Sometimes in order for a life to be rebuilt it has to be torn down and torn apart.

Within a two year period, I lost my mom and my source of income.  I stopped seeing my therapist because I could no longer afford to pay him.  Nevertheless, within six months, I completed and self-published a book that I had been trying to write since 1994.  I resumed my exercise and lost 30 pounds.

Then I broke my foot and was in a boot for seven months, which was an incredibly difficult adjustment.  Yet, my immobility caused me to stop and think.  I could do little else but reflect, meditate, and question what was going on with my life, what I was doing, and what I was going to do.  How many people get the opportunity to do nothing?  This is very critical.  As I wrote in my book, we’re on this treadmill and we don’t want to get off.  We think we can’t get off.  That’s what I thought.  What will happen if I get off of this treadmill?  I was very unhappy.  Yet, I kept going.  I kept doing the same things over and over.

After my mom died, my life seemed to fall apart and I couldn’t figure out how to put it together again.  It was a very intense time.  Even today, I become emotional remembering that period.  But I can look back and I see that what I went through was analogous to a building being demolished.  Anything that I no longer needed in my life disappeared.  Some forms of existence cannot remain if change is going to come.

Therapy began a process of critical and immense change.  That process included many births and deaths, beginnings and endings.  I regained my health.  People and institutions left my life.  I started Ancient Seeker.  I didn’t appreciate much of my journey as I traveled along my tumultuous roads.  Change is not always enjoyable.  It can be very traumatic.  Some people don’t endure great changes.  Their lives go along at the same speed.  I experienced substantial changes that were painful and traumatic.  But I got through them and became aware of the benefits.

I don’t react the way that I used to.  I don’t express anger as often.  While I still get annoyed and frustrated, my responses are not as extreme as they used to be.  I try to respond with detachment and positivity.  I used to respond at all times to those whose decision making appeared to me to be without logic or sense.  I used to let people immediately know whenever I deemed their speech or behavior to be wrong or unfair.  My dominant characteristic was to respond and react.  Now, much of what I think stays within.  I don’t express it.  I’m working on adjusting my thoughts and perceptions.

As Steve Jobs said, “Only by looking backwards can you connect the dots.”  I see how my therapy set off an energetic change.  Meditation, yoga, bodywork, changing my diet, and exercising also helped.  I am making my body receptive to an increased flow of energy by being more open, receptive, and allowing.

The body is a vessel through which energy circulates, providing not only physical and mental sustenance and evolution, but ever-heightening awareness and understanding in consciousness if we open ourselves to this possibility.  It is a temple through which we receive and disseminate the potentialities of our existence.  My body must be able to absorb, release, and hold energy.  It must be able to handle the flow and liquidity of energy in order to function at its highest potential.

What I consider a trying time was actually a time of growth and expansion.  My painful contractions gave birth to a new existence.  Although my life appeared to worsen and fall apart, in reality certain aspects of my life were removed in order to enable renewal.  My life drastically changed during a process of renovation that is positive and beneficial.

All of the drama, trauma, falling apart, and disintegration have been fires separating the wheat from the chaff as that which is no longer necessary and that which no longer impedes my evolution is burned away.