what's up

[healerman88]

i'm actually having some trouble writing this; i feel like i'm going on and on, but i think it's something i have to get out. i need to accept myself.

 

i was a major christian fundamentalist type in my teen years then realized how crappy it was- how i depended so much on "god's love" and found myself looking down on others for not believing what i believe. i was a depressed, bitter individual. it got to a point where i went to church camp and started praying for a sense of responsibility to care for all the people of the world. i admit i was not very charismatic about it, but i got no reaction at all. everyone would throw out hallelujahs and amens for the people praying for more funding for our local churches. it made me pretty sick. then i asked one of the leaders i respected why amazing, loving people could go to hell and he had no answer.

 

i had already known about the tao from reading about it in high school. i started practicing qigong and obsessed over finding a school where i could learn. as i got more into the healing arts i started looking into other self-healing systems. then i learned a lot about spirituality in general- magick (the fundamental laws of existence), egyptian alchemy, the law of attraction (how we create our reality), the theory that we are spiritual beings having a human experience. it's wonderful how all religions and philosophies seem to share fundamental concepts. somewhere in there i started to take psychedelics.

 

i've always had a little bit of paranoia, being shy around people i don't know well. so dropping acid at a funk festival crowded with people turned out to be a terrifying experience. i was with some older folks i just met (my girlfriend's stepmom's friends) who were just messing around trying to have fun, but i was couldn't find anything to say, which freaked me out, then i was afraid to express anything because i was so freaked out. i couldn't get the negative thoughts about what they might think of me out of my head. so they immediately started to come true. lsd is a powerful psychic amplifier. seriously.

 

it turns out i had this latent social anxiety that only acid and unfamiliar surroundings could bring out. i slowly recovered from it over the next six months. having the confidence to go out in public again is nice. reiki (and similar arts, they're all connected anyway) helped wash away the fear. at one point, i would just be so withdrawn, walking around at work preoccupied with all these problems in my head. eckhart tolle's book a new earth basically saved me at these times. i would just breathe and be the breath, the moment. just be. a little smile creeps up on me when i do this.

 

so it seems like my life is happening in waves. the disharmonious wave peaked with that one fateful night and i'm now coming back to the peace i had as a child. i've been doing wu tai chi chuan and writing music. i want to start giving reiki treatments, but i feel like i need to be able to communicate how this stuff works to people first. oh yeah, the other day i re-discovered the tao te ching. sweet!

[Aetherous]

Hey healerman, you seem great. Welcome to the forum.

[healerman88]

Hey healerman, you seem great. Welcome to the forum.

thanks!

[odi]

So glad you recovered. I should say welcome back.

[healerman88]

thanks.

 

i think most of my trouble has been in definition. i tended to think, this is how i should think so these things will happen, or i define myself as this to become more what i want to be. this kind of thinking has driven me crazy from time to time in my life. at one point, i thought i was the embodiment of one particular i ching hexagram and that my life would be wasted no matter what. it was so real at the time.

 

just for today, i let go and let tao. awareness of awareness, the solution to all of life's problems. or something.