Fruit of Suffering
I remember waking up, my vision blurred under the tears I hadn’t wiped away. I was confused, and handcuffed, and eleven years old. There is no autonomy in childhood rage. When you finally “snap out of it” there’s destruction, holes in the walls, stab and slash marks on the furniture, and everyone is looking at you. People are talking to you as if you have any idea what just happened. You’re exhausted, your throat is hoarse, your whole body is sore, and all you want to do is lie down and go away forever. You feel violated by something invisible, something not there and very real at the same time. You’ve lost yourself. More than depression, more than a miserable and painful day-to-day living with tic attacks, the rage experienced through my childhood and adolescence made me want to stop existing.
A few years later… I regularly sought death through deeply cultivated meditative states in which any facet of my ego that had my name on it disappeared. And when I’d come back, somehow I felt as though I had learned something. This practice daily, for months, and then years, and everything changed. More and more I could see how my symptoms manifested on the subtle layers of my mind and body. I found how everything I did, from the food I ate to the way I breathed impacted deeper physiological processes which would later express symptomatically.
Eventually, I was inspired to move from a budding career in dance, choreography and martial arts, into a six year graduate education and degree of traditional Chinese medicine. I made interesting contacts in and out of school, met fascinating specialists and masters of various kinds, and learned from some of the best in the world in gut health, nervous system regulation, and even ancient meditative traditions from east and west. What I had built through my own decade and a half of trial and error had been compounded, added to, and refined. Upon the backdrop of my own experiences and personal discoveries I have kept what works, discarded the BS, and adjusted what needed adjusting.
Today I can confidently say if you need your day-to-day experience to change I can show you how to make it happen. It’s not easy, and it’s not cheap. It is my life, and I can share with you its fruit.