Sometimes I feel like a blind, deaf, and dumb bastard.
Other times I feel like a prophet with a sense of humor.

I write today mostly as the dumb bastard (maybe we can find the humor).

Honestly, lately, I've been a mess.

It's day 49 of a 78 day initiation my soul made for me. The intention of this initiation is to revivify the athlete in me.

We don't have space for the details today, but suffice it to say; this revivification initiation I'm attempting is the hardest thing I've ever tried.

I have a lot of pain, shame, guilt, anger, and hopelessness to digest to wake the athlete up.

Like scar tissue wrapped around an old injury, the older the trauma, the more tightly wound the protectors are that guard it.

Modern people call their protectors 'addictions,' 'personality disorders,' and 'attachment wounds.'

Some people call them demons; others call it karma.

These parts that guard our wounds are human universals.

When my athlete died my senior year of high-school, my psyche had to do whatever it took to keep me from ending my life.

First there was the part that made sure I stayed high on oxycontin. He had to keep our mind fuzzy. I became addicted to painkillers.

The next major player was the nihilist. I had to kill all meaning to endure losing my meaning. I became depressed.

Once the painkillers ran out, a part of me started binging highly processed foods. I gained 40 pounds of fat by the end of high school.

I remember looking at myself in the mirror at 18.

I wish I had pictures from this time.

I was fat, depressed, and fucking hated myself.

My response was to get addicted to working out. I started taking pre-work out. I got into the best shape of my life, then tore something deadlifting when I was 19.

And for the next 10 years, I struggled with chronic back spasms.

These are the parts I'm facing in this initiation:

The shattered dreamer.
The opiate addict.
The nihilist.
The self-hating masochist.
The one ready to waste away from the world.
The over-compensating one that injuries itself.

To revivify the trapped aliveness, I will have to bow at the feet of each of these parts, hear their stories, honor them, and bring them home.

And it has been hard. There is. so. much. pain.

My childhood home was not a place I wanted to be. The drive to be great with a basketball kept me out of the house. When my parents got a divorce, basketball protected me.

When my mother told me she was being deployed to serve in Operation Iraqi freedom, I coped by putting a ball through a hoop.

When my grandparents had to move in while my mom was at war, and we had to watch our grandfather slowly die of lung cancer as he lay on the couch everyday, basketball helped me look away from death.

When my mom almost died after catching an infection while at war, I dissociated with basketball.

So when my humerus tore from my shoulder my junior year of high school, something in me frantically began denying reality.

-- -- --

I've been sitting here the last few minutes softly crying as I watch stubborn Texas leaves finally give way to the sway of December.

That cold gym floor in Tomah, Wisconsin that I lay screaming on is my most painful memory.

I see the golden boy king chosen one, writhing on the floor in his own sweat, screaming like a wounded animal.

Icarus had broken his wing, and his teammates didn't care. I had been an asshole to them. I had treated them like obstacles I had to embarrass to escape my life.

However, there was a flicker of something else that revealed itself that day.

The pain of a ruptured shoulder is absolute. There is a profound somatic 'wrongness' that floods your entire consciousness. And my primal unconscious response to this wrongness manifested in my left hand.

Something that wasn't my conscious mind possessed my left hand, and like a wild animal defending it's life, it clawed at my right shoulder searching for the spot to push on to put my shoulder back in it's socket.

That hand moved with a precise fury that changed my understanding of myself.

It reminds me of Ashitaka's possessed arm in Princess Mononoke.

Whatever it was that moved my left hand while my right arm hung from my shoulder, that is who I am trying to wake up with this initiation.

I know he's in there because he pops out when my life is in danger.

He popped up when my friend fell off a cliff when we were camping and our group needed a leader to save his life.

This part came out each time I've been in life-threatening car accidents (3).

This part came out when the Earth Team won the Tribal Games (IYKYK).

But this part has protectors:

The broken one.
The opiate addict.
The nihilist.
The self-hating.
And the one who gave up.
The over-compensating one that injuries itself.

And to be frank, I think the hardest part to integrate will be the athlete itself.

I imagine he's furious. It's been 15 years since I took care of my body well enough that he could sprint, jump, and compete.

It is as if I was gifted a sacred horse that I overtrained, injured, and then abandoned.

15 years is a long time, but I've finally returned to stable, earnestly attempting to reconnect, rehab, and revivify what has ossified.

So as you might imagine, consciously choosing to go into this stable has activated all these protectors.

There is a bouquet of areas of my life that are a mess as of day 49 of this initiation, but the for this post I'm going to focus on my voice.

It's wild to connect to, but almost to the day I started this initiation, my voice has changed. My voice feels strained. It hurts to talk. I feel like my voice is stuck in my throat. Almost like I'm being choked.

I've navigated a stutter my entire life, but this is different. This has never happened before. It's affected my self-love and confidence. I can feel I want to hide from people. I've noticed that the protectors that erupted after my shoulder surgery have re-emerged during this constriction of my voice.

This is where I can start to make contact with the giggling prophet.

There is a part of me that can see the perfect workings of being right in the middle of an initiation and feeling lost and defeated. That the fact I feel this means the initiation is working.

I can also notice the perfection that this 'injury' to my voice is bringing all these old protector parts up into consciousness. Because they are triggered, they are available to be worked with.

The next perfection thread is that because the 'injury' is to my voice, I can't ignore it. My voice is the instrument my dharma moves through. I cannot give up on my voice, and I can't ignore it. Every time I speak, every time I want to say a true thought, or connect with someone I love, I feel the strain. I feel the pain. I trust what is happening.

And I had an idea last night that feels like my soul showing me the way.

The Slow 78 Game

Today is the Winter Solstice, and today is the day I'm announcing the Slow 78 game.

Starting on January 1st, I am going to post a video everyday for 78 days of me meditating while humming a mantra.

For reasons I'll share later, I can feel this will not only resolve my vocal strain, but it feels like it's the next dharma artifact that wants to come through me.

Starting January 1st, I will be posting a video a day of me meditating in my free Skool community. Feel free to follow along if it will feed your soul.

If you are a member of the Dharma Artist Collective, I have an invitation for you.

Anyone in DAC who chooses their own Slow 78 practice, commits to recording themselves everyday, and completes the 78 days will become eligible to win the Slow 78 Games.

Winners will be selected via community voting.

You'll submit a video to the group documenting your journey like you were submitting for the zodiac games.

The top 3 most voted players will win money and will get their daily recordings featured along side mine in the Slow 78 classroom space.

If you've taken my journaling course, imagine what it would have felt like if each day, you got to see my journal entries from my first journal.

Imagine how powerful that course would have felt if you had gotten to read 3 other people's daily journal entries.

I want to create something like that.

So if this interests you, join the free community (no bullshit, no strings, truly free), and follow along.

We'll start Jan 1st.

If you're a member of DAC, I hope you'll join me.

I'm going to need the support.

PS. I Have A Request

A month ago I did a guided psychedelic journey with an underground therapist. I don't recommend this, but for honesty, I combined huachuma, 400 micrograms of LSD, and three rounds of 5MEO.

It was a beautiful incomprehensible experience, but there were a few moments of brilliant lucidity and all of them were moments of weeping.

The deepest grief well was when I made contact with the truth "if I allowed myself to appreciate myself even a fraction of how much people appreciate me, I'd never stutter again."

I wept at how true this was, and how blocked I am from appreciating myself. I wept at how much I've hurt myself because of this.

So, with the encouragement of my therapist, as a birthday request, I'm putting out the call to all of you; if you appreciate me, will you tell me?

Will you respond to this email and tell me how I've impacted you?

For sanity I will not respond to most, but I will read them.

And I'm going to cry. For my birthday, I'm going to let the appreciation in.

with love,
Erick