Ballad of a reluctant Yogi-Part 4
I went back to my practices and committed wholeheartedly. I went deeper. And as grace would have it, the advanced program that I had run away from some years back was scheduled again about the time my 90 days was up. The program offered an experience that enabled a person to experience themselves beyond the wall of the physical self—beyond what we have accumulated in this life. Something told me I had to go. So, I got on a plane, and a bus, and scooted up the hill to the ashram. As soon as I entered the ground, my ego knew something was up. The fear was immense. But maybe I was open enough. Maybe the soil was ripe for expansion. As soon as I walked into the mediation hall, the bottom dropped out for me. I didn’t have a concept of what was “me” and what was not “me” anymore. I entered a completely new dimension of myself. When I accessed this space, there was an explosion of joy and bliss. I didn’t even have to finish the process. It hit me as soon as I walked into the energy charged environment. I was blown wide open.
Coming down the hill into town after the program, I was ecstatic. I took a walk in a park, and with my mind, I had to consciously bring myself back into the form of my own body by defining myself as independent and separate. I would come up to a tree, look at it, and say to myself, “Ok, this is me,” and then touch the tree and say, “This is the tree.” I had to consciously define myself as a separate entity. This went on for a few hours. I visited my family and was overjoyed to see them. I was exploding with energy. When I came home to Colorado, it continued. There was an inner pathway to an energy that I had never experienced before. I could ride my bike for thirty miles at a click and never be tired. I had connected to a dimension of myself that was profound, energy charged, and free of my conditioned thinking and responses. Over the next few weeks, I began to notice the change that had occurred within me. My PTSD was gone. My system had completely reset. I never again woke up in a nauseous state of dread, separation, and fear as I approached the day. A tremendous amount of useless information had been instantly downloaded from my mind, leaving me with a new dimension of intelligence that was beyond accumulated thought and learning. There was a sense of ease and freedom that I had lacked all through my recovery process. I had found the freedom that had been promised in the rooms of AA and ACOA that had never been granted me.
Has my journey continued? YES. I’ve still had to work and recognize my old, subconscious, learned patterns. I’ve come to see that I tend to use the old survival tools that I have been given to incorporate, function, and survive in the world. But the PTSD and trauma response has been removed. I still have to live and be a part of the physical world, but if I maintain my connection and practice, I’m able to have one foot in the dimension of myself beyond what we refer to as name and form. That dimension is always available to me if I continue to evolve and practice. I still experience fear, but it's normal to circumstances. It's not an inherent, forever on alert fear which crippled me in the past. As I have proceeded in the world of recovery and trauma informed care, I really don’t hear anyone talking about this kind of experience. Can we manufacture this kind of experience for all who suffer this ailment of trauma and addictive conditioning? I have not encountered anyone that has revealed this type of experience to me. So, I have looked back on my 17 years of recovery and yoga practice to try and identify some key factors in relationship to what, why, and how it happened. What happened in relation to my experience as a recovering addict, ACOA, trauma survivor, and human being? Yes... human being. What enabled me to experience myself in such a way that my system remembered who it was beyond my conditioned responses to life? What did I recover and why? It's taken some time to identify and pinpoint it in relation to recovery and spiritual lore. I hear a lot of talk in recovery circles about people living with trauma response, but no one really talks about transcending it. But it happened to me... Why?
I never wanted any of this recovery and spiritual nonsense—I was suspicious and reluctant the entire way—but it happened anyway. What follows is a somewhat academic approach to a system of spiritual technology and self-inquiry that gives us an experiential possibility of transcendence. This transcendence is what is referred to as samadhi, self-realization, Christ consciousness, buddha nature, or the access to the dimension of ourselves that lies beyond name and form—beyond what we have accumulated as body, mind, emotion, and experience. I feel it’s the secret of recovery. It’s a combination of contemporary recovery tools and the 5,000-year-old science of experiential spiritual practice, that when incorporated together, expedites the process of recovery and spiritual transcendence. The process is tailored to unclog the pathways of energy in relation to our physical, emotional, and energy bodies, giving us the possibility to experience ourselves in a new dimension of grace. I’m not a yogi in the traditional sense. “ I am.” I’m no different than you. Anonymous through and through. I don’t sit on a pillow in Yogic garb, dispensing philosophy from a cave or temple. I'm not repeating quotations or philosophy out of books beyond my own experience. All the philosophy everyone is quoting doesn’t create an experience. The experience created the philosophy. What is your experience up until this point? Ask yourself.
Really, I’d rather write poetry or songs than to write this book. I’d rather sit at the corner café, musing with the fluttering of birds and passersby, contemplating the push and pull of the sun and moon. I’d rather be eating or fishing. But the result of this process was so profound for me that I feel it's my duty to pass it on, so you might have the possibility of staring into the abyss of a bliss and happiness so deep that it changes the reality of your existence and the world. Grace is always a factor. No one can be successful without grace. It's impossible. I’m living proof. It’s a fact. I didn’t choose this path …. It chose me. It showed up. My imperfect family showed up. Spiritual abuse showed up. The drunkenness showed up. The misery showed up. Shame showed up. Failure showed up. Sorrow showed up. Then sobriety showed up—in spite of myself, and who I thought I was. The terror showed up. The freaking Indian Yogi Guy showed up. It all just showed up. I’m so lucky. The universe conspires always to reveal to us just what needs to be revealed. It’s the definition of perfection, really. We just have to listen. Did I try at every turn to run screaming from the burning building and back to the known and my old self? Yes. I don’t know what kept me crawling back and moving forward. It was probably a deep-seated voice beyond the subconscious that was strong enough to outweigh the fear—the The Secret of Recovery 15 fear that deep down I knew was just a wall blocking me from something greater. To the union that I begin and end with . A place I like to call “Home”. I’ve laid it out because…if you are meant to…you will find it too.
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Success
Success is not success without a willingness to fail. How does success look in this program? For me it was accessing a dimension of myself where i was separate from my past conditioning. That meant not waking up in a ball of fear every morning that was debilitating. I had to have tools and people to help me not succumb the the paralysis it created. I had to separate from my thoughts so I could experience the distinction between who I was and my protection mechanisms.
For everyone the path is different. The one thing that is not different is our approach and the spirit in which we approach our recovery.
WHERE WE BEGIN AND END
We begin where we are, accept ourselves where we are, and how we are, and whatever happens … happens. If we think we know where we are going, we are selling ourselves way short. By thinking we know where we are going, we create a barrier that prevents us from accessing the miracle of the unknown. The Secret of Recovery is a science. In our recovery practices, we perform action. Every action has a reaction. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It’s a law of science that what we resist persists. So, we start our action where we are with no desired destination in mind. We just do. We get rid of our foresight. We do and observe. This requires an openness and a willingness to let action take us wherever it wants us to go. We trust. We get out of the driver’s seat. We do without knowing where it will take us. Only then can transformation happen. We will repeat this affirmation …
Ballad of a Reluctant Yogi-part 3
All this happened within a week. There were participants that had shared about an advanced program that they had taken. When they shared about it, they could not contain themselves. They fell apart with joy and tears. This scared me even more. The only thing scarier than our self-imposed, comfortable prison is the raw joy of experiencing a piece of unbounded freedom. It seems every time the ego butts up against the possibility of its own demise, it spits out its own form of squid ink called fear. That fear blots out the sky and disorients. It clouds the path one must take for one's own good. It’s a tremendous hurdle. For trauma people, it's even worse. The transcendent experience to overcome and reset the conditioned trauma response is almost a traumatic experience in itself. Asking a trauma person to do what is needed to realize himself beyond his or her protection mechanisms is like asking him to go insane.
That’s what it felt like anyway. But that's what is actually needed. I left that week overjoyed and committed. I started doing kriya yoga practices. Things started to move within. But what I thought was going to be a peaceful process was instead tumultuous. The practices started to open me up. Shit was moving and coming up. What was coming up wasn’t so pretty. The self-inquiry element in my AA program gave me something to do with it that was concrete. Slowly, the practices loosened, brought The Secret of Recovery 9 up, and revealed my interior life. My motivations, fears, regrets, loss, shame, guilt, and dishonesty were all revealed and came up for me to deal with. My distorted, protected, and comically put together self started to become unglued, and then I worked it out through the process of the program steps. This took time. Everyone is different. For me, the next few years was a back and forth dance on a train I was unable to get off of. Every time I had tried to exit stage right, the doors would slam shut. And I would find myself crawling back with the realization that there was no other option but to move forward. I did the back and forth dance that grace required for me to transcend my own trauma response. Most of the dance was not pretty. I did my best. I thought AA and therapy would help fix it and restore me to sanity. Although it helped to know where my trauma responses came from, it did not ultimately carry me all the way across the stream. Self-knowledge availed me nothing when it came to trauma. I was trapped in a never-ending cycle of a conditioned response that I had no control over. I could not solve the problem with my knowledge or willpower. I went in and out of my practices and tried to move forward. I’d drop them and start them again.
The inner fear was overwhelming at times, but I carried on. I never let the fear get the best of me. I plowed through it, but I was not free. I’d wake up terrified in the mornings. I’d throw up in trash cans before performances. I’d throw up dealing with my son. The whole public-school system was a huge trigger. I went back to a counselor. She identified the abuse and flaws in my upbringing and then offered me a book on Jesus. I did EMDR. I redoubled my efforts in the program. I tried the advanced program with the little, Indian man, and I was so terrified that I left. I did another yoga program. I would re-up my practices and then quit them altogether. Back and forth I went. Mind you, I never wanted any of this shit—it just happened. I crawled back into AA thinking I was the problem, only to become more depressed. The AA crowd would just look at me like I was doing something wrong. An AA guy’s biggest fear is that the program is not going to work. He hangs on to the program like it’s life or death because it is. But I re-committed myself. I did more inventories, looked at myself and my reactions to things. But my identification as a 100% be all, end all, selfish addict didn’t add up. I was trapped in a bubble that I couldn't explain. I rolled out of bed every morning feeling sick to my stomach and dragging myself through each day. For almost ten years, I did this in recovery. For ten years, the freedom they promised eluded me.
Then the wheels came off, and I crawled into ACOA (Adult Children of Alcoholics) and found out the root of my PTSD and trauma. I did the work. I accumulated an immense amount of knowledge about my predicament. But in the end, self-knowledge still availed me nothing. I was trapped in a conditional response, as a result of my story, that I had no control over. Finally, I had had enough. I was at the end of my rope. In the first yoga sutra, it says simply, “And Now Yoga.” Why? Because we have tried everything else. I had done the yoga kriya practices I had been taught, but I had never done them completely to open and make them a part of my system. If we start a somatic or yoga practice, we must do it once a day for ninety days, or twice a day for 48 days, for it to become a permanent part of our system. What we are doing is balancing our system and paving new energy pathways to access deeper states of consciousness. This breaks down the walls of our cellular protection mechanisms. If we fail to do this, energy just takes the path it once took. It always takes the path of least resistance and goes right back where it came from into the old riverbed in our bodies. In hindsight, I did it all half-assed. I was undisciplined. I always took the easier, softer way. I wasn’t all in. But at this point, I committed myself to a daily Kriya that opened and balanced the system. (Yoga kriya is a combination of asana, pranayama, chanting, and meditation. It takes about 25 minutes to do.) I did not want to do it. But I found myself doing it anyway.
BUY THE BOOK!
click here:
https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Recovery-ENLIGHTENED-TRANSCENDING-CODEPENDENCY/dp/B08DSVHQRF
Trauma, Yoga and Spiritual Recovery
Listen to the enlightening Podcast. Jeff talks with Dr. Craig Heacock about Trauma, Yoga and the profound possibilities of spiritual recovery.
The 5 levels of being—part 2
The 5 levels of being -part 2
THE ENERGY BODY—
PRANAMAYA KOSHA
Pranamaya means composed of prana or energy—the vital principle, the force that vitalizes and holds together the body and the mind. It's invisible and can only be measured through physical response. It pervades our whole organism; it's one physical manifestation is the breath. As long as this vital principle (the breath) exists in the organisms, life continues. This layer has a power all its own. It connects and holds our physical form together. Let's go back to the exercise where we hold our breath to try and kill ourselves. The breath connects our physical being to the forces that lay in and outside the body. This is why the breath is used in so many ways to help us realize the connection between the physical and non-physical part of ourselves. We need the breath and exchange of the breath to maintain our physical existence. Once the breath stops, the physical body just falls away. It cannot be maintained. The breath is impermanent. When we identify ourselves in this layer, we say— I am the breath.
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