Sexual Abuse and the Role of Enlightenment

Mar 31

Because the condition of separation is a dominant condition of most human beings, it’s not hard at all to then think that the spiritual, that God herself, must be somewhere else.

The Divine is this but I am that. Limited to the sensory world and habit, it’s no wonder you live a life of addiction to the mental, physical and emotional patterns. It’s like living in a box and the directions to getting out of the box are taped on the outside of the box. You truly do not know that anything exists and if it does, that, as far as the mind is concerned, it may be spiritually inviting but it’s hardly realizable.

You’ve heard it many times in your life, that when a person dies, that “they’re in a better place now.” Is Spirit somewhere else? How can it be that the Spirit dwells in the disaster, in the tragic, in the neglected, the forgotten, the murdered, the abused?

As I have shared before, I want to keep these conversations real and relevant to our daily lives because that is what you are trying to understand, to reconcile, to transform. So, I want to share a story about the sexual and physical abuse I encountered as a little boy. But stay with me as I will tie the experience into the act of transformation, the destination of all heartbreak and pain. But before I do, I want to state that’s it’s not going to end up the way you can imagine, the way it normally does.

As somewhat of a preliminary statement, I want to say that I have few memories of my life prior to the age of 14, the time of my stepfather’s death. As the years passed, I realized that I repressed those memories because of the pain and difficulty of recounting them. I was better off without them. Most of the memories I do have are happy ones, of playing baseball, of exploring the woods and building rafts down at the lake, of riding my bicycle to get away from the house, of the innocence of my life before the journey really began. I remember the innocence of who I was before it all started. I don’t want to embellish or aggrandize the suffering I went through, the deep impact it had on my life and my body but I also know that I would be lying if I said I could share the story objectively. But as I have shared with you before, the story of your life is not the story you think it is and mine is no different. So I’ll try to find the middle road.

My mother packed my biological father’s bags when I was 2 years old. By his very early twenties, he was already an alcoholic and did little to provide for his family. I would meet him for the first time 35 years later and I will address later in the conversation. But at age 7, my mother married my step-father. Until the age of 14 and his death, we underwent sexual and physical abuse. If it wasn’t happening to me, I knew it was happening to my brothers. Each of us would be witness to watching the other being attacked, slapped so hard that you couldn’t hear, jarred to the marrow of your bones. It became the norm, the given, and the prison in which each of us lived. I also knew my mother was imprisoned as I witnessed the abuse she encountered. Unconsciously, I was blaming her for not protecting us from the monster but I simultaneously knew there was nothing she could do about it.

It serves no purpose to share the details of those events because they are events too common to be told. Many people have undergone similar situations.

But several months before my stepfather passed away, I began to plot a different path. I practiced standing on a stool, being tall enough that when he came home from work and through the kitchen door that he came through every night, I could swing the bat and I could catch him directly on the forehead and take him out. I knew that if I missed, he would kill me. My intention was to kill him.

I think he decided to leave before he had to face the music and he died in a truck accident when an object from back of the truck went through the back windshield, struck him on the back of his head and he died instantly. I remember thinking that it was funny that I was focused on the front of his head and thinking that I should have practiced swinging left-handed. So, suddenly the perpetrator was gone and we went about our lives as though nothing had happened.

Of course, that is impossible because the mind cannot not respond. It records everything even if you repress it. But the years passed by. By age 27, my anger and rage about my life was surfacing and there was no outlet. It was at age 27 that I met Dr. Tony Speed, Vice-President of Farr Associates, a behavioral science firm in Greensboro, NC. Following several private sessions with him, I attended a couple of weekend self-awareness workshops and I was hooked. It was like a sanctuary to me, a cathedral. So, I signed up for another program and couldn’t have been more excited about being immersed and saturated in this place. Tony was keenly aware of my childhood.

When I arrived for this particular workshop, I was predictably excited and anxious to get started. I was in my seat by 5:45 PM with the workshop beginning at 6:00 PM. Tony wheeled himself in his wheelchair in the room about 5:55 PM and as the lead facilitator for the program, he began to ready himself.

I glanced away and saw faces that I thought I had seen before and was reminiscing about my past. When I looked up, I realized Tony was staring at me and I knew I was in trouble. I had witnessed this before in a previous program and I wanted no part of what was getting ready to happen but it was too late. The clock hit 6:00 PM. The door was closed. And now, just like in my childhood, I am trapped.

Tony: “Haydn, how are you tonight?”
Me: “I’m great. I’m really happy to be here.”
Tony: “That’s wonderful. Listen, would you like to work on your anger?”
Me: “I’m not angry. I’m really happy to be here.”
Tony: “I’m glad you’re happy to be here but I didn’t ask you if you were happy to be here. I asked you if you would like to work on your anger.”
Me: “I probably didn’t explain myself well enough. No one made me come. I chose to be here. I drove 3 hours to be here.”
Tony leaned forward in his wheelchair, smiled at me and said, “Do you or don’t you?”

I was stuck. I deeply wanted this man’s respect and I wanted him to see me as a player but I don’t have the courage to do whatever it is he is going to have me to. If I say no, he’s going to write me off and will not see me as a serious student of the work. I could hardly breathe.

Me: “Sure.”
Tony: “Excellent. Then, do me a favor and come lie down on your back in the middle of the room.”
Me: “What?”
Tony: “You just don’t listen, do you?”

I heard what he said and now I am enraged. I get up and lie down in the middle of the room and now, I can’t see him or any other face. Then, I heard that sound which I had seen and heard in a previous workshop. He got out of his wheelchair and was crawling over to me, dragging his lower body to where I was.

Once right above me and close to my face, he asked me, “How do you feel?”
Me: “Not too good.”
Tony: “Take a breath,”

And before I knew it, he had as many as 7-10 people holding me down. Pressure on my head, my shoulders, arms, hands, knees, shins, and feet. I’m not going anywhere.

And without warning, he lit into me. Bringing up my past and the abuse, he raised his voice and confronted me about my behavior, the rage I had adopted and the rage I used to run my life. I responded in kind and began threatening everyone, yelling and screaming at them to get their hands off me. It was of little use.

And suddenly, his hand slipped under the back of my head, he squeezed my head softly and whispered in my ear, “Now, tell me, how does anger run your world?”

It was all I could take. I broke down and for the first time since being a child, all of the shame and regret and hurt surged past the recessed walls of my heart and surfaced.

I began sobbing and managed to say, “I have so much to be angry about.”
He replied, “Everyone does.”

The tears began to fill my ears. The snot from my nose began running down my face but I didn’t care. For the first time in my life, I am at last beginning to address the darkness inside of me. I could not stop sobbing.

Suddenly, his hand pulled away and he began to teach me about my anger. Speaking in my ear, he began to teach me about my mind, body and emotions, how they are integrated, how they work. I am lying there in amazement. All my life I have wanted to understand this, to know this. This went on for what seemed to be 20-30 minutes and now, I am becoming relaxed, hyper-alert and attentive and calm.

And then, he places his hand back under my head and is being very complimentary and supportive.

He then says, “Way to go, Haydn. It took a lot of courage to do this. So, when you’re ready, why don’t you head back to your chair?”
Me: “How can I get up when you have all these people holding me down?”
Tony: “What people?”

And suddenly, I realized that no one was there, that he had sent them one-by one back to their chairs and that I have myself pinned down in the middle of the room. It was an awakening for me. I realized that I am doing this to myself. I am the perpetrator.

He was a master of mind, body and emotion, what is called the HPA axis: the hypothalamus, pituitary, adrenals. As a part of my journey with Tony, I would meet my second teacher, Nancy Willis, a gifted intuitive who would introduce me to the invisible world. I would work with Nancy for nearly 27 years, each meeting being another step along the way to waking up,

I could, of course, write volumes on both my relationship with Tony and Nancy, and I cannot emphasize enough the influence each had on my life but that is not the intention of this communication. As a result of being inspired and motivated by them, I began an aggressive meditation practice that would last from 1979 to about 1989, the year the end of my life would begin. I got very good at meditation, even addicted to it and it was through meditation and my relationship with these two teachers in which I was able to stabilize my life.

In 1987, I came home from work very late at about 11:00 PM. Everyone had gone to bed and was asleep. I couldn’t go to sleep, I was still wound up from the day, so, I watched TV for a while. I didn’t want to wake anyone up, so, I decided to just sleep in the bottom bunk of the children’s beds and as I twisted around to get ready to nod off, I glanced at the clock. It was 12:59 in the morning. I have tried at times to explain what happened to me next but there are no words for unconditional love, for God, for the Divine, but we need to try in order to gain the language to express what the heart is seeking, what the soul is here to experience.

No sooner than I had closed my eyes, I began to leave my body. I will not try here to go over the details of that experience because I have learned that personal revelation is not a particularly good teaching tool. Revelation is meant for the individual. But I will share this.

As the experience continued, I saw with absolute certainty that I had chosen my stepfather and the experiences of my childhood. I saw with absolute clarity the perfection of the individual path that not only I but all of us choose. I was not a victim. I saw and experienced that the soul could choose abuse without actually being abused and that the abuse was part of my formation and preparation. If you are going to heal the darkness, you damn well better know the darkness. I saw the perfection of the path of being a human being. I saw my innocence and my own perfection.

When I awoke, I felt like my body had been plugged into an electrical socket. I couldn’t find my hands and legs. I glanced at the clock and it was 1:11AM. It felt like I had been gone about 4 months. I stumbled into the living room and went to my knees with my upper body sprawled out on the sofa. I could not stop crying.

I had never been so happy in my life. I had no words then nor do I really have words now for what had happened to me but knew that what had happened was more real than the life I was living. My forgiveness of my stepfather was immediate. In fact, I realized that there was nothing to forgive for it was impossible that anything could be perpetrated against the soul’s wishes.

In the middle of the suffering that had dominated my life up until this moment, I discovered God. The spiritual was not somewhere else. It was right there in the middle of the abuse and it was going to take me all those years to at last, uncover the purpose and meaning of those events.

My step-father played the role of the one who would awaken my compassion, of understanding the true meaning of forgiveness not only for him but myself. I realized that my step-father had done nothing to me, that it was impossible to have done anything to me without my permission and that I had chosen those events as tools of awakening. While it had only started sinking in what had happened and that it was going to take years to process, at least now, I knew, I was on a different path.

I had discovered God in the middle of the sexual and physical abuse I had suffered. Each served the other. They were bound together, married together, never apart.

God was disguised in the tragic, in the heartbreaking moments of my life and that I was always, always safe.

And when I have moments today when I forget that I am safe, I remember the clock and the 11 minutes of bliss and safety and love that permeated my entire being, that entered into the cells of my body and that it was going to be my task to build my life upon that experience. I was learning that I was literally being prepared for the work that I was supposed to do.

In order to accomplish that, two years later, beginning in 1989, my life as I knew it would end. Everything that was familiar to me would disappear, as now, I had no choice at all but to follow the path I was intended to follow. I learned that the easiest way to live is to die, is to let die all of the past, to empty the mind of the pain and the suffering of the past and that when all is forgotten, all will be remembered, including the Truth of who you are. It is when all is forgotten that the essence emerges. And face it, if you’re honest with yourself…that can be really hard to do. Every time I think I have completed the task of letting go, of forgiving those in my life who harmed me, who abandoned me, who betrayed me and I have known great betrayal, I find I have more work to do.

But in these days, it is not without the understanding that I chose those circumstances as a path to God, to the truth of who I really am. I understand the necessity of the wounding and that there was no difference between being sexually abused and being ignored. The wound is the wound. There are no degrees as each person’s wounding is serving the role of the divine.

As time went by, I learned to distinguish between the real and the unreal and that each of us is unthreatenable, kings and queens on this earth, pretending to be paupers, seeking what cannot be found but what is meant to be realized.

woman 5.jpeg — Do you think you have to abandon your life to find Spirit, to find God, to find Truth?
No. You are the truth.

The soul doesn’t lose its connection to the unity of truth-consciousness, to God. It uses the mind as a secondary device to play the game, to enact the process of evolution. It can undergo sexual abuse without being sexual abused. It can pretend to be unloved without being unloved. Do you understand? So with this in mind, you can now see that there truly are no limitations to your life. If there is a limitation, it is the lack of seeing the truth, the lack of understanding of who you are and what you’re doing here. It is your ignorance.

This is why becoming conscious is so important. It is the only way to see through the veil that you deliberately created to become what you are intended to become. Why do you believe that consciousness is not found in the material, in physical form? Because that is what you have been taught. And that is what you learned. Now, it’s time to learn something else, to learn the Truth of who you are and what you are doing here.

And if I could summarize, there is no doubt at all that the intention of the process for the individual, for you, is the creation of heaven on earth, right in the middle of the suffering. For me, that is what I have done with my life. I have fulfilled all of my dreams, so, I create new ones and realize that the pain and the suffering of my life were the real illusions.

Heaven is real. Heaven is here, for this is the purpose of the earth itself. The finite is comprised of the infinite. The physical, the material, is comprised of the metaphysical. And if you can grasp this one, your suffering is comprised of the love that created it as a tool of awakening.

I’d like to end this message with the following quote from Aurobindo’s “Savitri.”