Shortly after the “dark night of the soul,” I visited two dear friends, Susanne Swibold and Helen Corbett who lived in Calgary, Alberta. I had met Susanne and Helen on Saint Paul when they would come there every year for several years on a self-financed research project about the people of the Pribilofs in modern times. I was now visiting them to conduct sound recordings of the people and the islands. From that they produced four films about the Pribilof Islands: Amiq (the Unangan name for the islands), San (the Unangan word for seabirds), Laakux (the northern fur seal), and Peter Picked a Seal Stick (a story about how Unangan boys cut seal reproductive organs off the carcasses that ultimately were sold in Asia as an aphrodisiac). The films received critical acclaim, and throughout the years we had become good friends.
While I was in their Canmore home in Canada, I received a phone call from the Stoney people at the reservation in Morely, inviting Susanne, Helen, and me to attend a sacred ceremony they had not performed in 150 years, not even in private. When we arrived at the reservation, we went to the women’s shelter where the ceremony was to be held. The people conducting the ceremony were all Elders with pure white hair, wearing traditional regalia of beaded buckskin. They spoke in their language the entire time. Susanne, Helen, and I, knowing we were guests, just watched and listened even though we could not understand the language.
The ceremony preparation included sacred pipes laid out in the four directions in a circle, and offerings of the people who attended. The Elders chanted and sang songs in their language until about two hours into the ceremony when an Elder spoke English for the first time. “I am speaking English for the benefit of our friend from Alaska. We know why you are here. We have been praying to the Creator, and we have a message for you to take back. We know that many people believe they have lost their way spiritually. This is not so. It has been kept for you in the unseen world, waiting for you to wake up in spirit.” As abruptly as the Elder stopped the ceremony to speak English, he continued with their ceremony for another two hours.
I was struck by this message. I had thought I was at the ceremony because the Elders had invited me, but the Elders knew the true reason: I did lament the fact that our people had lost the spiritual ways, or so I thought. When I returned to Alaska, I was invited to speak at many forums and to thousands of people that year. It was inexplicable. I even emceed a concert by the Indigo Girls. At all the venues I was invited to, I spoke of spiritual things and that message from the Stoney Elders. I realized that the message had affected me profoundly and set me on my spiritual path.
My experience at the Morely reservation did not end there. When I visited Susanne and Helen again, they told me about a man called Chief Sitting Wind, who was revered throughout Canada because not only was he an Elder but also a Chief, a medicine man, and what we call today a shaman. He had quite a life. Shortly after he was born, he became seriously ill. His mother lived in a shack that was always cold because the wind would penetrate easily. Being a traditional woman, she decided to ask a medicine man to help her baby. When the medicine man arrived, he instructed her to take him out into the snow and leave him until the next morning. The mother thought this prescription would kill the child because it was snowing out and the wind was strong. The baby will freeze literally to death, she thought to herself. But, being a traditional woman, she did not want to dishonor herself by refusing to obey the medicine man from whom she had asked for help, so she reluctantly agreed. She placed the child crying in the snow and left. The next morning she came back to find a strong and healthy child! The medicine man returned and told her that her baby would be a great medicine man, chief, and shaman.
I wanted to meet this man, so I called him. A “go-between” answered the phone, and I told him I would be honored to meet Chief Sitting Wind. The go-between said, “okay, but it will require two things of you. First, you must bring tobacco wrapped in red cloth because that is our tradition when seeing someone like the chief. The next thing will require deep thought about whether or not you want to do this, and, if so, then you have to let go of the dearest thing you cherish in your life. Call if you have decided to do this.”
I thought this was a strange request, but nonetheless I thought about what I cherished most in life. I thought of my own physical life, my work, my parents, and my two daughters who were now adults. I realized, that when push comes to shove, that my daughters were the most precious aspect of my life. My daughters. Why would I give up my daughters just to see this man? I thought to myself. After a couple of days, I thought, this man would not ask this of me unless there was a good reason. He is a very wise man. If I don’t really do what he asks, he will know. And so, I decided to work at letting them go inside myself. When it hit me that I must let them go, I cried and cried for a week, day and night. Exhausted, I finally felt I had let them go, so I called Chief Sitting Wind’s home again. This time Chief Sitting Wind answered. He had a voice I envisioned a wise man to have, soft and filled with love. He said, “you don’t have to see me anymore. You got what you came for.” I was stunned. He hung up. That was it. From that point forward I realized that my daughters had been spirit beings first, and I had been their temporary caretaker, not a parent who could claim them possessively.
Later, Susanne told me that, for some inexplicable reason, Chief Sitting Wind realized from our contact that he also needed to go into a healing ceremony for himself. He had forgotten to honor the wind that gave him his life.
The spiritual journey continued the very next time I visited Susanne and Helen. Susanne, the older of the two, is a person who lives her passion for life and living. She is an accomplished photographer and artist, and an excellent researcher. She has an ability to see things that most people cannot see. Her photographs are incredible. She showed me some she was doing as a series that I called “Spirit Within,” in which she photographs particular scenery then places it with its mirror image. What appears is a distinct “face” or “spirit being” each time.
Susanne told me that a friend of hers wanted to meet me to share a story she was given. I knew that Susanne would not ask me to do anything unless there was a good reason. Of course, I said I would meet with her. Her friend wanted to meet at a particular forest. Susanne drove me to the place and left. I will call her April, not knowing if she wants her real name revealed. She was gracious, and I could feel that she was a “heart” person. I trusted her intuitively. Walking through the forest, she said she was given permission by the Hopi and Maori Elders to share the story with me. I wondered how the Hopi and Maori Elders knew about me. She first recounted how the two groups always communicated with each other through the “inner net,” not the internet. I learned that there are people who still communicate this way, the Original Language or the Language of One as it might be called. April then told me that the Hopi have sacred stone tablets that contain their laws for living and their prophecies. She told me in detail what the stone tablets contained.
At the end, she asked me if I would carry the messages from the Hopi and Maori. The essence of their messages was that humankind is at a crossroads, that we can choose a road to destruction or change our consciousness to live in harmony with all that is. The way to harmony is to be in the heart and not the mind. I agreed, but I had learned from past experiences that each time I agree to carry messages from spiritual leaders, I would have to then face something within myself that would be difficult.
Susanne picked me up, and we went to her place where I was staying. Her house is worth commenting on. Everywhere in her living room where I slept were artifacts and sacred objects she had collected over the years, a sacred pipe, bones from animals, sacred pouches, and amulets. Outside her house was a genuine teepee that I had witnessed put together by a retired chief and his wife. At first, Susanne had asked architectural graduate students from the local college to help. It was funny to watch because, even with blueprints, they could not figure it out. After an afternoon of trying their best, the graduate students let Susanne call the chief and his wife to show them how it is done.
One night when I tried to sleep in this living room, a strange thing happened. The sacred objects became alive! They were moving from their places where Susanne placed them to the front of my face and back. This continued for several minutes. I thought I was imagining this. Then everything became totally dark. I could feel my spirit go out of my body. Before I knew it, I was carried to a distant place in the cosmos where I could see the stars surrounding me. Then the stars transformed into one ball of light. My spirit body was pulled toward this ball of light. Closer and closer it came, and I became afraid that I would be absorbed by it. And then the vision stopped. I was completely startled. It took me awhile to fall to sleep after that.
The next day, when I was to leave Canmore, Susanne gave me a manuscript written by a person who obviously was on a particular spiritual path, as I found out later when I read it. Susanne said, “this manuscript has a way of showing up in people’s lives when they need it.” I said my “see you” goodbye to Susanne and Helen, then boarded the plane. My people do not believe in saying “goodbye” to anyone. They say “see you” in the understanding that, if we don’t see each other in this lifetime, we are still connected through the heart, so saying goodbye is not true.
Anyway, while on the plane to Seattle I read the manuscript. In it the author told how he went out of body and was guided by an angel into the cosmos. When there, the angel asked him, “What do you see?” The man said, “I see a ball of light.” Then the angel brought him closer, “Now what do you see?” The man said, “I see several balls of light.” Closer yet, the angel said, “Now?” “I see many balls of light,” the man answered. The angel was the Angel of Life and told the man, “You are a child of light. You see many balls of light, and they are children of light. When you shine, you join those children of light until the whole universe can see you.” With that the man was brought back into his body.
Susanne was right, the manuscript finds its way into people’s lives when they need it. I could not understand my vision the night before until I read that manuscript.
After returning from my visit with Susanne, I became aware that I was re-living, every day, the childhood trauma of being in the Saint Paul clinic with double pneumonia. Each day of my adult life I would wake up in the morning, nose running and bronchial tubes and lungs filled with phlegm. I had difficulty breathing and I would feel anxious. I was finally aware enough to see the link between my experience as a six-year-old to my experience as an adult.
At that time, I began participating in peer group counseling, which involves the individual selecting a peer, from a group counseling session, who sits quietly and nonjudgmentally while the other releases whatever he or she wants to release and be free of. The peer counselor sees the other as he or she truly is—whole, well, intelligent, and healthy, regardless of what is happening in the moment. If the one being counseled wants physical contact, it is provided. Sometimes the peer counselor says or asks something in an effort to get at the issue the individual is trying to tackle. This type of peer counseling is one on one, although sometimes pairs volunteer to go through the session in front of the entire group so that the group leader can demonstrate proper counseling. The group may include up to a dozen people.
I asked a dear friend, Libby, if she might help me with my “problem” directly since she was the group leader. She said she would try. Libby was and is an accomplished peer group counselor—I trusted her implicitly. She said that it would be necessary for her to be present when I experienced the symptoms, so she spent the night at my place in order to be present in the morning.
Like clockwork, my physical symptoms and emotional state appeared in the morning. Libby then laid down next to me and said, “It’s okay, go into it and let whatever happens happen while being aware that this experience is just re-living the six-year-old’s trauma that isn’t real anymore. Go into it.”
I did as she instructed while she held her hand on my chest, over my heart. I got to the point at which I could not breathe anymore and was in a state of panic. Libby was there to remind me that this was okay and that this was only a memory, nothing more. I was reassured by her presence, her physical contact, and her words. The process lasted about an hour. When I regained my breath, I sobbed and sobbed while Libby held me. She held me until I stopped crying and my process ended, not saying a word the entire time.
What I experienced afterward was a profound sense of freedom from this childhood trauma. I no longer had panic attacks, and I no longer suffered from physically re-living my childhood horror. I am grateful to Libby for having the courage, love, and compassion I needed at that time.
Much later in life I realized, to my chagrin, that I still carried old wounds from that childhood experience. My sister Rinna finally told me that when I returned home after the pneumonia, I had changed and recounted how I would no longer sit with the family to eat and would take my food into my bedroom. I began to realize that I had blamed my parents and my grandfather for the trauma because they had left me in the clinic and never visited me. My pattern of distrust for any adult was set by this. I had continued to believe they would always leave me. I was shocked at this realization. It had colored my entire life, even to the point that I had sabotaged my relationships with the women I loved and who loved me. I would subconsciously test their love to prove that I was right about them leaving me by doing and saying things that hurt them, and over time I was proven “right.” I had fulfilled my own belief time and time again.
I also realized, to my horror, that I was prepared to die to prove my point. I had developed an illness that, after a year of tests by Western medical doctors and alternative medical doctors alike, no one could identify much less treat. I had lost seventy pounds over the course of a year, and my friends were worried about me. It wasn’t that I wasn’t eating—I ate more than I ever did and I still lost weight. I developed inexplicable pains around my groin, stomach, and back that were persistent. The pains became almost unbearable to the point that I couldn’t do anything. I was a public speaker and got invitations all the time, but I had to turn them down because I was in such pain. That lasted about seven months.
I also began to realize that my experience as a child left me not trusting even my own body. After all, it had gotten sick to the point of near death. As a result, I always felt I was going to die from any number of illnesses.
At last, I had an “aha” moment when I discovered that this illness and its consequences were the result of my trials and tribulations from my childhood trauma! At that point, I began to heal the “mysterious” illness—the pains disappeared and I gained weight with the help of a medical intuitive who was recommended to me by a trusted friend.
The mind is an interesting aspect. It hides the truth from us for a period of time, sometimes years as it did with me. Rita Blumenstein, a Yupik Elder, is someone I learned to admire and trust. She said to me, “You know, Larry, that sometimes even the spiritual can be a place to hide from things in life.” I thought about this and it is true. When I was sick and unconscious with pneumonia, I would awake to find myself alone and many times in my own excrement. I would then go back into unconsciousness saying, “I don’t want to be here. I’m going back to the place where I feel safe.” It would continue to be the place I would go to throughout my life whenever I felt that I was not of this place of chaos, violence, ignorance, stupidity, and destruction—until Rita shared her wisdom with me. “Sometimes the spiritual can be a place to hide from things in life.” I realized that I had done just that throughout my life. It was easy to the point of being second nature. Now, I go there consciously, not to escape the present moment but to experience what it is like to just “be” without any thought or emotion created by the mind.
Now I am thankful for the experience I had when I was six. Without it I would not have learned some of the most important lessons in my life: to trust in life and life processes, to trust my own body, to trust others, to forgive and have compassion for my parents and grandparent, and to forgive and have compassion for myself. Perhaps forgiving and having compassion for myself was the most important lesson I learned from this. The Elders say that “we cannot offer the world that which we do not have.” Until I forgave myself and developed compassion for myself, I could not forgive or have compassion for anyone else. Now I have compassion for all who take this human journey.
It is not easy being human. We are born into a world in which we experience all kinds of things—tragedy, physical and emotional suffering, violence, love, moments of happiness and sadness, confusion, longings, moments of bliss, moments of joy, judgments and criticisms of self and others, and loss. This is the present reality of what it is to be human, and we are still here. The human spirit is amazing.