Waking Up: For Me it Began With the Wallpaper

I’m often asked, “How did your spiritual path begin?”

The earliest memory that I have of “something greater” is when I was about seven years old. When the world would become too much for me, I would go and lock myself in our downstairs bathroom. The bathroom was wallpapered in a pattern of the streets of France. There were little cafés, pastry shops and brasseries. Little alleyways with flower shops and confectioners.

I would imagine myself inside a scene of the wallpaper, visiting first one shop, and then the next. Of course I would be warmly welcomed by the shopkeeper, treated to some wonderful French delicacy, and heaped with praise for being the obviously special kid that I was. These people in the wallpaper sure recognized me and my brilliance – why was it so hard for those family members outside the bathroom?

While I was in there imagining, I had another little trick. I noticed as I started to focus on the wallpaper, I would also start to notice my breathing – like it was really loud and plain and really big. I started to focus on it more and more, to the exclusion of anything else. And as I did this, I noticed that I started to feel better. I started to feel bigger, almost like I was not my body, but something much bigger.

I started to notice that if I just said to myself as I inhaled nice and slow, “B----R-----E------“ and exhaled nice and slow “A-------T-------H-------E” and just practiced saying that word as I did it, all these weird and wonderful feelings came over me. I felt so much clearer. So much more at peace.  And whatever (or whomever) I had gone into the bathroom to escape didn’t really seem to matter too much anymore.

Of course at that time I had no context for this experience -- I didn’t know that I was tapping into the ancient art of meditation. For me, it was just my little secret thing that I did when I needed to feel better than I did at the moment.

When I was a freshman in high school I read the book, “Life After Life,” by Dr. Raymond Moody. Dr. Moody has done extensive research on the near death experience, documenting the common stages that these people pass through. When I read that book I just knew that it was the truth. And the next time I had that feeling of knowing truth was when I discovered the Seth books in college.

Seth Speaks and The Nature of Personal Reality totally rocked my world.

As it turns out, I’ve discovered a few more of those “little things I do” over the years. And they have really helped me to have a life that feels good. My work is about sharing them with you so you may feel good too.