At one of David Hawkins' satsangs, I could no longer stay in my seat.
When he opened the floor for questions, I walked down the aisle and stood in front of him. I told him I had left Austria, my family, and everything familiar to follow this path. I had come for peace and enlightenment. My life had unfolded differently. I was overwhelmed by suffering, and I was deeply disappointed.
I told him I was feeling low.
His response, as I remember it, was:
"Buddha faced demons. Christ sweat blood. What are you complaining about? This path will test you. This is not for the faint of heart."
I was stunned.
How I Got to That Aisle
At twenty-two, in my apartment in Salzburg, I was reading one of Hawkins' books when a state of consciousness I had never known moved through me. A profound peace filled my body. The edges of my ordinary identity softened, and for a time I felt at home in a reality far larger than the person I believed myself to be.
It was not an idea I had acquired. It was something that had happened to me.
I wanted to live from that place. So at twenty-four I left Austria and followed Hawkins to Sedona, where the pursuit of God was not reserved for Sunday mornings. It was the organizing principle of people's lives. The rooms held real sincerity, and a longing for truth I have not forgotten.
I was also spiritually ambitious. I had sacrificed a great deal to be there, and I wanted enlightenment badly.
What I did not know was how little I understood my own suffering.
When Love Opened Something Older
Not long after I arrived, I fell deeply in love.
The relationship woke something beautiful in me. It also woke what I had never learned to hold: my needs, my fear of abandonment, the vulnerability of loving someone who could leave. We were both drawn toward spiritual freedom, and we both struggled with the demands of intimacy. Nonattachment was part of the language around us. In the middle of a relationship, I began to see how easily the movement away from attachment could become a movement away from another human being.
When it ended, I entered a depth of suffering I was completely unprepared for.
Something much older than the relationship had been touched. The loss reached into loneliness, abandonment, and longing that had been waiting in me for years. The spiritual experiences were still part of my life. They did not stop the pain from arriving.
My apartment became a cave. Fear sat in my chest. Despair hollowed me out.
I had come to Sedona to dissolve the ego. I was meeting parts of myself I had never been taught to hold.
What Reached Me, and What Didn't
There was something real in Hawkins' answer. He placed my suffering beside the great ordeals of the spiritual path. He reminded me that the path promises no perpetual peace, and that even the great teachers were tested.
I clung to his calm.
But something essential was untouched. I was still drowning.
I went back to him at later lectures, carrying my grief to the front like an offering. Nothing soothed it.
Looking back, I can name the difference with a clarity I did not have then:
His words spoke to the adult in me, not to the abandoned child.
They landed like Zen koans, awakening a higher Self without consoling the wounded one. Perhaps their meaning would arrive later, when my heart could bear it.
But I needed consolation then.
I needed someone to hold that boy, not instruct him.
I did not stop loving Hawkins' teachings. That is not the point. A spiritual answer and an emotional encounter are different things. One can illuminate the meaning of suffering. The other can meet the person who is suffering. Sometimes they arrive together. That afternoon, they did not.
The Room in Prescott
Eventually I found myself in twelve-step meetings, three times a week, driving more than an hour through the Arizona desert to Prescott. I arrived tired and humbled, with pain in my chest and some embarrassment at how much I needed the room.
There was no great advantage in appearing enlightened. People spoke about their shame, their losses, and what they had done to themselves and to others.
I remember a young man named Matt. He talked about the ordinary mechanics of taking care of himself, and about not abandoning himself when shame arrived.
There was nothing extraordinary in it, and I found it deeply moving. Here was a man treating himself with kindness. It was not a spiritual ideal. It was something he practiced.
For the first time, I spoke honestly with other men about my own pain. It was not the philosophical pain I could dress in Jungian language. It was the human pain: the heartbreak, the fear that I was not enough, and the loneliness I had carried since coming to America.
Something changed when I no longer had to translate it into spiritual concepts before it was allowed to exist.
Sometimes, after a meeting, the pain in my chest would lift for a while.
I remember stopping at a gas station one night. I stood under the fluorescent lights holding the pump, with the smell of gasoline in the cool air. Nothing remarkable was happening. The peace from the meeting was still moving through me.
I was not trying to reach a higher state. I was filling my car.
For a few minutes, my heart was not at war with itself.
What Being Met Looks Like
Later, I found another dimension of this work with the Jungian analyst Nathan Schwartz-Salant. He did not ask me to abandon the spiritual experiences that had shaped my life. He helped me become more able to stay present with the psychological realities those experiences had not resolved.
I came to see that being met has a recognizable shape. It does not rush to explain. It does not hurry you toward meaning. It stays while the grief is felt, and it does not leave when the feeling becomes inconvenient.
It can be a therapist, an analyst, a recovery group, a mentor, or a friend who knows how to be quiet. If your grief or despair has grown heavy enough that you cannot function or cannot feel safe, reach for that presence before you reach for another idea. I do not say this against spiritual practice. I say it because understanding and company are different needs, and a person can have all the first and none of the second.
The Human Being Who Remained
The experience in Salzburg showed me something true about the nature of consciousness. Heartbreak showed me something true about the human being who had that experience.
I needed both.
I no longer believe that every kind of suffering calls for an elevated response. Sometimes the most loving thing is not an explanation. It is a willingness to stay with a person whose pain has not yet found its words.
I went to Sedona searching for enlightenment.
I found something I had not known to ask for.
The possibility of being human, without having to transcend my humanity first.
