My New Heart
É mais uma rosa, é uma maravilha
Foi mais um sofrimento que eu passei na minha vida.
It’s one more rose, it’s a marvel
It was one more suffering that I passed through in my life.
Padrinho Sebastião, O Justiceiro no. 34
Where does a healing begin? Is it at the moment of crisis, when you have no choice but to pay attention to what your body/mind/emotions/spirit is raising up symptomatically in your physical or emotional body and therefore putting unavoidably in your face? Or is it when you make the sincere prayer to transform a deeply embedded pattern from your childhood that is impeding the answering of your even deeper prayer to manifest your true, unfettered inner self? Or is it in the roller coaster working out of the childhood trauma that we all carry as energetic memory in our vehicle: the boulders in the stream of our life force? How about before you are born, when you blithely took on the task of healing your karma, the learning by living it out of what you need to know to fill in your spiritual resume, therefore putting you to be born into circumstances and in relation to people who will stimulate that karma by their actions and/or neglect? Or does the healing originate in the unconscious choices you’ve made along the way that have reinforced the energetic patterns in your vehicle and in your consciousness that have resulted in symptoms as those patterns have come into friction with the inner drive to wholeness and oneness? The symptoms are the smoke. But where did the fire start?
I’m posing these questions to you, because they are among the ones I’ve been contemplating myself over the past few weeks. On April 25th I had a heart attack. It came out of nowhere. Except it didn’t. It came as the crisis point in a decades-long healing process that, now, looking from the point of view of being allowed by grace to stay in my human body and continue to live my life on this amazing planet surrounded by love, was a very strange and enormous blessing. As one of the doctors I saw recently said, “Somebody wanted you to stick around.” Actually, it was a bunch of somebodies. Some in human bodies, some not.
Everyone reading this will, I am sure, agree that a health crisis like a heart attack has multiple precipitating factors and, if one is to take advantage of the gift of being saved, requires many angles of subsequent examination and self-study. A heart attack is, if one is blessed to survive and stay embodied, both a serious warning and an opportunity. Diet, exercise, rest, work habits, thought habits, sequestered emotions, truth speaking, negativity in your thoughts and emotions, extraneous energies held in your field all play a part and are called into examination. And in my world, the examination of the prayers that were made that initiated and accelerated a profound transformational process that, strangely, involved a heart attack as one of its major steps. I am at present making an inventory of all those expressions and the previous choices I made in relation to them. Coming face to face with death provides motivation to make new choices that honor the gift of still being alive and the grace I’ve been afforded. A few of those areas will require major overhauls if I’m going to honor the reprieve I’ve been given. All of them will require further reflection, deeper levels of humility, more mindfulness, and ongoing healing processes. I’m discovering who I am now and what my new heart wants from me and can afford me. I have deeper insight into who I’ve been that got me to this point. I’ve sworn to those who saved me, and to those who stood by, sent me Light, held the space for all that occurred, and prayed that I wouldn’t leave them yet, that I am making the study and making the changes. I am blessed to be surrounded by people who are themselves committed to their own transformation and who recognize bullshit and don’t allow it to pass uncommented upon.
What I most want to share with you in this paper is my present understanding of the many levels that went into what happened and its present working out. I am doing this to get clarity for myself, and because so many people prayed for me, holding the space of Light, compassion, and faith that created the atmosphere that secured me in my body during the knife-edge process, and therefore allowed for the miracle of my healing. I can’t talk to all of you and thank you in person, but I can let you in on some of the intimacy of what you put your prayers towards.
I’m also doing this because I understand that a part of my mission on this earth is to teach what I have learned through living this life that has had its share of pain and pleasure. A life I’ve dedicated to healing - myself and others. I am walking the path of the wounded healer. The credit that I take for what I’ve passed through and where I’ve come to is that every time I’ve been offered the choice to stop or keep going, to say yes or no to delving into my own inner self and the mysteries of healing and life itself, I’ve always said yes. Most especially when I haven’t wanted to. I am, along with you, one of the slowly awakening blind amnesiacs, pointing the way by example for some of the ones stumbling with me and behind me.
I have been called since I was young to be part of the expansion of the conversation about what it means to be a spiritualized human being (even before I had the words to name it). And, for the last 47 years of doing direct healing work with clients and teaching others what I’ve learned; what the process of spiritually evolving, grounded, embodied healing involves. How we can heal ourselves and break the bonds of attachment to pain and unconsciousness that can make this life seem like a prison sentence rather than the divine school it is. And finally, all true healing is not only personal, but archetypal. We show each other the way by walking the way. I hope you’ll find what I’m writing here useful in your own healing, whatever that looks like.
I’m not going to specifically answer all the questions I posed at the beginning of the paper in relation to my recent healing crisis. That would require a book, not an essay. I will say that the real answer to them is, All of the above. A transformational healing comes as the result of a lifelong, multi-layered process whose signposts are marked with serious, sincere prayer to address those patterns. It comes with a powerful inner collaboration of your higher self, your guides, your prayers, your karma, and the outer help of other people on their own journey and with their own skills. It comes from you using the divine gift of choice to say no and then eventually yes to the revealing of what has been sequestered in the secret rooms of your consciousness. And it comes with a direct vibrational relationship with Light, whatever name you give the Universal Force that makes you be alive. What I’m going to focus on very briefly is the years leading up to that day. Then most specifically I’m going to describe as best I can what happened in the few days before that crisis, the event itself, the interventions that saved my life, and the days since.
Origin
In the spring of 1994, I was sitting on a log with four other men. We were in a big open space, in a room with wooden walls, a thatched roof and a large double-barred cross in the middle. The log was on a cement floor. The occasion was a meditation Daime work in the church of the remote Daime community of Céu da Montanha in the mountains of the Atlantic Rainforest in Brazil. There were 150 people participating in the ceremony, some on their own logs, some in chairs. At this moment I want to let you in on, I was bitching to God. Which my Jewish heritage encouraged and gave me permission to do. As if the Creator of All attended to each of the billions of whines emanating from humanity at any given moment. A sea of whining, of which mine was one more sour drop.
When I opened my eyes, which in those days was what I did most of the time when I was allegedly meditating, I could see the small group of people sitting around the star-shaped altar table in the center of the room. These were the main leaders of our branch of the Daime path. I knew that, besides the fact that they were undoubtedly much more physically comfortable than I was, they were also having what I imagined were beautiful and amazing, spiritually uplifting visions. I was not. My inner, incessant litany was (insert whiny voice here), “I want to see, too. What can’t I see? Everybody sees but me”. Etcetera, ad nauseam.
The truth is, I was so stuck in the upper two inches of my head, I wouldn’t have recognized an authentic revelatory vision if it had walked into the room and sat in my lap.
But because the divine beings, the helpers of the Creator, are merciful, and because I was – albeit misguided, clueless, and a bit pathetic – sincere in my efforts and intention, and because I had sincerely dedicated myself to this strange but authentic spiritual path 5,000 miles away from my home, what came next utterly changed my life and my work. I felt a force enter the top of my head. If my body was a syringe, this force was the plunger that temporarily squeezed my consciousness into the center of my chest. A clear voice said, “When you live here, you’ll see everything”. At that moment, my inner prayer became, and has stayed for these 29 years, I want to live through my heart. The subsequent seeing has, as promised, proceeded apace.
Flash forward through the next 30 years of being taught step-by-step, and then teaching others in various venues, the art of living through the heart. The adage that you teach what you need to learn has my face on it. And I can affirm, both from inner experience and from the feedback I get from the many people I’ve taught, both in my professional work with the Essential Light Institute and in the many hundreds of Daime works I’ve led, that those teachings have been most useful to many people, starting with me. They work. And they require work. Walking the talk is a central principle of my life. And while I’ve certainly stumbled and even fallen on my face a few times, I can affirm that I’ve always gotten up and kept going, and I’m truthful about my face plants. I’ve been in intensive therapy. I’ve drunk thousands of servings of Daime. I’ve examined myself as I’m taught to do on my path. I’ve cultivated the opening of my heart and the transfer of my loyalty from my third chakra – the doing, dominating, criticizing place – to my heart, the unifying, forgiving, compassionate place.
And yet. I received a hymn that says, “Oh, release this pain from your heart, this pain has got you in captivity.” The hymn was offered to someone for whom it was most appropriate. But a hymn is not just a message for the one to whom it is offered. It is given through a particular someone for the channel as well. A hymn is an offering and a mirror.
How much of my 99% clogged artery was from the goat cheese I love, the hundreds of greasy pizzas I ate in college, the sedentary life I allowed myself to live in these last years, and how much was from the unreleased grief from my childhood that I had not known how to handle and which had then over 62 years burrowed its way into my heart and festered there?
And how much of it was the weird answer to my prayer to have my heart opened, no matter what?
Back Further
When I was 10 years old, my mother died of breast cancer. When I was 11, my father died of leukemia. In between the two of them, my favorite grandparent, my mother’s father, died of a heart attack. I was the eldest of three children and the eldest of all the cousins. In a middle-class, Jewish, post-World War 2 family, that made for a lot of expectations - of me and in me. Based on the shock and heart-breaking trauma of those deaths and the unspoken and unattended pain that permeated our family because of it, in my desperate inner screaming swirl, at 11 years old I created the inner reality that I had to take care of everyone in the family, emotionally and psychically. That erroneous but brilliant trauma-belief survival mechanism (I didn’t go psychotic, or become drug addicted, or suicidal, or homicidal. Nor did I take care of everyone.) has led me over my life to – lo and behold – create many situations where I can prove to myself, over and over again, that, see, it is all up to me. That has led me to be hyper-responsible for decades, in charge of most venues I inhabit, and, more recently to work, at 72, like I’m still 40. After working more than full time since I was 20.
I meant to take better care of myself, I really did. My family held interventions to admonish me to slow down and pay attention to my health. But there’s just so much work to do! So many people need help. And I’m so good at it. All of which is true and all of which is also beside the point. Most especially when the package of accepting responsibility and having an authentic spiritual healing mission is wrapped in the thin, twisted cord of anxiety-driven, hyper-responsible avoidance of the remaining layers of heartbreak, the still-hidden pockets of desperate bereavement.
Acceleration
At the beginning of January of this year, I was in a typical moment of frustration with how much ongoing (30 years) effort it was requiring of me, my family, and a small core of people to continually hold space for what appeared, to my critical eye, to be the incremental spiritual and emotional evolutionary movement inside the people of my spiritual community. The feeling was not new, but my putting-my-foot down-enough-of-this-already prayer for something to move in that dilemma was new. I was tired of being frustrated. I was tired of my own inner critic that bounced uselessly between outer and inner blame. I prayed to my master teacher to show me how he taught, how he did his healing. And in the middle of the dancing work, I was shown in the way he and the Daime teach – through embodied, vibrational visionary experience – that there was a new way for me to do the healing and teaching work to which I’ve dedicated my outer life. More neutrally heart-centered, less of my effort and lower will trying to make things happen, even more completely connected to compassion and faith than to that thought of, “It’s up to me.” I understood that that was going to require a new level of awareness and a new level of opening my heart. I said yes. I deepened my prayer.
In March, a month before we went to Brazil for the workshop in which my inner shit hit the fan, my family did a Daime work for me. I was in a deep moment of inner examination, provoked by the recurrence of the difficulty sleeping that had originated in my childhood. For the first time in 20 years, I lay down and let other people hold the space for me to make my inner examination. I saw many things that day. Among them, I saw clearly how I had constructed much of my life and work around the false double-layered belief that a) it is all up to me, and b) if I want to receive, I first have to give endlessly and perfectly. And since perfection is a non-reachable goal, fully receiving is also an impossible carrot held forever just beyond reach. In that little work, I made a sincere prayer in that sacred space, attended by the presences that have guided me and my path, and with the witness of the people most precious to me, that I chose without condition to heal the childhood/karmic pattern that I saw clearly, and which had been somewhat unwound in that ceremony. It was, as far as I could tell, the last piece of what I had been given to unravel in this life.
And in that ceremony, after the cleaning and the seeing and the crying, I felt an infusion of the vibration of universal love arriving to my heart center that further deepened my prayer. It was exquisite, sublime, simple, undeniable; the actual answer to the underlying prayers that everyone makes. My prayer, without wavering or holdback of any kind, became, I really, really want to feel that depth of love. Which implied that the space of receiving that love, my heart, had to undergo renovation to accommodate what was being offered to fill it.
Be conscious of what you pray for. Seriously. Because when it arrives and you’re whining to God, you might remember that you prayed for this. Not the form it has come in, but that part is not up to you.
When we make a prayer and a choice like that, the witnessing presences take it seriously. I imagine them looking at each other, raising their eyebrows, rolling up their sleeves, and blowing on their hands. To increase the space for love, like any renovation, requires that whatever is in the way of the new construction – in this case the habits, the traumas, the beliefs, the ego configurations, the unconscious fears, all of which have energetic weight – must be transformed. The patterns of energetic bypassing must be short-circuited to be rewired by whatever means necessary. And every major jump in our inner spiritual program, every initiatory moment, involves some level of physical illness. It’s the law.
Typical of how I used to live my life, in mid-April we absurdly left only one free day between the end of a 4-day Healer’s Training intensive that I led and leaving for Brazil to take a group to a mountain retreat center for a three-week self-healing Daime workshop. My family – Jane, Aaron, Zara, me – plus our crew of Americans and Brazilians, were, without a break between intensive workshops, now guiding a group of 20 Americans and Mexicans in a program of deep self-knowledge and transformation. That program would involve doing 10 Daime ceremonies over a two-and-a-half-week period. It is work that we’ve done since 2001, up until 2014 with our teacher and spiritual mother, Baixinha. We love the work; it is the graduate level of the programs of healing and transformation that we do. Over the years we have gotten proficient at it, both in the results for participants and in the harmonious, mutually supportive collaboration of our team. We call what we do the Divine Hospital. We do it for us and for those called to go for their healing by jumping into the ocean of Light.
One of the principles of the Divine Hospital is that everyone – staff and “patients” – is in their own process of self-transformation. You never know when it is your turn to be the goose in the Duck, Duck, Goose game of healing. We began this retreat with the first ritual on April 21. I was leading the ceremony. And an hour into it, I was the goose. I was overcome with the vibration of the Daime. Something was moving in the depths of my being and my body. It was not going to let me bypass it just because I was in charge of the ceremony.
The prayers I’d made in the preceding month – to transform the energetic patterns of what was left of my childhood compensations, to learn the new way of working more deeply through my heart, and, most centrally, to feel the depth of love that I knew was waiting to inhabit me – took the next giant steps in their answering in that first ceremony. I lay down briefly in the work (another first) and was confronted with a memory from my childhood (authentic healing most often involves the arising of issues that seem peripheral or even irrelevant to the answering of the central prayer. They’re not).
After my mother’s death, my grandparents, Solman and Lillian Goldman, came to live with David (8 years old), Martha (6), and me (10) in our home in a suburb of Detroit. When our father died – no one even saying he was sick until he was suddenly gone – they became our guardians. They took on the thankless and extremely outside-their-box job of raising three traumatized pre-teens at the beginning of the 1960’s. The fuller story will wait for another day. What I want to say now is that when they took us on, after losing their favorite son, my grandfather was 72 and my grandmother 69. They had scraped a bit of money and were ready to retire. They had lived in the Jewish section of Detroit since arriving as refugees from Russia in the early 1900’s. My grandfather called cars “those machines.” My sister grew marijuana in my grandmother’s garden. My brother ran off to California with the underage neighbor girl. I got arrested multiple times and brought a horde of long-haired and braless hippies to sleep on my grandmother’s immaculate living room floor on our way to raise anti-war hell in Washington, DC. And mostly we were all in shock, my siblings and I, without a shred of expressed gratitude for the sacrifice of these simple, amazing people.
No one in the extended family ever talked about our parents’ deaths. The only outward sign of the immense inner pain we all felt and locked away, each in our own isolated cocoon, was the occasional random stopping of Grandma Lil in the middle of the living room with tears running down her face. No one comforted her or any of us. My view is that we children remained in a stunned state, stuck in the moment when we had been told that not only was our mother gone a year, but our father had, without any warning to any of us, joined her. And left us each in our trauma silo.
As I’ve said, a part of my compensation for that shocked, abandoned, wanting to race after my father, was to adopt an inner, secret version of being the energetic caretaker of my family. That translated into a secret habit. Every night when we would all retire to our bedrooms to sleep, I would stay awake long past everyone else. I would make a circuit of our second floor, stopping at each bedroom door and listening until I was sure that my brother, sister, and grandparents were all still breathing. Then I could go to sleep. Except that I often didn’t, for hours.
I had recovered that memory of my hyper-vigilant, anxious, magical thinking daily exercise many years before. I had marveled at what a brilliant, sad thing it was. I had embraced that 12-year-old me; comforted him, cried with him. And on that first day in Brasil, in the power of the Daime and in the grace of the answer to my sincere prayer, I went underneath that pain and found and felt the love that had underlyingly motivated that anxious nightly circuit. It was a blessed moment and a Duh! moment. It had taken me 62 years to step under the desperation to find the love for my family that had been waiting for me. As I felt that love, my heart opened another layer. I was humbled and happy. I felt free of the pattern of hyper-responsibility and anxiety that had been locked in all those years ago.
That’s the introduction to what happened 4 days later. Except to add that on the Sunday before the Tuesday when I had the heart attack, we went to an 8-hour Umbanda ceremony that involved being on our feet the whole time, dancing, spinning, doing healing for many people, and receiving many energies into our bodies. I stayed the whole time and participated in it all. That’s what you do as an initiate. Or as someone without a functioning inner take-care-of-himself meter. The next day I told my daughter that my heart felt tired.
On the morning of “the event,” as it shall heretofore be known, I got a call from a friend in the US. This person is a good friend, also a spiritual brother. Among other connections, we consider ourselves to be students, as we would say spiritual children, of our Brasilian teacher Baixinha, who left her body in 2014. She left those of us who loved and were loved by her an inheritance of spiritual healing work that some of us are carrying on. She taught many people, including my family and those of us on our Divine Hospital team, about, among many things, the use of spiritual power; vibrational, energetic, healing power. What I teach my students and facilitate in my healing practice has come from what she helped open in my own consciousness and my mediumship, of which she was a major teacher and practitioner in Brasil. Most importantly for this essay, she taught us to connect internally, authentically to Divine Light and the beings who ride upon it and heal with and in service of that Light.
Spiritual power is in fact neutral. One can use it for an array of purposes and with a range of intentions, from promoting Light – which means augmenting unity and harmony – to enhancing darkness, which means augmenting fear, separation, and power dynamics. It can be used for healing and for hurting. Baixinha taught us to make use of that Light for goodness and goodness only.
Baixinha was a practitioner and teacher of what is called White Umbanda. Which has nothing to do with race. It means that we are taught and swear to use whatever faculty we gain to promote wholeness, unity, harmony, forgiveness, mercy, and love. We swear off the use of those faculties for harming, manipulating, or controlling other people, no matter what our lower self in its pain and reactivity might wish for in terms of vengeance or a sense of earthly justice.
On that Tuesday, my friend updated me about a most difficult personal situation that was ongoing in his life. My interpretation of what he told me was that some of the people involved in the drama were in violation of what our spiritual mother, our beloved teacher, had taught all of us. That interpretation may or may not be true. In fact, I didn’t have any more than the personal, anecdotal evidence of my friend. I took a big leap into an interpretation based on my own prejudices and willingness to think badly of the people involved. I indulged a weakness for drama, and a delusion that my righteousness matters. I didn’t bother to consult my intuition, which most likely would have at least told me to chill. I own completely that what happened next is on me. I created the internal conditions for my heart to almost stop. Nobody gave me a heart attack.
My interpretation and my conclusion as to what had occurred broke my heart. (The metaphor is not lost). But rather than connecting to the sadness and heartbreak, I instead felt anger. I had a choice at that point. A friend who is familiar with Buddhism told me recently that the Buddhists would day I had at least 84,000 different choices than the one I made. I know I had at least 5. Sadness, compassion, forgiveness, mercy, and detachment were all available. And yet I chose to a) believe my reactive interpretation with scant evidence and b) to indulge the easy way of anger. I could have chosen to follow my own teachings, no matter what may or may not have occurred. I could have dropped my opinion, breathed into my heart center, and linked my awareness with the calmness and compassion that are always there to be activated. That’s not where I went. I plummeted toward my third chakra, where my liver was waiting to burst with anger, judgment, and condemnation. I didn’t hesitate. I dove in. If I had chosen differently, would I have avoided the heart attack? Given how I was still constantly working and not taking care of myself and given that by all accounts my artery was at least partially blocked already, it was an accident looking for a place to happen. But that morning I floored the car over the cliff.
It would have been ironic, absurd, embarrassing, and darkly humorous if I had died from ignoring every teaching I’ve been given and offered in my years of allegedly being a teacher of spirituality and healing. Looking naked in the mirror can reveal some serious blemishes. Among my plethora of gratitudes is the opportunity to gain one more level of humility. And to maybe have the eventual end of the story be at least a little more noble.
The anger started out as a familiar feeling. I do not claim to be free of anger, nor is it a goal of mine. Anger has its place and its uses. Anger was not built into us as a cosmic trick or just as a test. Anger can bring growth, clarify identity, make boundaries. Directed, conscious anger can be useful in cutting to the chase of issues and clarifying solutions. Anger is the energy of springtime, of new life pushing to be seen, heard, recognized. Heart-directed anger can open the hidden places in our bodies and consciousness and let the Light in to clean them. Compassion infused anger can cut to the chase of an issue, can offer clarity to stubborn situations and people. This anger may have started out that way. But the familiar fountain of anger in me quickly erupted into a river of fire. A rage that I didn’t know I had, came flooding through my body. It went in seconds from a familiar, containable, recognizable, manageable anger to an overwhelming rage. I was stamping around and sputtering, picking fights with people who had their own opinions and anger. I had never felt such rage in my life. And nobody in my family, including my wife of 53 years, had ever seen this in me.
My son, Aaron, said, “Dad, let’s go to the natural swimming pool so you can chill.” I agreed. On the trail through the pristine forest at Morgenlicht, the retreat center where we hold our Brasilian Daime intensives, on our way to a spring-fed pool, I stopped numerous times to scream, trying to release the overwhelming rage flowing through my body. Halfway to the pool, I started to feel really not-good strange. I was dizzy and I felt a tightening in my chest that progressed as the minutes went on. I said that we needed to get back to the retreat center, which we did, slowly. Aaron told me later that he was preparing himself to carry me if I collapsed.
When we got back to the center, I lay on my bed, surrounded by Aaron, Jane, and our friend and colleague, Mona, who besides being a member of our crew, is a world class doctor. The pain had progressed to encompass my upper back and down my arms. My breathing stayed steady, and my heartbeat stayed regular. I never passed out. I didn’t know if I was dying, but in any case, I decided to take advantage of the crisis to let whatever emotions were trapped in my heart center out. Remembering my hymn, “Oh release this pain from your heart,” I did. I sobbed and sobbed as much of the remaining pain from that childhood heartbreak as was available to clear. I knew that whatever was happening with my heart, releasing that trapped pain would make whatever happened next easier and give more of a chance for healing, if that were possible. There was a layer of grief and despair that had been sequestered in my heart for 62 years. I sobbed it out as my loved ones witnessed and prayed and cried with me.
It took probably a half hour from the beginning of the episode to its resolution. The pain eased off and amazingly I felt fine. A bit stunned and questioning what the heck was going on, but basically ok. In retrospect, I had just had a heart attack. A major artery connecting my heart to my body’s blood supply had been driven into spasm by the force of that rage that had taken me over. In reacting to the news from home, I had entirely left my heart center, abandoned it to indulge the bitter deliciousness of my anger. In that abandonment, an inner-plane entity (not metaphorical), whose job it was to seek out the vulnerable, unconscious, angry people so that rage could be manifested, had stoked the anger into rage through the opening created in my vehicle by my leaving my heart and identifying entirely with my third chakra and my sense of outrage and injustice. I opened the door. What came in had purpose. The augmented anger rose to my chest and created a spasm in a major heart artery that was waiting for a provocation to close down.
In retrospect, I had had subtle signs for a couple of years that all was not right with my heart. I ignored them. I had had a number of incidences of being out of breath upon minor exertion. I had started swimming again after many years. I knew I was out of shape, but I also knew I wasn’t that out of shape. I had just kept pushing through- on every level.
Characteristic of how I’ve lived my life (get up off the floor, dust yourself off and do your job) I got up from that bed, wiped my eyes, took a shower, put on my white clothes, and went on to lead a very strong, all-day Daime work. Five hours into it, I thought, “I think I should lie down.” Which I did. And the pain came back. My friend, Carlos, the owner of the retreat center and a doctor, came and sat with me after I went through that round. He made me promise that if it happened again, we would go to the hospital. Which it did, 4 hours later.
On one level, leading that work was just plain dumb. But what also happened in that work is that an invisible team of healers embodied and worked on me through the members of my family. I was cleaned of many, many extraneous energies that I had been carrying for many months, allowed by my overwork and under self-care. I was shocked at how much non-physical material I had been unconsciously carrying. Barrels of it. In retrospect, that energetic and spiritual clearing secured me in my body, lessened the effects of the heart attack, and cleared the way for the expert physical interventions that followed in the next days. There was far less energetic interference in the medical interventions than there would have been had we not done that work. One of the purposes of energetic clearing is to leave the body free to right itself – with outside help when necessary – as it knows how to do without extraneous energies clogging the mechanisms of healing. Through my crying, the vibration of the Daime, and the intervention of the healers working through my family members, the etheric, emotional, mental, and spiritual levels of my vehicle had been cleared. The brilliant doctors who fixed my physical heart a couple of days later could do so in a clear field.
The tricky thing in the middle of the third episode, which was the worst one, the pain progressing almost but not quite into agony, is that I couldn’t imagine getting in a car and traveling 90 minutes to the city of Nova Friburgo, the first part of the journey over rutted, twisting roads. Blessedly, the pain receded completely. It never came back until I was on the operating table the next day.
Eight of us piled into two cars (Daime people travel in packs). It was 9 o’clock at night. We made the journey, ending at a private hospital in the small city. Carlos and our beloved friend, teacher Ana Paschoa had intuitively picked the hospital because it was conveniently located, Baixinha had spent 3 months in it at one point, and they felt the urgency to get me to a facility quickly. It turned out that the hospital was, amazingly (not really), exactly the right choice.
There are two distinct types of hospitals in Brasil. One is public. They tend to be vastly underfunded, hugely understaffed, immensely overcrowded, and criminally under-equipped. The other type is private. The quality of which can vary greatly. This hospital presented an interesting contrast. Its general level of sophistication of equipment and its regulations are like the 1970’s in the US. They asked me at least twenty times if I was a diabetic. I said no twenty times. When I left the hospital and went to the pharmacy to get the medication they had prescribed, one of the medications they gave me was for diabetes. I’m not taking it.
When I was first admitted to the hospital, the initial evaluation said, “This is an old man, but he’s lucid.” And they proceeded to do almost nothing for me for two hours, during which I could have easily had another heart episode. Mona was appalled. I was shown recently that during that time in the waiting room, there was inner plane help that kept me calm and prevented me leaving my body, that made up for the initial incompetency of the hospital. Which raises the question of whether the whole thing was orchestrated to save me and teach me and everyone else involved: even the provoked rage, the hospital, the prayers of so many people, the medical interventions. It’s one of the questions I’m pondering. It seems most likely. It was for sure overseen and intervened in by invisible guides. And the result has been the further answering of the profound prayer I made. You couldn’t write a more perfect script for bringing someone to their knees in order to be resurrected in Light.
At one point in my stay, a technician came in to take a chest X-ray. His machine looked like a robot from a 1930’s science fiction movie. It was a large metal creature, dented, with various rust spots on it. I asked him when it was made. He told me, “1952.” Neither he nor I were given a lead vest for protection. He looked like he was 80. But given that he is exposed many times a day to unblocked X-rays, he may have been 30. And the regulations of the hospital were similarly ancient. For instance, it is usual in the United States that when a person has a heart intervention like I ended up having, within half a day the patient is gotten out of bed to walk a bit to stimulate circulation and begin a slow return to normal functioning. The strict, implacable, undebatable rule in this hospital was that in the ICU, no patient, whatever their condition, is allowed, ever, to step out of their bed. And they don’t believe in call buttons. If you want something, you have to yell out of your room.
To make the experience more of a squeeze for me, Brasilian culture is such that people are expected to unquestionably follow authority. Not my gringo forte. When I was admitted, I hid my Kindle reader under the mattress of the gurney on which they were wheeling me into the ICU. My contraband was discovered the next day. After a long discussion among the staff and my pleading explanation as to what it was and that I literally had nothing to do for hours, since I was not comatose, on a ventilator, or drugged beyond cognition, and I wasn’t interested in watching Brazilian telenovelas all day, they reluctantly let me keep it.
I admit that I was in some ways a difficult patient. Besides the constraints that I rebelled against, I was anxious and in shock. What had happened was far more serious than I had imagined. Being unexpectedly in a hospital in Brasil, not knowing how long I would be there, being told that I might have another heart attack at any time, not knowing where I’d be taken for what was still a mysterious intervention, and the rule that visiting hours in the ICU were a strictly enforced 2:30 to 3 PM every day, left me shaking emotionally and mentally. I needed to see Jane. I could breathe into my faith and my intuition that in the end everything would be all right, whatever the end looked like or where I was at that end. But we are made up of many layers: animal, human, and spiritual. All those layers rotated in me.
Carlos came to give me vital information about what they were going to do with me and to try and reassure me that it was going to be alright. He was forced to stand in the middle of the common area of the ICU and yell at me while he was being yelled at that he was in violation of the visiting policy and needed to leave immediately. It was 5 minutes after 3pm. And overall, the people who work at this hospital were kind, solicitous, competent within their paradigm, helpful, and in some cases even loving towards me. I had some difficult interactions around their rules, and some beautiful interactions around their loving help.
And it turned out that with its ancient equipment and unnecessary rules, this particular hospital, of all the places I could have ended up, has an expertise in exactly the type of treatment I needed. Its overall level of sophistication is in the 1970’s, but its facility and expertise in the performance of heart catheterizations is contemporary world-class.
Carlos and Mona spent the morning of the next day after my admission researching where I should go for the procedure that the tests they had performed when I was admitted showed that I desperately needed to have done. Despite my denial and the lack of ongoing pain, I had indeed had a serious heart attack. How severe it was wouldn’t be known until they went inside my heart and saw that one of the two main arteries was 99% blocked and almost ruptured. In recent days, my family has been processing how close I was to dying. It was clear to everyone but me that something had to be done and done soonest. Mona and Carlos’ research showed what I’ve said: this hospital and the doctors at it were experts in this exact procedure. Beside which, the other option was going to Rio, which would involve a four-hour car ride, maybe in an ambulance, maybe having another heart attack on the way, and then having the same procedure which cost us 2,000 dollars in Nova Friburgo done in Rio for 100,000 dollars, which wouldn’t have included the ambulance ride, or the tests in the hospital, or the actual staying in the hospital. I asked if I could have half a procedure in Rio.
The doctor who came to introduce himself before doing the procedure was a very nice, confident guy; relaxed, gentle, funny, clearly competent. I asked him about his experience in doing what he was proposing to do on me; a heart catheterization with the implanting of stents to ensure the artery stayed open. He said, “Ten a day for twenty years”. We talked about a number of things, including what I was doing in Brasil. I mentioned our work and the Daime. He said he preferred that I not be knocked out for the procedure. I said I preferred the same.
The procedure was very intense. This type of procedure generally takes under a half hour to perform. This one took 90 minutes. The way they do it is to numb the area on your wrist where the tube for the catheter is to be inserted. You feel the wire being threaded from your wrist, through your vein, into your heart. You are lying on an operating table with a bank of monitors next to your body on one side and the doctor positioned on the other. There is a big double square of an ultrasound machine rotating over your chest, showing your heart from every angle. And then I felt everything he was doing to my artery. It re-created, not as severely, the pain of the heart attack. And it lasted for most of the hour and a half of the procedure. At one point he asked me, “How bad is the pain?” I said, “A 6. But it just went down to a 4.” He said, “OK. Let’s keep going.” He was sweating and communicating with his team. I was breathing and praying and calling on my team too.
The entire time I was on that table, I was employing everything I’ve been taught and learned over these many years of doing healing and spiritual work. I breathed deep. I centered my awareness in my core and my heart center. I observed as much as I could with my insides being twisted and cut and pasted. There was a cold, extremely rapid vibration inside my bones that I made stay that deep. In retrospect, I see that it was the cold biological fear of death that was reverberating in the depth of my body. I knew I had to remain utterly still for the doctor to do what he needed to do, which from the conversation I could overhear was quite delicate, more than he had anticipated. I prayed to my guides to secure me and to guide his hands. They were there. And I was surrounded the entire time, held and secured by the golden-white Christ Light. The prayers of so many people in so many places, who knew what was going on through the Daime telegraph, were palpable to me as I lay on that table, securing me in my body. At one point I left my body. I wondered if I was leaving for good. But I came back and continued to breathe and pray. Mona was there watching and praying the whole time. I had angels with me on multiple planes.
At the end of the 90 minutes, the doctor, João, withdrew the wire through my arm. As they wheeled me out of the operating theatre, he spoke to me about what he had found. He used the word grave (as in most serious) a number of times. He assured me that if we had not done what we just did, I would have died on the plane ride home to the US. He said I had had a major heart attack and was lucky to have not died before this intervention. He said this was the second most serious type of arterial blockage, second only to another artery that they call, there and in the US, the “widow maker.” I was stunned and grateful and overwhelmed by his news, his skill, his dedication to saving my life, and by the incredible experience of Light and grace we’d just had. I had been unmistakably secured in Light. We had won a victory. I cried with relief and gratitude and in awe.
He also told me that he had seen another artery that was partially blocked. He said it had most likely been that way for some time, maybe even ten years. It was not dangerous at this point. The next day it would be decided to do another procedure to ensure that this one didn’t become a problem down the road. That procedure took 15 minutes and was nowhere near as intense or challenging as the first one.
The morning after the first procedure, the doctor made his final visit to me (another doctor did the second procedure). He reiterated what he had done and his instructions to be careful and especially mindful for a month while my heart adjusts and heals. And as he was leaving the room for the last time, he turned over his shoulder, pointed at me, and said, “And no more of that tea!”
I would stay in the hospital for two more days while they did the second procedure. Jane stayed with me for one of those days and then came and got me on Saturday morning to go back to Morgenlicht. I’d been in the hospital for 3 ½ days. I’d almost died, faced the real possibility of dying, had many people all over the world praying for me to live, been saved by divine grace, the intervention of my guides, the prayers of my brothers and sisters and dear ones, the faith and grounding and love of my family and friends. And by the work I’d done on myself for 50 years to allow healing to take place relatively unimpeded by mental, emotional, karmic impediments. The good we’ve done for many people, the charity we’ve performed, gave me a spiritual bank account to make serious withdrawal from, and the earthly skills of trained, dedicated professionals saved my blessed, compromised vehicle so it remained inhabitable by my blessed spirit. When we got back, I took a shower, put on my white clothes, and, smiling at the doctor’s admonition, went to the Daime work singing the incredible hinario of our beloved Vera Froes, drank Daime, and entered my new life.
I saw many things in that work. I saw the inner-plane entity that had used the opening created by indulging my anger to provoke the rage that then led directly to the clamping of that artery. I saw some of the inner plane helpers who then cleaned me, secured me in my body, guided those making the decisions as to my care, strengthened the faith and courage of my family members and those on our team so the space of faith was inviolable. There was a battle in my body and in the inner planes between those who wanted to take me out and those who wanted to keep me here. And Light won. I wept with awe and gratitude.
While I had been in the hospital, my family and our healing crew carried on with the workshop. My role had been, from the inception of the work in 2001, to lead the ceremonies and be the final decision maker in many cases. Suddenly, in addition to the multiple roles in the music, the teaching, the mediumistic and healing aspects of the work that each of them already occupied, Jane, Aaron, and Zara had to take over my jobs. Jane doubled down on what is her usual place. She held the calm center with absolute faith, being the anchor for everyone else in the room. She did this in the face of the uncertainty as to what was happening and going to happen with me. Having that much courage and enforced calm also had its price. She has been recovering in these last months also.
Before we had left for the trip, I had secretly thought, sharing it with no one, that I was going to surprise Aaron by putting him in my place to lead one of the ceremonies. In my estimation, he was ready, and it was time for he and Zara to start assuming more direct responsibility for the conduct of our work.
They were certainly surprised.
The result of that unwelcome, immediate squeezing and stretching, is that, along with our family being personally even closer, more truthful, more supportive, and more deeply loving than ever, our working relationship contains greater heart centeredness and more equality, cooperation, and harmony. Each one of us has been freed to develop more fully our innate talents and be guided into new roles. That harmony and expansion has extended to all the people in our circle.
Two days later, on May 1, I went to the second half of the all-day Daime work held in the church of Flor da Montanha, which had been started by Baixinha and her husband, Marcelo Bernardes. May 1 is his birthday and mine. Every year since 2001, skipping the three pandemic years, we have celebrated that day in that church with 200 people who come to honor Baixinha and receive the extraordinary spiritual healing power she brought – and brings – to us. At the end of the work, Marcelo asked me if I wanted to say something. I said, “You all know what I am going to say is true. All the things we worry about, occupy our minds and emotions with, are meaningless. What is important is love, the heart, forgiveness, helping each other. But when Death comes and looks you in the face and says, ‘Not now, my son’, everything gets very clear.” The cheering and singing and hugging and general happiness that followed was extraordinary. A victory for Light is everyone’s victory.
It is now 3 ½ months since the event. As predicted, it took a month for my heart to physically stabilize. I have seen that my heart was wrapped in a lace-like web of energy, protecting and holding it as it began the healing of what it went through and adjusting to having more blood in it and less emotional weight and physical strain on it. Today that covering is mostly dissolved, my heart stronger and able to take its place at the center of a new inner configuration.
I have seen, felt, blessed, and released the entity that was placed in my first chakra when I had the heart attack, securing my body from dying and me from exiting it.
In these months I’ve been very labile. A layer of steadying/buffering energy that was put in place to get me through the trauma of my parents’ deaths and the subsequent need to make a life, has been stripped away. The price I paid for that enforced stability was that there was pain in my heart that had me in partial captivity. I cry more easily than ever. My daughter said, “Dad, you always were a softee. But now it’s even more.” I welcome it, even as it’s a bit difficult and occasionally embarrassing to navigate. I am in constant awe at the beauty of this world. I am grateful for every breath and for every conversation I have, incarnate person with other incarnate person. I cry at the reflection of sun on a spring leaf, on the water of the lake that I can see from my deck. And I am reveling and curious in the expansion of my heart center.
I feel hollowed out, my energy bodies making up a cleared space where calmness reigns and Light is filling the newly available space. That has led to a time of mediumistic sensitivity that I have rarely encountered. To navigate this level of sensitivity, I have to be more calmly vigilant, more heart centered, less indulging of my opinions, and more invoking of compassion that ever before. It's a big gift, made necessary by not wanting to be ill from extraneous energies glomming onto me because of my thin energetic skin.
I run into people who tell me about their own similar experience or that of people they know. (We just love talking about our illnesses.) Some of them say things like, “Oh yeah. My aunt had the same thing happen and she’s completely well, with a new perfect life.” Not my experience. My experience is that the answer to my prayer to transform everything I brought into this life and accumulated in this life has been deepened and accelerated. The result has been an intensification of some patterns-emotional, physical, mental- that are up for intense examination. Childhood traumas and patterns are blatant. I’m doing various types of healing modalities and therapies.
I’ve discovered fear in my bodies that I never knew was there. I have declared many times that fear has no voice in my life and decisions. Jane and my life has borne out that declaration. But the stripping down of my defenses has revealed pockets of pain, including fear, that have risen to be seen, blessed, felt, and released. It hasn’t been easy or pleasant to have so many old, crusty emotions rise up. But it’s a huge relief to be even freer.
My heart itself and my heart center feel lighter and much more open than previously. I feel love for and from others in ways that make me cry and laugh. My healing work and my teaching have deepened. I still don’t know if I was saved for something in particular. If so, it hasn’t yet been made apparent. Being alive and curious is enough so far.
I could care even less than before about the shenanigans of humans, mine and everyone else’s. Opinions and judgments are even more apparently just blobs of gray energy circulating in the atmosphere, being batted back and forth like a game of badly played tennis. I do still have moments of irritation and reactivity. A heart attack is a message and a chance, not an instant panacea. But also, those moments of reactivity are followed much more quickly by the opening of the space of forgiveness, for me and for the object of my irritation, for the speaking of truth and the asking for forgiveness.
The last verse of the hymn I received says,
There is no one beloved than you
Come and look through my eyes then you’ll see
How the love glows in the depth of each heart
This is the one and true reality.
An auxiliary prayer since I was given that hymn (it’s called Message from the Master) has been, “Let me see through your eyes.” But now my own eyes are being linked more firmly to my own new heart. The Christ in me is seeing, at times and more frequently, through my own eyes. When I look at the vista of my life, I see a clear, open, Light-filled space, a space of as-yet-undefined potential. I am in awe of the chance I’ve been given and curious as to what they saved me for besides the grace of healing and the answering of the prayers of those who love me and weren’t ready to let me leave yet.
It wasn’t my time, and now there’s more time to see what’s going to happen.
A consequence of the trauma of my childhood, coupled with the reality of being a very sensitive person in a world that neither honors nor encourages, but in fact condemns, sensitivity, was that for decades I related to being in a body as a prison sentence. When I was young, I felt like a prisoner in constant pain and anxiety waiting for the parole board to meet so I could end my sentence of incarnation. Through the whole ordeal of having the heart attack, of being unsure if I was leaving or staying, I wanted to live. That never wavered. It was not from a fear of dying. I felt the biological fear of dying that is built into our bodies. Our bodies are designed to struggle to stay alive until they can’t. But my inner self, that was clearly present within and underneath the physical, sitting in the awareness, curiosity, and calm I felt underneath that biological fear, never wavered in its prayer to stay if I was allowed.
That embracing of life even when my body was balancing on the razor’s edge, was a testament to the healing I’ve done, the love I’ve received, the teachings from the Daime, from my teachers, and from the brothers and sisters, students, colleagues and dear ones who have blessed me by telling me their truth and showing me what transformation looks like. I work in a collaborative team of healers and teachers who are themselves healing and learning. They have given me hope and strengthened my faith. I have been and continue to be helped along the way by angels in bodies and not. I am part of a spiritual community of people dedicated to Light, to goodness, and to the path of waking up while still incarnated.
I have work in the world that is useful, interesting, always growing, and that brings me into contact with people sincerely dedicated to healing and the heart. I have friends who have supported me and my life in ways that I can only repay with gratitude and prayer. I have been blessed with a biological family whose unity, love, truthfulness, humor, commitment to Light and to living fully on this earth is beyond anything I ever expected or even contemplated deserving. I have had the immense honor to co-bring into the world two extraordinary, smart, deep, talented, truthful people who also are a brother and sister not only to each other, but on the spiritual path we share. I have a partner, a wife, an eternal companion, an example every day of what is possible in being a human being. That she loves me utterly and allows me to love her is the gift of all my lives. Caboclo Tupinamba told her she could have whatever she wanted in this life. What she wanted was for me to stick around for a longer while.
It is amazing to me to be given the chance to live out the juxtaposition of coming to love my life in this vehicle, even as I’ve come to identify with Light as my essence.
I am a work in new progress.
Jonathan Goldman
Ashland, Oregon
August 10, 2023