In one of the first ayahuasca ceremonies I was shown in a flash how I constructed an ego to survive certain failures of love in my earliest years. I crawled out of the maloca, and onto a grassy hill, looked up at the stars, and uttered the words I will never forget. "Fuck me, my life has not been my own". Over and over again I repeated these words in an astonished tone. I knew what they meant immediately—that I had learned to perform life for others in order to be loved, in order to survive, instead of living my own spontaneous, joyful, and unique life. I performed "good", "kind", "understanding", "caring", whatever it took to make the hurt go away.
It was a hard pill to swallow. I was a "successful" Christian minister serving one of the largest churches in Vancouver. How much of my success, however, was a good performance? I was an author of seven books, an international speaker and leader in something I called evolutionary spirituality. Again, how much of this was egoic posturing to get the love I was denied early in life? My hunch is that deep down there was a residual of the authentic me doing what I came to do. Still, my ego hit the ground with a thud, a blessed thud.
Right there, with the living stars as my witness, I declared that I would dedicate myself to "just being me". No more performance. I returned to the maloca, sat on my mat, spine straight, feeling strong and surveyed my courageous co-sojourners. I opened my heart to each one of them. One by one I prayed a simple, heart-felt prayer: Just. Be. You.
With the living stars as my witness I then dedicated my psychotherapy practice and my teaching to coming into relationship in a way that might liberate others to be themselves, and to create learning opportunities for these souls to reclaim their true life —strong, resilient, creative, loving, unrepeatable expressions of the Great Mystery that is living each of us, and wants more than anything else for us to express our radical aliveness in ways that nobody else on the planet can.
Other stories of healing can be found here.