Biomantic Awakening

Where other people around me seemed to dream of material success, big houses, expensive cars, security in their old age, I dreamed of awakening the magical potential in my own body and living out the mythic states of being and alchemical journeys of the magicians, wizards, yogis, saints, monks, and all the people across history who lived on the fringes of society in order to experience a deeper beauty and mystery, and to awaken their deep soul potential.

And maybe this is why, at age twenty-three, the night before medical school began, a profound sense of doom washed over me as I lay in bed in the middle of the night. By society's standards I was doing the right thing and choosing the right path, but the magical part of my soul was flashing warning lights. In the end, I embraced the decision because I knew part of my destiny was to learn about the path of healing, and, more importantly, to heal myself along the way.

The first day of med school was difficult. I instantly felt the lack of resonance with those around me. At the time I had long blond hair colorfully dyed with streaks of bright green, wearing wild and brightly colored clothes, marking me out as a rebel. A bit later, a chief resident in OB-GYN had the pleasure of telling me that for my own good he would offer me the choice of cutting my hair short, or he would give me a failing mark for the rotation and I wouldn’t graduate.

From the get-go I was more interested in alternative therapies. In particular I wanted to explore how consciousness, what I now call bio-magic, could heal people at a deeper level and in a more graceful way. I understood that pharmaceuticals could be a powerful healing tool, especially in emergencies, but certainly not the only option and not without serious potential risks. The gap between my reality and the reality of the medical culture was highlighted one Sunday afternoon when a friend and fellow medical student told me how he had successfully helped a woman with psychosis fall asleep without medications. She was huddled on her bed one night, clutching her knees to her chest, terrified of all the snakes that appeared to be on the floor around the bed. My friend was told to give her a tranquilizer. Instead, he suggested that perhaps they were friendly snakes, here to help and protect her. That made intuitive sense to her, and relieved of the terror, she had a wonderful night’s sleep.

“Incredible,” I thought. I saw how the snakes were a primal archetypal symbol that had emerged from her subconscious at this time of crisis in her life, and that re-storying her relationship to them was a far more powerful method of regulating her nervous system than anti-psychotic meds. But my friend was failed as a punishment, and forced to repeat a semester of medical school for the sin of using symbolic magic rather than the sanctioned pharmacologic drugs.

This world of medicine stood against the idea of magic, and by my third year of med school, I had dropped into a profound clinical depression. The memories of the Balinese priest’s prayers on the wind and the effervescent magic that infused all of life were gone. Instead, I was being crushed under the weight of a huge mechanical system that denied my own magical soul.

One night a few weeks later I simply could not fall asleep. My sense of despair and anxiety had heightened to the point that I knew I needed help—I couldn't heal this alone. So, naturally, I turned to the medical system I was studying to see what they had to offer me. First, I saw a family doctor who gave me an anti-depressant called venlafaxine (Effexor), but it made me even more anxious. I then went to a psychiatrist who gave me a different anti-depressant called paroxetine (Paxil). After six months, not only had it not helped the depression, it made me feel profoundly dissociated, it crushed any sense of libido or vitality and it caused irregular heart rhythms. Next, I saw a psychiatrist who specialized in psychoanalysis, but he could in no way create the kind of container I needed to heal. Our conversations went nowhere.

It was a wake-up call. I realized that the profession I was studying had none of the tools I needed to heal, and actively discouraged and shamed me for seeking alternative therapies outside their system. I made the monumental decision that I could not carry on in medical school and I needed to drop out. The true healing medicine that I needed lay elsewhere.

That night, I went home to my housemates full of fear and anxiety about my decision. They were integrated, streetwise young men, studying business, and I confessed to them I was quitting. They sat on the couch with me and listened with a warmth and presence that my psychiatrist had not been able to muster. After we had spoken about it in depth, one of the guys looked me directly in the eyes and asked, "Are you sure you want to do this?" I hesitated for a moment, but then a deep knowing rushed up into my body. It was as if those prayers on the wind spoken by the Balinese priest had only just reached me. "Yes," I replied, "I need to do this."

A moment later he stood up, popped quickly into his room and brought back a copy of a spiritual book he treasured. I opened it, and the first words I saw were "go forth spiritual warrior, trust your instincts that guide you on this spiritual path." As I read, tears started to stream down my face; it was the confirmation I needed. The other young man put a hand on my shoulder and handed me a DVD of a movie I had not yet watched—The Matrix. I spent the afternoon watching the movie, which blew my mind, with its story of unplugging from a mechanical and false reality to reclaim our primordial biological inheritance. I was ready.

I then called the dean of the med school, and later my parents, to break the difficult news.

A few weeks later I was sitting in a cafe in suburban Washington, DC, a young man adrift from the world, with no place of belonging, three years of study and an enormous financial investment down the drain, my parents out of their heads upset with my decision. I was still feeling depressed, and had no useful job skills to support myself. Sipping on a tea, I reached over to a free New Age healing magazine, the kind of thing considered forbidden contraband in medical school. I casually flicked through it, until my hand rested on a page, and my attention dialed in. It was a moment of destiny. There was a small ad for a healing modality called Core Energetics, created by Dr. John Pierrakos, a psychiatrist and protégé of the pioneering body-psychotherapist Dr. Wilhelm Reich, friend and colleague of the well-known psychiatrist Carl Jung. The ad read “Do you want to feel radically alive?” “Yes!”, I actually said out loud.

That night I called the number in the ad, and entered the world of somatic, body-centered healing. Within a few weeks of starting a powerful daily breathwork practice, I experienced more healing than in a year with mainstream doctors. The depression lifted, never to return, and a whole new world opened up to me, that I would now call body magic. I began a multi-year professional training course in alchemical bioenergetics, supporting myself with an organic home-cleaning business. A year later my Core Energetics mentor persuaded me to return to med school, saying he had a gut feeling it would be important to my journey.

And, I did return, but this time on my own terms—knowing through first-hand experience that there existed powerfully effective bio-magical healing modalities outside the scope of conventional medicine. And, that I no longer needed my professors or the other students to approve of me. I just needed to graduate, get my degree, and follow my healing dreams.

It turned out that with this renewed vision and perspective, I could also appreciate how valuable it was to learn the anatomy and physiology, to master the state-of-the-art diagnostics, to hone my skills at research (I spent two years doing research at the National Institutes of Health in mother-child attachment), and to have the invaluable experience of working hands-on with many thousands of patients. It was just that the modern institution of medicine, the “system”, was difficult, not the age-old profession of healing. I went on to complete a family medicine residency. Amongst other highlights were assisting-attending 150 live births, and working as the sole doctor covering emergency rooms, intensive care units (ICU’s) and internal medicine wards in rural California hospitals. My training was firmly grounded in the best of conventional medicine. Meanwhile I was building a successful private practice in leading-edge integrative and “soul medicine” that would become my full-time career for a number of years.

And, in those years my healing practice flourished. People flew in by helicopter and plane from distant states to see me. I was booked out for several months in advance. I traveled the world learning the latest regenerative technologies in combination with bioenergetics and emotional-symbolic healing. All was on track, or so I thought. But then in the midst of my hyper-busy schedule, flying home from a conference one day I heard a clear voice, as if announced through the PA system of the plane, that I needed to leave that practice and seek a new dimension of magic, or else I would die. I turned to the person beside me to ask if the captain had made an announcement. No, it was my inner voice, speaking loud enough to finally get my attention.

What life wanted of me was my next level of magical initiation and awakening, to discover a new (and ancient) vision of healing and connection that my soul was longing for, which would heal and awaken me at a deeper level than anything I had yet experienced.

In the years that followed, I began a deep apprenticeship in the earth-centric, “feminine” mysteries, researching and co-writing, with my wife Seren, two books on the global traditions of earth and feminine-based healing and awakening once practiced by every Elder culture around the world. I came to realize that my trauma, and our collective trauma (because we are all traumatized at some level), did not originate from where our culture teaches us to look.

Yes, many of us have had difficult childhood experiences, and some people have had it extremely so. And we must tend to that. Others have experienced the trauma of systematic ethnic and racial biases, which begin to get closer to the roots of the issue, and we must tend to that as well. But, all modern humans are suffering from a profound bio-magical and eco-magical disconnection. Our modern cosmologies, our worldviews and systems of healing and awakening have lost contact with our deep interconnection with natural world, and with the magic of our bodies and cosmos that was once so obvious to our ancestors. This absence is so much a part of the fabric of modern life that we must take a step back to even perceive how adrift we are.

We are cosmological beings, children of the stars, the sun, moon, the mysteries of the galactic center that birthed our world. We are children of the Earth Mother who gave us our body and who guides us, and we are younger siblings of the Plant Ancestors who feed and nourish us with so much more than calories and nutrients. The Story we live inside grows us at a foundational level, shaping us into the people, families, communities, collective we become.

I knew deep down that the medicine we needed most was a re-genesis of our Story, to inhabit an alchemical cosmovision that could guide us into our truest potential, and also educate us on the magical realities of our bodies, and the multi-dimensional ecologies we live within. Out of this knowing emerged Biomancy, as the culmination of thirty years of study and healing, along with my own personal awakening journey and communion with the more-than-human world.

I would like to open the door for you, into a new world that is waiting for you to step inside.