WE ALL EXPERIENCE METAMORPHOSIS. It is a natural human experience. Whether you’re a man, a woman, a child you have or will experience a transformation that changes your entire perspective on the world. I found my own transformation embedded in what I now call the Path of Presence.

“Was he an animal, that music could move him so? He felt as if the way to the unknown nourishment he longed for were coming to light.”

― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

Sometimes it is a negative experience, and other times it feels like the sky itself is opening up and revealing a microcosmic slice of the divine. Regardless of the polarity of that experience, what will come from it will be a wholly new you, capable of living in a way that the present you has no way of comprehending. A caterpillar has no idea how to be a butterfly, but in its transformation, it is gifted wings and made into a wholly new being capable of flight.

I experienced one of these life changing events, and I continue to live today only because I transformed.

My Life Before Metamorphosis

A little over seven years ago, I was a completely different person.

You’ve heard this story a thousand times, the transformation tale is one of the most prevalent myths in all the world. Just to be clear, when I use the word myth, I am not using the colloquial form. When I use this word, and I use it often, I mean to employ a deeper meaning. A myth is something that is both abstract and fully grounded in our manifest reality. When I say that I lived the transformation myth, trust that I have chosen my words very carefully

I was a derelict, an utter disgrace. I couldn’t hold down a job, I didn’t have a penny saved, I didn’t even have a bank account. I had zero-sense of self-worth. I was as self-destructive as I was arrogant and weak-willed, to boot. I was an addict, pouring every penny I had down the drain on booze and whatever other drug I could get to silence the voice inside. I wanted to be liberated, but I had no idea that I had the keys to the prison. I was the prisoner and the warden. I had no direction, no drive and the scariest part of it all, was that I believed that I had it all figured out.

I was enlightened!

My First Rock Bottom (Because there wasn’t just one)

I had one tiny, unrealized ambition, that I failed to capitalize on every single day, I wanted to write. Yet, I couldn’t do it without imbibing in the spirits of alcohol. I believed that the drivel that I wrote was amazing work, that I was writing a masterpiece that would be seen as the next great piece of Americana.

I had no idea that throughout the past decade, I had been lying to myself and squeaking by with what little personal power I had allowed to remain within me. In point of fact, I got very lucky to have not been killed or worse killed someone with my recklessness. 

I don’t remember the exact moment that my mind turned toward ending my tirade of morbid bacchanalian mélange, but what I do know is it took a concussion, a broken nose, a contusion in my left thigh, one hell of an embarrassment, and nearly losing the love of my life in addition to losing almost every friend I had. Add a hangover from hell on top it all off and you can see what sort of state I was in before…

I realized I had no one to blame for my problems, but myself.

My awakening to the Path of Presence

It really was not as glamorous as I heard it described by the myths and legends, in point of fact it was quite painful — akin to drawing poison from a wound.

I was wholly wounded, but out of this destruction, I had made way for something new to grow. What that was I would not know for some years. What I did know was that I had a chance to build something real, something whole and new.

Over the months that followed my exodus from self-destruction, I began to open up to the prospect that I did not in fact know everything.

Thus I went in search of knowledge, methods, and philosophies that might help me create the person that I had always wanted to be. I spent more months than I could remember in introspection, getting to know the real me, potentially for the first time since I was a child.

Throughout the course of this rebirth, I came to notice that the person that I was before was wholly constructed by my runaway ego and its armory of trauma memory. Thus I knew that I could make myself anew.

So I sought new methods that would allow me to grow and at the same time, also allowed me to put to rest my old habits. It was then that Reiki found me.

Enter my search for a spiritual solution and my discovery of meditation, yoga, Reiki, and ritual magick.  What I now call the Path of Presence.

In my college years, I had taken courses on comparative religion and philosophy so I knew one area I could address right away.

I had been what I believed to be intensely spiritual in my early twenties, trying on the many different guises of the world’s greatest religions, but none of them had allowed me the ability to simply be myself. I knew that I agreed with the precepts of many of the world’s religions, but I simply could not stomach the rules and regulations that excluded people on the basis of color, creed, sexuality, or in truth any exclusionary excuse that denied people access to the divine.

When I found the Path of Presence, it instantly jived with the beating of my own heart. Not only had it been re-discovered and transmitted from the East, which I studied voraciously in my twenties, but it also resonated with many of my own very western ideals. It was flexible, it was versatile, and allowed me to explore the divine at my own pace, without critical eyes or judgment.

I jumped in head first…without reservation, without care. As one of my favorite philosophers, Alan Watts once said…

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

Alan Watts

I had always wanted to experience the peace, the tranquility, and the sense of oneness that was described by the masters of meditation and zen. I had tried earlier in life and had always failed to grasp exactly what it was that these people were speaking of.

The path of presence came easy to me, though the discipline of keeping up with it since has been anything but easy. I did not have to go to a mystical ashram in the mountains, I did not have to fast for years, I simply had to open up to what was already available to me. I found out very quickly that this path was far more than healing — it was my birthright, and it is yours too. It is your ticket to return to your natural state.

My journey with the Path of Presence…has only begun.

Seven years ago I received my attunement to Reiki Master, though I would hardly consider myself to be worthy of the title. Instead, I view it as the beginning of a new and very exciting journey toward the mastery of the principles, precepts, and possibilities of living in the present moment as my true self.

Though I have only begun this journey, I have already seen inconceivable results.

I do not know how it was exactly that I went from being an alcoholic, an addict, and self-destructive soul and began the path of healing what was literally overnight. I used to drink close to twenty alcoholic drinks per day, on average, and I smoked over a pack and a half a day. Now, I am no longer crippled by the chains of addiction, though I would be remiss in declaring that I am free of it, it merely no longer controls me.

Those who are closest to me have seen the transformation, and though they claim it as a night and day miracle, I know it to be something far more profound — it was the universe and Presence that interceded on my behalf.

Why? Because I was put here to aid others in healing themselves.

This path has allowed me the ability not only to explore the process by which I healed (and am still healing today) but this remarkable energy also allows me to guide others down the path toward total health and wellness.

Seven years removed from my attunement to the universal life force of energy and my embarkation on the Path of Presence…

I have published four books, I have a stable and very fruitful marriage, and a wonderful little boy, a daughter on the way, have launched several business ventures, and flourish as a writer sharing my life journey with others. 

I have now taken responsibility for my own life, my path, and my own happiness which has yielded remarkable results.

Not only is my health vastly improved from where it was seven years ago, but my mental state, my emotional state, and my spiritual state have followed suit. If I had only known before that there was a modality that was so utterly efficient and powerful.

This is the reason that I write this testimony, so that others can see that no matter how broken you are, no matter how hopeless it feels, there is a way (in fact many ways) to transform your life and make yourself whole again, Presence is but only one way.

If you want what I have found you only have to look inside…

If you need guidance on how to achieve this