Episode 026 - Relief in Silence

I spoke to Alfredo Gomez after he spoke at a Circles of Men Project gathering. The theme was “If you know yourself, you can move past fear.” It was his first time at a Circles of Men gathering, and he was inspired to share. When I later asked if anyone would be willing to speak for a podcast, he contacted me to share his story in a little more detail.

Thank you so much, Alfredo, for sharing. I think it means a lot for men to be able to model openness and vulnerability to other men, and your story was moving and definitely relatable.

Our theme song is “Start Again” by Monk Turner + Fascinoma. All other music in this episode was made by me using my new toy that I’m having so much fun playing with and learning: Ableton Live. So much fun! I hope you’re all finding ways to learn and grow and connect while we’re staying the hell away from each other.

Here’s the transcript:

I was born in Mexico. I was born one of 12 kids, and my mother had kids kind of like in a row, like almost every other year or every year. And so there was 2 older brothers and 2 older sisters before I was born, and then the rest of them followed, so I’m the 5th kid. Well, I felt like because of the number of kids that my mom, the large number of kids that my mom had, she just couldn’t, didn’t have the time to attend every one of us, and she neglected some of us.

And my father was a federale in Mexico, which is kind of like the Texas Rangers used to be back in the day. And he was rural, which means that he had machine guns, shotguns, .45s, carrying, you know… So he was very aggressive, and he would take some of that aggressiveness to the house. And he had a horsewhip for us. Sometimes he used the handcuffs on my older brother that I saw that he did. He handcuffed him to the window and whipped him with the horsewhip.

My mom, she would try to stop him from beating us, but then she would become a victim herself. He would push her out of the way, and then he would, that would really, made him more angry than anything because he would continue the beating, and then he would hit her after that for getting in the middle or trying stop him.

And so all those things made me fearful. I mean, I got horsewhipped too, but more than anything, what scared me the most is watching a lot of the stuff, my mother getting beat. It was just a lot of trauma. For me, just watching that and even my older two brothers were fighting at one point, and I went and told my dad so he could make them stop. They were hurting each other, I mean, there was blood. So I went and told my dad. I said, “Hey Dad, you know, they’re fighting.” So I wanted him to stop the fight. So he goes and stops the fight, of course, and whips both of them, and then he comes and whips me for being a snitch. And as a 6, 7 year old, you don’t understand what you did wrong. I didn’t understand what I did. And so it was, to me, very brutal.

And then so when we came to the States when I was 12 years old, the whole family. My dad, my mother, and all my brothers and sisters. We all came. Well my father had a job. He first came in and got a job here in Corpus Christi. He did a lot of construction. And then he brought us after he got settled, he brought us into the States.

I couldn’t speak English. I went to the school, and next thing you know, people don’t like me. They’re being mean to me, and they’re telling me, I don’t even understand what they were saying, but they kept on repeating this word “wetback,” and I didn’t know what that meant. I really didn’t know. That was my first time… Living in Mexico, there’s no, everybody’s the same, you know? There’s no racial tensions or any of that stuff, and so when I came here, that was foreign to me and a different culture.

So things didn’t get better for me. And then going to the school and then not being able to speak the language, the teachers would get mad because I was speaking Spanish. But what else was I going to speak if I can’t speak English, right? So then I would get in trouble for that.

And my English teacher, we were reading, everybody was reading out loud, and then she called me to read, and I had a really heavy accent, and she made me read out loud, and if you can imagine, the rest of the kids laughing at the pronunciation, giggling and all that. It was really hard for me. Being there, kind of like in front of everybody so everybody can laugh at.

So then I was 15, and my father had a gun in the kitchen, and I knew where he kept it, a small .22 revolver. And I decided that I just wanted to just finish this, finish with this anger, this anxiety, this hate that I was feeling constant. So I went to the kitchen and reached for the gun. And I looked in the chamber, and it had bullets, all of them. So I put it on my head and decided to, started squeezing the trigger. Well, being that it’s a revolver, and it’s, you know, as you’re squeezing the trigger, the hammer was all the way up, and I figured OK, it’s got to go off any time, and then there was a little pause in my mind that said, OK, what are you doing?

And then I stopped and thought for a second, and I say, maybe this is not what I should be doing. So I took it off my head, grabbed the hammer and put it back into place slowly. I put the gun back in the kitchen, and I went and picked up a Bible. Just a Bible. I just wanted to read something, something reassuring. The first thing that I read, I just opened it at whatever it would come up, and it was a scripture that I read somewhere along these lines. “God gave you life, thou should not take it away.” And then from then on, any time I felt that that was the answer, I knew it wasn’t the answer, taking my life out. So I decided that was never going to be an option.

It’s kind of funny because my father talked about the Bible a lot, and he said he had read the Bible, but it seems like he was choosing the things that kind of stuck, like using the rod and not letting kids get away with anything, but instead he used the whip, the horsewhip and belts and whatever. And then, I never saw him go to church, but he would send us to church. 

And there was a bus from the church that they would send by our house, and so I really enjoyed those times because they called it the Joy Bus, and so we were all singing church music and church songs, and it was really nice. I really enjoyed that growing up. But still, I always felt like I was alone, because I couldn’t talk about the stuff that was happening at home anywhere else. This is kind of like a secret, or a family secret. Still I felt alone during those times.

Then I got into athletics. I kind of decided that athletics was a good thing for me because I felt a lot of anxiety, and I felt like by doing athletics, by exercising, by running, by playing a sport, it would get my mind off and concentrate on something else than all the stress and all the anxiety at home and at school and so on. I tend to be competitive, if I couldn’t depend on people, I could depend on my own self by being the best that I could be on whatever sport that was.

And so the abuse with my father still continued, but I joined the track team when I was a sophomore, and I became a very good runner. I was a naturally good athlete, and they put me on the JV team, and because I joined like a week before the first cross country meet, and I was training by myself on my own, I had no knowledge about training, but I would just run as fast as I could for as long as I could, and that was my training. So my coach puts me on JV not knowing anything about me. And he told me before the race, Alfredo, if you get tired, just walk. He did a prayer also, before the race, and that was really neat, and I really liked that.

And when the gun went off, I ran into the guys in front of me because they were going like, they weren’t racing, they were jogging. So I went to the front with the frontrunners, and they were doing the same thing. They were jogging. In my mind, it’s like, you run as fast as you can. It’s a 3 mile race, cross country. So I’m like, OK. I ran with them for about 2 or 3 blocks, and then it’s like, I have enough. I just took off. I took off. I tried to relax as much as possible, but I ran at 90% effort, 85% effort, and then if I got tired a little bit, I would slack off a little bit and then resume again. That was my first 3.1 mile race, a 5K, and my time was a 16:08. As a sophomore in JV. And the winning time for varsity was a 16:06. So then my coach was just so happy, he’s like, oh my God, who are you? Tell me more about you! So the next time, he puts me on varsity.

So then I felt stronger, too, as a sophomore, and I started working at Kentucky Fried Chicken part time after school. And so my routine was to go to the gym at 5:30, go for a 3 mile run or lift weights, and then be at the school at 7:30 to start the classes at 8. And then after school, and after the track training, I would go to the house, and then get ready, go straight to work at Kentucky Fried Chicken, and then get off at 10 o’clock, do my homework, and then get up early in the morning the next day. And that was my sophomore year.

But then one day I decided, they were having something where they had some balloons that the manager said, hey, you want to take these to your brothers and sisters? Three helium balloons. And I said, yeah, I have a little brother and 2 little sisters I can give them to. So I took those helium balloons to the house, and I gave them to each one of them. And then my younger brother wanted the balloons, the girls’ balloons. And I told him, no that’s, you have yours, and you have yours, and you have yours. Now my dad was spoiling kids now. Now he wanted to change his ways, I guess. So he spoiled the youngest one, and he told the girls, give him their balloons. And I’m like, no Dad, that’s, everybody has a balloon. And he got really mad, and he started yelling and cursing at everybody, saying give the boy the balloons.

So he walked away, I went to the kitchen, grabbed a knife, and popped all 3 of them. Well, if you can imagine my father. He goes, oh, you see what you're going to get. So he goes inside to the bedroom, comes back with the belt. I’m 16 years old already. And he’s coming towards me, and I stopped him. I put my hand up, and I said look, Dad, if you hit me, we’re going to fight. I’m just telling you what’s going to happen. I’m going to fight you. I’m probably going to be on top of you most likely. I’m just letting you know, and I don’t know what’s going to happen after that. I’m not going to let you hit me again.

Well, he looked at me, and he saw that I was very angry. He knew that I wouldn’t have it any more. He looks at me, he says, well just don’t do it again, turns around and walks away. That was the first time I felt some relief. I felt some relief that that stopped. My father was never going to hit me again, and now I could stand up to him.

I mean, it was still the struggle. And my father was still very loud and aggressive and abusive with my younger siblings and with my mom. But he knew that he couldn’t do the stuff that he used to do to me. So I felt safe, but I would see what he was doing with everybody else.

And then my brothers, my brothers used to drink and do drugs. And I was a freshman and sophomore in high school, and one of them was more aggressive than the other towards me and everybody else. He was more angry. And one day, about the same time that I stood up to my dad, he came in, and I was playing with my youngest sister, and I was sitting on the floor with her playing, and he was sitting on one of the couches behind me. And then he told me to leave her alone.

So I looked at him, and I saw that he either had been doing drugs or he was drunk, one of the two, so I said, I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m just playing with her. And then he kicks me in the back of my head and tells me again, I told you to leave her alone.

So when he kicked me, I got up, and I felt that anger rise out of me, and then I hit him. I just hit him one time. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the expression, turning off the lights, but I did turn off the lights on him. He couldn’t see. I didn’t knock him out or anything, but I hit him like right on the temple, and he could not see for like 15 minutes.

And I just had so much anger already, and I just had enough, everybody beating me up, and everybody… And I couldn’t talk sense into them, so I just felt like I had to use physical aggression. And now that I was running and lifting weights, I felt like, you know, I’m going to defend myself now. And I don’t feel good about it, but that’s what I did as a 16 year old. I hit him.

But you know what? That was the last time he ever tried to hit me again.

So then, it’s like I feel OK. I feel better now. They can’t mess with me anymore. But I felt like a lot of the damage was already done. But running would help me get out of the house, and I became one of the fastest, like I said, I won district in the mile, the two mile, in cross country. My sophomore year, my junior year, and senior year, in a 5A, which was the biggest division there was. And then I went to regionals and won the mile, or the two mile at regionals, and then I went to the state. I ended up 4th my senior year, and I think it was also 4th in the mile and two mile.

So I started getting scholarship offers, and I could go anywhere in the country, basically. I never thought about going to school. Well, with that, being that my brothers were also working construction, my dad worked construction, I’d be the first boy to go to college. My grades were OK. But my coach said to me, Alfredo, you ought to try it. Try to go to college, and if you don’t like it, try it a little bit more. And if you still don’t like it, try a tiny, tiny, tiny more before you… What I’m saying is, just give yourself a chance. And once you give yourself, you tried, and you didn’t do it, and you couldn’t do it, and you tried again, you couldn’t do it still, then you can say, at least I tried. So I said, well, I’ll try it coach. And next thing you know, I graduated from Rice.

But going through Rice and going through college, I found myself with a lot of anxiety. Doing presentations, I would feel that anxiety getting in front of groups, large groups in front of the classroom, I felt a lot of anxiety.

R: Did you think about those kids laughing at you in high school, and that fear of being laughed at?

A: Yeah, being laughed at, that I wasn’t smart enough, that I didn’t belong there, almost kind of like I felt like I didn’t belong in the States, coming here to the United States, because I was a wetback. I felt like I didn’t belong at Rice, that I shouldn’t be there. Same old feelings. And then getting in front of a classroom, I felt a lot of anxiety in speaking in front of, in doing a presentation.

But then after I graduated from Rice, I decided to teach there at Lamar High School in Houston. And I was teaching there, Spanish and coaching soccer, and I did that for one year, but again, I felt a lot of anxiety being in front of, in the classroom. And Mondays was like my worst day of the week. Well, actually Sundays, like the anticipation of Monday, and then Monday was terrible my first hour or two, and then I felt better towards the end of the day. And then Tuesday was better than Monday. Wednesday was better than Tuesday, and so on. And then Friday is like, what the heck was wrong with me on Monday, right? Well, the weekend came, and then Monday came again, the same feeling again. I felt awkward. I felt insecure. I felt, and I’m like, OK, it’s going to get better, right? And people say, well, it’s natural. You know, you get over it after awhile. It just wouldn’t go away. And I’m like, what’s wrong with me?

R: Why do you think you were drawn to that profession when you had such anxiety about standing in front of people?

A: Well, because I care about kids. I wanted to help kids. Helping people, even like love and affection, or caring for your students, showing them that you care for them, and that kind of thing. I really liked that, but I didn’t like to be in front of the class all the time. And I know that that was what I was signing on for, and I thought that I could handle it, being that I’m not talking to a whole bunch of professionals. These are high school kids, right? But then still I felt that anxiety of being in front of the class, like I said, Monday through Friday. And it was a cycle. It never got better.

So I moved to Austin from Houston. I started working for Texas Employment Commission, and I did a lot of good programs for them. I did Communities in Schools, which is a dropout prevention program. And I also did the Job Corps program, helping kids get education and training, and a lot of those kids had problems with the court system or with the law, and they were on probation and trying to get their life together. So I was trying to help those kids, and I did that for awhile, altogether for like 10 years working for the state.

But then I had my first panic attack. I didn’t know what that was. I found myself that I couldn’t breathe, and I was breathing very heavy and hard. The breathing would not slow down. So I’m like, what the heck is wrong with me? So then I started getting light-headed, and I felt like I was going to pass out. This is at the office. And so somebody said, you’re having a panic attack. You need to go to the doctor about it. And I went to the doctor, and they said, yeah you did have a panic attack, and he prescribed Xanax.

I was doing the Unemployment Services also for the Texas Employment Commission, so I was always doing presentations at which I felt anxiety, but it was a little bit more controlled, suppressing some of those feelings. And I would still do my job, but it got to the point where it was kind of like putting stuff under the rug all the time and just piling and piling. I mean, the medication would help me, but it never solved the problem. To me, it was just kind of masking my feelings and my emotions.

So after the Texas Workforce Commission, I got a call from a new program that was starting. It was Steve Jackobs from Capital IDEA. Capital IDEA is basically getting people into careers, not just a job, but a career. So we provide the training, the education, everything that they need so they can get a good quality job with benefits and the whole 9 yards, not just a job. It was 5 of us that started that program from scratch, and we started recruiting, we started doing presentations. I worked for Capital IDEA for almost 5 years.

But it got to the point where I felt that I’ve taken a deep dive, and I was running out of oxygen. And I could see the surface, but I didn’t think I had the energy to swim all the way to the top. That’s how I felt when I left Capital IDEA. And they offered me all kinds of different options, work from home, part time, don’t leave, what about your benefits, and all this and all that. I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything. I just wanted to leave. I couldn’t handle it anymore, and I went into a deep depression, anxiety, paranoia.

R: Were you doing anything besides the medication, like seeing a therapist or counselor or were you involved in church or anything?

A: No, not at that time.

R: Just on your own, huh?

A: On my own. So when I had, I call it a nervous breakdown, I mean, because I totally went under the radar after that. I just stayed at the house after that. I didn’t want to leave. I even felt embarrassed going to the mailbox to pick up the mail. So I just kind of stayed in one spot on the couch or whatever and just stayed there all day. And it was really dark for me.

That lasted for about 3 years, until I just felt that I needed to get a job, get back on my feet, and I got some medication. They thought I was bi-polar, and then they thought maybe it’s just anxiety, and then depression, so I was taking medication for just about everything for a large number of years. But it wasn’t doing anything for me. I mean, I would gain weight, it made me foggy, and it wasn’t just doing the trick. I had a lot of side effects that were kind of worse sometimes. I felt worse.

So I tried everything, and so then, so what is the answer? What can I do now? I started to look at more manual work, more using my hands more, and trying to ease the anxiety. So I tried to look for work that was less involved with the office and meetings and stress and the anxiety that I felt and working more on my own. So, and then for the next, I don’t know, 15 years, I would get a little job here and a little job there.

So then I started reading more about... and reflecting. Why am I so nervous? Why am I feeling so anxious? What happened to me that’s causing me… Is it in my blood? Is it passed down from my mom or my dad? What’s going on? Why do I feel so awkward? Why do I feel so much anxiety? So I started reading more about it, educating myself more about it. I went to church too, praying. Maybe I don’t have enough faith. More prayer. Maybe God, I need to get on my knees more often. So I was trying to do all kinds of things to help me deal with my anxiety, but I wasn’t finding a lot of positive feedback from a lot of that stuff.

My girlfriend and I were looking at documentaries, and we were looking into yoga, and then she was telling me, because she's been into yoga a lot herself, and she was telling me about it. And then we were looking at some documentaries from some of those masters, like the Dalai Lama and all those guys that are very deep. And then we saw Thomas Keating. And I'm like, oh, who is this guy? I don’t know, So when I saw the documentary of Thomas Keating, a guy that gave his life to God basically when he was 5 years old, because he got really sick, and he heard the nurse and the doctor talking about his condition that he might not make it. OK, I want to know more about it. 

So I started watching the documentaries, and I started, and then we start buying books, so we started reading about Thomas Keating and his beliefs and his findings and all of that. He studied all religions, not just the Catholic Church, or Christianity, but all the religions around the world. And at the end, you know how we have this little, something is missing in our lives? Everybody’s got that almost, like maybe you think it’s money, maybe you think it’s a relationship, maybe you think it’s a hobby, or a house, or something that you’re always trying to get to fill that little empty hole, that little empty thing in your heart. And what I’m gathering is that it’s the union with God, that you have to have that union with God in order to fill that empty hole there.

So then I started to do that for myself. I want to feel close to God. How do you get that union with God? Well, through prayer. And silence. So then I started doing some meditation, some prayer, and I started looking into yoga. And I started looking at Thomas Keating for answers, and I felt like that was one person that I could trust. One person that I know I can trust because his intentions were good from the beginning. He could have been a millionaire, he could have been whatever, if it was about money. But he saw that that was not him. So I found a little bit of a relief reading about him and what he's saying about our intentions, and to be kind to yourself, you know, and I've never been kind to myself. I hated myself for the longest. I hated falling short, not measuring up, and I’ve never been kind to myself.

But I started thinking about all that. And then, so my understanding of prayer was that you pray, and you’re always asking God for something. God, can you help me with this? God, can you give me this? Always asking. And I felt, and thankful, you know, thank you for the health. Thank you for helping me today, for this, with this.

But then when I started listening to Thomas Keating, he was talking about more, you kind of surrender to Him in silence, and you want to connect with Him in silence. You do that for like 20 minutes, most of the time, because of my anxiety and all the things that I'm always thinking about something, it's very hard for me to get anywhere because always, he talks about not getting on the boats that are passing by because your mind goes somewhere, and get off the boat and go back to the word that you, for the prayer. I find myself that for the first 20 minutes I was thinking the whole time about something else. And then the little alarm that I set up goes off. It's like, Oh my God, I didn't get to do the silence as much as I wanted to.

But it takes practice. It takes practice. So then I would do like, I'll try it again, and then I would get somewhere. I did it one time where I actually did 20, about 20 minutes of totally silence, and I felt getting deeper and deeper with union with God, and I felt the connection of almost kind of like stages as meditation and being in union. I felt so much peace. And I'm like, I want more of that.

So now one of the things that I'm beginning to realize in being kind with myself is that I do get a physical reaction with stress and anxiety. I do. I don't want it, but it happens. It's kind of the fight or flight sort of deal response for me because it happened to me for the first 16 years of my life. Even though I understand that is what is happening, I have to acknowledge that and not try to change it, but accept it sort of, and be kind to myself and tell myself that, yes, this is my body reacting because of my trauma, but it's not really who I am.

And so I joined the men's group, the Circle of Men. It's like 30 people in a group, 25, 30 people. And when Clay Boykin did the introduction about, OK, we're not here to judge anyone. We're here to support everyone, and this is not a group. This is a network. And we love each other. We care for each other. And what’s said here, stays here. And I felt a lot of love from everyone.

And I'm still, with my fear, with my anxiety, my fear’s always on guard. I always have my hands up for whatever happens. So then I started dropping my guard down, and I started listening to the stories or the conversation. I felt that I needed to come out, and I told my story in short, very compacted, but just basic, I came from Mexico, and all the things that happened to me at home, my dad was very aggressive and abusive and my brothers and sisters, and so on, and growing up and then coming to the States. And I, oh my God, my nerves were just, I felt it all over me. I was shaking inside me. I was sweaty. My body was reacting, and I was like, what is happening to me? as I'm talking and telling my story.

And the group was just so understanding and so compassionate with my story. And then I put my head down, and I said, I'm sorry guys, I'm feeling this way. And everybody's like, no man, there's nothing to be sorry about. There's nothing. They were giving me assurance and acceptance for the very first time in a large group like that. And I still, I was, I felt embarrassed. I felt the shame. I felt all these negative feelings about myself because I just kind of like, I've been carrying this load of rocks and I just dumped it right in front of the group. And when I did that, I was apologizing for that because the group had to hear it. And everybody was so understanding and caring, and loving and supportive and all that, that it was the very first time. I've been afraid of men for a long, because my history and everything that I experienced in my life, and I was angry at men.

So being in a group of nothing but men and feeling a little bit of acknowledgement, acceptance. Validation. I just felt like, ah, man. After I finished doing my spiel and feeling embarrassed and all that, I usually, when something like this happens, I tell myself that was stupid. Don't go back there. You're an embarrassment, sort of thing. I tell that to myself, so my natural reaction is like, OK, I’m out of here, I'm not coming back. I'm so embarrassed and so ashamed, I’m not coming back. But I told the group, you know what, I am coming back.

We are harder on ourselves. I've learned that, and for me, people are nicer to me than I’m nice to myself. And, and I realize that, and I realized that that's how we are. I tell my daughter who's 15 years old, that has some of the, as a 15 year old girl going to school, and the friends and all of that, and being very critical of themselves again. It's like no mama, just, it's like, I don't even tell that to myself and then I'll tell her, and it’s like, I should listen to myself when I'm talking to her. It's easy for me to tell her that, but it's hard for me to tell myself.

That helped me a lot being in that group. But still, I'm always going to come out with my hands up, guarding myself, especially the first 5, 10 minutes. And then I feel more at ease. Now can I stop my body from reacting? So far I haven't been able to stop my body from reacting. I don't want to fight it. I just want to be kind to myself and saying, it's OK, Alfredo. You've been through some hard, it's OK. Don't be anxious about being anxious. But I just have to be kind to myself, accept it.

And maybe sharing. Maybe others might feel the same and maybe I can talk to them about it, compare notes and help each other out. This past meeting, we were talking about free will and what is God's will. But I really believe that God's will for everybody is for everybody to be nice and be the best human they can be. You got struggles? We all have struggles, some worse than others. But at the end of the day, God's will for us is to be the best person that we can be. Help each other out, be there for each other, give somebody your hand so they can lift them up, and maybe they'll lift you up next time.

Episode 005 - Breathe Deep

Rod Haden

In this episode, I sit down with Christopher Howell on squeaky chairs in a church conference room to talk about personal growth, spiritual exploration, addiction, work, cancer, and taking yoga out of the studio and onto the trail. He is doing what many people dream of doing: earning a living doing what he loves. Yoga Hike is a deeply satisfying experience. I've done it twice, and will be out on one of Austin's many trails with Christopher and his team again soon. Check it out on the web at yogahike.com or on Facebook ( you can also search Facebook for "Yoga Hike"). He's also on Instagram at @yoga_hike.

Here's the transcript:

I tried college out of high school. I wasn’t a disciplined student, but I was a good salesman. And in those days, it was still believed that you could get by in life with a good handshake and a smile. And so I went that route. I was up in College Station selling shoes at 18, 19, 20, and she would drive in on the weekends, got pregnant one weekend, and as a good Catholic boy, that’s what you did in those days.

And I wasn’t good at relationships. And I was in my 20s. I was in my 20s. I mean, that’s just it. I hope no one ever gets married before they’re 30. Wasn’t for me. And no birth control as a Catholic, and so, you know, we had 3 boys and a miscarriage. We were pregnant the whole time that we were together. I was money-driven. That’s all I wanted. I wanted to be successful. I was one of the top Chevrolet salesmen in the country, number 3 in the state of Texas. I like to, still like to brag about that 25 years later. The only path for me after that was to buy a dealership, and that wasn’t a path that was going to suit me.

I was an alcoholic in my marriage. I was just very irresponsible 20 year old, had 3 kids from 20 to 27 like that. I wasn’t actually, I’m not that kind of guy. I’m not the father of 3 children kind of guy. And so the cocaine came as a way of covering the feelings that came with all of that, all the shame around even saying, “Hey, I’m not that kind of guy.” You know, I can say that now, 27 years later, but I couldn’t say it then.

For about a year following the divorce, all I cared about was being successful. I didn’t really deal with the pain of making my first mistake. I was kind of a golden boy growing up. I didn’t make a mistake until that divorce, and it hit me pretty hard. I mean, I got in trouble as a kid, but that was part of the adventure for me. That was the first time that, because I had a pretty strong Catholic background, that was the first time I’d ever failed at anything. I really never made a mistake.  And I didn’t really deal with that.

I felt if I were successful enough, it would make up for it. I got introduced to cocaine, did coke for about 9 months and then, I think I probably had a psychotic break, a drug-induced psychotic break, quit my job one day, left my demo, walked from the dealership to my house. That was about an 8 hour walk, went to bed for about 2 months.

Then got in my car, started driving around. I drove from here to California, and then I was making my way, I was going to go to Florida, and met these hippies down in South Padre.  I was 28 at this time. I even remember the night before meeting them. I mean, I got down on my knees, and I prayed with all of my might to try and find a way out of the hell that I was in.  And that showed up for me. And they invited me to go on a meditation, and I was pretty much a confirmed atheist following my divorce and such. But the girls were hot, so I said I would join them.

We met on the beach at dawn, swam out to this sandbar, and the leader of the group gave us a mantra to use, just saying a series of words over and over again to confuse the brain. And we’re doing them silently. He also told us to visualize dolphins while we were doing these mantras. I played along. Peer pressure. About 20 minutes into the experience, there was like a simultaneous breath, and everyone opened their eyes at the same time. We all kind of looked in one direction, like satellites, you know, and there was a school of 15 dolphins that went swimming by, the same amount that was in our circle. And so, that was interesting to me. It reawakened me to the possibility of some kind of mystery beyond my understanding that I’d pursued in the Catholic church as a child. The only thing that I’ve come to is that there’s this idea that Jung has of synchronicity.

So these people that I met down in South Padre were from Austin, and so I moved to Austin to study with these guys. The excuse I gave my family was that I was going to learn how to do massage therapist. I didn’t tell them I was coming up here to study with a hippie.They were intense. They used breathwork as the therapy for cleansing the body to make that realm of possibility more accessible to the psyche. The guy that was leading the group, I sat outside of his house for half an hour bawling, trying to get the courage to walk up and ask him if he would be my teacher. He was connected to something that was, that I very much wanted to be connected to.

What I’ve done since shortly after that experience, I got introduced to The Power of the Myth. that was an interview with Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell. And I have chased the references of that conversation for the last 30 years. So all of my reading has been on the authors that he’s referenced.

And I added work by Stanislav Grof, who’s one of the leading technologists in brain studies, near-death experiences, and how to access that using breathing techniques. Grof’s background is that he was the leading psychology researcher of LSD research in Czechoslovakia in the ‘60s. And then when he moved to the U.S., he couldn’t use LSD, and so he found this breathing technique, which I think is more impactful than LSD. I think that breathwork is more substantive and accessible, and you get as much of it or as little of it as you want at any time.

Psychologists will work with having you exame decisions you made as a child from 1 to 6 years old, or something like that, and that’s kind of determined who you are as a human being. Well, a spinoff from the work that Stan Grof does with breathwork, he does what’s called holotropic breathing, and it’ll be deep, round, circular breathing, where you go beyond hyperventilation for 3, 4, 6 hours, and using different sounds and things like that, it creates a what he calls a non-ordinary state of consciousness which is also the way he describes near-death experiences. And so all spiritual awakenings, according to this theory, come from that edge.

A deviation from that work was there was some work in the ‘80s and ‘90s called rebirthing. And the rebirthing is using the same, similar, breathing techniques as Grof, but what you’re working on is the interpretation, what they were working with is that the decisions and the way your personality is shaped by the way that you interpreted your birth experience. And so what you’re working on doing is breathing deep, full breaths and clearing out the cellular memory of whatever decisions were made during that birth process. So when you have a thought, it creates a chemical reaction in your body, and that gets stored in your body unless you find some way to work it out, and then you get addicted to that chemical blend, and that influences your psychology. By using specific breathing techniques, they would use an affirmation process. You’d write affirmations over and over and over and over again to stir up a thought that you hadn’t fully integrated. Like it might be, “I, Christopher, am an innocent child of God. All my desires are holy and always have been.” That was the first thought that I worked with, and I probably wrote that thousands and thousands and thousands of times because just to work through the layers of where I wasn’t an innocent child because of all of the shame that I’d carried. And using these breathing techniques helped facilitate that for me. And then part of the work there was discovering what your purpose is, and helping people realize their oneness is part of what my purpose is using my charisma, my ability to learn.

I was introduced to a weekend encounter group. With the rebirthing work, there’s not a lot of emotional work done. You’re supposed to breathe through the emotion, and I think that’s one of the fallacies of the work, or one of the shortcomings of the work. I think you need both. And so I was introduced to this encounter group where we just cried and screamed and everything at 100%. The weekend was about expressing yourself at 100% through the entire weekend. And so every time I went, you found new expression, new levels of 100%. There was tons of healing that went on in those classes. I was able to do years worth of therapy in one weekend, all the time. And I went into a training to learn how to facilitate those weekends. 2 years worth of training once a month out at a corporate headquarters, a Thursday through Monday training, and then every other weekend at a local training facility, for 2 years. Only like maybe 5% of the people that went through the training ever graduated and became facilitators, because you have to go through your stuff. So I took my sales background, I became a good teacher, and I learned how to fill these courses for these folks. They didn’t have a machine that would regularly put together classes that they could count on in size that they needed, and so I helped build that machine and then helped build franchises for them and other centers around the country with that.

I didn’t get a buzz from putting people in Chevrolets any more. I really got a buzz in putting people into their lives. And so as easy as I could make that process for people to make the decision to take those steps and make those changes, and we finally found a path and you know, worked on it for 2 years.

I was teaching, I was facilitating the weekend events. And what those were was a male and a female instructor and 24 students. They paid about anywhere from $500 to $700 to be in the weekend. And then there’s 20 to 30 graduate assistants who come back to help provide the same course experience for other people. So I got trained on how to facilitate those, but in the path, along the road there, one of the things that the franchises had a problem with is they didn’t know how to put people in the classes. They were just weak at doing it. Attracting people to the class. Anyway, I found a path. I found an introductory workshop that made it easy for people to make the decision, see if it was good for them, found a way to get the graduates to make that available to their community.

So I worked in that for about 7 or 8 years, and then the facilitators starting going in another direction. I went to massage school. This was in my late 30s I guess. So through all of that work, you’re also working with the work of Louise Hay. Louise Hay’s work is that you store different thoughts, feelings, and attitudes in different parts of your body, and those can contribute to different types of illnesses. So she’s got this catalog of “here’s the illness, here’s the low quality thought that might be impacting that area, here are some high quality thoughts that you can add into it,” and that’s affirmations, and you would work to that.

So through that, I got to understand where thoughts, feelings, and attitudes are stored in the body. I can look at somebody’s posture and kind of have an idea about their psychology just from being in the work and doing it myself. And massage is a great way to work it out of people, so it was like doing the same kind of work that we were doing in these encounter groups, but instead, I could just put you on the table, have you practice specific breathing techniques while we’re doing massage, and we can work those thoughts and stuff out of your body in a massage. So it was all the same kind of work.

So I had a lot of clients that we did an intake on what are your dreams, what you think your purpose is, if massage could facilitate that, that kind of thing. From there I opened the Center for Health Resources on Burnet Road. We had 4 rooms there. I rented out 3 of the rooms to other therapists, helped therapists coming out of massage school learn how to build their own business, and there’s 2 people still operating in that room now, and that was started probably in around 2000. So, after having a full practice for about 7 or 8 years, I was still traveling around, teaching weekend courses every once in awhile, but it wasn’t a full-time gig. And I had been exploring this breathwork more deeply.

And so, there’s one process where you can fast for several days, a vision quest kind of process. Fast for several days, and then I would go… this is the first time I went camping, actually. That was on my 40th birthday. So I fasted, and then I got to Enchanted Rock and started a silent meditation, stayed up all night Friday night keeping a fire burning, and then hiking, started hiking at sunrise, practicing these breathing techniques in hopes that I would have some kind of vision, like, you know, Jesus fasted in the desert for 40 days, and Billy Jack got in the snake pit and got bit by a bunch of snakes.

You don’t know Billy Jack? It’s a great cult movie from the ‘70s, really influenced me when I was 13 and just after my father had died. Yeah, that’s how he had gotten his transition was, they like put him in a snake pit. You gotta see it. It’s a cult classic. Yeah. “One tin soldier rides away!”

So anyway, just to produce a non-ordinary state of consciousness along that lines without using mushrooms or LSD. And I had a non-ordinary experience for about 6 hours. So what I wanted to do was I initially wanted to start taking people on those kinds of adventures. I wanted to take you, have you start fasting, get to a campsite, stay up all night in silence keeping a fire burning, teach you these specific breathing techniques. You would have to learn the breathing techniques before we go on this adventure. There would be like an advanced thing, and then bring you into this other realm.

But to do that, I felt like I needed more credentials, and so I wanted to go back to school and get a doctorate in transpersonal psychology so that I could have an academic conversation about what I was doing. My wife’s business, was quite successful at the time. We were in a position we could do that, where I could go back to school. And in that process -- this was probably 41, 42 -- after selling the Center for Health Resources, back in school at ACC, and I was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Then the testicular cancer really kicked a hole in all of that. I put too much emphasis on, “Why didn’t I catch that low quality thought in order for that illness to show up in my body?” So I had a little guilt and shame and stuff around that. I used to think Louise Hay was a bible. And we don’t know what the fuck cancer is. We don’t know, really know, what disease is. I mean, when you really get honest about it. There is so much variable.

And so that started tainting me. So after I got sick, I didn’t, I wasn’t interested in going back to school right away. I went to work at a plant nursery digging holes in the winter for, I think I was working $8 or $10 an hour. I mean, really just digging holes. And so, I didn’t say much, and when spring started coming around, I had a conversation with the owner and told him that I had some other skills. We had discussed partnering and opening a second location, and I recommended instead that we build something here, build something spectacular here. And it ended up going from a 6 employee place to 30 employee place. And 2 ½ acres into 5 acres, and it’s one of the top 100 destination nurseries in the country. And it’s fantastic.

While working at the nursery, I was just kind of slipping further and further away from any metaphysic healing, oneness. I don’t care. I’m working for this guy that’s a, just a… I call him this deeply rooted Aggie, deeply rooted into family in a spiritual way, but doesn’t care anything about any of the other… I don’t think out of the 7 years that I was with him, I might have hugged him once. And I hug everybody. Yeah. But we were buddies, you know what I mean? And he was a hunter. I started just becoming a Joe Six Pack. Worked hard, drank hard, and gained about 60 pounds...

So I went to the nursery just to heal from the radiation. I was really sick after radiation, and I didn’t have any juice. I didn’t want to think. And this was a nice… It was a great hobby. We were wildly successful in what we were doing, but it just wasn’t really true to me. And so I was just kind of slowly slipped into this depression, which I didn’t really realize. I was kind of in a panic mode.

I dropped 60 pounds on P90X. While I was working at the nursery. And I got almost an elite, fit body. First time I’d been fit in my whole life. And on P90X, there’s a yoga section, and I physically hurt myself every time I did the yoga portion. And so, about a year out of the nursery, and I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was 51 years old and didn’t want to do massage again, and so I was kind of freaking out again. You know, I was having a spiritual crisis that I had like when I was 27.

I could’ve ridden that at the nursery until I died, and I’d have been just fine. I’d have been as happy as anybody could expect to be in their life, you know? It would’ve been just fine. And I think what it was for me was, like I said, meeting those people down in South Padre, the night before I was on my knees praying with all my might. And I had one of those nights. While losing the weight had a lot to do with it. I do believe that that weight was a result of thoughts, feelings, and attitudes that I was carrying in my body, and I wasn’t carrying that anymore. So I had to take those layers off to get down to something closer to the core of whatever was going on, so it was more accessible then. Here I am, a 51-year-old guy. I don’t want to go back into car sales. The relationship business stuff is… the way that I was doing it was in the past. I didn’t have enough education or credentials to really start something new with that at the level of, there’s already work out there that’s great. There’s other programs that I send people to now for that kind of work because it’s better than anything I could’ve done. Anyway, so I was in a panic on what am I going to do, and it was a, I think, probably like a midlife crisis. It was that same kind of feeling of just getting down on my knees and praying with all my might on, I’m so fucking lost. I remember one night just really wailing and wanting it so passionately. And then it was probably within days of that that I found Sapphire’s yoga class.

And so I went to a beginner’s yoga class at Yoga Yoga with Sapphire Bell. Sapphire Bell’s parents were yoga teachers at Esalen in Big Sur. Right? So she was doing yoga in utero. But in her class, man, in addition to the asanas or postures that she was putting you in, she was getting people to breathe efficiently and deeply, and while they’re doing that, she’s just dropping in all these huge spiritual bombs that were in alignment with all the other stuff that I’d been… I was like, wow, this is really powerful.

The reason that I was hurting myself was because I didn’t have alignment. You know. P90X is an extreme workout. You’re going to get to an elite, fit body in 90 days, and that’s extreme. The yoga portion of it is extreme yoga. That’s for people who had been in yoga, they know the difference, you know, if you’re in Warrior I, you ought to be able to look down and see your big toe. I didn’t know that. My knee was bending over in the other direction. And all the modifications that were available. That’s why I was hurting myself. I didn’t know good posture, and I didn’t know modifications.

So I went to yoga every day for a year. There might have been a couple of 6-day weeks in there, but most of them were 7 days a week. Wow, my body’s starting to vibrate up right now just talking about it. I’d never been fit before, and so what I liked was the fitness aspect of yoga. I liked that I could still get my workout. But like I said, in that very first class, I knew what she was doing with breath. I had an understanding. I was like, wow, this is profoundly therapeutic. And they were bringing in high quality thoughts at the same time. And now, how can I maintain that same breath and state of mind while holding a posture? That was interesting to me. That added another dimension to the experience.

And rapid therapy started happening for me. You know, that depression I kind of slipped into over the 6 years started peeling away. So then I went to yoga therapy training with Genevieve Yellin at Sundara Yoga Therapy, and that was just 200 hours of training. It kind of teaches you how to learn how to be a yoga teacher, really. Then you have to find your practice and continue doing other training. I wouldn’t consider myself a yoga therapist until I’d done 1,000 hours of training with them and maybe 10,000 hours in practice with classes.

But it was incredibly therapeutic. I did a bunch of emotional release work, and it brought me back to that connection that I had before I got sick, brought me back to that mystery in a very powerful and emotional way. And in the middle of that training, I thought, “Man, if I make my way through this, I’m going to bring as many people with me as I can.”

And that’s how Yoga Hike ended up coming to be. It was after I did my year of training, now I’m a 52-year-old guy, I’ve only got 200 hours worth of training, and you know, who wants to go to that class? So I started inviting friends that I trusted to go with me to the Austin 360 bridge for sunrise, and I would just kind of practice teaching yoga with them. So then I put it up on Facebook as an event, and 4, 6,10, 12 people started showing up to the events, and I was making it donation-based classes. Then there was one event where 5,000 people on Facebook said that they were going, and so I had to build a website to filter that to something that was manageable, and something that was manageable all across the board. I didn’t know what was going to be what.

And so, but we had 100 people show up on a January in 37 degree weather, overcast, sprinkling a little bit, and we had to cross 100 feet of water ankle-high deep, and nobody turned around. That’s when I realized that there’s something larger than me that I want to try and ride with, and so the following week we had 80 people at the same location, and then 2 weeks later we had 90 people show up to clean up the Onion Creek trail that had been flooded the year before.

What I have found is that there’s something that’s informing the trees and informing the birds and the cosmos. Seems like there’s something there that has order, and the human ego seems to be the only thing in the universe that’s disrupting a natural flow with all of that. And so what I hope to do is have myself be more connected to whatever it is that it’s informing the trees and the birds and the sun and the oceans and the moons and all of that and have a heartfelt connection to that. And being on the trail seems to do it in a more profound way than being in a yoga studio where all that aliveness has been kind of manufactured out to make walls and air conditioning and all that kind of thing. So I think the reason that Yoga Hike has been so profound for people is because they’re more connected to whatever all that source is. I just open them up to specific techniques and mental games that connect them to that for themselves.

It’s because of whatever I’m synced up with, I’m sure, but I’m just amazed at how many people that I meet that, what the Austin experience has been for them is that they’ve had that transition like you speak about having, you know, 3 years ago, that this is a place that was an impetus for it. So there’s something magical here.

I think I’m a spiritual atheist. We may edit that out later. I don’t know. I’ve tried it on a few people. They don’t seem to like it. But the thing is, is that there seems to be some higher functioning in the brain that if we’ll surrender to it in a really powerful way, a higher brain functioning comes in and guides us on our path like it would a bird, you know? And I think it comes to that mental breakdown, where you’re just, “God, I can’t keep moving like this. I need something.” Where it’s a cry from deep in my soul. I think everybody gets to that. I think that’s what it is. It’s that final breakdown on, fuck, I’ve got nothing left. Help. And it feels like God comes in, so I could see why books would be written about that.

For the business of Yoga Hike, we’re hoping to expand that this year to where we can have 6 or 8 classes going every month instead of the 4 classes that are happening now. And then I’m interested in weekend adventures. I’ve tested a couple of them, camping locally, come out on a Saturday, set up camp. We do a sunset practice, or sunset hike and practice, a night hike back, have some dutch oven cooking overnight, a big campfire, have scotch and a cigar. It’s not a yoga retreat. It’s a yoga hike. And no pressure to have scotch or a cigar. I need to work on that marketing a little bit. And then a sunrise hike in the morning, and paddleboards, and a couple of kayaks, and that kind of thing. So Camp Yoga Hike is on the horizon.

Travel Yoga Hike, or Yoga Hike Travel, is also on the horizon. We’ve done a few trips where we went to Yosemite from a Thursday through Sunday and had a cabin a mile from the Yosemite park entrance. So all the food is catered by Whole Foods, a big, huge deck to do a morning practice on, go out to the hike in the park from can until can’t. And those have been great. So I’m hoping to do more of that. September this year, I feel pretty good that I’m going to take a group to Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, which has one of the best sunsets I’ve ever seen anywhere, any time. You’ve seen it in movies. It’s a cool spot. And then, you know, if I’m smart enough, and I pull the right kind of team together, I’d like for travel, for Yoga Hike Travel, to expand to being international, trips to international locations. I’m interested in that landing out in Norway, and there’s other places, and then having nationally ranked yoga teachers be part of that.

We’re starting to hire teachers now. I’m starting to get the courage to ask people that are way better at teaching yoga than me. I’ve been a little intimidated by that, so we’re going to start branching out into bringing masters in and getting #OldGuyYoga off the trail, with the exception of adventures. The weekends and the long adventures, I’m interested in facilitating those, because we can incorporate a bunch of other work.

That’s the biggest challenge that I’m having with Yoga Hike right now, is that I think that I’m trying to open people up to too large an experience at their introductory experience. Right now, the hikes that I lead, I think I’m more intense than what people are expecting to show up for. Some of these other great teachers have the finesse to ease people into that in a beginner’s class without them knowing. I think that’ll come from experience. I don’t have that right now. I think I hit people too hard on their intro experience. That’s one of the reasons I’m interested in bringing in other teachers that are a little bit more gentle in that approach and haven’t had the experience of taking people as deep, so they’re not going to. I feel like I bring a whole encounter group, weekend encounter group experience, into the way that I say, “Deeply connect to your breath, your purpose, and your intention.”

How much of me are they coming to the trail for? Those people that are coming back, are they coming back for the experience of the trail, or for me, or…? I’m hoping that they’re coming for the yoga and for the trail. I don’t want the Yoga Hike to be a cult of personality. What’s been great is that me, as a dumb ol’ country boy from Beaumont, Texas, people have had profound experiences on those hikes. And I want anybody that has the desire, to provide that, to be able to do that by facilitating a yoga hike.

So the one thing that I would hope that everyone, that I do want to close my experience with everyone with is that, there’s something about this that is a calling for you, and I hope that all the things fall into place in order to make this kind of experience a thing that supports the kind of lifestyle that you want to live. That’s my biggest dream for you and for anybody that’s interested in listening to this conversation between you and I.