When my pursuit of Life finally led to the organic surfacing of my suppressed past, I found myself in the middle of a serious emotionally based struggle that I wasn’t prepared for. Because of how I grew up, I didn’t generally trust people, but I no longer had a choice—I needed help. A friend I did trust made some calls, and she found two practitioners for me to try out. The first was a conventional therapist that used some medicinal plants instead of drugs in his practice. It took me about 5 minutes to see that he didn’t have what I needed, so I moved on to the second practitioner, who was a different story entirely.
Steve was a trained psychologist that had grown disenchanted with the results he was getting with his conventional approach. He pursued years of intensive training in a healing modality that allowed him to engage and work with the energetics of the emotional system directly. His whole approach to working with clients, and the results he was able to achieve changed dramatically with the use of this new modality.
Steve turned out to be one of the most powerful healers I’ve ever met. When I made the trip up to Flagstaff, AZ from the desert to try working with him, it only took one session to understand that he had a practical, effective approach to emotionally based struggle that fit my needs. I decided to move up to Flagstaff so I could work with Steve, and after about 4 months of intensive work, I was back on my feet functionally and immersed in the beginning of an emotionally based healing process that was new to me.
I don’t remember how long I worked with Steve because I’m notoriously terrible with remembering how long things take. It was months—maybe six in total—not years. But I do remember how things finished. It began with a regular trip into the nearby woods to do some emotional work that I now call anger release work.
Before that day, I hadn’t ever done any type of singing in my life. Not even in the shower. That day, as I was in a burned-out pine forest evacuating my anger in a healthy way, I was finally given my Gift—the songs of Life. I don’t talk about some of the details of what happened in those woods because they’re too personal. All I can tell you is that screaming—which I was doing as a part of anger release work—turned into singing, and I walked out of that forest with a tangible new ability to sing into and through my emotional debilitation in a way that I had never even heard about, let alone experienced.
Song was given in a language that I call the tongue of the plants. I walked out of the woods being able to sing in a language I had never known—one I was opened to instead of one that I learned. I know it sounds strange (welcome to my world!), but that’s how the power of Creation was brought into my life, and how I continue to share it to this day.
Everything about song was foreign and new to me in terms of its use, but at the same time, there was something about it that felt completely familiar. Does this ring any bells for the reader? I basically had the same type of experience when I was a boy, being welcomed into the plant communities that would allow me to survive the abuse of my young life (Post #1: My struggles begin).
It took me a long time to understand why song was so familiar to me—at the time the only thing that mattered was that I could use it to heal. What I eventually learned is that the songs of Life are plant songs. They are medicinal songs, shared by a grouping of medicinal plants so humans can have the medicine needed to recover from the loss of emotional wholeness in the same basic way medicinal plants also help our physical bodies heal.
When you’re put on this earth to be a healer, and you’ve gotten far enough along your path, you are given your Gift so you can have a chance at blazing a trail back to wholeness and wellbeing that others can then follow. This was the point I had reached in the woods that day. I was ready to receive and use song the same way a fish is ready to swim in water. Because I was a plant person, receiving song felt completely natural, but I had no idea what song was, nor how to use it skillfully.
From a young age, I’ve had this innate ability to move forward in life without the need for a written roadmap to guide me. It’s a unique ability that I took for granted for many years. The way I now talk about it as a seasoned healer that has walked this path for decades is that I’ve always had a strong talent to hear and use something called the breath of the Spirit to find my way. This breath is usually a subtle, seemingly invisible force, often just a soft current that guides us through life. If you can recognize it, and then learn to meet it, it helps us to move fluidly into and to be a part of Life, even when we don’t understand how all the pieces fit and work together.
The songs of Life didn’t come with an owner’s manual. But by the time I received them, I was already involved in what I would later come to know as a core level healing process. This meant I was healing at the deepest part of my emotional system with the help of Steve’s modality.
Once I received song, I started singing into my emotional debilitation, and it became clear almost immediately that I could do with song what Steve had been doing with his modality. That was saying a lot, because by then, I had confirmed how powerful and effective the work Steve shared was. I worked with Steve for a little while longer to make sure I had what I needed before concluding our work.
I then struck out on a journey with my new companion—the songs of Life.