When last we left Little Will, he and I had walked through the door of the guest bedroom at my grandparents' 1976 Riverside, California home and into the Dallas, TX backyard of my childhood.  We walked out between the switch bush and the crabapple tree and over towards the tree that stood next to the old shed my parents let me turn into a clubhouse.  

The tree was neither tall in height nor full in branches.  Yet, it was just perfect for a little boy who liked to get away from time to time from a world in which he never fit.    A place to sit and look out, over and across the horizon, to see if there was a world out there.  In which he did.  In which I did.  Fit.  

On this fall day in 2006, I followed Little Will back up into that tree.  We climbed to the same spot I had sat in hundreds of times before, a perfect spot from which three thick branches shot out like an upside down stool.   And, as I also had done hundreds of times before,  Little Will and I looked out across the horizon.   Past so many days and early evenings in that tree.  Past years of memories.  Decades of moments.  Until I saw what Little Will wanted me to see.  

It was the backyard of our home on Flamingo Lane, a place we lived very briefly between the apartment of my infancy and the Lake Haven Drive house of my childhood.  Until that day in 2006, the only thing I had remembered about Flamingo Lane was the story of my 8 year-old sister running away from home one day after a fight with our mom.  On her tricycle.  To the corner.  Where she stayed.  Until dinner. 

But this day in 2006, as I looked out across the years back to 1970 or so, another story came forward.  This story was about the time my mom found me in the sandbox in our backyard playing with a dead bird.   I can still see that bird.  Looking at it back then, I remember thinking it had something for me, even in Death.  As a 5 year old boy, I thought the whole thing was pretty cool.  My mom did not.  And, as is often the case in little boys' lives, Mom was right.   Playing with that bird made me sick.  Very sick.  As in, put in a hospital sick.  Turns out the dead bird--and even the sandbox--was rife with some kind of virus.  

I don't remember much about the whole experience, aside from showing my mom the bird, her wrapping it and me (separately, of course!) and putting us both in the backseat of the car to go to the doctor.  Beyond that, the whole experience, from the car until I was back home, is a big dark hole.  Except for one part.  It occurred while I was in the darkness.  

In the background, I could hear the voices of my mom, the doctor and a nurse.  But, I was moving in another direction.  I was moving down a dark corridor into a massive library.  With mile-high shelves of books.  Books that you would never find at the Audelia Road Library in our little Lake Highlands neighborhood in Dallas, Texas.  Books that were being watched over by rather grave-looking, serious figures dressed in topcoats and tall hats who quietly and slowly moved between the mile-high shelves and grown-up chairs and imposing tables placed very intentionally around the room.

It wasn't until that afternoon in 2006, sitting on a tree looking back into the 1970's, that I connected the dots and realized it was that visit, made from the dark hole of a viral infection, that first ignited a lifelong passion for reading.  A passion fueled by a hidden desire to learn the contents of those long-ago forgotten books.   

And it wasn't until six years after that, in 2012, that I learned I didn't have to search very far to find the answer.   Because, you see, those books were written...

...by me.   

The journey to unlocking your Truth can take time.  

Or not.

Take yesterday.  A client who I've been seeing for about a year came to see me.  An artist in her 20's, she was stuck in her journey.  Big time.  She had returned to New Orleans recently after traveling home to the Midwest for a few months to resolve some lingering family issues.  And resolve them she did.  Big time.

She cleared out a busload of issues that were as nasty, as smelly, and as big as Jabba the Hut.    Issues that had demanded her attention, consumed her energy and blocked her path.  Ever since her childhood.  Now they were gone.

Freed from her past, my client expected new wonders to come in to her life.  Upgraded relationships.  Gigs that would allow her to get her own studio space.  Most important, clarity of her artistic voice.  

She got none of that.  "I keep trying and trying.  To make this happen, to make that happen.  Nothing is happening," she explained.

“It feels like there’s a wall around you,” I observed.

“No, not a wall,” she corrected me.  “I just feel empty.  There’s nothing there anymore.”

“Yes, empty,” I agreed.  Looking out beyond her, I listened to the Universe.  I heard…and repeated to my client,  “Something is blocking the natural Birth that should be following the Death of those family issues.  It has nothing to do with what you’re doing outside. It’s inside.  The block is inside.  Of you.”

As I did so, my client literally wilted on my couch.  Empty.  I helped her up and half-carried her into the room where we do our sessions.  She lay down and the fun began.

"You're going to die now," I whispered into her ear, channeling whatever spirit her Soul had called to help clear the block in the vessel it was currently occupying.  

"Let go of everything. Even your breath.  Slow your heart.  Die to that emptiness."

Slowly, slowly, my client disappeared.  When she was gone and her body still, I stripped off the layer of dead energy that had entombed her like a snake sheds its skin.   I placed her hands on her chest and we did the heart meditation I wrote about last week.  She started to come back.

No longer channeling, I told her, "Own this space that is your body.  Live in it.  Fully."

She sat up.  Smiling and swaying. 

“Stronger,” she said, “but a little crazy.”

“Why crazy?”

“There are so many sounds.  It’s the sounds I usually hear, but now there are so many of them.”

“Let them out,” I said.  “Open the gates of your heart and let them out.”

Boy did she.

Sounds I have never before heard began cascading out of her.  Primordial sounds.  Vibrational sounds.  That shook her body.  Threw me back. Consumed the room.  And they just kept coming. 

Finally, my client carried one sound forward across the bridge from primordial times to the present moment.  What began as an indescribable audial vibration ended as a glorious coo. 

I’m not sure about her, but I know I had tears in my eyes.

With the Universe whispering the words to say in my ear, I told my client, “You’ve just found your Truth.   Bring those sounds, those vibrations, forward through your art.  Create that which will share their wisdom in today’s world.”

She opened her eyes, which indeed did have tears.  “Really?  That’s it?  I’ve always heard those sounds.  But I’ve never shared them.  I’ve never done anything with them, except keep them to myself.  I’ve been too afraid of what people would think.”

“Yes,” the Universe told me to say.  “That’s where Truth can most often be found.  Behind the sentry of our Fear.”

But, once found, even for a second, there’s no turning back.  The birth has begun.  

"What is it that you seek today?"

It's what I ask every client at the beginning of a session.  When I asked the question of my final client on Sunday afternoon, he stared back.  Blankly.

"That's the problem," he said as he lay down.  "I don't know what I seek.  About anything.  I don't know what I want to do career-wise and it's been so long since I've had a relationship that, when someone asked me the other day the last time I was in love, I had to pause and count the years. I couldn't remember."

As Tom Kenyon's "Manna" came on, I began working with my client to release all that was no longer serving his highest purpose.  All that was keeping him from knowing.  His Truth.  His Soul.  Looking down, I saw that from his third chakra down he was as thick and solid as tree stump.  There was no flow, no movement, no anything. It was as if his lower chakras were the proverbial bump on a log!  They had checked out, shut down, walled up.  No wonder he didn't know, couldn't remember.  

And then I heard it.  The world's loudest heartbeat.  Louder than the music coming through the speakers attached to my laptop.  So loud that I could hear it from every corner of the room.  North.  East.  South.  West.  Above.  Below.  It wasn't just my client's heart beating.  It was the universal heart beat.  Stretching back to primordial times and out past me into infinity.  

It was calling me. Closer and closer.  

I put my ear down to my client's chest. 

"Come inside," the heartbeat said.  

Entering my client's heart chakra, I saw that it was overgrown with dead brush.  There was no light.  It was like being on the floor of the Amazon rainforest.  Nothing penetrated it.  

"He's trapped here," the heartbeat said.  "Caged."

I made my way through the darkness.  Seeking, sensing, until, in the distance, I saw a cage with a single beacon of light shining down.  My client was inside it.

"That's not him," the heartbeat whispered.  "He's hiding.  Look where you wouldn't look."

Surveying the amount of dead brush covering everything, I thought to myself, "Well, this could take awhile.  And I have dinner plans in an hour!"

Then I looked where I wouldn't look. And I saw the guard standing sentry to the right of the cage, just behind a thick swath of dead brush.  I looked into his eyes and saw the glow of my client's eyes.  The cage disappeared.  So did the brush.  All of it.  

I returned to the room where my client lay, took his hands and placed them on his chest.

"Feel your heart beat," I said.  "Feel it until your fingers vibrate in synch with each beat.  Nod your head when you feel that."

After a minute or two, my client nodded his head.

"Now," I continued, "moving through your fingers, I want you to bring your entire body, your entire being, inside your heart. Let your right toes be the last part you bring in and wiggle them as they move inside."  

He wiggled his toes.  

"OK," I finished, "now that you are in your heart, I want you to look up.  See the light streaming down.  Feel it.  Smell it. Hear it.  Drink it in.  That light is you."

He did.  For a long time (though I still made my dinner!).   And, as he did, the stump that was his lower chakras disappeared.  The natural flow returned.  A beautiful smile came across his face.  My client left that night still not clear on what he sought.  

But at least he had found the guide who would get him there.  His heart.