What I Met On The Crossroads!

 I wake in the morning and look into the mirror.  What do I see?  I see me, but is it the me that I saw the night before in the same mirror?  NO, it is the new me that woke to look again.  In any given moment we are not the same, we have changed ever so perceptually from one moment to the next.  I have become more now than I was yesterday, and tomorrow I will be more than I am today.  That is the nature of our ever continued existence. 

Almost 25 years ago I had a physical and spiritual crisis.  I was broken and moving became difficult.  When you do the type of work that I did and your life depends on your ability to physically move, and suddenly your ability to do that movement stops you go into crisis.  This crisis leads to a spiritual conflict.  You blame other forces for your short comings.  Those forces are responsible for your not being able to complete the things that you need to complete.  Therefore you go to war with unseen and unknown forces of nature.  You are at war with yourself.  This is not a war you can win, and this conflict causes an extreme spiritual conflict.  I meditated upon it.

I fought this battle, physically and spiritually for almost three years, and it nearly destroyed me.  I was presented with a cross roads.  Just like Ralph Macchio  I stood in the center of that cross roads and waited for the Devil to make his presence known to me.  Unlike the movie, "Crossroads" however, the devil I was faced with looked just like me.  His eyes were penetrating and he tempted me with all sorts of wonderous things.  He said to me, "I can give you everything you want in life, I can give you your life desires, I can give you the world."  Sounded tempting.

I realized I was not fighting with an outside source, the devil I was intellectually battling was indeed myself.  This battle was not painless, it was not unemotional, it DID effect everything about me.  I became a New Me.  I was, and am forever different from who I was just prior to the turn of this century.  This is when I began to let go.

I let go of everything I was.  I let go of the stuff that I thought I was teaching, I let go of the  things I thought were important.  I began purging my soul.  Just before the year 2000 I met her.  She came into my life, my new life and I was gone.  She and I have been constant companions for 23 years as of the time I'm writing this.  She has filled my heart, and I began to create.

I created, worked and reworked, and created again things that I thought were lost to me.  What I was teaching, and thought was a good way, was not.  It was a bastardized form of that devil that I met on those crossroads.  I had to let it go or I would have died and taken a toll on my students.  I walked away.

20 years passed and I was approached by by my past.  2 individuals came back into my life and asked for instruction, "I have not what I used to have." I said.

"What do you have?", they asked.

"I have what I was in the beginning, and what I will have in the end. I will teach you to be you." is what I said.

From the Crossroads I grabbed the Devil by the hoof and pulled him off of his feet, and hit him on the head soundly with the Rock of Ages sending him back to Hell from whence he came.  

So she and I now share all, and I teach what I am pronounced to teach.  They Learn to Be Themselves.

Peace and Balance,

John