When I was a boy, I was sexually abused for years. The severe trauma shattered me to the point where I suppressed my whole childhood—I didn’t start remembering my life until I was 12-13 years old. That’s the awful vein that has run through my life
During those early years, I would go to the woods near my house to get away from my homelife, and it was there that I found my refuge. This didn’t just come in being able to get away from the negative. When I went to the woods, something peculiar started happening. The best way to explain it is to say that the natural world came to life in a very tangible and what we would describe as a mystical way. That’s the beautiful vein that has run through my life.
As I started to open to the Life within the woods, my connection to the communities of plants stood out. Through this connection, I could see that the plants were aware, that they could communicate with one another, and that they were volitional. I could see that the individual plants were tangibly bonded into larger communities, that these bonds were infused with Life, and that they used their bonds to find wholeness and peace.
I came to understand plants in this manner because they welcomed me into their communities. In so doing, they showed me that I wasn’t alone, which was like sharing a feast with a starving kid. This experience felt so familiar to me that I accepted my experiences and the truths they generated as normal even knowing they weren’t. These unusual bonds meant everything to me. They stamped themselves deeply within my heart and soul because they were the only reason why I was able to survive the almost pure isolation of my childhood.
When I suppressed my childhood, I lost all memory of my experiences with the Life within Creation that the plants shared with me, but the way these experiences stamped themselves into me still stayed with and guided me. When I was 18, I finished high school and went to college in Colorado so I could get away from my family. I was a serious bicycle racer by then, but I couldn’t handle the pressure that came with racing because I was shattered emotionally.
Half way through college, near the end of the summer before my junior year, I accepted the clear fact that I wasn’t going to become a professional bicycle racer, so I stopped racing. I had a couple of weeks before school started when this occurred, so I decided to throw some panniers on my mountain bike, and to ride into the Colorado Rockies for about 10 days so I could do some exploring. With that, I returned to the woods—a place that felt strangely familiar to me.
The most important thing that happened to me in college was when I met the monks. A couple of Roman Catholic monks came to my school to teach a class. They were mystics, which meant they had committed their lives to connecting with and nurturing a direct experience of God. At the time, I was an angry young man that called himself an atheist. But as soon as I met the monks, I could see that they had found something special that somehow made sense to me. I took their class and got to know one of the monks pretty well. I went up to the monastery and was given the chance to spend a week there, and it was there that something critical happened.
The mystics called their connection to God agape (a-ga-pe), which is an old Greek word describing a specific type of selfless love that exists outside of you, but that you can connect to. The monks were committed to finding and nurturing their connection to this type of Love, which they felt was the embodiment of Christ’s presence in the world. Their connection to it was what radiated from them, and that felt so familiar to me when I met them.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, I related to what radiated from the monks because of my time with the plants. This same experience was deeply infused within their communities, allowing them to be grounded in the loving embrace of the earth. When I was able to open to an experience of agape early on in my stay at the monastery, I was stunned. The experience felt somehow familiar to me, like I was somehow coming home, but at the time, I had no idea why.
When I opened to agape at the monastery, it didn’t feel as much to me like I was opening to what the monks were calling God as much as I felt as though I was coming back to an experience of what I now call Life that was as normal and natural as breathing air. This is why I settled on calling this experience Peace.
Almost immediately, I knew Peace would be the focus of the rest of my life. It would take me years to realize that this decision had been made many years before this when I was a boy, and that the remembrance of it that had been stamped into me was what had driven me to find my way back to It.
Frustratingly, as soon as I left the monastery and returned to school, I lost my connection to Peace. Still, this experience had been tangible enough for me to know that I had found my guiding light. It didn’t escape me that the monastery was situated deep in the Rocky Mountains, surrounded by the natural world. It was clear to me—without me really understanding why—that it was the earth, not the monastery, that held what I needed.
Junior year of college I worked during the school year and saved some money, and then I toured from Colorado to southern Canada during the summer months between junior and senior year. I did 3 big tours in all, riding thousands of miles as I was able to slowly work my way back into a relationship with Creation and the Peace that was infused within It.
By the time I reached my early-twenties, I had stopped touring and was living in an adobe roundhouse in the Arizona desert near the Mexican border. I had come to Arizona to take a 6-month intensive program focused on learning about medicinal plants, and I had continued living in the desert afterwards. By this time, my pursuit of Peace was at the center of my life, and I had done well to establish it as a consistent experience in my life. What I didn’t understand was that I basically had a ticking emotional time bomb that was waiting to surface because I had years of suppressed trauma that was getting woken up by the Life that I was striving to be a part of.
During the years I toured, plenty of negative emotion would surface as I pursued my connection with Peace. I just accepted this as a normal part of the process. In the desert, I finally reached a tipping point with my suppressed past, and it came crashing back into my awareness. I not only broke through to an overwhelming amount of negative emotion that I didn’t know how to deal with, but I had a lot of physical symptoms appear as well. All of a sudden, I had heart problems, my vision was messed up, I could barely eat food, I became sensitive to chemicals, and I would have times when I was unable to do anything because I was so lifeless. I literally thought I was dying—it was awful.
The only thing that was clear to me was that I needed help.