pre graduation essay

[Jennifer]

A month ago, if you’d asked me, would I be writing my pre-graduation essay now, I would have said, no way.  I thought I had another year or so to go before I could say I’d integrated and understood the principles of the classâ€"maybe!  Really, who knew how long it would be? But things change, and sometimes they change rapidly.
Six weeks ago I made the decision to stop taking the pain medications I’d been on for my ruptured disks.  I have a tolerance for opiates from some experimentation I did in my twenties and so I had to take a lot, to reduce my pain.  I didn’t like the effects.  The drugs emphasized victim tendencies that I’d been working to surrender.  They also seemed to heighten my tendencies to look to other people for what I needed, another  behavior I was working to stop completely.
   Quitting the drugs wasn’t hard.  My body actually felt a lot better right away. Right after, for no good reason I lost a job I’d had for three years, got pissed off, then let go of it.  Moved on, started thinking about a new career in counseling.  Got an application for the program.
   I went back to see a trauma therapist I’d worked with before, an amazing healer who is also one of my teachers.  The session I received from Lee was much stronger than any we had previously done.  I felt the session had a similar effect to a shaktipat session and a bunch of very old and dense feeling things just lifted away. For a month I continued the process of surrender and clearing karma on my own, intensively, while hanging from an inversion swing.  My entire thoracic spine, once racked with pain, cleared and healed.  Bones in my skull moved.  Energy shifted.  And then, everything began to change.  I stopped feeling I needed anything from other people.  I started to feel good inside myself, and peaceful, almost all of the time.  The intrusive fear thoughts I’d once been troubled by were gone, what few that remained seemed to have become reminders to me to embrace my shadow side with unconditional love.
   Something came calling in the middle of my meditations.  It was as if I would go into my heart, and then suddenly, be in a place where all sensory input would stop.  The ringing in my ears from playing too many loud gigs, the sound of my heart, the flow of my pulses, all stop, in total darkness.
   And, then I would feel deep fear, and as soon as I felt this fear, I would be back into myself, my sounds, and my previous meditation, out of that smooth black space.  What is happening?  I wondered.  And then I realized, I am going into the void.  And at the same time I knew, I have done this before.  And I also knew, that in order to accept this invitation to enter, I would have to first understand and surrender the deep fear I had of the void.  I decided to do that, and in setting that intention I began a brief process in which all the pieces of my life fell together, many of them pieces I’d been juggling for a very long time.
For most of my life I’ve had two questions.  They can be best summarized  as:
1.  How did I get so fucked up?
2.  What the hell just happened?
Now I’ve found the answers to these questions, after years of chasing the story.  My mind ran like a rat through my story for years, until finally I abandoned  its pursuit, and then the story was revealed to me, like a cosmic joke.


   Six months or so ago I found out that my mother failed to bond with me as an infant.  I’d been wrestling with my mother issues for a long time, and was blaming her for a lot of stuff, including a supposed “toxic lineage”.  That concept was the extent to which I could understand the dynamic, and it was a flawed one, a result  of incomplete understanding.  Now I see, that whatever was done to me, was also done to my mother and that she is not a villain but a victim herself.
   Learning that she failed to bond with me explained why I had felt so messed up, so wrong, for my entire life.  I never knew why I was like that, but I always wondered.  I knew my stepmom had hit me and slapped me around, but that wasn’t that bad.  I knew my dad was a drug addict and emotionally disengaged and controlling, but that wasn’t that bad.  I knew my stepdad was am emotionally abusive alcoholic, and that wasn’t that bad either.  None of the things I remembered seemed to account for the depth of my personal pain. 
   I wondered, had I been sexually abused and repressed it?  Whenever I asked to see if that was the case, nothing came up except my friends dad exposing his dick to me once when I was nine.  And that wasn’t that bad.
   When I learned about the lack of bonding, that explained everything, and my heart voice told me that yes, that was indeed the source of my deep pain.  I began to explore my toxic behavior patterns in light of that knowledge, and I saw how all the problems in my current relationship were actually a projection of that original wound.  I studied it for a while.  The behaviors lessened.  But it was not until I got off the pain meds I’d been taking for 6 weeks that I was able to fully move on.   After that, the behaviors stopped completely.
   Now, when Eileen told me last summer that I was creating my own crap, I did not believe her.  But it was something about what she said….how it had only been by the grace of god that she herself had believed….that made me believe-while-not-believing.  I knew deep down that what you and she told me was true.  But I couldn’t wrap my mind around it.  So, instead, I adopted a fake-it-till-you-make-it-approach, deciding to believe even though I didn’t believe.  And eventually, it wasn’t fake any more.  And one day, I saw very clearly everything I had done to myself. 
   Remember when you said to Santiago, “well, at least now we know what happened to you.”?
   Well, I think I now see, that this is the same thing that happened to me, only with a twist of ignorance and lack of respect for the true power of psychedelics.
   I did not realize until very recently, that I went through a series of ego death experiences in my 20s while on LSD.  I never knew what they were, until I asked myself, why am I so afraid of this void, and when have I been here before?
`   Well, when I had been there before was when I was having what I thought was a “bad trip” caused by interactions with Prozac.  But, oddly enough, I kept taking this bad trip over and over and over again….and at the same time this didn’t feel compulsive.
   What would happen in the trip is that at some point everything would go deep, deep black, like I was sucked into a place of total darkness.  Sometimes, when that happened, in the real world my body would pass out and seizure or just be sitting there totally catatonic like.
   In that place I would spinter into a million fragments cast throughout the velvety darkness and I would also see hellish scenes.  It was terrifying.  And the next morning I’d wake up in bed going “What???  I’m not really dead?”  I’d have to integrate the fact that I was actually still alive.  I’d wake up as what I called “Mr.Nobody”, a blank slate without personal preferences. 
   I did this to myself, over and over again, for six months, for reasons I didn’t understand or even feel the need to try to fathom.  Prior to this period, I’d taken LSD many times before with no ill effects ever.   And after that time period, I took it once or twice, and was fine.
   Well, this was a very very bad idea.  I had no esoteric training whatsoever.  I was not practicing yoga.  I was completely unprotected by myself and vulnerable to my fear.  The void had its way with me.  I became more afraid.  One day I saw my husband Charlie’s head getting chopped up in void space.  I told him about it.  It terrified me, and I was so sad to see him getting destroyed, and somehow I knew we would be separated.  After that I stopped tripping.  Six months later Charlie’s head getting chopped up manifested in real life.
   He was stabbed by a crack addict in a robbery.  Charlie joked about it after he left the hospital.  He thought it was odd I had foreseen the event.  Maybe I was psychic, he said.  We had no idea.  Charlie was never the same again.  Three years later he had become a heroin addict, we had split up, and he was robbing banks.  He went to federal prison at age twenty-one.  We remained friends and I wrote to him during that time, but I never saw him again after he was released.
   I was never the same again either.  After I learned that Charlie had developed a secret heroin addiction, I freaked out.  I went across the country to my mother’s house, where right away her boyfriend tried to sexually assault me, and after that I had a total breakdown when she would not believe my police report and kicked me out of her house.  I healed, in time, as much as a person who has been traumatized all her life and knows nothing of divine grace can ever heal.
   It wasn’t until many years later that the real healing even began, and when it started it came with great pain and struggle, after having been kidnapped and raped by a psychopathic stranger.  After the rape, I’d gone through two years of zombie and then called myself “normal” again.  I wasn’t.  I was a PTSD closet case, and a severe one at that.  When Septeptember 11 happened, and I saw the towers fall from my rooftop, that was the PTSD straw that broke the camel’s back, and I used it as an excuse to enter EMDR therapy.  That wasn’t really why I was there at all of course.  And between that, and my yoga practice, something shifted and K started moving.
   And then I began a process of self study, clearing, repatterning and surrender that seemed like it was going on forever.  Until recently, it stopped, and everything made sense.  A month ago, I stopped faking it and started making it, when I saw how it was just like Eileen said, I created it.  Ouch.
   I did it all, to myself, supposedly “unconsciously”.  But I know I wasn’t truly unconscious.  I did it all.  Everything.  I even went into the void and manifested my husband, who I loved dearly, getting stabbed.  On Acid.
   Great.
   I’m the one, just me, me and my shadow, my clever invisible shadow who was willing to take all the blame for so long.  He took it, and took it, and as long as I feared and hated him all was safely hidden away.  But the minute I loved that shadow, he told me all his secrets of what I had made him do, and how I had made him promise never to tell.
   So, I said to myself, self, this is very interesting.  Let’s look at what I did to myself and why.  I subjected myself repeatedly to ego death under LSD, which I found terrifying, and did not understand, and I traveled through places in the void which were full of demons (my own, of course) which I also found terrifying, and, holy shit, I’ve destroyed my life, and fucked myself up, and hurt other people, and my shadow totally fucked me over!  But….uhh…wait….if I can see this then I must not be fucked up any more.  And actually, I feel a little sad and freaked out, maybe a little grief, but under that, I feel fine.  I feel, actually peaceful.  I guess I didn’t truly  “destroy” my life.
   And then, I realized, that my shadow is actually my very best friend.  And that it did these things to free me, and that sometimes, well, freedom hurts.  And probably, some time in the past, young and rash and disrespectful of the power of the sacred medicines, full of pain and fear but also brave, I wished to be free.  I wished to be free, knowing me, by the fastest and most expeditious route.  And I got it all, and not at a pace that I could handle. I deserved that, for my lack of respect.  And because of the pain that added, I was one day forced to sort it all out.
   So after thinking about all that stuff for a while, I asked myself again, why did I do this?  Whatever the LSD did, it probably only amplified what was already in my mind.  Why did I go to the void?  Well, LSD facilitates ego death, I discovered through research.  But I think there were other reasons.  I felt I’d been there before, secretly, a long long time ago.  And then I remembered.
   Void was where I went, before I could speak, when my mother left me cold and alone as a newborn.  My mother’s failure to bond was death to me, meant death to my infant body/mind, and so I tried to go back.  Felt she wanted me to die, and tried to give her what she wanted.  I remembered, seeing it in third eye vision.  I tried to leave, went backward into the void, hung out there, that blackness feeling safer than my mother’s arms.  And I saw too in this vision, that she was unaware of what she had done to me, because the same thing had been done to her, and she could not allow herself to see it because the pain was too great. And so she blamed me, told me there was something wrong with me all my life long, it was easier than blaming herself.  And I grew to do the same thing, blame her, easier than blaming myself.  I saw also, that by studying myself and my own shadow, I could learn exactly what had happened to me as a child.  And so I did.  The pain released and drained out of me, and I forgave myself.
   All my life, I had been projecting this original wound onto all my interactions with other people. That made for some very bad relationships to put it mildly.  In the repeated acid trips, I relived the original wound, but as an adult with a fully developed ego the effects were devastating.  They tore me apart so deeply that I had to find my way here, and get all the way from the place where I was then to FST, before I could put myself back together again.
   I have not yet chosen to dive into the void.  I know I will simply enter, when the time is right.  I am no longer afraid of it or of the one who guards it, whom I now love.  And though I haven’t gone in, I also feel I don’t need to, and that just by understanding the true nature of the void (insofar as I have seen it) and the true nature of my experiences there, I have learned so much.  What have I learned?
   The void is empty and black.  Some say it lacks any light or love, and that this is why it is terrifying.  I learned, that this so-called lack of light or love, does not have to be terrifying.  It could be instead, peaceful.  The nature of the void is emptiness, and what is shown to me there is what I have brought into it in the form of my own karma.  All the fearful things I saw there, were just myself reflected.
Once I saw that the nature of the void is emptiness, I was able to see that the nature of the Earth is love and  energy and abundance.  Love is all around us, all the time; and even humans acting “evil” are still in a way an expression of love, because they are of the earth.  The absence of love in the void can feel terrifying, if inside you feel terror. The emptiness there is also shining and beautiful. The void is a blank canvas on which my mind reflects and where there is no ability to hold denial.  No wonder it is hell to some people.
Finally, I am healing.  The trauma is gone and I am bruised but whole, and healing.  I feel I will soon be ready to devote myself in service to others, after I complete the training I will soon start as a counselor.  And that is my purpose I feel, to take whatever all this brings me, add it to the yoga teacher background I already have, and use all of that to serve humanity.  People don’t scare me any more, or give me unwanted empathy.  I actually find people really interesting and good to be around these days.  My main practice is to keep surrendering, because I can feel new ego stuff and karma, trying to grow constantly.  When I feel myself going into a judgment space, or getting ungrounded, I know there’s something I need to let go of.
And a few days ago I was going through FST lessons, reviewing, because I always find something new that I’ve missed.  And I realized, that I am no longer finding new things I have missed, and that I am done.  So I sat down to write this essay to explain how I got here.
I’m done, and I want to keep going.  I’m ready to fly.  And how did all of this start?  Well I decided to take a course called  Fire Serpent Tantra with this really cool teacher who was believe it or not, a former dominatrix.  And I said, hmm sacred sex that sounds very interesting and I am going to try it right now.  So I sincerely with all my being dedicated my sexual act to the goddess.  I got both a smashing orgasm and a daughter, my first after three sons.  I almost lost that daughter by bleeding  in early pregnancy, and my love for her took me deep into themystery of my own relationship with my mother, and the solution of my convoluted story.  Wow.   Thank you goddess for such an amazing journey over the past year!  And thank you all you FSTers, guiding me along and supporting me through my frustrating struggles with my victim shit.  I appreciate having been a part of this space in which I learned so much.  Now the victim crap is done!  Things are totally different now, no blame, and only open space.  I am free.  And I forgive those who have harmed me, and no longer feel they or any one else “need” to change or do anything different.  It is and was, All Perfect.
And life still has its hassles and difficult moments, but wow, what a different world it is!  I feel excited to explore this place and to see what it means to live as my true self, my highest self.  Thank you!
namaste,
Jennifer

[Gustaf]

Thank you so much for sharing your grad essay Jennifer!

It's an incredibly intense read, of how you have blossomed through the ups and downs of life and so much suffering. Absolutely beautiful. Keep going! I can't keep myself from smiling on this end.

Namaste
Gustaf

[juergen]

Dear Jen,

i felt quite early, that You were only a few bits away from a breakthrough, and that You would soon give me a boost on my own way, and with your pregrad essay this has fulfilled!

last night i had a mystic dream, and one thing i remember of it was a sort of void-experience:

i was in a large and dark cave system underground and felt challenged to enter an even darker car(for a repair? - it came the the mind but with no gut's confirmation), in the Back-seat area; i felt incarcerated and panicked, only desiring to get out. Of course it also has a sexual allusion; but then i think, sexuality is much or All, what The Void is about; or think of a conjurer's black cylinder hat, ...or Pandora's box, or Isis's big house(The Pharaoh).
At least i learned some respect there in that short while, and it was arousing anyway
I liked your expression: "still had to wrap my mind around it", which is where i'm still 'operating'.
Yesterday in the evening, with a candlelight illuminating my thoroughly renovated place i experienced a brightness and feel of wealth,  in peace, with Your essay still on my mind.

What i early sensed about You, is that something more, than just " white new age";  that certain streak of darkness, that has now become your friend

What do You ask a client when counseling, first?
tell me where it hurts

good chopping wood!

Juergen

[Jennifer]

Dear Gustaf and Juergen,
Thank you for your warm responses.  It was intense for me too, to write and post this essay for others to read.  Juergen, it pleases my heart that my experience was useful for you.  I so appreciate your wacky sense of humor, wordplay and your lightness of spirit.
Namaste,
Jen