My name is Rob, and I’m a 42-year-old man living in California. I’m currently an author, entrepreneur, and freelance writer, but this article isn’t about my current profession. This is about my time in the US Army Special Forces, which took me to multiple places of combat. I also led me to eventually find the healing journey that lightened my load.
Different men will find their way to donning the Green Beret for their own reasons. Some have made the Army a career to find a new adventure or to test themselves to find their limits. Others like me are the post-9/11 types who felt that it was their duty. Special Forces is not for the faint of heart, and the experience can affect everyonequite differently.
My life had already been an interesting one before I decided to join the Army. I was adopted as an infant due to parents who were far too young to be parents. Also, I lost my mom to cancer when I was just a pre-teen and found myself on such a rebellious path that I ended up in military school lest I do something that would have destroyed my life’s opportunities forever.
I’m from a long line of military men. My experience at military school had been enough to believe that I would be the one to “break the chain”. But as the saying goes, “we make plans and God laughs.”
I was a sophomore in college when the commercial planes flown into the twin towers and pentagon on 9/11. Like many of those who saw that as their sign to serve, that led me to a military recruiter’s office. My dad left the Navy to be an airline pilot before I came into his life. The fear and anger I felt, knowing that my dad could have been there, lit a fire in my belly.
By the time my service was done, I had deployed to Iraq twice, North Africa, and Afghanistan. I have a purple heart from wounds sustained in a firefight in Afghanistan. I have also seen friends and enemies alike meet their maker.
One thing I didn’t expect was that I would continue receiving phone calls long after I left the service. They would let me know that my friends had died, which is probably the worst part of it all. The feelings that if maybe I had been there, perhaps there would have been something that I could have done.
My fiance during my time in uniform was Buddhist. I was able to see both the Dalai Lama and Karmapa before my deployments. Before dangerous missions I’d make my teammates drink water that had little pellets of rice blessed by the Dalai Lama. All in an attempt to keep death away from my Brothers for as long as possible.
Most men have a basic understanding of how they will perform if truly tested in a life-or-death situation. But far fewer understand how deep the effects of going through those situations can be, or how long they last.
One of the issues that I’ve found plaguing the men and women who have served our nation in combat is an extreme hesitance to open up and talk to others who haven’t “walked the walk.” If you put two combat veterans together with enough time or a few adult beverages, they will open up. They will begin sharing war stories with each other for hours, quickly becoming lifelong friends. But if the company they keep doesn’t have that experience (even a therapist) they often refrain from opening up.
Some aspects from our military experiences we never lose: an enhanced sense of hyperawareness at all times. A survival response that only exists in those who’ve been in deadly situations often. Or a certain uneasiness in crowds when we’re not in a controlled environment. And more often than not a lifelong difficulty sleeping.
My inability to sleep led me to drink heavily, a coping mechanism that took me over a decade to break. Thankfully the Buddhist woman I was engaged to knew of healthier treatments to help me be on the right path.
She took me through different treatment modalities that would exorcise the demons that resided in my soul. She took me to a Reiki master for example. In fact, after seeing the beneficial results that would come from my sessions, my then-wife began taking Reiki classes herself.
We visited energy healers and tried acupuncture, mindfulness, meditation, and anything else she could find that may work. Several years and two children later, my demons, temper, and drinking became too much for her, and she took our kids and left. For a man who was adopted and left Special Forces to start a family of his own, that, was my proverbial rock bottom.
Things got so bad that my dad flew out to visit me in California with my best friends from childhood. I had become a walking zombie, unable to sleep, eat, or basically function. Being around those men and having their support helped me to stand back up on my own two feet.
Half a year later I found myself called into an office at work that I’d never visited before, sitting across the desk from a gorgeous woman who seemed to see into my very soul. A ten-minute conversation about my office fees ended up lasting for eight hours as we remained talking long after everyone else left the office.
She was also divorced with kids, but as luck would have it (I no longer believe that it was simply “luck”), she was not only familiar with Reiki, but she herself was a Reiki master who had been healing others for years. We became inseparable, and before long she knew more about me than I’d ever known about myself. She, in fact, put me back on my healing journey.
She not only made me realize that life was worth living but also that healing the past traumas and ridding myself of the demons that I’d been living with was doable. In fact, she set to work putting me on a crash course in various healing modalities, performing her own Reiki sessions on me but also taking me to places and people known to heal some of the deepest wounds.
Also, she took me to Enchantment Resort in Sedona. What I thought was going to be a relaxing weekend soon turned into a round-the-clock series of healing sessions. She took me to workshops, retreats, specialists, and sound baths, but the true breakthrough was when she introduced me to one person who did just about everything.
The previous attempts at ridding myself of my demons had all worked for a time, but none of them – from weekend retreats to Mother Mera cutting the strings of attachment, Reiki sessions, and even the Dalai Lama himself had only provided a fleeting respite from my inner turmoil. Some demons, as one energy healer told me, attach so tightly that it takes a gargantuan effort to remove them.
When she first sent me to see Jean Anne Allen in Beverly Hills, CA, I have to say that I didn’t expect much. I thought that she would just be the proverbial snake oil salesman in Beverly Hills, waving her hands and lighting some incense over rich & spoiled trophy wives to make them feel better. There was no way that I was going to find the final step of my healing journey in an office in Beverly Hills.
But I did, and it was quite some time before I learned why.
It’s not only that Jean Ann was a proverbial powerhouse of healing – she uses all of the above: Reiki, sound baths, acupuncture, aromatherapy, crystal healing, guided meditation, energy work, past life regression, and many other healing modalities that I still don’t know the name for. She would pack five or six intensive healing modalities into a single session, throwing the proverbial kitchen sink at getting me back to the funny, happy, life-loving man who I’d been prior to my time in combat.
In the end, I think my healing came because Jean Ann was not just the first to make me actually believe that I could finally get rid of the demons that had plagued me for over a decade, but that I should want to heal.
And that is the key aspect that I’ve learned from my long, arduous journey. No matter how powerful or experienced the healer, we are still the most important part of our healing journey.
To put it another way, no matter how strong the spiritual medicine is, it will not find its mark until we ourselves are ready to embark in our healing journey. And from my own personal healing journey, finding the healer or partner or person that can finally convince you that it’s time to heal is the most important step.
For any of my Brothers or Sisters-in-Arms who have been on their own search for healing, or anyone else who’s had some sort of trauma that has plagued you ever since, please take my story to heart and skip all of the unnecessary steps that caused my road to last for so long. Find the person who can make you want to heal, and then find your way home.
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