It’s premature to state this before my death, but I feel fairly certain this week has been one of the most important weeks of my life. Puzzle pieces from so many areas of my life have fallen into place within myself and in the moment I’m writing this I feel like a new man.

On Friday night I stayed up too late. To be more accurate it was Saturday morning. It was 1 or 2 am and I was scrolling through Facebook feeling ashamed of myself for scrolling through Facebook at 1 or 2 am. Scrolling, scrolling, I came across a video from my hometown in Vermont. A local guy, someone I knew since I was very young, was being interviewed by the staff of the recovery center where he found his sobriety. I started watching the video and found his vulnerability really moving. In my core I could sense the impact this interview was going to have on other local men. As I watched I thought to myself, “I want the skill to reach folks like this man is reaching folks.” Simultaneously I sensed an internal block keeping me from it. I then asked myself, “What is it that’s holding me back?”

Asking that question of myself immediately transported me back to being on the stage of my kindergarten Christmas pageant. There I was, with my class, all of us dressed in green and red and wearing bells and elfin themed clothes. I was filled with terror. An uncountable audience sprawled before me and I sat terrified and frozen. I couldn’t open my mouth and sing and I couldn’t remember any lyrics anyway. I felt embarrassed and I believed the audience was laughing at me. My gaze was locked on the floor; too afraid to look for my parents in that crowd.

I’ve never forgotten this Christmas pageant memory. I’ve thought about it many times over the years and have wondered what use I had with it. What changed this Saturday morning is that I stayed in the memory a little longer. I stayed sitting on that stage and feeling frozen. I located the source of the terror. And then, within the memory, I made that young-me look up from the floor and find my parents sitting in the audience. Making eye contact with my mom, I saw her smiling, glowing face—she was very proud! And then I began crying very deeply. I resisted the urges to open my eyes and to stop the memory. I kept myself on that stage longer, I maintained the eye contact with my mom, and I cried more and more deeply. After a couple minutes I felt great relief.

On Monday I sat in my therapist’s office and I told him all about the Christmas pageant and the big cry. I described it as “one of the top three cries of my entire life.” I can’t remember what happened next, but he asked me a few questions, and suddenly the Big Cry returned. That terror that I had isolated while sitting on the stage of that memory—I saw it again in other memories. Like an arrow shot through the Rolodex of my life I could see the terror play out throughout my childhood. It was there when I was 5, and 7, and 12 years old. I cried even more deeply. And then I thought to do the same trick I had just learned. I stayed in each memory a little longer, and one by one, I undid the terror in them all.

My therapist sat patiently as I went through this process wordlessly. He watched me sitting there crying. After a few minutes I started to tell him about everything I had just witnessed in my mind and how I had undone the terror in several memories. Yet when I started to speak new mental images came in. I started remembering a new memory, one from before the age of five. In it I was happy and comfortable. I was with my mom and a great aunt, and they were having coffee, and I was carefree. It felt very nice.

Then the therapist interrupted my process. He instructed me to open my eyes, to “come back into the room,” and to get out of my head. He said I needed to “feel more” and “think less.” I couldn’t disagree more—the new memory was pleasing and the work I did with the other memories brought it to me. I didn’t want to leave the new memory. I wanted to watch it, explore within it, and see what the trauma had caused me to forget for 35 years. I felt completely certain he was misdirecting me and overstepping.

This is where things became very weird. There was a back and forth between my therapist and me. He acted very defensively. He disrespected my process and did not listen to what I was saying. I left the session feeling very uneasy despite just having the biggest breakthrough in two years of therapy. Today I spoke with a therapist friend and she helped me come to the conclusion that I need to find a new therapist.

This story ends at tonight’s mid-week Quaker meeting. But I need to set that up with a few words about my relationship with Quakerism.

Four things—

* Firstly—I’m not a Quaker. I’m an “attender.” Traditionally Quakers are meant to be “convinced” before joining, and I’ve never experienced Quaker convincement.

* Secondly—Having read the words of early Quakers I wholeheartedly believe that many of them, while sitting in their meetings, employed some kind of mental therapeutic process. It’s clear to me that a good number of them were spiritually advanced.

* Thirdly—For years I’ve been trying to figure out what the early Quakers were doing. None of them clearly explained the process. And what they did write is in an older form of English that’s hard for the modern reader to comprehend. What’s clear is that one is meant to “mind the light,” but exactly how one’s meant to mind the light remains extremely vague. Naturally modern Quakers all seem to have differing opinions on it. Old Quakers were clear in its importance: mind the light, mind the light, mind the light. It’s practically all they wrote about!

* Lastly—Quakerism has come up in almost every psychedelic experience I’ve had. As with everything psychedelic-related I know the following will sound absolutely crazy to folks who haven’t worked with these medicines, but on one journey I heard a voice say, “Walter, you do not need to work with psychedelic plants for healing for you have the Quaker method and it is just as effective.” This somewhat-reassuring message left me MORE CONFUSED THAN EVER because ***I still didn’t know what the heck the Quaker method was!***

So tonight I headed to the 6pm meeting and I sat down with the other two people present and a computer sat before us with another five folks attending via Zoom. The meeting starts and we all sit quietly. After a little while of “centering down,” I decided to mentally revisit my therapy session. I went back into those same memories that came up recently and I continued the work of “correcting” the terror within them. Essentially, I was hanging out in each memory, watching what happened as objectively as possible, reaching the stuck point where the memory becomes frozen, and then waiting until I was guided on how to proceed. The relief with this technique was immediate and I cried quietly as I worked. And as I sat there working, three words came into my mind with all the certainly of an absolute Truth and they applied themselves to that process I was doing. They labeled it: “Minding the Light.”

And in that moment I realized that what I’ve been doing in my therapist’s office all along is the process of MINDING THE LIGHT. For the last seven or so years, all the memories I’ve been observing in my mind, and all the catharsis and crying they’ve unleashed; this whole time I’ve been minding the light. While I was searching for what the early Quakers were doing I unknowingly was using the process the whole time!

After these realizations I spoke in the meeting tonight. I told the others about the cry on Saturday morning. I told them about the therapy session, the continuation of the cry, and the confusion with my therapist when he instructed me to stop the process. And then I told them how I continued the process just now and how “Mind the Light” came into my mind and applied itself to the process so very clearly. And quite naturally—the Big Cry continued and I cried in front of them all.

My body feels so loose now. My mind feels clearer than it has in over two years. After tonight’s meeting I left feeling so good. I don’t plan to explain exactly what the “terror” was that I experienced in those memories and how I corrected it, but I do want to say that it’s directly related to all the stress and insecurities I’ve been experiencing while being unemployed for the last half a year. I’ve been living a stuck life; stuck like on that kindergarten Christmas pageant stage. Frozen. I don’t know if it’s over now, but I can say that the “stuck” energy has shifted a great deal. The impulse to keep my eyes looking downward has greatly lifted. My sense of self-assurance feels quite high right now. And whatever job I end up doing I know I will feel happier doing it now than I would have months ago, even if it’s something simply to pay the bills.

And now I’m left feeling fairly certain that after all these years I may have experienced “convincement” in tonight’s meeting. And I will keep sitting with this thought for a little while.