‘There can be no rebirth without a dark night of the soul, a total annihilation of all that you believed in and thought that you were.’

HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN

My work with Victor had laid the choice between sorcery and shamanism in front of me. And I had made my choice. Both Gabrielle and Victor were clear that the purpose of their work was to support their students to live as creatively and as powerfully as possible in the world. And I had chosen them as my teachers.

I embraced a new level of discipline in my work with Victor. For me, there’s nothing more satisfying than throwing myself totally into any creative endeavour that comes from the heart. I now began to apply this to my shamanic journey.

At the same time, the door to becoming a father had well and truly opened inside me. I was amazed. I’d always thought that it wouldn’t. My awareness of the crisis that we as a species were in had always laid a dark cloud over that part of me that more than anything wished to father a child with Susannah. But when the spirit called, it was a choice-less choice to answer.

It was the autumn of 1990 and we were in another gathering with Gabrielle in London. We were due to be teaching ourselves over the same weekend, so we could only attend on the Friday evening. After the dance, Gabrielle led us into what she called ‘trespasso meditation’. It was simple. It involved sitting opposite a partner and softly gazing from your own left eye into the left eye of your partner. Susannah and I ended up sitting opposite each other.

As I settled into Susannah’s eyes, a doorway opened at the top of my head. My spirit moved up and out through that doorway and I found myself looking down at our bodies. My mind was quiet. And in that silence, I suddenly knew without doubt that Susannah was pregnant. I was astounded by how delighted I was by this knowledge. At the same time, I was certain that Susannah would be freaked out.

We discovered later that Susannah was having almost exactly the same experience, her own knowledge coming from the sound of heavenly bells ringing. Looking into my eyes, she had become certain that she was pregnant. She was secretly overjoyed about it and certain that I would be freaked out!

Neither of us mentioned this to the other until the next day. We were in a venue just outside London, preparing for our workshop, and were sitting under two huge cedar trees. It was late afternoon and we were talking about how to begin. I don’t remember if it was Susannah or me who brought up our experiences of the evening before, but all of a sudden, we were acknowledging that both of us thought Susannah was pregnant. We both admitted we were certain the other would be freaked out by this news. But neither of us was. In fact, no sooner had we shared our experience than we both fell into a kind of trance. It was if our eyes opened for the first time and we could see each other in a new light. We were in a state of love that was beyond the two of us as the sun set between those two magnificent cedars. We were convinced that we were about to become parents. And we were ecstatic about it.

In fact it turned out that Susannah wasn’t pregnant, but there came a moment in her next cycle when we both consciously opened the door to the spirit of the child we both felt we had already said yes to. Susannah said out loud, ‘If you want to come in, baby spirit, now is the time and there may not be another.’ The gate opened and in came Reuben, our son, who, as Gabrielle had rightly predicted, became our new live-in be-here-now Zen master.

I was both overjoyed and scared by the thought of becoming a father. My relationship with my own dad was still fractious. He had already cut me out of his will when Susannah and I decided to marry. He remained deeply concerned about how I was going to survive doing work that he didn’t understand. And I was concerned about how much I would repeat the stresses and tensions I’d experienced growing up. I wanted to change the story, but I knew it was going to be a challenge.

The nine months of Susannah’s pregnancy were quite an emotional ride for me. It was a cocktail of total excitement blended with a whole host of stressful questions. How would we survive? Would I be a good enough father? Would we still manage to follow the path we were on or would I have to get a ‘proper’ job in order to provide?

Reuben’s birth remains the deepest ceremony I have ever been part of. Susannah’s labour went on all night. She was magnificent. Our midwife was an angel and we were beautifully supported by our good friends David and Julie. The moment I held our son for the first time and he looked into my eyes was one of those shining pearl moments that will stay with me forever.

I was to discover that children bring their own fortune with them. And as our young son grew, so did the success of our work. As each day unfolded, I fell more and more in love with the beauty, strength and innocence of this everyday blessing called family.

I was working hard, setting the wheels in motion for our work, and as a young family, we travelled everywhere together in those early years. We taught with Reuben in a sling strapped to either one of us and we danced ourselves around Europe and the USA teaching and just about making a living from our work. When Reuben got too big to carry round all day and wanted to explore more, he made a beeline for one of our participants. Malcolm loved kids and was happy to take him out and play. And that’s how he got the job and became part of our travelling band. We were on the road a lot, carrying everything in a good solid Volvo. Those were special times – lots of adventures, lots of laughter and the little miracle of being in a relatively well-functioning family.

At the same time, not everything was rosy. As those of you who are parents will know, parenting isn’t all a joyride. And being a father brought out the worst as well as the best in me. There were moments when my emotional responses were so strong that I was unable to disentangle myself from them and witness them. Once fully identified with a feeling, perspective is limited to say the least. I found myself as irritable and unpredictable at times as my own father had been with my sisters and me. Susannah and I occasionally had blazing rows born of deep misunderstandings on both our parts, and our son was sometimes caught in the crossfire.

I have compassion for it now and can even laugh at some of those early parental memories. But the stress of being young parents and being young in our work, coupled with the ongoing need to pay the monthly bills and a lot of travel, made for some challenging times.

In fairness, the amount of laughter and play and love-filled moments in our household more than balanced out the moments of suffering. Right from the first moment I laid eyes on our son as he came into this world, the love I felt for him and his mama was the most powerful feeling I’d ever experienced. In contrast, the moments of losing the love and being overwhelmed by life that were part of our everyday experience of being parents were deeply upsetting.

I could see that the pain I was causing was an import from my own past and generations past. It was deeply rooted in both my own childhood and in the stories that came from the undigested experiences of my family line. I was never physically violent with either my wife or our son, but I kept finding myself being triggered by deep and unconscious feelings. I could see that I needed to get to the roots of these old emotions. I wanted to be free of the unconscious patterns that kept taking over my day-to-day actions. I wanted to be a better husband and a better father. I was 28 years old.

I was aware that my survival fears were more than simple present-day fears. I saw in my dreams that they were deeply rooted in being the great-grandson of refugees. I felt a growing urgency to do something to try and free myself from the weight of the past. I needed a way to heal this trigger-happy papa who was so full of love and responsibility and so apparently unable to handle the deep feelings that would arise over the slightest kitchen spillage or teabag left in the sink.

As is often the case, come the need, come the medicine. Victor had begun to talk about his new distance-learning course called ‘The Art of Living Purposefully’. I signed up on the spot. Its purpose was to free ourselves from the learned habits of the past that no longer served us and, more importantly, wasted so much of our precious life energy. The most intensive of these ritualized processes was to be the recapitulation.

The recapitulation was the central practice of the Toltecs. The ancients saw that most of our available life energy was taken up in presenting our idea of ourselves to the world, rather like playing a character in an ongoing soap opera. We repeated the same mistakes again and again, as if the script we were living was cast in iron and we had no choice but to follow the inevitable expectations of this character to their bitter conclusion. We needed to change the dream, but the effort was doomed to fail since we lacked the spare energy. They also knew that a source of high-octane energy was available to us in the undigested and unhealed experiences of the past, and they had a technique for accessing it: the recapitulation.

Each story that keeps repeating itself in our life has a root experience behind it. The ancients called this experience an ‘energetic command’. It often takes place in childhood. Faced with shock or trauma, children have a massive capacity to survive. They do this by separating from the experience in order to protect themselves from the full impact of what may be happening to them. The result of this is that what Susannah and I have come to call the ‘self’s protective adaptive survival mechanism’ (or spasm) kicks in and the trauma is locked away in much the same way as the body deals with physical trauma: it is frozen in the body. Each frozen experience is life energy that is no longer available to us.

The purpose of recapitulation is to gain access to each frozen experience, bring our present-day consciousness to it and change our relationship to the memory it holds. This releases the energy that has previously been used to keep the memory frozen.

The ancients did the recapitulation process in a cave. However, due to the lack of both available caves and South American warmth in northern Europe, we were instructed to construct a recapitulation box. The box was to be just large enough to sit in and was to be covered with black cloth on the inside so as to be completely dark once we got in.

At that time, Susannah and I had just bought our first home – a ground-floor flat on the outskirts of Totnes that happened to have a cellar. We had converted the cellar into a sauna room, and since it was below ground and mostly soundproofed, I thought it would be the perfect place to carry out my recapitulation.

Victor gave us precise instructions. We were to write a list of all the people with whom there’d been any significant exchange of energy in our lives, starting in the present and working all the way back to our parents. Next to each person, we were then to write down, in a bullet-point fashion, the nature of those events. This would leave us with a list of approximately 4,000 events. We were then to make time every day, or during the night if necessary, to sit in our recapitulation box and breathe through these events one by one using specific breathing techniques.

In the decades that followed, I refined the system that I’d been given to make it more effective in the modern world. I called it the SEER process (systemic essential energy retrieval) and it is described in my first book, co-authored with Susannah, Movement Medicine: How to Awaken, Dance and Live Your Dreams (Hay House, 2009).

In my own recapitulation, I spent between three and six hours a day in that box. I went on doing our admin, being a papa and teaching too. When I was working during the day, I did the recapitulation at night. When I was away from home, I sat in darkened hotel rooms with a blanket over my head to cut out the city lights and continued.

We had no source of income apart from our teaching, but Susannah saw the need for me to do this work and she literally held the baby whilst I did my work in the office and in the cellar. Even though we were on a low income, we’d decided we didn’t want to receive any support from the state. We thought this was the best way to affirm our capacity to be self-sustaining.

I’d never been so determined or met so much resistance in my life. Every time I climbed down those wooden steps into the cellar to begin, I had that familiar feeling, Uh-oh, Mikk, you’ve finally gone and lost the plot. Have you really got nothing better to do than sit in a black box and recapitulate the fine details of your personal history? Aren’t you taking yourself just a little too seriously? Isn’t this all just a tad selfish?

But nevertheless, with Susannah’s support, I went down those steps and into that box. And day after day, I went through my list. It was thoroughly boring at times and super-painful at others. And every now and again, a jewel would appear like a shining turquoise gem as I sifted through the sands of the past.

I was getting a deep insight into the themes of my life. As I recapitulated my relationship history, I was astonished to see the same stories repeating themselves – different times, different people, same stories. There I am feeling betrayed again. There I am playing the victim, and wow, what drama I can create! I witnessed myself choosing to faint several times as a young teenager when I was emotionally overwhelmed by a situation. I did it on a train to school, at parties, even in a small forest in Ibiza when my then girlfriend went off with another guy. To see myself with such naked clarity was embarrassing, challenging and sometimes really touching. In the Ibizan forest, I was found on the ground by a good friend, picked up and carried back to the hotel. But then my girlfriend showed up and I whispered in my ‘oh so dramatic lost boy voice’, ‘See what you’ve done to me.’ Oh dear!

I witnessed the hundreds of times I’d felt overwhelmed and lost and been unable to communicate clearly. I saw how the stories I had about who I was and what I could expect were remarkably self-fulfilling.

I witnessed my personal, familial and cultural wounds. I recapitulated the time my father caught me stealing and beat me and how in response I closed my heart to him. I recapitulated the time when my mother told me how my father had wept as he read the letter telling him that Susannah and I were getting married. I saw that he felt he’d failed in his duty to pass on the traditions of his forefathers. In some ways, maybe he even felt that he’d failed as a father. I felt such love for him then. I recapitulated the time when he called me on the day before my wedding to ask me not to marry Susannah. How painful it was to hear him in such distress and to know there was nothing I could do. And at the same time, I began to discover a certain compassion for the young man I’d been, and for the child, and for the father and husband I’d become.

I saw clearly that my experiences had created a deep separation from the ground of the body and through that a loss of connection with the Earth herself. I saw with sadness how these patterns repeated themselves in every area of my life and I saw the roots of my own disempowerment.

I began to recognize that the patterns I kept on repeating all had their roots in early experiences. Events such as a Caesarean birth or the trauma of ritual circumcision had set a default mode in me. This original setting had led to event after event that would simply confirm the underlying mistrust of life, and particularly human beings, that I had carried inside me for so long.

It became clear that each misfortune that I’d encountered along the road was a repetition of an earlier event, and as I kept mining through the rubble, occasionally I would find one of those ‘energetic commands’ appearing like a crushed diamond in the coal face. When I found a ‘root event’, it was like hitting the jackpot. One day, I found a young boy who was so in touch with spirits. Like everything that lives, he just wanted to be recognized in the magic, innocence and power of his soul.

Day by day and night by night, I continued. And day by day and night by night, the clarity of my focus intensified and I found more and more willingness to face the difficult truths about myself.

I witnessed the martyr in me, and the addict who could never get enough of anything. I saw how I wasted my energy by trying to gain kudos with people by sharing some amazing shamanic experience that I’d had. And most of all, I saw how much fear there was in me. I was afraid to really show up. I was afraid of doing my creative work for fear of it being judged unworthy. I was afraid of my power. And I was afraid that I wouldn’t live up to my own very high expectations of myself.

I kept seeing the present through the filter of the past and acting accordingly. Often, I wasn’t actually present at all, but acting my part in a movie with only one predictable outcome.

It was painful work, but step by step, the effectiveness of the recapitulation gave me the strength to step further into my past and change my relationship to it. Giving back what didn’t belong to me and retrieving the life-force that had been locked in those stories enabled me to recognize that when those triggers were activated, I had a choice about whether I identified with them or not.

Slowly, my family and I began to experience the harvest of my work. My dreaming became increasingly lucid. I had more and more energy available for my wife and son and our work. I felt as if the work I was doing in that black box was giving me the millisecond of awareness it takes to avoid going into an old story. Just as my hand reached out to press the ‘play’ button on that old movie in which I’d starred countless times, a quiet voice inside me began to whisper the magic words, ‘Choice, Mikk. Choice.’

I began to listen, and often (though not always) I was able to step back, take a breath, see another possibility and choose to change.

I was determined to let my past become my medicine rather than my excuse. But for a time, I found being with people excruciating. Everything that came out of my mouth seemed the voice or opinion of some imposter or other. As much as I was gaining energy, I had lost my old ground, and the new road was still under construction. I’d left the known and, like my refugee ancestors, I was a stranger in a new landscape. Learning to stay steady in the unknown is very much part of the initiatory journey, and it can be tough to do so. Only the love I had for my wife and our son and the love I received from them both kept me going.

Step by step, and story by story, I moved on. My recapitulation took me nine months, but eventually I reached the end of my list. I had finished. In my square, dark womb under the ground, with the support of those who loved me most, I had been reborn.