Healing

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By Laurie A. Roth

This is a story my awakening healing journey. Follow me as I give you a few vignettes of how I moved through my fears and doubts to walk through new doorways. I found my way home to the Love that transcends death and into experiences beyond time and space.

Rational or Crazy
My parents were Jewish atheists. They were certain that there was just this three-dimensional world and then nothingness. If it wasn't rational or explainable, it was crazy; and crazy was bad. They did not act or think rationally, however. They said one thing, did another, and were unaware of what they were really communicating to their children. "If you don't stop crying, I'll give you something to cry about," as if I weren't crying about something in the first place.

I started having physical symptoms very early, as a result of being raised to fear and then deny my feelings, perceptions and experiences that did not align with my parents' narrow view of reality. By first grade I got headaches, but when I told my mother about them, she replied with, "Children your age don't get headaches." This tactic didn't help them to go away. Was she telling me my head didn't hurt? Was I a child not my age? What was really going on here? As the pain of being repeatedly negated grew within, I learned how to hide my feelings, to doubt their validity, and to think that religious, spiritual or mystical experiences were crazy fantasies and crutches.

LSD first broke open my rigid intellectual beliefs in 1967. I was in love with a mystical poet who wanted me to take LSD with him. I had read quite a bit about LSD and noticed something special in the eyes of people I met who had taken it. I also happened to read Whittier Bynner's translation of Lao Tzu's, Tao Te Ching the morning of my first experience, as the book was assigned reading in one of my classes at Indiana University. We took the LSD in the speckled red and yellow Indiana countryside. I slid out beyond all words. "From wonder into wonder," I expanded my existence.

Afterward, I had to completely reassemble my psyche. My world view had been dismantled. It was as if I had been living some anguish-filled black-and-white master plan based on the illusions of my parents, teachers, and society and I had just experienced the color and joy of a world that extended far beyond those limited perceptions. I eventually left Indiana and began a search for truth. No one I knew seemed to understand "what was happening" on this planet. I saw others beginning to search, and I decided I needed to find out for myself.

In my early twenties a flute student of mine introduced me to transcendental meditation. By 1974, I felt I needed something stronger. I had a dream in which Yogandanda and Muktananda sat on a saffron love seat chatting with each other. I heard a deep voice, much like a voiceover in the movies, say, "Either one will serve you now."

Muktananda initiated me in 1975. Shortly after I began practicing Siddha Yoga Meditation, I had a precognitive dream that directly told me to stop using all drugs. In the dream, I walked up some stairs in a barn, and a man took a carved wooden box filled with all kinds of drugs, and offered me anything I wanted. Again I heard the deep voiceover narrator, "If you use drugs you won't receive the benefits of your new meditations."

Two weeks later, I was invited to play music with some musicians I met at a café in Berkeley, California. When I arrived at the address I had been given I saw a big house and near it the "music studio" which was a red barn-like structure. I was the first to arrive and the guitarist met me at the door and invited me up the stairs. As we climbed I noticed the stairs looked exactly like those in my dream. We sat down near a window and the guitarist took out a carved wooden box. He opened it and it contained many different drugs. He held it towards me offering me any I wanted as he named each one. When I said, "No thanks," rushes of energy filled me. I realized that hallucinogenics and marijuana had helped me in many ways, even possibly saved my life, but now I had to choose to move beyond them if I wanted to open to my real spiritual wisdom and power.

A few months later, while fully lucid but in the twilight state between waking and sleep, I had a vision of a marching soldier. I heard the same voice talk again while I observed the soldier in his strange uniform. The voice said, "You are now going to learn what karma is."

Within a few weeks, I began to experience intense spontaneous physical movements while deep in meditation. My arms shook, I screamed, my head fell back and my tongue thrust forward. I thought it was the lion pose; many yoga poses are said to originate in such deep kriya experiences.

During the next months, my first memory of a previous life began to spontaneously come before me while I was meditating. I was watching a woman in a long skirt cooking and I felt very close to her. When I saw the scene it was as if I was there, not just watching it. I felt like an eleven-year-old boy and she felt like my mother. A few days later I saw the same scene and then soldiers came and took the woman away. I thought it was either the civil war or the revolutionary war era. I cried for hours, even after I was out of my meditation. Several nights later, when I was almost asleep but still lucid I saw a man come through two big barn doors towards me. I felt terror when I saw him; then I couldn't get back to sleep. I didn't know why I felt so much terror. When I thought about it, he was a good-looking guy. This was rather traumatic, not only because of the intense emotions but also because I didn't believe in reincarnation and thought that I might be going crazy.

I was haunted by these terrifying images for four sleepless nights. Exhausted and desperate, I finally found help from someone at the ashram. I was guided through the images and feelings of being choked to death. Again my head fell back and my tongue was thrust out of my mouth. But this time I went through the death. The 'place' after death felt so free. I felt sane again and very alive. This changed my beliefs about reincarnation and about my life. I realized that I might as well deal with all the painful feelings and issues that I might wish to avoid or I'd have to eventually face them in some other lifetime. My chronic sore throats also began to diminish after I released the memory. I felt this was because I was more in alignment with my own truth, and the choking death had created an energy blockage that going through the memory had somehow released from my physical body. Some healers say that all our lifetimes are recorded in the multi-dimensional strands of our DNA. These open as we open spiritually.

For more of my spiritual awakening adventures, and tools to help if you are wanting to grow or suffering and want to awaken the inner healer go to my website:
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