Since the time of my earliest memories, I was drawn to Native Americans. As a child, I would sit for hours and look at books with photographs of Native people and their ritual practices. At the age of fourteen, when I began to learn about traditional Native doctors (medicine men and women), I decided that, if ever given the opportunity, this is what I would do with my life

At seventeen, after completing my junior year of high school in southeast Texas, I took off on my own. I made it as far as Oklahoma, where I landed among a community of Kiowa Indians. Soon after arriving, I began to attend peyote meetings with the Native elders. It was in one of these meetings that I first met Horace Daukei, the traditional doctor who was to become my mentor. Horace didn’t have much to say when we first met. He tended to be quiet and introspective after peyote meetings.

The following winter, an older Kiowa man I had grown close to arranged for Horace to conduct a special peyote meeting in which he would work with one of the grandsons who was suffering from a rare blood disorder. I remember being so afraid that evening that Horace wouldn’t allow me into the meeting, as they often didn’t allow non-Natives to attend. At one point before the meeting, Horace stopped and stared at me as though he knew something. In hindsight, I think he realized at that moment that I would be his apprentice.

At sunset, we entered the tipi and took our seats. Sometime after midnight, Horace began to work on his patient. He first covered the body with a black silk handkerchief. Horace, like many traditional doctors over the centuries, possessed paranormal abilities. He took a live piece of coal from the fire and placed it in his mouth. As he blew on the coal, sparks flew from his mouth. He then had a live mole come from the ground and placed it on his patient to facilitate the healing process.

The following year, my grades in college were starting to go down. I felt as though I wasn’t doing what I needed to be doing with my life. After speaking with a few friends, I decided to approach Horace. When I finally met up with him on a Friday evening, I was so fearful that he wouldn’t be receptive, and I was shaking as the words came out of my mouth: “I want to learn to do what you’re doing.” Horace responded, “What are you doing this weekend? Can you start fasting?” I immediately said, “Yes!” He then had me drive down to the Wichita Mountains to fast for the next two days without food or water to see if I was truly serious.

After my brief fast, I met Horace following a peyote meeting the next Sunday, as he had asked me to. We spoke for a while, and then he asked me to come out to stay with him at his home on the Navajo Indian Reservation in northern New Mexico.

Everything about my apprenticeship with Horace was intense. From the beginning, he took me along and had me assist as he doctored his patients. At times he would take objects, such as the end of a feather seeded with the medicine he possessed, and then transmit portions of his healing gifts to me by projecting it into my body. Whenever he did that, it sounded like a gun with a silencer going off, and it would knock me briefly unconscious. Horace would then have me go through the vision quest to earn the right to work with these gifts of healing. The vision quest is a traditional practice that involves fasting alone in the mountains for four days and nights without food or water.

As I progressed, Horace had me take a more active role in assisting him with his patients. On one occasion he had me help with a man who was left paralyzed from the waist down after a front end loader turned over on him. I was stunned when I saw the blood clots that had come out of the back of the man’s leg.

Despite Horace’s encouragement, I was very hesitant to begin working on my own, fearing that I didn’t yet know what I was doing. Horace said to me at one point, “You have the medicine. I can’t show you everything you need to do, because this power is going to work differently for you than it does for me. You just need to start working with people, and this power will reveal itself to you.”

One of Horace’s family members I’ve stayed in touch with shared how he received the medicine from his father as a young man. Not long after, Horace was shipped off to fight in Europe during World War II. Years later, when one of his sons—very young at the time—became seriously ill, he was told, “You have your father’s medicine. Use it to help your son.” His son recovered.

Horace was mind-blowingly powerful. There were many instances in which people were seriously ill, and some were not expected to live, yet they recovered as a result of his intervention. Of all the healers I’ve ever encountered or even heard of, Horace is by far the most powerful. He was profoundly gifted when it came to treating physical health-related issues. He also had the ability to look into people’s bodies to determine what was going on. Even though he didn’t know proper anatomical terms, he would describe what was happening within people’s bodies in great detail.

Even though Horace was profoundly gifted as a healer, he struggled to work effectively with his own emotions. He could be reckless at times, and toward the end of my apprenticeship he became quite destructive. Much of the power he possessed left him then, though the family member I mentioned earlier told me it later returned.

Seeing Horace’s destructive side and not knowing what else to do, I severed contact, which was very painful to me for a number of reasons. Horace was, in many ways, the closest thing I ever knew to a father. I also felt as though my dream of learning from a powerful Native doctor was crashing down. It wasn’t until a few years later, when I started working with people on my own and receiving their feedback, that I thought to myself, “Oh, I really did receive something powerful from Horace.”

Horace inadvertently taught me that even with enormous power, you’re still human and still flawed—the stakes are just much higher. In sharing this, my intention is not to disparage Horace, though I’ve been accused of that. Horace set me on the path, and I still miss him to this day. Yet I feel strongly that we all need to self-examine, to honestly assess ourselves, and to address our dysfunction. I genuinely feel that he was doing the best he could at the time with the understanding he possessed. The problem for Horace—and for adepts from other ancient spiritual traditions—is that their understanding of trauma, and how to work effectively with their own emotions, is often extremely limited.

Of all the ancient spiritual lineages I’m familiar with, none of them are trauma-literate. They don’t possess the understanding needed to work effectively with their emotions and to heal the deeply wounded parts of themselves. It wasn’t part of any of these cultures. That is clearly evident when you take a closer look at many of these cultures. For instance, brutal warfare was prevalent among Native Americans, and it was common for tribes to massacre one another. The horrific abuses of casteism have been commonplace in India for centuries, and although its influence is waning, it is still widely practiced today. I also was shocked by the level of physical abuse of children I witnessed when I was spending time in China.

I’ve spent many years traveling to different parts of the world and spending time with people from many spiritual traditions, including some who had attained varying degrees of mastery and possessed extraordinary powers. I’ve seen this pattern up close, and I’ve watched many other examples from afar. In some cases they didn’t know any better; in others they were attempting a spiritual bypass, believing their spiritual attainments made them exempt from doing the hard work of feeling and digesting their own emotions. Yet some of these individuals had suffered a great deal of trauma.

We all carry emotional wounds and struggle in some way, and many of us have suffered various traumas at different times in our lives. People often contract around the traumas they’ve experienced and the deeply wounded parts of themselves. Others are more inclined to act out these traumas by wounding other individuals. Either way, we’re hurting ourselves and others.

When someone possesses extraordinary power, such as Horace or the adepts of other ancient spiritual traditions, the power that works through them can greatly amplify the wounded parts of the self. Because they possess all this power, they’re more likely to work with, and have influence over, large numbers of people. What happens is that they often act out their trauma and other aspects of their woundedness or dysfunction among their own followers.

There are so many examples of this: Indian gurus, prominent Buddhist and Sufi teachers, cult-like followings, sexual abuse of devotees, heavy drug use. In a few extreme cases, even murder. Well-documented cases include Asaram Bapu and Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh in India, both convicted of sexual crimes, along with widely reported allegations against Buddhist teachers such as Sogyal Rinpoche.

The reason so many people are susceptible to this turbocharged spiritual dysfunction is that those who follow have their own blind spots, because they too are not doing the deep emotional processing needed to heal their wounds.

Over the years, I’ve worked with many current and former devotees of gurus and other spiritual teachers who have shared, at times, the graphic and sordid details of what their gurus and teachers perpetrated. The sessions I offer help to facilitate the healing of the deep emotional wounds they carry.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve watched people and learned from their examples. There’s always been a part of me that is fearful of making the same mistakes. Horace taught me a profound lesson he never intended to teach: that one has to deal with their trauma and emotional wounds, and only by doing so does one develop the healthy foundation needed to do the work.

As I began to work with the healing gifts that Horace passed on to me to assist others, initially it was like pouring hydrogen peroxide into a deeply infected wound: the traumas of my childhood and adolescence reemerged, and I found myself reenacting them in my attempts to form intimate relationships. At first, I was at a complete loss, overwhelmed by all the painful emotions. I sought out a psychotherapist, and that was very helpful to the extent that it helped me gain an intellectual understanding of the trauma I had suffered and my emotional wounds. Yet it wasn’t actually healing these deeply wounded parts of me.

During this time, my relationships were not working all that well. I was struggling with a pattern of unrequited love—forming attachments to women who were disinterested or unavailable, and a few who were quite abusive. The pain I felt then was excruciating. Instinctively, I sensed I needed to dive into the depths of those painful emotions, sometimes for hours on end, yet at a certain point I could feel the pain breaking open and coming out of my body in waves.

Working with this practice continues to be an important part of my own healing process, and I teach it to everyone I work with. Being human, there are times when I get triggered emotionally, yet overall the pain has lightened a lot and I work through things much faster. I continue to practice daily: I acknowledge what’s happening, what I feel in response, and where the feelings are situated in my body. I breathe softly and deeply while fully immersing my awareness in the depths of any feelings and bodily sensations that arise, and then I follow the feelings and sensations as they go through their progression.

Much of humanity wants to disconnect from that which feels unpleasant and from the wounded parts of themselves. Many people escape through work, digital media, recreational drugs, and other distractions. Spiritual and religious folks often attempt a spiritual bypass. By doing so, we’re only compounding the issues. Our lived experiences and emotional responses need to be thoroughly digested, which can only happen by working with the process I described above.

By learning to work effectively with your emotions and doing the work required to heal the deeply wounded parts of yourself, you develop the healthy, grounded foundation and humility to work with the knowledge and any capabilities you develop, including spiritual gifts, in a way that makes this world a better place and facilitates true healing.

Having trained with a traditional Native doctor and gone through so many vision quests—and after years of doing the hard work to heal my own deep emotional wounds—I now work as a conduit, as Indigenous healers have done for centuries, to facilitate healing within the body and mind.

If this resonates and you want to explore further, you’re welcome to reach out. We can talk about what you’re going through, the practices that help, and whether it makes sense to work together. To learn more or schedule a session: call or message (332) 333-5155 or visit teachmetomeditate.com • benoofana.com

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