My Healing Journey

This is a photo of me at 16 years old.

It always stops me in my tracks.

I had just been released from 5 months in jail, after I surrendered to a nationwide warrant and manhunt for my arrest.

How does a kid from cookie-cutter suburbia end up being the subject of a manhunt, you ask?

I left my very unstable home life and lived on the streets from ages fifteen to twenty-one.

I found other kids who shared the same dark pathway as I did and they became my new family. 

I tried to continue my schooling, but because I did not live at home, I was no longer welcomed. 

There was a dark voice that continually told me that I did not have to be controlled by anyone, society had turned its back on me, so I was entitled to do the same in return.

I gradually, and then suddenly, let that dark influence take the wheel.

I became addicted to every drug and drink that I could get my hands on.

I ran with street gangs…. we were nothing short of a public menace, and as a result, there were frequent stays in the jailhouse.

I made a home in the darkness of the mean streets of several major cities. 

Clinical depression ravaged my mind for two of those years. 

I loathed the person that I had become and did everything I could think of to drown out my thoughts, but everywhere you go, there you are. There was no escape.

When I was 21, the tiniest ray of light broke through the dark husk that shrouded me.

It convinced me that I was worth more than the deception the darkness offered.

I hung onto that ray of light as if my very survival depended upon it…because it did.

Many of the lost souls I ran with back then never made it out alive. 

I grew that light within my mind, steadily, daily, until it gained the strength to send the negative influences that had influenced me, back into the shadows. 

I made a map of how I would escape the mean streets and leave the drugs, booze, crime and depression behind me.

I forced myself to follow the widening path of light before me, with a great sense of purpose …I cleaned up my life.

Three years later went to college and obtained a business degree. 

I settled down and raised three amazing daughters. 

I became re-focused on my healing ability that had meant so much to me as a boy.

Today, I use the healing tools that I developed to save my own life, to help others find their way back into the light.

I used to call my dark years, my wasted years…Now I refer to them as my learning years…where I learned to heal my own darkness, from the inside out.

When I work with clients with mental health issues, when I work with troubled teens, when I help people free themselves from the misery of addiction, I get to look them straight in the eye and let them know that I know where they are at. That knowing is based on personal experience, not on studying their afflictions from a schoolbook.   

This builds a sense of instant credibility between us and helps strengthen their own recovery process. 

My journey from darkness to light has become a strength that I could never have imagined.

Sometimes gifts come to us in the ugliest of packages.  

I would love to tell you that I am enlightened and that you should be like me, but that would be a big fat lie. 

I use the healing tools I share with others, to keep my thoughts in a healthy space, each and every day.

Life as a spirit in a human form is no easy undertaking for any of us, but as a wise person once said, it is not about how many times we get knocked down; success is measured by how many times we get back up.