Read Greg's story
I’ve danced naked with witches around fires. I’ve meditated in graveyards. I’ve played the drums of my ancestors until I heard my old life snap like a bass string plucked too hard. I’ve walked barefoot up Mt. Subasio at dawn to St. Francis’ hermitage above Assisi and crawled up the steps of John Lateran on my knees in Rome. I’ve chanted with Hare Krishnas until tears streamed over my face, and I’ve traipsed in trance through the Underworld, where all our riches lie.
Intellectually curious, poetically imaginative, and tormented by the traumas of childhood abuse, all in equal measure, I poured myself into the techniques of various traditions and kookery in the hope I’d find the key to unlock the prison of this life. At the end of each exploration, each trial, each confrontation with divinity, lay myself, the very thing which I’d hope to escape. The gods, indeed, make mock of us all.
And yet I knew that something lay within my suffering and within my gifts to get me through the wasteland of my past. One of those gifts was being gay, something I never struggled with and even when people around me revealed their homophobia – whether school, church, or government – I knew they were liars. My gay spirit was a source of power, psychological and spiritual, something I’d find proven through research of pre-Christian, pre-patriarchal spiritualities.
Suicide was my constant companion. What was the point of this life? Why continue to suffer the pain, the deleterious self-hatred? I knew, as countless traditions uphold to this day, this place was a den of iniquity or a wheel of repetitive tedium bound to drive the best soul mad.
And yet, under all of that pulsed the heart of a mystic who knew with equal force that this place is wondrous, that even in sorrow there is splendor. The practices I committed myself to eased the impulse for death, but not the longing. It was therapy that did that, but with someone who knew how to work with my own experience. With the heart of a depth psychologist and the witchcraft of EMDR, he dove into that hell of my past, and in two years, the shroud of parental-inflicted self-hatred unraveled and only the mystic remained.
For what are therapists and other “mental health providers” (so anemic that term) but the shamans of our age. They guide the individual down into the underworld of themselves and then lead them back out. As the Sibyl in Virgil’s Aeneid says to the hero as he seeks entrance into the land of the dead, “Easy it is to enter the underworld. Death’s gate stands open and smoking all day. But to come back, this is the exploit, this the struggle.” I was an expert at going down there. I needed someone to bring me out.
And now I do the same for others, in my way, through ritual, Vedic astrology, meditation, yoga, all the arts I studied with shamans and teachers and used as a balm to a flayed soul. I know the way down, and more importantly, now, I know the way back.