If you’ve read these posts through from the beginning of my story, you’ll know that the core healing process plays out organically in three distinct phases. By the time I arrived at the end of Phase II, I had reclaimed the right to feel and be safe at a core level. I was feeling so much emotional wellbeing and fulfillment that it actually worried me at times because I would start wondering when the other shoe would drop. Yet there was still one more phase to go if I wanted to fully reclaim the state of emotional wholeness that I had lost in my childhood. This entailed taking on a challenge that I had always found completely impossible to meet—to step out into the world of people so I could actively share what I did professionally with them.
Receiving the songs of Life has been one of the most important things that has ever happened to me in my life. It’s certainly on par with getting the chance to bring a child into this world—both things giving you the chance to handle and be a part of Life. This has made the sharing of song with others way more than just a job that I do. Sharing song has always involved taking one of the most precious parts of my life, and needing to share it with a world that will minimally question what this strange and foreign thing is, and at worst will ridicule and attack me for it.
When you grew up in the type of abusive world that I did, you learn some things at a bone deep level. I learned that, if there was anything about me that was appealing or attractive, that it would serve as a target on my back that would pull in the awful, and that the awful would crush me over and over again. You learn that this process is inevitable, that you are totally powerless to stop it, and that you even deserve to be tortured in this manner. This is the vulnerability that sat at the heart of me being shattered emotionally. It was very strongly linked to me engaging with people. It created a shattered emotional knee that was completely incapable of even thinking about walking up the rather simple mountain of putting a precious part of myself out into the world of people, no matter how much value I’d displayed as a practitioner.
At the time that I received the songs of Life and got serious about healing through what seemed like my endless backlog of negative emotion, I was working as a carpenter, and living in Flagstaff, AZ. I loved what I did professionally, having grown up learning how to work with wood and metal from my teen years. Because I had been so intensely hurt by the people that raised me, I just couldn’t handle people in any intimate way. Any type of closeness meant being opened to people’s darkness, and I couldn’t handle anymore of that. I didn’t like people in a fundamental, foundational way. I could tolerate people as I needed to, but I didn’t really want them in my life.
When I was given song, I never expected to need to share it with anyone else. I simply got busy using it to heal, and worked as hard as I could to get better. I don’t remember how long I did this before I accidentally stumbled upon my first client. Maybe a year or two. A woman had put up a flier in a local coffee shop for a type of sound therapy she used with people that were struggling emotionally. Because I hadn’t ever heard of sound therapy, I thought she might be another traditional singer. So I called her, which was something I normally never would have done. It took about a minute to figure out she wasn’t doing the same type of work that I was. Before I could figure out how to get off the phone, she asked me what I did, and when I squeamishly tried to explain it—something I’d never done with anyone—she asked me if I’d share song with her.
Share song? With another person? OK. Why not. She became my first client, she told a couple people about me, and on it built from there. In time, I reached a point where I had to decide whether to stop working as a carpenter, and to go full time with the healing work. I was a white traditional singer existing in a culture that had no understanding of the modality I was using. I was literally unable to reach out and to tell others what I did for a living unless they showed an honest drive to receive my help by initiating contact. So, when I decided to go full time as a practitioner, I expected it to last for a matter of months before I would have to get another job as a carpenter so I could pay my bills. But I went ahead and did it anyway.
Why did I do it? Because when you accept the fact that you’ve been put on this earth as a traditional singer, the only way you can breathe, the only way you can have Life, is to sing. I didn’t have a sound plan, or anything that even kind of seemed reasonable. I just knew I had to turn the healing work into a full-time pursuit. So I went pro full time, and for the next 25 years, as I filled my schedule, built up a nationwide client base, built up a waiting list so long I had to shut down the list, helping people all along the way to create results that the conventional therapeutic world didn’t believe was possible, I had to fully depend on word of mouth to bring new clients in.
You might expect a practitioner that couldn’t really handle dealing with human intimacy wouldn’t do so well working with the delicacies of the emotional struggles of others. You’d be correct. I wasn’t a trainwreck of a practitioner, but I was overly coarse and direct at times when a delicate firmness was often needed, and I chronically needed to push clients away and keep them at a distance. It took a long time before I even knew that my behavior was out of balance because its negative emotional drivers were buried so deep. The fact that I created so much success during those years speaks to the extraordinary power of song, and to the level with which I had learned to use it. I did my best as a practitioner, but I was so torn up around engaging intimately with people that my best left quite a bit to be desired.
I was successful professionally for many years while I continued to work to heal my own debilitation. Eventually, a time came when I’d healed to the point where I knew that I was arriving at the foothills of being able to learn how to walk up the mountain of bringing in clients without the need of referrals. So, after having just had my most successful year ever, I decided to completely shut things down professionally. I first took some time away so I could work deeply into the worthlessness, shame, defeat, and feelings of powerlessness and isolation that come with Phase III. I then started stepping into the world of people, using my rehabilitative approach to progressively heal into and through the heart of the deepest and most vulnerable emotional wound that was left.
The journeying back to Life posts will tell the story of how I used three areas of challenge—learning how to ride horses, learning how to dance, and rewriting my manuals and writing this blog—to accomplish something that not only felt impossible, but that actually was impossible. I didn’t just come out of hiding in relationship to people so I could find ways to proactively share what I did with those in need. I also reclaimed the ability to actually like and enjoy being with people. Unless you’ve been through something close to what led me to need to suppress the first 12-13 years of my life, you can’t understand how impossible this task was. But I did it, and continue to do it to this day!
Let’s get into my Phase III stories so you can hear how all of this unfolded.