The years 2000 to 2009 were truly trying for me. My wife, after 20 years of continuous descent into madness, had finally brought herself to the final stages of defeating alcoholism. One day while I was out of town, she fell, hitting her head and causing permanent brain damage. She was in a coma for a number of months and the prognosis was that she would not recover. Surprising to me, my daughters, and everyone who knew her, she then suddenly improved. She woke from her coma and regained some of her consciousness through intensive therapy.
I was unable to deal with our interactions any longer and I separated from her in 2009. This was after years of frustrating attempts to help her with horrifically expensive rehabilitation programs at various facilities around the country. The year 2009 was filled with deep sorrow and pain as I watched her go through her life and death process, which was of her own choosing.
Though instinctively I knew I was an integral part of the ongoing process, I sensed there was a mutual agreement from a past life in play. I felt helpless and powerless. Perhaps my role was to facilitate my wife in her awakening, and she in mine, though there seemed to be little evidence of progress.
For many years, bad news in the way of offensive emails, telephone calls, threats from doctors, lawyers, hospitals and collection agencies, and even highly questionable medical practices filled each day. It certainly seemed like it was open season on our finances and our emotions by one of the greediest industries in our society.
While she was in the coma due to her fall, I was living in a 16-foot trailer in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, trying to hold my life together and doing an exceptionally poor job of it. My emotions were literally on my sleeve and the smallest little thought would call me into an emotional breakdown over which I had no control. I felt as though I had sunk to the lowest and darkest point of my life. Because of the incredible costs associated with her confinement in a hospital and her subsequent therapy, I had to put our La Jolla home up for sale. This was at the beginning of the downward slide in the economy and in home values. What at one point in the ‘90s had been a home valued at close to $2,000,000, now had become a “difficult sell” at whatever the market would bring. This process took the better part of the following year to finally complete. Little did I know then that the eventual sale of the home would free me from the past and allow for the rapid unfolding of a move to a better and more joyful time, although this would not materialize for many months.
One day while sitting in a street-side coffee shop in San Miguel de Allende, two people walked in who I recognized from the RV campground, Marguerite and John. Knowing each other mutually as fellow campers, they asked if they could join me. Though I was not prepared to face anyone, it felt extremely rude not to accept. As it turned out, and as synchronicity would always have it, John was in the business of dealing with alcohol addiction and Marguerite was a natural and advanced healer in her own right. I then realized the truth in the saying, There are no accidents in life. Everything does, indeed, happen for a reason.
As we started to talk I fell into serious emotional distress and ended up relating the years of tragedy I was living. Marguerite mentioned she had just attended a lecture on the Mayan prophesies given by a powerful shaman named Maria Teresa, and suggested I make an appointment to receive, at least, a cleansing. Somehow that felt right and I followed up on her advice later in the morning.
Several days later I found myself sitting across the table from a small, mysterious woman named Maria Teresa at the biblioteca, San Miguel’s beautiful multilingual library. Maria Theresa was dressed in a long flowing skirt, bulky sweater and tennis shoes. She was not quite like what I had imagined a shaman to appear. We talked for an hour or so as I stared into her dark eyes and poured out my pain and concerns.
For some reason I cannot explain, the initiation I had given a few years ago at the Rosicrucian Temple in San Diego to the woman who shape-shifted into a wolf kept haunting me. While telling Maria Teresa my story, this thought nagged at me. Was there a way the dark spirit of that Wiccan woman could have possessed or taken over my being? Was I carrying a curse that was infecting my whole family? Did she transfer that dark demon into the depths of my soul? I certainly felt spiritually compromised at the time. I did not know for sure and neither did the shaman, but she told me there was a ceremony that coming Saturday night and she highly recommended I attend.
Saturday night I met her and another ceremony participant, Palomita, at the entrance to the Real de Minas Hotel. We all got into Maria Teresa’s car and headed off into the night, driving to a pueblo named San Luis de Potosi just north of San Miguel de Allende. When we arrived we entered a modest but mid-scale neighborhood and arrived at the house of the regional head of, what I was later to learn, the Church of Santo Daime. In Spanish Santo means saint and Daime is Brazilian Spanish for give me, or, give me the blessings of the saint.
The host for the ceremony was a remarkable man about 45 years old with clear, steady eyes and a seemingly unflappable constitution. Mauricio was his name. Months later Mauricio was to spiritually become mi hermano, my brother. Anna, his wife, a beautiful, full-figured and strong woman from Brazil, joined him. They greeted me warmly and welcomed me into the house. A small group of other Hispanic people, mostly young and healthy looking, soon joined us. They greeted each other and me with abrazos y besos, hugs and kisses which is a Latin tradition.
The ceremony began with the arranging of a table in the center of the room. Chairs circled the table with half of them reserved for women and the other half for men. A cross made of two cross-beams sat on the table along with a picture of the founder of the Santo Daime, Raimundo Irineu Serrathe, the Padrino or father. He was a tall and mysteriously serene looking dark-skinned man from Brazil.
Everyone was dressed in white, with the leaders and helpers dressed in parochial school style uniforms. We were all seated around the table when Mauricio gave a short discourse, in Spanish, describing the nature of their religion and the nature of the soul. It was, in its own way, very beautiful. He described how the essence of Christianity has a deeper message that brings us to the realization that the Second Coming of the Christ takes place within each of us when we align ourselves with Light and purify ourselves of darkness.
To me, that was profound! Knowing that we are the journey and we are the path, and knowing that the allegories referred to in books like the Bible, Bhagavad Gita and the Koran are about our inner process, illuminated my mind in a way like never before.
This revelation showed me that we all have a responsibility at some point in our life cycles to begin the ascent to Self. Step one, from what I could see now, was to clean my spiritual house and get rid of the clutter and preconditioned beliefs. By doing so I could open up the way to higher and more refined energies. Greater purity of thought leads to more simplicity, beauty and joy in life.
I liked their style as it made sense out of my views toward religion. Most dogma left me empty, especially the religious sort, and I leaned toward what I call spirituality. His words seemed to combine the two, religion and spirituality, into something unique and beautiful. It also helped alleviate my discord over what we (all of us) are seeking; why we, as a species, seem to be in want of something bigger to believe in, thus evoking myths and wild stories of virgin births, transfiguration, ascendance and so on.
When Mauricio finished his opening speech everyone began to sing beautiful and soothing tunes in Portuguese. I have always found Brazilian songs to be some of the world’s most beautiful music, mostly due to the softness of the Portuguese language. These songs were about petitioning the presence of Santo Daime, the Mother healer and guide, to enter into the room and our souls. The ceremony consisted of singing, and blessings followed by the drinking of a particularly nasty tasting, bitter dark brew made from a mixture of roots found in the jungles of the Amazon.
It is said the shamans go into the nether-worlds by means of a dream and receive instructions on how to locate, mix and present this concoction. Today the brew is fairly well-known. Even the American Psychiatric Association reportedly claims that the taking of Ayahuasca, the name of the mixture, is equivalent to 20 years of psychotherapy. Santo Daime churches have now sprung up around the world including in Oregon, Washington State and New Mexico, where it is now legally permitted to use Ayahuasca as a religious tool.
Sometime after I drank the liquor, I found myself still sitting there expecting something to happen. Nothing happened. By nothing I mean I experienced no real great psychic revelations or challenges other than some physical discomfort. I had an almost overwhelming urge to vomit. The compound caused a very unsettling feeling in my body that I successfully fought with all my strength. I maintained a level of nausea that I would have preferred not to experience. I just did not like it! It felt decidedly unpleasant and unnatural. Was this supposed to cure me of my 20 years of hell? I just did not get it.
The session ended with more singing and blessings. Somehow I remembered receiving some clear insights but soon forgot them in the process of psychically returning to the room at the end of the ceremony. It was a somewhat cute ceremony, innocuous but certainly not something I thought I needed at the time or wanted to experience again. Given my circumstances I did not think this approach was beneficial to my healing.
Over the next week however, I continued to receive more messages and insights. There was remarkable information coming through, which though I had not known it at the time of the ceremony, seemed to be preparing me for some task I had yet to accomplish. One message that came through repeatedly was to give in, do not resist. I was not sure just yet to what that idea referred. During the first session with the Ayahuasca I fought a vague feeling that I might be consumed or taken over by an unknown entity. I had the distinct impression that Mother Daime was telling me to allow her into my inner domain the next time we were to meet. I made a decision then to do just that; to accept and give in, to not resist, and to allow in whatever was to happen. I intuitively knew this lesson was also meant as a life lesson to be remembered and applied in my daily affairs. I had to learn to just allow.
A bold new adventure stood before me; one that was coming after 20 years of fortifying my being from the intense emotional and psychological attacks that were constantly upon me due to the embroiling chaos and insanity of my family situation. Daime told me: I had to let go. I had to open to that river of consciousness flowing through the universe, the Matrix and through each of us. By being open to this energy I would receive protection, inspiration and guidance while on the material plane. My path would be opened to all possibilities and, if I maintained that state of being, I would be blessed with abundant joy, happiness and love.
Here, I would prefer to use the word surrender rather than acceptance. Daime emphasized over and over, I had to let go of resistance. It’s as though one was sitting in Siddhartha’s Stream, allowing the movement of water–of life–to caress the consciousness–to live without judgement. This concept has very little to do with acceptance.
Since 2011, I have experienced joy, happiness and love in abundance, as well as a great improvement in the health of my body. By surrendering into the All, one can realign one’s energies with the cosmic power that motivates and maintains all of existence.
When I lived in La Jolla I had a neighbor Javier, from Peru. He had a life philosophy that went like this: If you have a problem and can do something about it, do it. If you can’t do anything about it, then there is nothing to do!
This is the art of surrender or giving in. We are in an enormous spiritual river of opportunities and events. Each day we are given our sustenance, be it food, fortune, love, whatever. Accept the flow, choose what’s best for you and just Be. When we stop resisting, life comes to us.
With this session being so benign I was totally unprepared for my next venture into the land of the Spirit. I was determined to apply my new found commitment to let go, but had no advanced clue as to the serious nature of the next, soon to come, Daime session.
From my book Counterpoint to Reality Available on amazon.com