Black Sheep Rehab
The David Michael Method for Personal Growth
“Only to the extent that man exposes himself over and over again to annihilation, can that which is indestructible arise within him.” -Karlfried Graf von Durckheim
“I had to come to terms, a long time ago, with the fact that in order for me to live thousands — if not millions of creatures — would have to die,” David Michael says, as he casts his finishing line into the deep river water that runs into the Atlantic Ocean just outside of Folly Beach, SC.
I am fishing with my guru very early on this Saturday morning. The sun has just risen above the marsh. We’re sitting in his power boat that is tied to the marina dock, and the lesson of the day is that my guru says it’s okay kill other living things to sustain my own existence.
Life can be such an existential dilemma. That’s why I’ve needed David. And he’s right — once again.
Every time he puts his boot on the ground, millions of microbes are murdered. We could sit here in self-loathing about that, but it’s just part of the monstrous nature of life. It would be mental illness not to embrace your place in the food chain. Your position is ultimately impersonal. Every casualty is recycled in the intelligent design of the Earth anyway.
And nothing in this world is intrinsically good or bad/right or wrong. That’s David’s main message.
There were days David Michael seemed like a crippled, hobbling contradiction to me. He had the loosest hip flexers I’d ever seen. Sometimes he’d stretch them by lifting his leg against his kitchen counter after sitting for one of our hour long therapy sessions; and it surprised me because the only way he moved around his apartment was with a cane. His thinning silver hair was always pulled into a ponytail. He’d gained some weight over the last few years, because he gave up trying to get high off carrot sticks long ago, and said he was at the point in his life where if he wanted to eat a gallon of ice cream in one sitting, he was going to.
David Michael could watch a 250-pound man punch a wall in front of him to release decades of repressed rage, and he would not fear for his life or flinch, but if I reached out to touch him in an act of affection, he’d immediately jump, and tell me, “Not today.” He spent many of his waking hours playing violent video games. He was a man who had merged with his shadow. He was comfortable with the fact that there is a potential killer in everybody.
At the time of this outing, I am a self-loathing, aspiring vegetarian, who doesn’t want to murder any living things, yet can’t seem to do enough to earn atonement for the unnamable feeling of badness that has accompanied my existence since I was a little kid. I can’t help but think about how twisted is it that in order to be at peace, we have to let things die: the attachments we build our lives around, all the people who stand in the way of us rising to self-esteem. David says that growth is a destructive process, and I need to get to used to that. There are beautiful types of dying, and I’m beginning to think that maybe it would serve me to eat a giant turkey leg.
So today, David and I are out fishing, and I’m learning to view it as a form of sacred sacrifice. It’s okay to want to survive evolution’s zero sum game.
Atonement = At-one-ment
The goal is to become a balanced, unbiased observer of the unfolding of the universe (without getting raped, murdered, imprisoned, or hacked for identity fraud).
I met David almost a year and a half prior in the kind of a make or break, bottomed out moment that makes a person realize they can’t tell their ass from their elbow; the kind of compounding crisis that inspires an alcoholic to surrender their arrogance to start the first step — but it wasn’t the bottle I needed to put on the shelf. I had to admit that I was powerless over my own mind, the neural pathways that had been programmed into me long before I have a working memory. It seemed I had been conditioned to fail if I continued to live my life controlled by my subconscious; and I could never get to point B being the person that I was, so I had to trust someone else to guide my steps until I turned into someone else.
Word on the street was that David Michael, the crippled consciousness coach who had 47 jobs in his lifetime (including ice cream salesman, yogi, raw foodist, meditation teacher, private investigator, property assessor, short order cook, pizza flipper, owner of a vitamin company, CPR trainer, etc.), was supposed to be better at life than me. So I went to his condominium apartment in a gated seaside community, where he saw clients and kept a few registered guns and a stuffed bear named Juarez. He called his practice, where he worked as an unlicensed pastoral counselor, The Center; and it was either going to be the safest place in the world or the most dangerous.
“The people who are the most fixated on peace are often the ones with the most internal conflict,” David says.
We are lost souls looking for God, a phenomenon so timeless. People only seem reach out to the redemptive force called Spirit when the pain of their situation becomes so great, they can either grow, kill themselves, or go insane. David says the magic words are “there has to be a different way.” And then, a guru is supposed to appear.
However, what David Michael would soon bang into my head is that the phenomenology of psychotropics and metaphysics, the counterculture of new age bliss bunnies chasing good vibes, free rides, and ephemeral love is entirely divorced from the mindfulness, morality, and radical accountability that create a society of true non-violence. There are people who want to know what others see in them, and many others who don’t. If you are someone who wants to be self aware, if you’re someone who has to be self-aware to keep from self-destructing, it’s a gift to find someone who will call you on your BS without pushing you away. For some people, it’s self-actualize or combust.
Because we don’t live in a state of one love.
“One love is where you came from and it’s where you’ll return!” David told one day in the back room of his apartment that had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled with authors ranging from Glenn Beck to Paramahansa Yogananda.
I was crying about why we all couldn’t live in the Garden of Eden.
“You didn’t come here to experience one love!” he proclaimed.
“So I came here to be in the war?!”
“Yes. Except it’s not a war, it’s an awakening.”
And thus, in this world at war (that is not really a war, but rather the dyad of life learning to experience itself as oneness), there are supreme life skills a person must learn to live alongside sleeping people ruled by the selfish gene. According to David, we can only embody love when the people around us embody love too. Until that happens, it’s only a matter of time until the fangs come out, and we take an eye for an eye.
“Love is essentially self-communicative; those who do not have it, catch it from those who have it. Those who receive love from others cannot be its recipients without giving a response which, in itself, is the nature of love.” — Meher Baba
No matter how many crystals we have, how much reiki we do, how much green juice we drink (and these are all amazing tools), we can’t avoid that the human animal is an animal: self-centered, reactionary, and largely unaware of our impact on the exquisitely sensitive life forms that surround us. Humans have biological drives. We are blindsided by a hunger for flesh, and when pushed to our edge, we will retaliate. History has shown us this.
“Humans have two sides,” David said. “There is a side of me that only wants to do what I think will feel good for me, and there is a side of me that can take in account its impact on you. Don’t fool yourself, kid. The second you pretend you don’t have it in you, you’ll slip. You’ll hurt someone, and you’ll lose. The only battle you’re here to fight is the one within.”
Life is a continuum of ethical decision-making. David helped us train our minds to see the domino effect of our actions so we really could recreate our reality — and I was starting to see results.
At David’s, I had permission be myself. If myself happened to be frothing at the mouth as I was bombarded with decades of memories of degradation that I’d stuffed down with one night stands and booze and pot and whatever other vices I chose to cling to, I could come to The Center to express it all.
With every tear I cried, I began to see more clearly.
The mask I’d crafted to survive an unloving world began to crack open and fade, and only spirit remained. It had the power to outshine whatever had happened in this lifetime, and maybe others. The only thing I had to do was let whatever was in my psyche come up and out, and not do anything stupid in the midst of the growing pains.
“I want you to start hanging out with people who are nice to you all of the time,” David told me.
“All of the time?”
“All of the time...”
David had a lot one liners I could tell he often used with clients. There was:
“You could show up here with a bottle of whisky in your hand, a cigarette in your mouth, tell me you’re pregnant, and I’ll help you get through it.”
And then there was:
“If you were my daughter, I’d put you on my shoulders and run around town. I’d be so proud.”
Also:
“I will not let you sit in that chair and be a victim!”
He let me have a neurotic inner world, full of delusions and morbid images, emotions so painful they felt like a pot of scalding water had just been thrown at my skin, and he would witness. He was the person in my life I could confess everything to, and he’d say, “There’s nothing wrong with ya!”
He’d offer some way to help me see every conflict as grist for the mill, an opportunity to improve, an occasion to laugh at myself and deepen my connection to life and the unraveling of my soul’s purpose; and his ability to do this was a gift so rare, it was easy to want to pull up a cot in his living room and just stay there.
You can’t go throughout this life without forming an enemy. Not everyone is going to be your friend, but everyone in the drama of your life has been cast, perfectly.
Feeling is the only way out of the hamster wheels in the head. Feeling is the only way to reconcile the life threatening events and oppressive social contexts that fracture our perceptions and split us into opposites. The way to awaken is to be transformed by the world of symbols and memory that exists behind our eyes, to burn ourselves clean of misdeeds. In his lifetime, David had restored thousands of people of the right to have their emotions — a freedom most of us lose in childhood the day we’re punished for being real.
No boutique spirituality practiced here! At The Center, you won’t find ladies rubbing feathers on each other’s noses and exclaiming that we are made of love and light as we fuck our married bosses! The David Michael Method is a strict and potent form of damage control, an individually designed, non-dualistic form of psychic surgery that preaches the importance of the idiom of “when in doubt, don’t.” According to the David Michael Method, the key to success is integrity. Do what you say you’re going to do, and watch your life immediately improve. Integrity is the alignment of what you think, say, and do.
He doesn’t use a DSM. The David Michael Method is behavioral, humanist, emotional and spiritual shadow integration work with components of Gestalt inner child counseling and primal scream therapy. It’s based on the trauma-model of psychotherapy that contends people are more than a label of dysphoria or restless leg syndrome. Our inappropriate behaviors are all responses to unmet needs, to unprocessed stories that strip soul of its belief in itself.
And if we suffer enough, some of us decide to start digging into those stories in order to release them. The deeper we dig, we grow to find that life itself is trauma.
We are born. We get bruised over and over again. We are forced to live knowing that everything we love will fade. We begin to believe that we are separate from God because of all this, and that is the journey we go on. It is the journey to be redeemed of our faith.
Keep digging, and we find that it is our trauma that connects us to humanity. It is our trauma that can turn us into keepers of each other.
The David Michael Method is for the adult children of this world, who have tried everything else to grow up and still feel stuck at dwarfed emotional age.
Because David Michael is in the business of turn girls into women and boys into men.
The first task he requests of students is to get a fucking job. So I did. The second order was to not buy any plants, cats, dogs, or go hunting for a significant other. This was about learning to take care of myself and no one else. No flirting. No drinking. No sex. No smoking. No ayahuasca. People will do anything and everything to distract ourselves from our internal world.
About six months into therapy, he delivered my analysis with the kind of cutting courtesy that scared so many people away from the importance of what he had to say. Some people loved David because he told the truth, and some people hated David for the same reason — but when shit hit the fan, they always called David.
“Well, kid, I hate to tell ya this, but your parents warped your personality.”
Parents — they are everyone’s original wounders. This story is nothing new. Maybe that’s why we’re all here, to be wounded by our parents and this dystopian empire, so we can learn how to empower ourselves and in the process others. Maybe we attract people into our lives who can show us the parts of ourselves we hate and deny, so we can see the way we impact others and change our ways. Maybe we birth our every difficult experience and dramatic relationship from the depths of our consciousness to learn how to embody peace and love on Earth, to learn when to declare ENOUGH. The madness has to stop, and we have to mean it.
There’s absolutely no way to prove this philosophy with the scientific method. However to see life through this lens is a choice everyone has to make if they want fully heal. It’s a choice that David says my sanity will depend upon.
Throughout this, I’ve had to learn that tortured souls don’t appear out of nowhere. They are tortured. That’s how they get that way.
This is one of the last days David will be able to walk to his boat. Within months he’ll be bedridden. David suffers from PTSD, COPD, depression, an autoimmune disorder, and a baker’s dozen of other chronic medical conditions he wore like a Purple Heart from his years of taking meth, LSD, and living fast and hard before he was spiritually reborn.
I sat next to him in the passenger seat in the docked power boat as he put the bait on the hook.
“Whatever you do, don’t touch the pole,” David says to me. I didn’t have a fishing license. “If the DNR sees you, I’ll be fined.”
“Do you always follow the law?”
I just…wanted…to touch…the pole…
Before meeting David, I’d always been more of an anarchist type.
No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of time, conditions, and place. — Emma Goldman, 1917
“Whenever I move somewhere I look up the local laws,” he replied. “If I don’t like them, I won’t move there. If I want to change a law, I lobby at the local level to have it amended.”
If you get pulled over by the cops while driving, David’s advice was to not flick them off, but thank them instead for risking their life to approach you in your car. Most people think of freedom as total abandon. To David, it was learning how to maneuver the world of Things, while respecting a multitude of boundaries, set to protect other’s needs.
Alas, the chronic rule breaking is another earmark of the profile of the adult child — the black sheep, the family scapegoat who needs to be re-parented. We live in a world that most often shuns and blames its wayward children. David Michael could see through the barbed wire. He could speak to the precious person buried within. And because of this, he may have been the only person living in South Carolina both willing and capable of being a re-parent to so many young people.
His promise was that he wouldn’t leave you. For 30 years, he’d given his phone number to people who could call him 24 hours a day if they were in crisis. All he asked is that you put a gift of money in the collection bowl and followed his instructions. Show up on time. Write the date and time in the left hand corner of your journal. Keep the toilet seat how you found it.
If you failed to do any of these tasks, you could expect militant reprimanding, because there are no small things in David’s eyes. You either respect others, or you don’t. It’s through little actions that we cultivate maturity and selflessness. It’s through the details in daily gestures that we either say “fuck you” or “I love you” to those closest to us.
If you chose to trust him, even when life had taught you to trust no one, he’d help you unravel the toxic secrets that dictate your actions, that generations of people in your bloodline have swept under the rug. Pain was the tool that could break the karmic chains. Awakening is a painful process of remembering. And memory is an elusive construct, but to learn to be loyal to our own perceptions is all we humans have really got in our struggle to make sense of what’s real and what’s not.
It takes time. Damn it. It takes longer than a 30-day webinar. It takes years to become conscious in a society that seduces us into a trance and clouds us with lies and shame, but when we do, we find ourselves filled with the vibration of gratitude, because we realize the great mystery of life is a process that can work no other way.
He wasn’t perfect. David was a gruff and hyper-vigilant realist, but he could listen when I told him what I didn’t like about him. He was one of the first people who really heard my observations of his actions and used the information to adapt his behavior. He said his entire practice relied on his ability to walk his talk. And if I saw remnants of violence in him, other people surely did too. David Michael used to be a violent man.
Through the process of reforming himself, he realized humans have a way of saying we’re about one thing and then doing another. We think we want connection, when most of the time we push it away.
David walked over the metal trap on the edge of the dock and pulled out a few crabs.
“So you don’t feel bad about killing these later?” I asked him, once again trying to wrap my brain around how a man who preached about all this could voluntarily kill another innocent living being.
“Listen, there are different ways to go about it. I know if I throw the crabs in a pot of boiling of water, it’s tremendously painful for them, but if I put them over ice before I before I boil them, their nervous system shuts down and they can’t feel a thing. So I choose to be compassionate, and do that, but I’m going to eat my fucking crabs.”
“What about our depleted fisheries?”
“Every species, including humans, is evolving toward extinction,” he says. “I tell everyone I know to abide by fishing regulations!”
“So what do you think about the people trying to save the planet from climate change?”
“I think that’s great.”
“What do you think about the people who are killing all the whales?”
“I think that’s great too.”
I guess being ambivalent to the polarity of politics is part of the enlightenment package. And besides, perhaps controlling the grand finale in the web of life isn’t what we humans came here to do. That’s the ego once again fooling you.
“These people in these nonprofits will help you save the whales, but they won’t do this kind of work. They won’t listen to the ways they hurt the people sitting right next to them!”
According to David, the problem of man isn’t an ideology. It isn’t capitalism or communism. It’s the way we treat each other.
Consciousness was here long before we arrived, and it will remain long after we’re gone, and there will be necessary losses all along our circular route.
David threw every fish he’d hooked throughout the morning back into the river one by one, because it was against the law to do otherwise. And as the sun began to rise halfway in the horizon to the noon position, it was time to go. He hobbled out of the gently rocking boat, carrying his fishing gear, as we walked to his apartment from the dock. He wheezed and he wobbled, as he dumped all his weight onto his cane. Step by step, we slowly progressed up the wooden walkway to get to his apartment.
We rode the elevator to the fourth floor of the building. We could finally see his doormat that read Restoring Honor Starts Here, when David’s knees buckled and he collapsed.
Even though he always said it was the best day of his life and meant it, every student of David’s knew he was in a lot of physical and emotional pain. He told me once that he had to deliberately turn his pain dial down around others, or else they would get so reminded of their own they’d run away from him.
But now I could see it, I could see him, completely uncensored — his pain dial blasting at volume 10. David’s guard was down. The strongest person in my world’s mortal vulnerability was fully exposed. One day I knew I would have to lose David Michael too.
I offered to help him stand up.
And “Don’t you dare!” is what he said to me. For if I intercept in another person’s journey to rescue them from their challenges, I hijack them of everything they have, everything they’re here to do. If everyone on the planet could face their own battles, maybe all 7.5 billion people could live in a state of interdependence — instead of as needy assholes, practically possessed as we push and pull objects of desire towards us and away.
So I watched him suffer instead. I watched him stand on his knee and one foot, only to fall back to the floor again and again, as he blessed Spirit for the pain shooting through his body. I watch him attempt to get up three times before he could finally walk the few steps remaining to open his apartment door.
And as I watched him, hunched over, coughing and wincing, all I saw was the white light of God illuminating the torment of the flesh; the eternal world of energy penetrating the body of a dying person who had so much conviction in the power of the present moment that he did not want to be saved. And all I could do is stare at David Michael and take all of him in, the way he did with everyone who arrived at his door with cookies and problems and personality disorders. The only the way I could serve him was to not look away. To honor him, I had to fully feel, the way he always prescribed. I had to feel until the line between life and death became so blurred there was no longer a reason to be afraid.
Whenever I asked David what I could do to change the world, he said the only work I need to do is on myself, and the work never ends, but if I really wanted to do something for others, I could bear witness to the fullness of them until they remembered they are whole. I could stand beside them in agony, embrace them with my presence as they encountered their own terror and grief, their awkwardness and their emptiness — though I could only do this if I’d faced my own.
