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Rama

I think I was born to be a seeker. The first memory I have that relates to that is when I was 5. I was watching a magician, the father of one of my friends,doing card tricks. We were just tall enough to see over the table and watch. While his hands were moving doing what magicians do, my eyes wandered up his torso to his head and watched him as he did his tricks. His face showed insecurity and concern, like he wanted to please us and was worried he wouldn't. Seeing that did something to me that I can't explain, but I found myself wondering what this, as an adult I would say THIS, is all about. I still remember riding home on my bicycle, we lived in the Bay area then.   The summer fog was in at dusk making halos around the street lights. I remember being very quiet and thoughtful as I looked at the magic of the street lamps in the fog.

I tried to read Freud when I was sixteen. Although I was active in all kinds of creative stuff, music and theatre, I also often found myself watching and observing the others around me, again with this 'what's it all about' attitude.  Psychology was my first path then pretty much throughout my college years; experiencing what was really a golden age in new therapeutic techniques: Gestalt therapy, Rolfing, Bio-energetics, Sensory Awareness techniques, all in the service of trying to figure me and THIS out. On the way back from my last Polarity Therapy, number 10, session (it was quite a bit like Rolfing), I had a bit of an Epiphany.  I heard a voice inside saying that I had gotten what I could from others (therapists in this case) and that it was time to find a technique that I could use all by myself to continue this exploration into what became at this point 'Who am I'. 

The following three or four months passed quickly with me somehow in a deep state of let go, no real concerns just waiting with an odd sense of quiet confidence. As if Somebody knew what was going on and because of that I could really relax as an adult for the first time.

I was fitting a new head liner into my Volkswagen bug; when I noticed a VW bus that was parked in the driveway next door, htat I hadn't noticed before. I needed to borrow a pair of scissors and I knew the guy next door, Howie, would have a pair so I walked up to the side door of his house, the top of the Dutch door was open, and peeked in. There was a guy lying on a coach and a big bunch of light was all around him. I walked in, walked up to the guy pulled him off the couch sat him down and heard myself say, 'what have you been doing to get to where you are, I want you to show me.'

And so began a love affair with meditation which took me to India and an Ashram where I spent the better part of 17 years learning the Esoteric Sciences* and many forms of meditation.

In 1991 on a visit to India I did a long training in Hypnotherapy based on what in the East is called the Psychology of the Buddhas.  This period also included my beginning to teach meditation after a profound opening which answered for me finally the question I had been carrying with me since I was 5, "Who am I?".