If I had to find a beginning of this story, I would say it started one day in February of 2000 while I was travellng through Central America. I was 22 years old, in San Marcos, Guatemala, sitting over a small, rocky cliff overlooking Lake Atitlan. I got the message: “It’s time to turn around. This is as far as you go for now. Head back to Colorado where it will make more sense to buy a round trip ticket to Peru”.
I began retracing my steps from my last six months of travel where I had been celebrating the new millennium as a free man, mostly living on the beach and in the jungle for the last several months doing the backpacker thing and checking out the Mayan Temples and Ruins. I was happy to be out of the States for the whole Y2K madness and figured if everything malfunctioned and collapsed, which was the prediction, that I would be safe in the jungle and beaches of Mexico where probably not much would change anyway.
I started heading back up through Mexico and revisiting some of my favorite spots that I’d been backpacking through. Palenque having been probably my favorite magical spot where the magic of the ruins, the jungle, the ancestors, the locals, and the mushrooms enchanted me. It was in Palenque on the way back to the States, I had an unexpected and brief romantic encounter with a French Canadian woman. After a few playful days together, she begged me to come with her back to the apartment she was renting back on the beach in San Augustinillo on the Oaxaca coast where we could spend some time and get to know each other. I had this feeling I was on a mission and so with some will power and a dash of stupidity, I refused the offer. In some strange way, I feel this was a very interesting fork in the road in my life. I only spent a few days with this woman, but given the occurrences that played out after my choice to stay on track on my journey, I sometimes can’t help but wonder how my life would have played out differently had I chosen this enticing invitation and missed the dramatic events that followed.
Finally, I arrived back in Boulder, Colorado on a Friday afternoon in March. Within hours of rolling into town, I was invited to my first ayahuasca ceremony weekend. This was ironic, given that it was Peru which was my ultimate destination and I was still technically en route there, on my “mission”. But going in the opposite direction, I still was greeted by Mother Ayahuasca, which is what was calling me to Peru. I was an instant yes to the invitation and within a few hours, I was at the mansion of the host with several of my closest friends at the time. It was a hard, but powerful weekend that changed my life forever. There are parts of that ceremony weekend that I will always remember and it was there that I also met Marcio who played a significant role in my medicine journey. That weekend was a true initiation into a lineage that would become a pillar of my core spiritual life.
After that ceremony weekend, I was looking for a place to ground out for a few weeks. I was given an invitation to become the caretaker of a local Ashram in exchange for rent. It would come with the opportunity to take Ayurvedic classes, be part of a community, and learn how to run the weekly pujas. It was a no-brainer offer that I couldn’t refuse. South America would have to wait.
It was a good 8 months that I lived there, at Alandi Ashram. It was a nice time living in Boulder then. Alandi was, and continues to be a wonderful hub of Vedic wisdom and devotional community. I learned a lot from Alakananda and Sadananda, the founders of the Ashram, about different spiritual and religious practices and got to taste them all in communal settings with other elders in the global community who were connected to them.
Towards the fall of that same year, I got the travel bug again. This time, my vision had changed. Living at the ashram had sparked my interest in the Far East and I had planned an epic “renounce the world” voyage that would take me through Asia, the Middle East and Europe. I was ready to go where life would take me and I knew, from meeting several other globetrotters, that you can always find a way to make things work and that world traveling is a whole lifestyle and subculture. I had my one-way ticket to Thailand. Set to leave November 26th, 2000.
In the meantime, I had a few months to spare, to make some money, and enjoy community life. One day, a woman in a big funky painted van showed up at the ashram. Her name was Pana Columbus. She had been travelling around the Southwest, doing a one-woman production that she had created, which she called “The Initiation”. It was the story of a woman who falls in love with the Star Sirius, which is symbolic of Christ Consciousness. One day, she falls asleep and has a dream, where she goes through a series of initiations where she becomes one with the Star and becomes illuminated. The woman wakes up and becomes the embodiment of this illumination. This was all very symbolic of events to come.
Pana was looking for a place in Boulder for her next performance and was hoping to stay with us for a few days while she was looking. We all connected with her and appreciated her journey. In fact, there was something about Pana that deeply touched me. In telling her story of how she became essentially a travelling bard, she would keep talking about her commitment to live a 100% authentic life. It was the first time I’d heard someone talk this way about being 100% authentic, no compromise. And that as hard as it can be, it is the only way to live and worth every step of your commitment to get there. Her inspiration gave me something very important to contemplate, and which eventually became a pillar of my life, as well.
Interestingly, Pana had been told two years before, that she would meet someone with my name, or a name that sounded a lot like the name I had been using at the time, Asira Nova. She had been in Egypt in the White Desert living with a Bedouin tribe there. One day there, she was bit by a scorpion. During her healing process, that is when she met an elder who had many things to tell her, but that she would meet me was one of those things.
Also during those late summer months, I began recording an album. After making several mediocre sounding productions on my 8-track, I decided to pay someone for the first time to help me record Adamic Resurrection, an album of Hebrew mantras and music for a spiritual, and maybe literal, resurrection. I had been deep into the Keys of Enoch at this time in my life and was intrigued by the power of sacred languages, of which that book explains the power of sacred language that had angelic or cosmic roots in the cultures where they were derived. I recorded that 5 song EP with a man named Jimmy Dunn at his home studio. He is a great human being who also coincidentally survived a Near Death Experience. We wrapped up the final touches on October 2nd, 2000.
It was a beautiful Fall in Colorado that year. On October 3rd, the day after I finished my resurrection album, we planned an ashram community outing to Rocky Mountain National Park to see the changing leaves. It was a brisk day, but clear blue skies that morning. Pana, Alakananda, Sadananda, Seva (another ashramite), and myself loaded into Pana’s funky van and got into the park around 11. We drove slowly, stopping at a few scenic areas, with the intention of eventually finding a nice trail to take a hike.
On Trail Ridge Road at 12,000 feet, we pulled over at a large scenic overlook. We got out of the car at the parking lot and took a short walk to see the epic spread of golden Aspens in the valley below. It was there, the weather started to turn and the clouds rolled in. A few minutes later, we saw a lightning strike in the distance. It began to precipitate and then turn quickly turned into hail. Pana and I were together and the others were slightly up the hill behind us at a different part of the extended overlook. We started to walk at a fast pace together back to the car.
Then the two of us, Pana and I, were struck by lightning.
I don’t remember any of the actual strike. I’ve done different types of somatic therapy after that, but never was able to access that moment. I think it was too intense and big for my nervous system to integrate. What I do remember though, is opening my eyes and seeing people I was pretty sure I recognized huddling over me, with the rain and hail wetting my face. They were chanting an ancient healing mantra. But nothing made sense. Something had happened. It may have happened to me, but I wasn’t sure. It probably did happen to me because I wasn’t sure. But I still wasn’t sure. Nothing made sense. Nothing was firing correctly or completely in my nervous system. I was completely fried and my circuitry was malfunctioning.
Apparently, I was told later, someone who was there saw the lightning, like a whip, come up through the ground and hit me and Pana. Pana had received the full strike and had burns starting from her hair, wrapped around her breast and body, down her left leg and out her foot, leaving an exit wound, a literal hole in her foot. Just like lightning wraps around a tree, apparently it can spiral around us too. Pana fell on top of me and I hit my head on the concrete. With blood running down the side of my head, I sat up and tried to call for help. I have never been able to consciously access this memory, but this is what the others there saw and later shared with me. I remember someone helping us get out of the rain and let us sit in the back of their car until the ambulance came. But I don’t remember any more about that. That is when I left my body.
And then I found myself in a place. It was an Ocean of Love. I was floating there. Everything was perfect. There was a field of unified consciousness. Everything in the ocean of soft violet and green colors was alive. Everything was intelligent and interconnected. I was floating in that Ocean of Love and Oneness for what felt like a few minutes, when two presences appeared before me. They were orbs of light. I didn’t have to say anything. They knew everything I was feeling in that field of Oneness. They told me it wasn’t my time to go and I had to return to me body. I responded saying it’s so nice here and I didn’t want to go back and asked if I could stay. They then told me again it wasn’t my time and I had work to do. Then I had the feeling they turned me around and kicked me out of the door. I started to feel myself descending through the realms. This most expansive feeling of being free in Creation started to fade as I felt myself being compressed back into my limited human form and specific imprint. I was holding on to the feeling of divine love and total freedom. I woke up laughing.
And then I realized I was in a hospital bed. Several hours had passed. I had got a CT scan to make sure I didn’t have an internal bleed. I knew it was the right place to be, but I was immediately wondering how much this was going to cost me. Thrown out of heaven back into the blinding complexity of the material world. I was sent home that same day. I had just pierced the veil of reality, got a good report from the hospital, and was supposed to just carry on my way. The next few weeks were just like one big WTF. It was all too surreal to think about what happened and that it happened to me.
Nevertheless, before I go on with some of the after events, it’s important to explain more of what I actually felt and received in that place. I’ve come to call the place I went the “waiting room” because, I think I just needed a place to rest while my body did a deep reset and recalibration. My heart never stopped or anything like that, but what I felt and received when those beings communicated with me was that only Life knows when it is our time to go. Outer circumstances matter very little, at least the way our minds understand it. When it is our time, it will happen. Maybe it sounds simple, but it is an important simple understanding that there is a whole set of laws and way of life that we don’t fully understand from our limited perspective.
Another gift I received was this direct experience of how everything is alive. What seems like air or space in front of us, is filled with the prana and essence of creation. We all live and breathe in the unified field of all Life.
But the best gift I received, was feeling the absolute Love of Creation. I can say that I know that Life is Love. We have a Loving God. It’s hard to put these things into words in a profound way because it is the most simple truth. God is Love. Love is the glue that holds everything together.
It is in that same moment of integrating this into my soul, that it became instantly obvious to me, that this world we live in is a place where we come to learn and grow. This isn’t meant to be a heavenly realm that we live in. It is a place where our souls have specific lessons we have to learn and integrate. Those lessons may not even be what we think our life is all about, like our careers or major goals in life. But whatever our lessons are, we will be here until we embrace them and meet the challenges and potential growth that they all come with. Many people give up. Many people lose their sight, becoming complacent and homogenized. Many people just want to leave this plane in one way or another. But we are here to embody. We are here to forget about heaven, in a way, because heaven will always be there. And when I say heaven, I mean the higher realms that are all part of the One, which we all traverse through. It will always be there. That is why it doesn’t make sense to try to escape. It is a world of duality and separation that serves its purpose. Maybe at some points in time, future or past, this may be more of a heavenly or enlightened realm, but for now, it is what it is. And we must be here fully in the body to progress on our soul journey. The ultimate point of all these lessons is to one day come to know ourselves as Love. It is Love that is guiding this whole operation behind the scenes.
It is hard to explain the weight I felt this experience put on me. Some days it really felt like a heavy load and like some kind of curse. To see through the illusion, and then be so deep in it, is disorienting. It definitely made me question the meaning of everything. And to have been told that I “had work to do” felt like an assignment. But with no direction or handbook. I feel like the words “why me” would just replay in my head.
And then the headaches started. It was about 5 weeks after the lightning. Daily chronic headaches that would get stronger each day. I would turn my head and it would throb. I knew I had to get checked out by a chiropractor or doctor. I would take a high dose of ibuprofen before going to work at the wellness center where I was doing massage. It was about 10 days before I had my one-way ticket to Thailand and I was on my last shift at work, doing my last massage of the day, when I started seeing colors. I couldn’t talk. Something wasn’t right in my nervous system. Somehow, and how stupid is this, I kept doing the massage. I finished about 5 minutes later and went out to the lobby and told the receptionist “something isn’t right”. Coincidentally, at that exact moment, a friend of mine stopped in to the wellness center to check it out, having never been in before. He didn’t know I worked there. The receptionist said “You” to him, “take this man to the emergency room now!” I said “Hey, Dave”.
Dave stuck with me that night, taking me to the emergency room and waiting for the test results from the CT Scan. The doctor came back to tell me the results and words all kind of blended into one: “Major internal bleed. Need to operate immediately. No room in this hospital. Need to move to next nearest hospital in Longmont. Scheduled for 2 hours out. It should have been done a week ago.” Something like that.
Basically the pain I’d been feeling was my brain being pushed against my skull to the point of almost giving myself brain damage. I had a slow internal bleed which was not detected in the initial CT scan. So here I was, hit by lightning and about it to get it through my thick skull. Could the wack over the head, literally, be more obvious? What was the wake up call? What am I supposed to learn? Getting hit by lightning and getting it through my thick skull seemed like two pretty strong metaphors for waking up.
This episode left me with some typical head injury symptoms. It took me at least two years to feel somewhat recovered from the head surgery. I had a few seizures after that. The whole right side of my body went numb a few times. For years after that, any kind of extreme stress would make my body go partially numb. I would trip over my words a lot and honestly, my thought process has never really been the same since. I checked myself into the emergency room a few times over the next two years because I was convinced I was having internal bleeding again, of which every time it turned out to be what they call “skeleton” pains, certain psychosomatic pains that reoccur with no physiological correlation.
For a solid year after the lightning, every time I did a massage for someone, I would get a shock when I would initially touch them. This doesn’t make any sense really, but it happened and eventually stopped.
I cancelled my plane ticket. I was in bed for three weeks at my brother’s house, high and happy on Vicodin and felt like some kind of crazy karma had been released.
This gave me time to contemplate the message. It was time for me to stop this incessant traveling and face my fear of being “in the world”. I felt like such an alien in this world and was more interested in the transcendent, that as much as I loved it, I knew it was out of balance. I knew I had to face my fear of being “normal” and responsible. Of course, I’ve come to find so many other gifts from this experience, but at the time, this lesson to be learned felt like the beginning of my mission. So, I eventually got an apartment, a job, and jumped into my growing edge at the time. Those first two years after the lightning were hard in many ways, but then again, my life has never been short of mystical and magical moments.
Pana was in bed for several weeks, but eventually made a relatively speedy recovery. I think she was teaching a movement class in three months. She had some nerve damage, of which eventually healed. Pana has shared a lot of her own story in her own books. You can read about some of the amazing things she has continued to do and link to her books: https://panacolumbus.com.
I forget how it all evolved, but a group of our friends, along with Pana, decided to enact The Initiation all together, playing all the roles that Pana had initially played in her one-woman act. We had a few sold out performances in our friend Ty’s earthship up in Nederland, outside of Boulder. It was a great experience to host a production with all my closest friends.
I now have a deep respect for the power of lightning. I used to romanticize the idea of being hit by lightning and was somewhat of a lightning chaser when I was a little younger. It wasn’t so much lightning, but electricity which fascinated me and which I had some odd encounters with growing up.
One time, when I was 17 years old, I was at home alone at our house in Maine, the state where I grew up. I had been actively interested and studying shamanism for about a year. I was listening to some shamanic drumming by Michael Harner, a leading expert on shamanism. The drumming put me into an altered state. I don’t remember exactly what drove me in that moment, but I felt this primal instinct and I decided to take off all my clothes and go out in the yard. I began doing some kind of tranced out dance where I felt like I was invoking some powerful energy. All of a sudden, this ball of electricity came zipping around above me. It was only a few inches, but it was like a crackling sparkler and clearly was intelligent as it was flying at high speed about 15 feet above my head, around me. It zipped back and forth a few times above me in the yard and then disappeared. I don’t know what it was, but seemed like an electric fairy being.
Later that same year, I went to Sedona with my family and was able to bring a friend with me. Rufus and I already had some crazy, unexplainable magical experiences together. My family started going to Sedona, which is known for its energy vortices when I was 15, initially to celebrate my father’s 50th birthday. I took Rufus to a secret spot I had previously explored and wanted to share with him. We took a great hike through an unmarked trail that ended with an amazing overlook. As we were walking back, shooting the shit, all of a sudden, this electric orb flies over our heads, about 20 feet up, in the same direction we are walking until we can no longer see where it went, fading out into skyline not too far ahead. It was the same crackling, sparkler-like electricity like the one I had seen before, except more like the size of a soccer ball. Rufus fell to his knees and exclaimed, “They are real!” I was filled with curiosity and exhilaration. What in the world was that, why was it going in our direction, where did it disappear to, and what did it mean that this happened to us? I’ve since done some research to see if I could find any kind of explanation about these electrical phenomena, but nothing has really satisfied my experience and understanding of these electrical forces.
The last pre-lightning, electrical initiation is more mundane, but shocking nonetheless. I was 20 years old and was traveling through New Zealand, doing work trades on farms through WWOOF – Willing Workers on Organic Farms. I WWOOFed my way through New Zealand, which remains one of my favorite places I’ve traveled. I was staying on a family farm and wanted to go on a hike into a local park. The family gave me directions to go through some pastures and some other farms to get to the entrance of the park. At one point, I came to a large gate, not knowing it was entirely an electric gate, connected to a smaller electric fence. I went for a running leap, to get over the gate and grabbed one of the beams with both hands. It threw me about 8 feet and I blacked out for a moment. I was okay, but in quite a state of shock. That must have been my training for getting thrown by the power of the electricity.
In conclusion, the lightning and near death experience has continued to unfold. It now feels that rather than an experience, it was a seed that was planted inside of me. Watering that seed has been driven by that voice that told me I had work to do. If I had work to do, then I had better pay attention. Follow the signs. Do the work. Keep that peaceful place in my heart. One day, I know I will return to that place, as we all must. The fear of death is gone. I am more excited to experience the next phase of Life and to reunite with the great mystery. But I am also not afraid to live. I have no intention of rushing things. It all goes by in the wink of an eye. So, celebrate life. Celebrate love. Pay attention and do your work.