Matter is energy. Energy is matter. This means that even though we exist in this universe as material entities, we are, in fact, merely another form of energy.

At an age that varies widely from between the fourth or fifth month to the thirtieth or thirty-sixth month, the psychological birth of the infant occurs. In developmental psychology this stage is known as the separation-individuation phase and is said to designate the child's emergence from a symbiotic fusion with the mother.

Others believe that before this stage, our psyches are still basking in the remembrance of the Oceanic Oneness from which each person's consciousness emerged. This stage is also when we experience our own energies only as forces that exist without any psychological overlay whatsoever.

When an infant is hungry, then, the energy of that hunger is released immediately through crying. When an infant feels joy, that energy is expressed in immediate smiling or laughter. An infant's emotions are naked and direct. It is only when that inevitable period of individuation occurs that he or she begins to be socialized to the idea that some energies must be repressed or delayed and that others are perfectly okay to express - at the right place and the right time.

Thus begins our lifelong struggle to become psychologically healthy human beings. From the moment of our individuation, every event we experience and every person we encounter begins to add layers to our psychological makeup. Our psyches can be likened to an onion; but one that grows in reverse. Instead of growing from the inside out, our psyches develop from the outside in, with the oldest parts of our psyche being the most deeply hidden.

This helps explain why childhood emotional trauma can be so difficult to discover and heal and why dozens, perhaps hundreds of different modalities have been created over the centuries to help reveal these hidden psychological wounds. Many of these modalities are spiritual; others are psychological. More recently they are increasingly pharmaceutical.

In a few of my posts here, I've written about my own struggle with depression and anxiety. I never trusted the idea of psychoanalysis. This may be because as a man who has never felt comfortable having heartfelt discussions with anyone, I never believed that spending perhaps years merely talking out a problem with a so-called professional (and one who more than likely got into the profession to deal with his or her own issues) could be beneficial. Also, I've never made enough money in my life to entertain the notion of spending up to hundreds of dollars a session to discuss my life. It seems like becoming a crack addict would be cheaper and maybe just as effective!

Then twelve years ago, I decided to try the SSRI, Paxil.

Almost overnight, most of my depression and anxiety disappeared. For years afterward, I became a great advocate for these next-generation anti-depressants. Targeted specifically on serotonin, the most important psychoactive neurotransmitter affecting our well-being, SSRI's have restored a sense of equanimity to millions in the past twenty years.

These drugs, however, are not without side effects. The most severe, in Paxil especially, are the sexual side effects, which include erectile dysfunction in men, diminished libido and can include total loss of ability to have an orgasm.

Like major bummer, dude!

Just a few of the other reported side effects of SSRI's are:

• anhedonia
• apathy
• nausea
• drowsiness or somnolence
• headache
• clenching of teeth
• extremely vivid and strange dreams
• dizziness
• changes in appetite
• weight loss/gain (measured by a change in bodyweight of 7 pounds)
• may result in a double risk of bone fractures and injuries
• increased feelings of depression and anxiety (which may sometimes provoke panic attacks)
• tremors
• autonomic dysfunction including orthostatic hypotension, increased or reduced sweating
• akathisia (the inability to sit still or remain motionless)
• liver or renal impairment
• suicidal ideation (thoughts of suicide)
• Photosensitivity (increased risk of sunburn)
  

Obviously, these have only been observed in a minority of people who take SSRI's or the FDA wouldn't have allowed these agents to be on the market.

Yeah, right!

Still, my experience with Paxil had been positive for the most part until I realized that I'd spent the greater part of twelve years in something like an emotional fog. For me, though, this was fine. In fact, it was more than fine if I could live each day free from the obsessive thoughts I'd experienced for years over a litany of complaints I dwelled on constantly.

Then a couple of years ago, I began this spiritual journey and it soon became obvious that I didn't want to be in a fog of any kind. So I ever-so-slowly weened myself off of Paxil, since this drug can be a real bear to withdraw from.

By August 2nd of this year, I was off Paxil completely. Then for the next month, I experienced what I can only call the most manic phase of my life. Without doubt, my withdrawal from Paxil was the trigger for this upheaval, but there were other, more provocative reasons for much of the stress I encountered during this period.

Then, a month after I stopped Paxil completely, I realized that I was fighting a losing battle with my many neuroses. Depression was seeping back in through the cracks of my psyche, and I made the decision that regardless how it affected my attempts to be more open to the goals and intent of this journey, I had to restart the old fog machine.

The first couple of weeks back on Paxil were tough. While withdrawal can be an absolute bitch, bringing those levels back up to an effective level can bring with it its own unique problems.

For weeks, I was very sensitive to touch around my neck and upper chest. I could barely stand to wear shirts and was constantly tugging at my shirt collars to remove the "pressure" of the cloth. Yet even without a shirt, I had similar phantom sensations. Thankfully, it was still summer when this occurred.

Slowly, these symptoms disappeared and the familiar psychological salve of the drug took over once again.

Then with my "mania" quickly forgotten, I again felt that I was giving short shrift to the journey of self-discovery I've been on for these past few years. So I decided again to decrease my dosage - and this time the consequences be damned. But when I reached the most minimal amount I could take before stopping altogether, I decided to try something else.

I felt that since my inability to produce enough serotonin is undoubtedly a problem for some reason within my nervous system, I wondered if there was something that would help produce more serotonin rather than just prevent the recycling of the limited amount that was being produced by my body.

In doing some research on this idea, I read about something called 5-htp, which is the precursor chemical to serotonin and is a metabolite of the amino acid tryptophan, which is found in many foods.

5-htp is sold as a food supplement and is therefore unregulated by the FDA. This means that while it is questionable in its efficacy, it doesn't carry the high cost of pharmaceutical research. So I decided to purchase a quantity of capsules and supplement my now minimal amount of Paxil with them.

It has been about a month since I started this regimen and I've been pleasantly surprised by how effective this combination seems to be for me. What has surprised me most is that during this past month, I've gone through what I can only call the most emotionally turbulent period in my life. Yet, during this time of great turmoil, I've still been able to maintain an equilibrium I never would have expected or believed.

I can't give all my credit to the 5-htp, however. I've done something else for perhaps the first time in my life. This is to seriously explore the power of prayer. The reason I say that this is the first time is because I frankly never really believed in prayer; even as a dutiful and serious seminarian on my way to becoming a Claretian Missionary Priest.

I can't recall ever praying to God or Jesus or the Virgin Mary as my Catholic upbringing taught me; at least not with any serious intent and expectation that anyone was listening on the other end. I still haven't prayed to these Christian ideas during this time. Instead, I've used other modes of prayer I've learned about during my spiritual journey like offering my distress and emotional pain to Spirit and to create an intention to move beyond the pain I was feeling and to then expect that my intention would be realized.

Michaela Torcaso

As if to prove that I was on the right track, I was then given an wonderful gift.

This gift was given to me by my daughter, Marin, who quite honestly been as much teacher as daughter in the past few years. Whereas during my life I've clung stubbornly to an old and sterile scientific belief system, Marin has always been open to the mystery, joy and wonder of life. She has tasted the fruits of many of the world’s great philosophies and religions from the joyful emotionalism of Fundamentalist Christianity to the most ascetic practices of Buddhism and others in between. Moreover, she has been nourished in some way by each of them.

So when in the past I discussed with her my frustration at not being able to get beyond my left-brain dominance to experience the ideas I've been studying for the past couple of years , she told me that I should take a class at some point with a woman named Michaela Torcaso, who runs a school of massage and energy work in Madison, Wisconsin called TIBIA (Transformation, Intuition, Bodywork In Action).

While a student at UW-Madison, my daughter had what Dr. Stanislav Grof would call a Spiritual Emergency. It is called an emergency in the sense that while the experience can be terrifying and feel incredibly threatening to the ego’s grip on its version of reality, the individual’s Spirit is actually trying to emerge. It is this emerging or Emergency that has been called The Dark Night of the Soul by mystics.

Marin credits the love and power of Michaela’s intuitive and healing abilities for midwifing her through her own psychic birth canal. Out of that experience was born a young woman who now carries within her the wisdom of a very old soul. However, some of these ideas are still difficult for the scientist in me to begin to fathom.

Fast forward to last weekend. My daughter emailed me a few weeks ago that Michaela would be having her last introductory seminar for the year to what she calls The Foundation Workshop: Freeing the Power to Heal. On the TIBIA website, this workshop is described this way:

In this class, we distinguish between our automatic defense mechanisms that we have previously thought of as our Selves, and the authentic Self from which everything unfolds naturally, with grace and ease. We learn to move from "helping others" to allowing healing to occur for ourselves and those around us.

With this somewhat vague description (or maybe it's my own denseness), I still didn't get what the Foundation Workshop was about. I certainly didn’t understand what energy work was about, but I decided to attend mostly because Marin felt that I could benefit by it.

For two days last weekend, then, I explored my energies, my ego, my personality and its many ego-based subtypes and about the idea of centering. But most of all, I explored a part of myself that exists deeply hidden in my subconscious. This is a region of our psyche we all possess because we are all human beings living in the same physical world, and who share many of the same wounds and scars that are endemic to us as the thinking monkeys.

By the end of the first day, I felt that while all this energy work was interesting and relaxing, it had the same effect on me as a couple of Reiki and acupuncture sessions I’d had recently: close, but no cigar.

As I lay on my bed in the hotel room that night, I wondered if there was something wrong with me that I couldn’t feel whatever it was I was supposed to be feeling during these sessions. Maybe I was just too old and too set in my ways for all this stuff! Maybe senility was peering around the corner and the connection to my right-brain has been broken or damaged. I just couldn't understand why nothing was happening with any of my efforts to experience things just out of reach of my five senses.

This has been a complaint I've had most of my life, but especially since I attended a shamanic journeying workshop a year ago, as well as with the Reiki and Acupuncture sessions. It has also been a problem with my meditation experience over the years.

Then, on Sunday, during the final energy session, lying with my eyes closed, listening to songs selected only by the intuitive sense of Michaela herself, I felt something stir. And as the gentle souls who were assisting Michaela as facilitators for the weekend applied intuitively-selected essential oils and used their own powerful sense of transformative touch to work with my subtle energies, I began to weep. This weeping became more intense as the minutes passed and soon I was crying uncontrollably. What's more, I couldn't understand why this was happening.

But somehow the combination of tools and techniques brought together by Michaela allowed wounds that had been hidden for decades to suddenly become exposed. And when these wounds were finally allowed to exist in the Now of that experience, they just seemed to clear away.

It was a remarkable weekend for me. I honestly feel that in a sense, it was my own re-birth from the pain and darkness of a life lived only in the mind into one that now feels more a part of all that exists. Since then, I've felt lighter, more buoyant, much less isolated and now feel that the island I’ve always felt myself as inhabiting alone in this world has been discovered by people who love and care about me.

Throughout the two hour drive home Sunday evening, I kept flashing on people's faces from the workshop. This person would pop into my mind, then that one and I realized that instead of missing anyone in particular I'd met over the weekend, what I would really miss is the collective energy of the great work we all did together. It was an environment where "souls could be bared" and emotions displayed within a safe space we all helped create.

One thought about the demographics of our little group. There were about twelve people in the workshop; all but three were women. The ages ranged from those in their early twenties to well into their 60's.

As one of the only males in the group, it was difficult to watch a few of the women reconnect with childhood incidents of sexual abuse during the workshop. What was demonstrated so forcefully to me a number of times over the weekend is how long-lasting these acts of physical and psychological violence against a vulnerable child are. People deal with many kinds of wounds from growing up, but the intensity of the pain of sexual abuse - once it is allowed to surface - is difficult to bear witness to. Yet, I believe that it is necessary for the healing process.

While boys as well as girls are sexually abused, the majority are obviously girls and then these sweet little damaged souls must learn to process these traumas early on, or bury them. Nevertheless, there is no way to bury the damage it does to the psyche and to the personality that evolves from it.

More than once over the weekend, then, I felt an odd but very real sense of guilt by the very fact of being a male in that group and of knowing how brutal my gender has been in this regard for perhaps as long as the human species has existed.

I can only hope and pray that this becomes one of the first areas we as human beings evolve beyond as we move ever-so-slowly towards an enlightened evolution.

A few more words about TIBIA. Much more than just a massage school, TIBIA's mission is to teach its students how to use the powerful energies we all possess - but seldom use – in the spiritual evolution of humanity itself.

This is a lofty goal to be sure, but Michaela wants to create this ideal in one person, then another, and then have those people go out into the world and do the same thing until a critical mass is reached. Only when this happens can humanity truly approach its evolutionary imperative to create what French Jesuit Priest and paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called the noosphere. Wikipedia describes de Chardin's idea of the noosphere as follows:

[It is] a sort of 'collective consciousness' of human-beings. It emerges from the interaction of human minds. The noosphere has grown in step with the organization of the human mass in relation to itself as it populates the earth. As mankind organizes itself in more complex social networks, the higher the noosphere will grow in awareness. This is an extension of Teilhard's Law of Complexity/Consciousness, the law describing the nature of evolution in the universe. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, added that the noosphere is growing towards an even greater integration and unification, culminating in the Omega Point—which he saw as the goal of history.

I believe, then, that it is through the work of people like Michaela Torcaso, her students at TIBIA - as well as its non-profit offshoot and ultimate goal of Creating a Peaceful World - that we as a species are moving inexorably towards this goal.

I feel incredibly grateful that the light of this wonderful experience was allowed to shine on me. I still have a very long way to go on my own path. But I feel today that because of that small enlightenment, my way has been made clearer.

For me to do nothing now or to feel that I have little to offer toward creating a peaceful world would be a terrible disservice to myself, the people who guided me so lovingly and ably last weekend and ultimately to humanity itself.

Carolyn Myss

Finally, as has happened so often during this journey, just when I needed a teacher, one appeared. I now consider Michaela Torcaso to be one of my teachers. But in another example of a synchronicity that happened with me, I stopped at the library Friday before the workshop weekend to pick up an audiobook to listen to while driving the two hours to Madison.

As I was browsing the selection in our library, I spotted an audiobook by Carolyn Myss. Some time before I began this journey, my sister recommended one of Myss's books for me to read. She had been quite impressed with this woman, whom she described as a medical intuitive. As soon as I heard this term, however, my skeptical observer surfaced and as I listened to the book at that time, I kept thinking how self-delusional this woman was - or that she was simply just another New Age charlatan.

But while listening to Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential this past week, I kept trying to remember what had turned me off so much about Myss, because I became very intrigued in what she was saying about the contracts we make with other souls before we are born.

She describes it this way:

Our spirit made contracts with other spirits to come into our lives after we are born because when at the time of our birth, our souls break into a thousand pieces and we forget these contracts. In order for our souls to become whole again, each of those contracts represent a piece of what our soul is missing.

Certain people - but not all - we meet in our lives are the fulfillment of those sacred contracts whether they affect us positively or negatively. The idea is that they bring to us something that we need to learn in this life to restore our soul to its wholeness.

Returning to the issue of childhood sexual abuse, however, I simply can't accept that all victims of abuse are working through some kind of karmic legacy or that these traumas are the result of some kind of destiny contracted for before birth. I certainly don't claim to understand the workings of the Universe in these kinds of things, but I have to seriously question a God or god or Spirit that would simply allow this kind of damage to occur. So besides this being a very real problem, it is also one of the most difficult of philosophical and metaphysical questions to ponder:
why does God allow bad things to happen to good or innocent people?

Back to Carolyn Myss, in addition to sacred contracts, in her book she discusses an area I find truly fascinating: that of archetypes, which are those interior "personalities" we all possess. The four archetypes she says that we all share as humans are The Child, The Victim, The Saboteur and The Prostitute. She explains that we all possess the four because they are necessary for survival. Besides these four there are innumerable others, but she filters them down to about 75. In her book, she teaches a divination technique determine to your astrological or zodiac wheel using the twelve archetypes we decide most resonate with ourselves.

Since finishing Sacred Contracts, I find myself listening to many of the free talks and videos found on this prolific writer's website. Carolyn Myss claims that one of her strongest archetypes is that of The Teacher, and watching any of her videos will show how accurate this is.

She is an entertaining and even demanding teacher, yet will impress you with her knowledge, her wisdom, her wry wit and humor and her powerful sense of caring. Carolyn Myss gained fame as a medical intuitive and while I'm not quite ready to completely throw over my skepticism of this concept just yet, I've opened to many ideas that once seemed ludicrous and irrational and this may be one more that I am learning to accept.

So while continuing to maintain my sense of doubt, I also feel increasingly able to intuit the ideas that incorporate the Truth of our existence.

This leads to another area, which I will expound on at a later time: the idea that so-called gurus and spiritual teachers can be both highly-evolved spiritually yet possess personalities and habits that seem counter to their spiritual states and reputations.

I've learned that one must mine for the gold in areas of Spirit and spiritual ideas. The gold, of course, is Truth and is not found only in the richest veins, but must also be teased from low-grade ore.

Whereas formerly I would dismiss a teacher entirely if his or her lifestyle didn't conform to my idea of an enlightened soul, today I am more willing to seek the gold within that person even if the ore seems worthless or adulterated at first glance.

Energy and Intuition are subtle concepts that Science doesn't deal with well, if at all. The information about Intuitive Healing from The Skeptic's Dictionary is a good example of how 'Science' views such issues.

Yet there are people and institutions that are attempting to bridge the gap between Science and Spirit. The Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) is one of them. I've listened to Dean Radin, Senior Scientist at IONS, discuss these issues in the past and along with quantum physicists (e.g., David Bohm, F. David Peat, Fritjof Capra and Fred Alan Wolf) who initially brought my thinking around to the idea of a separate reality, this gap has closed considerably for me.

Looking at it another way, as this gap was closing, another was opening for me. This gap led to an acknowledgment within my own thinking that we are only in the infancy of understanding the material universe and invisible reality behind it.

What we do know is that Einstein's famous equation, E=mc² is a physical truth that allows the mind of man to attempt to understand the mind of God. To deny that the mind of God exists is a rational irrationality that I can no longer accept.

My own hope as I move forward on my journey, is that my ability to feel the subtle energies that move within and without us will become more focused, as will my ability to discern these energies. This kind of intuition can be brought to the surface by learning from people like Michaela Torcaso and Carolyn Myss.

This is not magic. It is simply applying age-old principles to bring out abilities we are all born with, but forgot immediately after each of us crossed our own Lethe or River of Forgetfulness. Some souls remember them quickly (often as a result of traumatic events), while others may take decades to even begin to understand what they've forgotten.

I am at this latter stage. I pray that I continue to be open to the "miracles" we are heir to, and one of the things I am more and more certain of is that my life will never be the same again. I've reached a point of no return where there seems to be too much to do to help our species evolve and I must now determine what role I am to play in this evolution.

For me, this is goal number one. In Sacred Contracts, Carolyn Myss says that there is an idea that 40 days (a number very important symbolically throughout the Bible) is the time it takes for Spirit to work with an idea, prayer or intention. Therefore, when we feel we need to know what direction we are to take in our lives, we should pray to Spirit to reveal to us what we are to do on our spiritual journey. Once we do this, we are to wait 40 days and when this time has passed, look back at anything or anyone who energized us in any way - positively or negatively. In those instances, she says, our role or job will have been revealed to us.

And so I've taken her suggestion.

Yes, this lifelong skeptic now has 31 days to go before my own revelation is manifested. I believe that this will happen, and when it does I will write about it here.

Stay tuned!

Image by Javad Alizadeh