After that, I became involved with environmental politics. I had to quit my job with Octavio Paz to spend more time trying to save the planet, or something like that. In Vera Cruz, I once chained myself with a bunch of other people to the first nuclear facility in Mexico to try and stop them from opening it. But they opened it anyway. And it's still running and people say it's polluting, but I really don't know.

Then we did a magazine called Ecologia Politica Cultura. It went broke. Then I got tired of being an activist, because I knew that we weren't solving anyone's problems.

And after that, I got my first mountain bike. Which really was a turning point in my life because I was a drunk up until then. An alcoholic. But you could not be an alcoholic and be a good biker. And I liked riding in the woods better than being a drunk.

So I started a mountain bike touring company. And we took people into nature. This is how I started becoming a teacher--indirectly. I did some ceremonies with the people that were in the groups and it was very successful and everyone liked it a lot. And then I became more and more involved in not just being an activist for nature, but understanding the nature of nature. And that, in my opinion, can only be achieved through very extensive, profound observation of nature. So I did that for some time. And my interest in shamanism and alternative medicine grew out of this.

And then, eventually, I found a teacher who was an international level martial artist and a very powerful healer. With him I learned the basic techniques of meditation and healing with energy.

This teacher was a very hard teacher. We did two to three hours of meditation every day starting at 4am. Every day. If you missed one, you were kicked out. If you arrived 30 seconds after the door had been closed, you were not allowed in the class. Three of those and you were kicked out. There was also very hard physical discipline with energy-oriented techniques like Tao Chi, Chi Kung, and another technique, one that was designed by him.

My teacher was never pleased with what any of his students did. He was constantly very degrading and insulting--not out of rage, but out of the mentality of teaching he had. It was very interesting. He was teaching me to be humble, trying to get me to break my self-image and my self-importance. When, after three years, I achieved that, then I had no need to stay there anymore. So I looked for a different teacher and a different approach to healing--which led to my starting the healing center where I now work.

What I do related to holistic healing, but it is not what is called traditional healing or traditional medicine. Traditional healers are like doctors, they can sometimes take the pain away, but unfortunately, I think, too often, the people just return in six months with another problem. What I believe is that disease and pain will teach you a lot of things, and you have to know when to cure pain and when not to get into that.

I can give you an example: I was doing a healing on a Cherokee elder who had this fatty tumor in his back. He'd had it for sixteen years. I worked with him for a couple days and it got very badly infected. It was extremely painful. And it began to blow up and do these really messy things. So my teaching there was that you shouldn't confuse pain with suffering. And slowly, he stopped the pain. He controlled it. He learned a lot about it. And he was healed. But it was not a soft heal, like you'd expect in a hospital, where you go to sleep and get an operation and two days later you feel nothing. This was a process of great pain. But in this process, he learned the origin of his fatty tumor. He learned that he had caused it himself and with this knowledge, he had a chance to make peace with a very dark part of his past that he was hiding. When that happened, the pain went away, and the tumor didn't need to be operated on. And the doctor who was a friend of his--a regular, western doctor--he was very surprised at this from a medical standpoint.

In healing people, my perspective is that our emotions are the origin of all disease. Especially fear. And there is one root fear--one fear that's primal--the fear of not-being, of not existing. From that comes fear of dying, fear of rejection, fear of change. It translates into other things, too, such as guilt, repressed anger, sadness. But essentially, it's fear. And, if you have fear in your mind, and your mind is connected to your body, it makes a lot of sense that it's going to affect your body.

I work at a center with four other healers and basically, what we do is we try to put the mind into a small cage where it cannot run away. When the person is in this cage, we make them look up, and there's no ceiling. There's only one way out of this cage and it's up to Spirit. In order to avoid fear and thereby avoid disease, you have to get in touch with Spirit. Spirit is not afraid. Spirit does not deal with emotions because it's connected to reality and reality can't be judged. It's beyond judgment. Nothing is good and nothing is bad. It's just what it is. That is reality and Spirit deals only there, with no judgment whatsoever. No opinions. When someone says to me, "I'm entitled to my opinions," I say, "show me the title. Who said you were entitled? Where'd you get them from?"

At my healing center, we don't charge people. It is my personal belief that we're born into a world of abundance. Abundance, to me, means "what you need and more." So the way I see it is that if I do Spirit's work, then Spirit will take care of me. So I don't charge people. I just ask them for money. There are two ways you can get a healing session at our center. One is you can give donations with money. This is what most people do. The other is you make no donations but you have to become an apprentice and do the same that we do--also for free. If we take money, we're allowing the patient to have expectations and expect results. It makes it like a contract. But it's not like that. We do what we do out of love. For the patient, for ourselves, for creation. We give people the chance to put back some money in exchange for the teachings, but if they don't have money and they want to bring some food, that's okay. Or, if they want to learn and then teach others, that's enough for me too. Usually this goes very well. We get a salary of an average executive of a big corporation. Which in Mexico City would be 12,000 pesos, which in dollars would be about 2,500 a month in donations and this we split between the four of us.

We have different techniques for healing at our clinic, but they are all about Spirit. As is stated in many ways, in many sacred texts, in many traditions: "When you are one with the One, you become aware that nothing bad can happen to you, and there's nothing to be afraid of."

And by the way, if someone's bleeding really bad, we take 'em to the hospital. We don't suggest that our therapy is a substitute for medicine. If someone has cancer and they're going in for chemo, we don't tell them not to. It would be very irresponsible. Medical treatment can be aided and complemented by energetic and other kinds of treatment, such as acupuncture, but they're not substitutes.

I do not call myself a Buddhist, or a this, or a that. I don't follow a special method of healing, or a philosophy, or a method of meditation. I just call myself a man who is in Spirit. The only thing I do on a regular basis is engage in contemplating nature. At least once or twice a month for six or eight hours, I just go outside somewhere and play music and watch a tree or an anthill or a squirrel--whatever comes by. Sometimes I'll bury myself in the ground. Sometimes I sit with my legs crossed and all of that. But it's never the same. I feel that routines take away the possibility of being aware of what you're doing.

I have no idea what the future will bring. I don't know what will be the result of my work, and I don't care. I'm not supposed to know. I'm just supposed to do it out of love for Spirit and love for myself. And the only reward that I get out of doing this is that I live away from fear and suffering. I have no other reward or expectation. My only goal is to be happy through inner peace. I don't have another goal. When people walk in to see me, I tell them: "Whatever you're going to tell me is a lie. And whatever I tell you is a lie, too!" I really don't pay much attention to what my patients say, because what they say comes from their ego-mind, and it's not the truth. It's never the truth. That's where what I do differs from traditional psychology--they want to analyze the root cause, and it takes forever! What we try to do with this work is put you in contact with Spirit so you can have this experience of total well-being and total love, and if you achieve that, then you can understand all the rest. And you won't need me to help you anymore.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

BACK TO ARCHIVE