The calm before the storm

Episode 13 — The Calm Before the Storm

A note to readers: this entry becomes somewhat spiritual because meditation plays a central role. I’ll briefly explain how I meditate and provide a simple overview of chakras. Chakras are important to both my spiritual beliefs and my meditation practice. For readers who practice this too, I know there are more than seven main chakras, but I’m simplifying the explanation here. I promise this will all connect back to mental illness.

“Chakras are seven main energy centers said to run along the spine, from the Root at the base of your feet, to the Crown at the top of the head. Each center is believed to influence specific physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects of life, from survival and confidence to communication and spiritual connection. Chakra practice focuses on keeping these centers balanced and energy moving smoothly so they do not become blocked or overactive.”

By the second week of November, I was free. I spent seven weeks between a behavioral health center and a rehabilitation center. I was home, but I felt like a scared rabbit. During that first week, my wife tried to get me out of the house as much as possible, but she didn’t understand what I was going through. I could not be around people who were drinking. I was no longer afraid of the FBI, I wasn’t seeing black SUVs everywhere, and my phone had stopped clicking. Still, I knew I had been through something traumatic. Loud noises startled me, crowds made me panic, and although I was happy to see my child, I could not focus on her for long because my mind had not healed. I felt scattered.

For the first time in a while, I had open time. I had quit my job with the cannabis company as soon as I got home. It was an easy decision; I knew I wasn’t wanted there. I had money in stock, so I felt comfortable taking a few weeks off. Rehab had been expensive, but I had enough to cover it. I was on all new medications, and my body was adjusting to them. There were no benzodiazepines. I was eating again, and the new medications caused me to gain weight. During that period, I looked healthier than I had in years.

In rehab, counselors explained that newly released patients often become fixated on “people, places, and things.” Three weeks after coming home, I understood what they meant. I wanted money and new things for myself. Everything before rehab felt like my old life, and I wanted this new life to look and feel different. Still, I didn’t want to sell my stock to pay for it. I needed a job, and I knew where to find one.

A few entries ago, I wrote about a man who once worked for our company—the same man who lied about having a contact at a big-box retail store in Arizona. He was now the CEO of a company in Medellín, Colombia, and he needed a Vice President of Sales. Before rehab, I had heard troubling things about the company, and I wasn’t eager to work with him. But I needed a job. My family needed income, and I wanted those “new things,” so I called in a favor and asked for the position. I was told to fly to Medellín immediately.

I won’t spend much time on my work with the Medellín company. The simplest way to describe it is that it began as a shell company. It had all the pieces a cannabis business needed, but government restrictions in countries with legal cannabis programs prevented us from selling our products. In short, those countries did not allow imports from Colombia. There was a certification the company could have applied for that would have opened many of those markets, but it would have taken years to obtain, and the company was running out of money. If they had pursued it when the business first opened, they might have been generating revenue.

I lasted about eleven months in the job. The C-suite kept asking the sales team to take risks we were not comfortable with. No one wanted to smuggle cannabis into countries that were closed to us, and after everything I had been through, I wasn’t willing to take any risk at all. Eventually, the company could no longer make payroll, and the entire commercial team was let go.

Medellín is intoxicating—a city set in the jungle, surrounded by mountains covered in wildflowers. A large waterfall even runs through it. But at night, the city becomes wild. Sex tourism is everywhere, and many women approach men for money. Even after I told the men at my company that I had just come from rehab, they insisted I experience the nightlife. I quickly became a target. I went out to dinner with the group twice. Nothing happened, but under pressure from the men urging me to stay out and from women who would not leave me alone, I had a drink. It took me weeks to forgive myself. I knew I did not have a drinking problem, but I had just left rehab and should not have been anywhere near alcohol or partying. As beautiful as Medellín was, it was one of the worst places I could have gone after rehab.

During the latter half of my time with the Medellín company, I returned to a practice I had left behind for years: meditation.

I had practiced meditation on and off since I was fourteen. A close friend of my mother’s spent a lot of time teaching me Transcendental Meditation, and my mother, happy that I had found an interest, bought me books on Reiki and channeling. For whatever reason, meditation came naturally to me. The books were easy to follow, and he was an excellent teacher. I quickly learned how to quiet my mind and relax my body at will. With practice, I could meditate for two hours without noticing the time. I continued through high school. Years later, in the New Jersey apartment, I relearned the skill and stretched my sessions to about three hours a night, the amount of time it took to calm my mind and body enough to sleep. During that desperate period, meditation saved my life. It was the only good thing I carried out of New Jersey.

In the last half of my time with the Medellín company, I decided to relearn the skill again. I bought a few guided meditation apps and used them at night after putting my daughter to bed. The practice came back quickly, and while I was doing it, I felt amazing.

Around that time, my wife became pregnant with our second child. It was unexpected, and I worried because we were not financially prepared. I found out just as I was beginning to realize I might not last much longer with the Medellín company. My wife was ecstatic. I knew we still had stock, but its value had dropped significantly. I was also only seven months out of rehab, the most traumatic period of my life, and I still did not feel like myself. Meditation helped me control the worry.

Around my wife’s fourth month of pregnancy, I lost my job. It was not a surprise. Around that same time, I had a meditation session that would shape the next several years of my life. During it, a memory surfaced—or at least something that felt like a memory. After I stopped taking benzodiazepines, old memories began returning. Benzodiazepines can severely affect memory, and when memories come back, they can appear out of order or form storylines that do not quite make sense. This one took place in the summer of 1999, after I came home from boarding school. In it, an old flame—the first girl I loved, Andrea—asked me to come to a house her mother had rented for the summer so we could have a serious talk. I remember it like it was yesterday, though I use the word “remember” loosely because I still do not know whether it happened.

The rented house was about ten minutes from mine and had a pool, which I assumed was why they rented it. I pulled up in the VW Bug my father had bought me that year, and Andrea ran out to meet me. As I stepped out of the car, she whispered, “Do not listen to a thing I say.” I laughed and asked what she meant, but she said we should talk by the pool. Once we got there, she told me, “You don’t know this, but you are somebody.” She was not someone who drank or used drugs, but she was acting strangely. Then she added, “But so am I. We are going to do something.” I asked what she was talking about. She told me to listen, and I reminded her that she had just told me not to. She said I could listen to this. Then she told me I had to do something in her field. At the time, she was studying medicine, and I told her I was going to school to act and had no plans to do anything medical. She said it had something to do with marijuana. I told her I did not even like weed that much and asked what I could possibly do with it. She said it was a secret and could not tell me. I listened, but instinctively I did not take it seriously. I asked if it had something to do with the government because of how strange it all sounded. She said no that “they” worked against the government. When I asked who “they” were, she said it was me, her, and Scott, one of my best friends and hers. She told me I would go through something hard, then I would find her, and things would get better. When I asked when all of this would happen, she said later in life, maybe in our thirties or forties, depending on me. I asked what would happen after that, and she said I would find her and we would fall in love. That surprised me. I had always been the one chasing Andrea. We had always had a “thing,” but it never became serious because she seemed uninterested. After she said we would fall in love, I had heard enough. I told her I needed to go to Matt’s house and asked if we were done. She smiled and said, “You are going to fall in love with me, Pat.” I told her I already was, but that I had a girlfriend and could not act on it until that relationship was over. She seemed to understand. I said I would see her soon and walked back to my car. I felt incredible. I did not think about the strange things she had said. I was too focused on the fact that, for the first time, Andrea seemed genuinely interested in me. That night, I drove to Matt’s house, where we took mushrooms. It was my first time. I never told anyone about the conversation with Andrea.

That was the memory that surfaced during meditation, and it became the spark for my schizoaffective episode. It raised question after question: Was it real? If so, how could Andrea have known in 1999 that I would later work in cannabis? Was the government involved in the breakdown that led me to rehab? And if it was, did it connect in any way to Andrea’s predictions? There were many more questions after that.

As with most unusual experiences in my life, I felt I had to keep the memory to myself. I decided to spend my nights meditating to see what else might surface. I was sure there were other memories that trauma and drugs had buried.

I meditated every night for at least four hours, and eventually another memory came up. This one included both Scott and Andrea and seemed to take place a year after the first, during the summer after I had been home from school. In it, I was sitting in Andrea’s house beside Scott while they told me I had done something important. They said I would have a lot of money someday, but that I would not be an actor. Scott said I was going to become something more. I told them acting was all I could imagine doing because it was the only thing I believed I was good at. Frustrated, Scott put his hands on his head and said he wished he could tell me what I would become, but that if he did, it would take much longer. If this was a real memory, I remember not taking either of them seriously. I told them I would probably just be a poor theater actor, and I was fine with that. Eventually, they seemed tired of arguing with me. Andrea finally said, “I think we should go to the fair tonight. We will never convince him. But Pat, I need you to remember this: there are two of you. One fights with love. The other fights with everything.” I did not respond. I simply stood up from the couch and said, “Let’s go to the fair.” I wrote the memories down because I wanted to journal every thought that came to me.

Those were the two hidden memories, though I still was not sure either had happened. I began writing them down, along with the feelings that surfaced during meditation. Four months into my nightly practice, that second memory appeared. Around the same time, other things began happening. I started feeling energy in different parts of my body. When my mind was completely clear, it would move over me like a light breeze, settle somewhere inside me, and leave me charged, almost as if I had taken a shot of caffeine. I needed to understand it. I had meditated on and off for years, including long stretches of consistent practice, but I had never felt anything like this. I contacted a friend who knew far more about meditation than I did.

My friend suggested I investigate chakras. He explained that the sensations I described can happen when people do chakra work during meditation. In simple terms, people in deep meditation who are aware of these energy centers can move energy from one chakra to another. Different chakras, he said, can create different sensations in the body. For example, the sacral chakra, located near the sacrum and genital area, can create sexual energy. He gave me a list of books on the subject. I downloaded many audiobooks and bought a few hard copies because they included diagrams. I read them at night before meditating. They were easy to get through, and I finished most of them within a month.

I understood what the books were teaching, but I still wasn’t convinced chakras were real. I had heard of them before contacting my friend and knew the general idea, but I also knew there was no scientific evidence proving they existed. So, I formed my own belief: chakras were less like energy vortexes and more like a map of the nervous system. They were described as located along the spine, with front and back points that corresponded to different areas of the body. To me, the sensations people associated with chakras seemed more likely to come from focusing attention on specific parts of the nervous system. If I focused on the sacrum, for example, it made sense that sexual feelings might arise because that area is connected to sexual response. I believed all seven chakras could produce sensations, but I saw them as nervous-system reactions rather than spiritual energy centers. The heart chakra, for instance, is said to create feelings of love and healing. When I focused there in deep meditation, I felt a surge of energy from my chest and noticed my heart rate increase. I did not know whether that was love; it simply felt powerful. Most of it seemed explainable. Still, some things did not. One night, while meditating and doing energy work, I felt intense pressure between my eyes. After focusing on it for about an hour, it felt as if something there opened. The best way I can describe it is that something seemed to crack open—I could almost hear it—and energy began moving from that spot. I had read that the third-eye chakra, located in that area, sometimes requires pressure to open. It was one of the strangest sensations I had ever experienced, and I could not explain it. I knew the pineal gland was nearby, but I could not understand why it suddenly seemed to be releasing energy.

There were other things I could not explain. Each area associated with a chakra seemed to spin. When I focused on one of those spots, I felt a light breeze settle there and rotate clockwise until I shifted my attention. I had read that chakras spin, but I had not focused on those passages enough to imagine the sensation intentionally. It felt as if it was happening on its own. I also could not explain why the energy seemed to enter my body like a breeze. When I focused on a chakra area, it felt as though energy from outside me moved in, settled there, and spread through my body, creating a rush of emotion and sensation at once. The best way to describe it is that I felt able to draw energy into specific parts of my body and trigger emotions connected to those chakras. It felt like a superpower, and I became addicted to it.

During those months of meditation and reflection, I felt better than I had in years. I believed I had uncovered memories that gave me a mystery to solve about who I was and what purpose I had. I thought, “Maybe the FBI really had been following me. Maybe it was about much more than I understood.” I badly wanted to call Andrea and Scott to confirm whether those conversations had happened and to understand what they had been trying to tell me. But something held me back. A small voice inside me said to keep it to myself for now.

After eight months of intense evening meditation and self-reflection while the rest of my family slept, my time was about to be interrupted. On November 11, my little Ivy was born. I had a new baby, and I was smitten from the start. I knew she would be my last, so I spent as much time as I could holding her and playing with her during those first few months. Nighttime wakeups did not last long with Ivy; she slept well. Of course, I felt pressure to find a job, but after all the revelations I believed I had uncovered, I kept thinking I had a destiny. I applied for jobs, but my heart was not in it. I wanted to understand who I was and why I had hidden memories. Once Ivy began sleeping through the night, about four weeks after her birth, I returned to meditation.

After Ivy had been sleeping consistently, I settled back into meditating four hours a night. It felt incredible. I believed I could control the energy with my hands and direct it into one of the main chakra areas, where it would enter and create an intense sensation. I tried to dismiss it as imagination, but it felt so good that I kept doing it. With a calm mind, I felt as if I could make myself feel almost anything. I relied heavily on visualization. I imagined the energy as a color tied to each chakra: red for the root, red-orange for the sacral, yellow for the solar plexus, green for the heart, blue for the throat, dark blue for the third eye, and violet or white for the crown at the top of the head. Every chakra book assigned the same colors, so I used them in my practice. I visualized each color bringing energy to the correct part of my body, then spreading through me until my whole body felt charged. It was a wild sensation. Then, everything changed.

One night in February, I had an entirely different experience. As I meditated, a new kind of energy came over my body. It felt dark and frightening. It began on the left side of my stomach, making me nauseous, then moved into my chest and heart. My heart pounded, and I began sweating heavily. It felt as though someone had my heart in their hands and was squeezing it. The nausea worsened. I jumped up from the chair and ran to my daughter’s bathroom, expecting to vomit. I did, and I felt a little better. Then I went into my bedroom, where my wife and two children were sleeping, and crawled into bed. As soon as I closed my eyes, a vision came to me: a group of people touching my body, which made the nausea return. I did not want my daughters to see me throw up, so I went back to my older daughter’s empty room and into her bathroom again, expecting to vomit. This time, nothing happened.

 I decided to sleep on the floor of my daughter’s room. When I closed my eyes, the same vision returned. It moved quickly, but I could piece together that someone was doing this to me. In that moment, I did something I would have considered crazy at any other point in my life: I spoke to the vision. “What do you want from me?” I asked. Then a voice spoke in my ears: “We want to test your faith.”