Sloan Bashinsky           

I have a friend named Baxter.  He teaches yoga, offers yoga therapy and sometimes ventures to serve as a spiritual counsellor.  We both live in Colorado but are originally from Alabama.

  I practiced law  in Alabama for twelve years.  Then I went off the deep end (according to some people) and studied healing.  Out of that came my realization that legal conflict could be approached just like dreams in the Old Testament were approached:  as symbolic messages from 'above' which have nothing to do with anybody but oneself.

  Baxter and I visit over lunch from time to time, trading stories, helping each other see our blind spots, giving each other encouragement and so forth.  Neither of us is a stranger to the dark night of the soul, which is quite different from much of the New Age view that spirituality is all love and light.  In the dark night of the soul, known in Christian and Sufi mysticism, as well as in yoga, you spend a great deal of time getting to know your 'shadow', the nasty, awful, grubby parts of yourself that you spend most of your time trying to avoid and keeping others from perceiving.

  During one of our lunch meetings, Baxter said he needed legal advice.  He had recently taken six months off to visit his son on the East Coast, where he lived with his mother.  Baxter had enjoyed being with his son, but quite a bit of acrimony still seethed between him and his ex-wife.  The trip had depleted his resources to the point that he was in financial straits.  He wanted to know about taking personal bankruptcy.

  I told him what little I know about his options under bankruptcy law.  Then I shifted to another level and spoke to the broader aspects of fiscal bankruptcy.  It was symbolic evidence of a deeper, more pervasive spiritual bankruptcy.  Since you go into bankruptcy court asking for forgiveness of your money debts, I suggested to Baxter that he might explore the spiritual lesson of forgiveness.

  Inasmuch as his trip to the East Coast to see his son had triggered Baxter's financial crises, I suggested that he probably needed to look at forgiving his ex-wife and that he also needed to look at forgiving himself for being an absent father most of the time.  He nodded and smiled, then chuckled.  "You can't get away from what Jesus said, not even by becoming a yogi!"  This was an ongoing theme in our many discussions - the necessity to return to and embrace the essential aspects of one's birth religion.

  "Now I must ask myself what this is all about for me," I said to Baxter.  "I think I already see some of it but I will wait until our next meal together to tell you about it.  We finished eating and said our goodbyes.

  I knew it was about my first wife, Dianne.  when I was in law school, our first child, a son, was born.  We travelled all over the place showing him off to our friends and family.  On the return to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where I was attending the University of Alabama School of Law, we decided it was not wise to travel with him at such a tender age and made an agreement not to do that again.  Shortly after that we reached our home.

  Not five minutes after we were inside, the telephone rang.  It was Dianne's brother, Jim, in Memphis, Tennessee, where we had been only a few days before on a visit with Dianes family.  Jim, who had not been home during our visit, was passing through town on his way to Thailand with the Air Force, to service American bombers during the Vietnam war.

  Dianne wanted to see him off and said she was returning to Memphis.  I objected, citing the agreement we had just made.  She told me the deal was off.  We got into a terrible fight, yelling and screaming at each other while she held our son.  We continued the battle all the way to the airport.  I put them on the plane and they flew off to Memphis.

  The next night, our son died of sudden infant death syndrome.  We never got over it and divorced eight years and two children later.  I never forgave her because I felt in my bones that it would not have happened if she had not broken the agreement.

  This was in my thoughts as I walked back to my car after having lunch with Baxter.  Over the next few days I did some serious soul searching that led to my realization that it was really me who was the target of my rage.  After all, I had started the fight which led to my son's apparent decision to leave his body.  In his shoes, I might have done the same thing.  It was I who had played 'lawyer' by attempting to enforce a man-made agreement, which had been overridden by matters of the soul.

  So I wrote a letter to Dianne telling her this and apologizing for taking so long to wake up.

  After that, I did some trance work with a healer in whom I have a great deal of trust.  It helped me to resolve some of the residual feelings underlying my angers.

  The next time I saw Baxter he had filed for bankruptcy and his life was moving up.  He had worked through a great deal with his ex-wife and had resolved in himself his role as a father to his son.  I told him about what our last meeting had triggered for me and thanked him.

  My bowel disorder has not resolved, even after sessions with three different spiritual healers.

  One of the spiritual healers who worked with me called himself a light healer and was very opposed to evil.  He said his guidance had indicated to him that it was a karmic thing with me and that if he tried to do anything about dissolving my karma he might die.

  I later heard through a mutual friend that this healer had confided to her that he was terrified of me because he saw several black spots in my aura, which he said were related to when I held a high position in early Egypt and did some pretty awful things to people, which he personally witnessed as one of my overseers.  I had no conscious knowledge of this, but I was struck by the fact that he was letting his knowledge of a prior life rule how he related to me in the present and by how fearful he was of darkness.  I think that if he would take a closer look, he would find that I am different now.  He might also find a few areas of darkness in himself that could benefit from his attention.

  In closing, I share that I finally got around to taking yet another look at the scenario around my son's passing.  What I saw was that I wanted to have my way, to enforce a man-made contract at the expense of a higher calling - my wife's need to see her brother off to war.  I begin to sense that this is related to the problems in my bowels.  They stay constricted.  This is a core issue in me.  I am a control freak.  I want my way, to impose my will on everyone around me.  The remedy?  Simple: Thy will, not mine, be done.  Well...simple to say but not so simple to do.
 
  Perhaps I have not yet forgiven myself completely.

  Being a healer certainly is humbling work!

Sloan Bashinsky is a former practicing lawyer, 2439 Kalmia Avenue, Boulder, Colorado 80304, USA
 

You may quote from or reproduce these editorial clips if you include the following credits and email contact:
Copyright © Daniel J. Benor, M.D. 1993 Reprinted with permission of the author P.O. Box 76 Bellmawr, NJ 08099 www.WholisticHealingResearch.com   DB@WholisticHealingResearch.com 

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