My Journey of Becoming Who I Am

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Before I get to know you, I'd like for you to get to know me. Here's a thumbnail sketch of who I am, where I've been, what I do, and how you can join the journey. It's a story of true healing and, yes, enlightenment; an overview of how I overcame mental illness and addiction through yoga and meditation and found lasting liberation through Divine Union; a testament to the results of authentic spiritual practice in alleviating pathological suffering.

Welcome to my Awareness.
Welcome to my world.
Welcome to the spinning cogs of my mind.

Who I Am
I am a self-proclaimed connoisseur of consciousness. I am a terrestrial traveler of inner space. I am a mystic of the Great Mystery. I am a happily married monk. I am a yogi writ large. I am a breatharian. I am an intuitive and highly sensitive empath. I am a fully healed former addict. I am a mental disorder success story, freed from the chains of Big Pharma. I am a mishandled contactee of divine realms. I am an ancestral anomaly, the bah-bah black sheep.

I am a lot of things, and I am none of them.

Sound like a spiritual walk in the park? A piece of cosmic cake? Like I was "born this way"? Well, yes and no.

It wasn't always this easy. These are the results of a most perilous and peculiar journey that began when I was but seven years old. It's required everything I have (and everything I don't) to piece together the puzzle, find wholeness in the damaged vessel, and awaken to Union with God. ​

Where I've come from
Not what you might expect. Not the Pleiades. Not the star system Sirius. Not "the future." Not another dimension. (Though I'm not ruling it out!) 

I come from a rural town in a notch of the Bible Belt called North Carolina. I was touched by an unknown Presence that rocked my innocence and indelibly altered the course of my life.

Here's what came of it:

• Put in the pipeline to be a preacher
• Developed a mental disorder
• Pathological pressure in the bodymind
• Bottled-up, suppressed, and underdeveloped kundalini wanting to rise
• Accumulated severely addictive behaviors to cope

In spite of the suffering, however, grace has abounded all the more. The encounter planted a seed of heightened awareness (among other "side effects") and awakened a desire for communion with God above all else. Rare for anyone; exceedingly rare for a child.

I struggled with the "why me" question for a long time. Am I special? Surely not. But I feel different from my friends. What's it all mean? Later I learned about something called reincarnation, which was kept from us conservative Christians, and I have come to terms with the probability that I simply picked up where I left off last life.

What I've done
From that point, an insatiable (but necessary) search ensued: for Truth, for peace, for healing, for liberation. I made myself available to God if ever and how ever "He" wanted to use me in service to others. And though I always knew I'd be doing something like I'm doing today, it took a while before I was ready.

While I'm at it, let me offer some unsolicited advice from my own experience to anyone thinking they want to "help others":

• God doesn't need your help.
• Whether such a vocation becomes your career or is simply an act of charitable good will, in the grand scheme, it's for you only; no one else.
• What's more, if it's authentic, it cannot be done for egoic gain.
• You must wait until the time is right and ripe for you to begin.
• You must not be a "wounded healer."

• You must have made considerable progress in your own work before teaching it, sharing it, giving it, extending it.

Anyway...

As I grew and got older, I saw very keenly the shortcomings of the institutionalized church. The fairy tales lost their luster. What the grown-ups said was supposed to happen for those who love God and neighbor simply didn't. No amount of believing the right things or praying the right way or reading my Bible with the right devotion changed anything. In a way, lots of things got worse.

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