after rolling over my car. Suddenly there was stillness, and an acute awareness of sound. I heard the air releasing from the car tires, the trash truck creaking ahead of me, and people screaming in shock as they witnessed what had happened from the side of the road. I also heard sirens from firetrucks and police arriving on the scene almost immediately. My hands could move, so I put them on my head and face to see where the blood was. There was no blood. I kept checking all over my body knowing that when there is acute pain, the body shuts off the pain receptors. I knew better than to think that since there was apparently no pain, I wasn't dying. This was a metaphor for my life until then. I couldn't find any bleeding anywhere and managed to crawl out of the shattered passenger window quickly when it occurred to me that the car may burst into flames. As I laid against the curb with two paramedics and a policeman attending to me, I looked up and saw a street sign in plain view. My attention still acutely focused as if it was all I could see. The street sign said "Butterfly Lane"...

Knowing the language of metaphor and seeing that I'd finally lost the last material thing that had much value to me, I burst into hilarious laughter, much to the chagrin of the paramedics assessing my condition. I wasn't going to die; I wasn't even hurt at all. The pain and struggles of my life were giving birth to something beautiful. In that moment, I knew it, and began to embrace the possibility of a happy and pain free future.

A few months after the car incident, an angel magically appeared in front of me while I walked slowly down a trail in the forest of Oregon at a place called The Beloved Festival. This was my next vacation after the skiing trip. His name is Malcolm. He said he had a dream in which he was guided to the place where I was, not knowing why, but he'd learned to follow his dreams. After listening to me explain a pattern of severe suffering, seeing me walking with a cane, compulsively twitching from severe nerve damage and so drugged up on pain meds that I was usually drooling spit from my mouth by the early evenings, Malcolm said he felt he knew why his dream had brought him there. He had come to help me out of my suffering. That is how we met that day, after not seeing each other since he'd been a client of mine 20 years earlier in Beverly Hills. As I recall, he said I needed help to stop all the catastrophes I was creating...

At the time, the idea of me creating disaster after disaster was incomprehensible. As I saw it, I was just an innocent victim of crisis my whole life. Nonetheless, I listened. Malcolm graciously invited me to the jungle to have some drinks... something called ayahuasca which he thought could help me. Over the following several years I became his client, and he became my dreamwork coach, spiritual teacher, and ally as I worked extensively with ayahuasca, some amazing healers, and multiple healing modalities.

During my apprenticeship, I almost died once again after a severe case of shingles. I'd been managing over 40 projects simultaneously including a huge one for the School of Medicine at Stanford. My adrenals were maxed out and finally by body let me know it. After fourteen days of intense vomiting, I laid on my livingroom floor unable to move. My phone was within reach, so I called my tenant who was initially not able to do anything when he arrived but freeze. He called a lady friend of his, and she took action. Together they brought me to the ICU where I was informed, I would likely have expired if I had arrived much later. Thanks again for two more angels who saved my life that day. By then, I was starting to see that the path of a wisdom carrier, spiritual teacher, healer or what some people call a shaman is not glamorous as some may believe. First, they usually need to go through some pretty tough stuff, learn to heal themselves and find their way out of suffering.

After the game of shingles, I took a long sabbatical and had the good fortune to spend time in Bali, Mexico, Thailand and Guatemala receiving help and learning from open hearted healers, shaman, indigenous elders, and high-level spiritual masters and teachers who magically showed up as if I had an appointment with them. My life slowed down and felt like a waking dream for a sustained period. I found happiness, and the courage to go into, and finally embrace the depths and roots of my mind and suffering, and the fact that I'd created all of it due to persistent and habitual thoughts, feelings and patterns which originated for the most part in early childhood.

In 2019, I quit my corporate career, having decided to dedicate the rest of my working life to helping others find their way out of suffering and way beyond that. I attended a two-year long program through IPEC and become a certified, professional coach. Seventeen years of study including deep dives into Dzogchen (the Tibetan Buddhist lineage in which dream yoga is practiced) Hinduism, psychology, alchemy, nonviolent communication, shadow work, mantra, kinesiology, breathwork, meditation and Native American and indigenous shamanism weaved nicely into the practices I offer and teach today.

After wrapping up 9 years as Project Director and lead consultant for audiovisual and communication systems for the new Stanford School of Medicine campus and the new Stanford Hospital, I had a keen understanding of certain aspects of the traditional health care system. My background in shamanism showed me that they were treating the symptoms of chronic disease, and not the root, which was held in consciousness.

I left my corporate career, seemingly for good and headed to Mexico at the beginning of 2019. While there, during a period of isolation and fasting, drinking rose water and learning from the rose in my dreams, I dreamt I bought a ticket to Costa Rica, March 16th. I follow my dreams, so I bought the ticket and coincidentally arrived the day the boarders were shut down due to Covid. I was then guided in another dream to a magical place in the hills overlooking the ocean where I was invited to live and work with some pure hearted souls, helping co-facilitate ayahuasca ceremonies for about two years. I was absolutely living my heart's desire and a dream like life of service in paradise while knowing that many people on the Earth were deeply suffering. I met another beautiful lady who I knew to be my twin flame. She was also a healer, and we had a wonderful time supporting ceremonies together and made tentative plans to live together in Costa Rica or Kauai. That turned out to be another dream. She ended up getting cold feet and backed out at the last moment.

Again, my heart felt crushed, and I went into a state of panic and anguish. I got the Covid thing, the beautiful home I was living in, overlooking the ocean was sold, and I returned to the US in hopes that I could spend time with my daughters and parents who I'd not seen for over two years. When I arrived in the U.S. my family was not all that interested in spending time with me. My daughters were becoming women. There were some judgements from some of my family about working with ayahuasca and the "organic tobacco" I smoked constantly. They were unable to see things a different way. Another metaphor for most of my life.

I spiraled back into a feeling of disconnection, seeing and feeling all the fear in the U.S. resulting from what I perceived to be untruths on a global scale. I moved to Arizona where I could work a corporate job without being vaccinated. I'd gone from living in a tropical paradise with a beautiful lady I thought I loved, to living alone in the dirty downtown urban area of Phoenix Arizona. After 7 months of hardly working at the corporate job, and mostly sitting in silence in my smelly apartment, looking into my mind and patterns, I magically closed a big sale without reaching out for it and, in many ways, started to feel better again. I mustered the courage to leave Phoenix and the high paying job I had, trusting that by following my dreams again, I'd be more than well taken care of.

I booked a one-way ticket to Lake Atitlan Guatemala, a place where I'd spent three months practicing Taiji at a monastery a few years before when more magic happened. I knew that the most important thing for me to do was raise my vibration. A week before leaving in December of 2022, I visited a friend who I'd done some ceremony work with in the past. He worked with the Sonoran toad medicine, and I felt it could help me clear some of the dense energies I'd been consumed by. The day the ceremony happened I was totally ready to go all in, even if I died. By then, I'd lost my fear of and belief in death. It happened... Now I know what the Grateful Dead were talking about.

After the last round, I let go of every belief, every desire, construct, perception and attachment. Who knows how I knew to do this and, with the help of the venom of a toad, I went to the place I'd always wanted to go. Nothing comes close to describing the experience, literally, and still, even "nothing" is a word. I had an experience lasting a few minutes wherein there is literally nothing. The closest I can come to describing it is infinite nothing and pure light. I didn't feel anything, not even love. In the days that followed, I knew I was a changed man forever. There was no more seeking. The idea of desire and seeing the world as reality and only through the five senses was and still is quite odd and obviously limited, to say the least.

I'd already booked a one-way ticket to return Lake Atitlan, Guatemala and spent three months in mostly silence watching the movie of my mind and integrating what has become a sustained shift in perception, now, still... at the forefront of awareness with a settled absence of desire or aversion, and a wonderfully peaceful acceptance of everything in the moment. All of life has come to a slow pace, and I see... Whatever I believed myself to be was already everything and nothing apparently. Therefore, the idea of desiring anything doesn't make any sense, at least not in the way it did, until it didn't.

I met some amazing young people in Guatemala during two weeks at a couple of "retreats" and even had some conversations I found interesting. They inspired me to re-engage with phenomenal reality and share some wisdom and love, which seem to be calling me. The perceptual shift deepened and grounded more while spending three months, mostly meditating alone on the beach, watching the movie in Mexico. To sum it all up, as if that is even possible, two words come to mind. Who knows?

While many of the teachings, medicines, and tools have apparently been helpful, the most important things I've learned are to stay humble and curious, love and listen deeply particularly to the divine, embrace compassion, let go of knowing, and see and trust the divinity in everyone and everything, allowing that to blossom in the right time and way.

What is there to desire when one perceives themselves as everything already and the essence of everything to be nothing? Who knows?

I recently bought a one-way ticket to come back to Costa Rica. Cheers to finding my way and helping others to experience Pura Vida, the pure life. Apparently, I, or something will be writing some books, doing some coaching and teaching in person, online, and who knows what else. I can't say I look forward to it, or anything the way I used to. I am here now, and that, is wonderful.

The middle way is the way, where we find, peace, love and happiness in the moment, apparently for no reason at all, except perhaps, that's what love is and does. So, with a deep bow, I offer my sincere gratitude to you for listening, my teachers, and especially love, suffering and transformation. I happily offer up any merit from my life and work to those who are suffering.

Thanks for nothing, and everything and everyone. I intend to spend the rest of this lifetime at least, enjoying the moments, and in service to the mystery that cannot be named.

Om Mani Padme Hung