My favorite healing story

images (18)This is my favorite healing story. I first heard this story from higher consciousness teacher, Caroline Myss, who, in turn, learned this first-hand from her friend and our protagonist, David Chethlahe Paladin. Conversation with the wonderful Lynda Paladin, our protagonist’s wife, added more meaningful background.

David Chethlahe Paladin is a Navaho Indian living on a reservation in Arizona. David would laughingly say that his mother was a nun and his father was a priest. It turns out his mother became pregnant by a visiting priest. She, in turn, decides to become a nursing nun and leaves her son in the care of the extended family of their tribe.
David and his cousin spend a great deal of time leaving the reservation and going into town. They drink a lot, and they think life is better in the white man’s world. The local constabulary is forever returning the boys to the reservation. By the time David is 13 years of age, he is an alcoholic.

David and his cousin determine that they are going to make it off the reservation once and for all – and they do. They find their way to California, wherein they lie about their ages and sign up for work with the Merchant Marines. Here David befriends another young man from Germany. He also begins drawing; some of his sketches include the eventual bunkers that the Japanese are building on the atolls in the Pacific Ocean.

World War II is declared. The US Army tells David that since he lied about his age with the Merchant Marines he has a choice. He can go to jail for a year or enlist in the army. David enlists. He is a teenager.

The army tells David, as he is a Navaho, they are going to drop him behind enemy lines and use him as an information gatherer in their special services. Given his native language is a code that the Germans are unable to crack, much less decipher, David is to relay his findings to another Navaho who will translate and pass along the intelligence.

David is dropped behind enemy lines. Ultimately, he is captured and interrogated for information. The German officers find him useless and direct that he be sent to a death camp and executed as a spy.

Imagine, if you will, the scenes we all have invariably seen of the railroad station and the platform filled with lines of prisoners being pushed into box cars for transport to the camps. Here is David. He is being pushed and shoved into a boxcar. There is German soldier behind him saying “Schnell, schnell” (quick, quick). David stops, turns around and looks at the German soldier. It is his friend from the merchant ship. The friend recognizes David and ushers him to a different box car that will send David to Dachau.

In the barracks at Dachau, David sees an older man, a fellow prisoner, drop something. David bends down to retrieve it. The guard, who has witnessed this moment, asks David, “Are you the Christ?”

The guard then orders that David’s feet be nailed to the floor and that David stand there with his arms outstretched for three days like Christ on the cross. Every time David would falter and crumple the guards would hoist him up again. In the middle of the night, someone would sneak in and cram raw, maggot-covered chicken innards into David’s mouth.

When the Allies open up this camp, they find David a mere shell of a man, weighing maybe 70 pounds, and speaking Russian*. They turn David over to the Russians. David later speaks English and gives his name, rank and serial number to the Russians who transfer him to the US military.

David is sent to a VA hospital in Battle Creek Michigan where he spends the next 2 years in and out of a coma. At the end of two years, his legs are encased in metal braces, similar to what polio patients used. David, a young man, maybe not even 21 years of age, is to be sent to a VA home for the rest of his life.

David asks if he can visit his family on the reservation. The answer is, “Of course.” David literally drags himself onto the reservation. He meets with the elders of tribe. They ask to hear his whole story. David tells them every horrible thing that he endured. He is full of anger, rage, and hate.

The elders confer and tell David to meet them tomorrow at a designated point on the Little Colorado River. David agrees and at the appointed hour he arrives. One of the elders tethers a rope around his waist; others remove the braces from his legs. They hoist David up into the air and as they throw him into the raging current of the Little Colorado River, they say, “Chethlahe, call back your spirit or die. Call back your spirit or die.”

David would later say that those moments in the Little Colorado River were the very hardest of his life. He had to fight himself for himself. And he was able to see the big picture; he understood why things unfolded as they did. For example, he realized that the raw chicken parts were meant as a source of protein to sustain him so that he might live.

David Paladin was thrown into the river as a very shattered man. David emerged out of the Little Colorado River like the phoenix out of the ashes. He had metaphorically walked through the fire, or, in this case, swum through the currents, and had come out alive. He was born again.

And, that, dear ones, is what I think healing is all about for each of us. It is calling home our energy; it is calling home our disenfranchised pieces and parts. It is letting go of the toxic and the outdated. It is reclaiming ourselves.

David no longer needed his braces; he became a shaman, teacher, and artist and went on to work with priests and addicts. He died in his middle years in the mid 1980s.

* Remember David sketching during his tour of the Pacific and speaking Russian when the Allies first found him half-dead at the camp? It turns out that David was channeling, i.e., the Russian artist Kandinsky. In fact, Kandinsky’s best friend came for a visit to the U.S. from Russia. The friend, the story goes, told the press that he felt as he had spent the day with Kandinsky.

The heart of a home: tales of suicide and compassion

heart and homeThe foreclosure agents repeatedly rang her doorbell; there was no response. They pounded on the door; there was no response. The locksmith, who accompanied the team, unlocked the door; whereupon, they saw 53 year-old Amaya Egaña standing on a chair on the sixth-floor balcony of her apartment in the Basque city of Barakaldo, Spain. Upon seeing the agents enter her now-foreclosed home, Amaya jumped off her balcony and died a short time later from the injuries she sustained.

Egaña’s death was not in vain. Her suicide became the tipping point in a series of suicides and ongoing street protests that have now prompted the banks in Spain to stop foreclosure proceedings for two years for those who cannot pay their mortgages (under certain provisos regarding income and young children at home). The news reports say there will be financial repercussions for the creditors.

In Spain, Italy, Greece, Ireland, India, the US, and other countries, “suicide by economic crisis” is a very real event. Far too often, hard -working family members are faced with the shame, despair, hopelessness, and powerlessness of being unable to keep a roof over the heads of their loved ones. These repercussions are bloody and tear-stained.

On a bitterly cold night in an upmarket enclave of London, there is a knock on the door, a homeless man asks, “May I sleep on your porch tonight?” The homeowners are taken aback, but they quickly invite their unexpected guest to spend the night in their home. They offer food, a hot drink, a blanket – all of which their visitor refuses. He simply wants a sheltered place near their front door to sleep for the night. They agree.

Now, three years have passed and the homeowners and their visitor are on a first-name basis. Every cold night, their visitor is fast asleep on their porch. They acknowledge one another when their paths cross in town. The homeowners have put a chest in a corner of their porch for their visitor to stow his night gear. Every once in a while, they will leave a warm sweater; on particularly cold nights, there is a thermos of something warm to drink. Their visitor always leaves them a note that says thank you.

In a world rife with fear and apprehension and all-about-me-ness, these London homeowners take my breath away. Would I have been able to be so boldly compassionate? Could I have responded with an immediate open heart, especially when it comes to the idea of my home?

Be it a house, an apartment, a lean-to, a car, a tent, a mountain top or cave, our home is our sense of personal space. Indeed, our home — in whatever form or fashion– is our personal castle and sanctuary.

Just the sound of the word “home” can connote deep feelings of safety and a place where we let it all hang out. Home is our shelter from the elements – as well as a world gone mad. We can close the door and block it all for the moment. Home serves not only as our physical base; it is also our psychological touchstone — all will be well when I get home, when I am surrounded by the familiar, the comforting and the comfortable. At home, I can slip into my fuzzy slippers, tattered sweatpants, and take a breath.

Home is a heavily weighted four-letter word.  It is a psychological anchor, physical tether, and for many, a once-considered secure financial investment to keep body and soul together.

In today’s world where a precarious economic climate has been sent teetering by bloated banks, profit-margin-crazed corporations, redundancies, shifts in the work force, and CEO payments and perks akin to the national budgets of a small country, the individual has been summarily overlooked in favor of the greater bottom line. From my perspective, many companies have lost their heart. Hey, no problem in making a profit….but does it have to cost so much that mothers jump off their balconies. Was there no thought to the ramifications? Does global leadership preclude the consideration of consequences?

The banks and creditors can be like the Big Bad Wolf; they huff and puff and can blow your sense of home to smithereens. In the Old West, these banks would have been met with the business end of a rifle because losing one’s home is a place of enormous desperation.

Where to go? What to do? Without your home, you are adrift, homeless, and helpless. It’s hard to get a step up when you have no home base — no restful place to sleep, bathe, dress, cook a meal, or do your homework.

And, then, there are those like our polite gentleman on the porch who has, like many others, his own story about how he ended up without a place to call home and living off the streets. Be it mental illness, physical disabilities, unemployment, substance abuse, lost family, or no traction and going under, he represents one of many. And the numbers of the homeless are increasing exponentially.

Mother Teresa said, “If you can’t feed 100 people, then feed just one.” And, that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is where it all starts. It starts with one person making an act of compassion.

Be it a check for the shelter, a bag of groceries for the food bank, support of the veterans (current stats place them at 40% of the homeless population and inordinately high risk of suicide), children’s advocacy (1.5 million children, that’s 1 in 50 go homeless every year in the US), job training, ethical business practices, and the myriad of creative things we can dream and do to help one another, each of us needs to be mindful of our ability to make a difference. Drop by drop, compassionate act by compassionate act, we change the statistics and help our neighbors find a place to call home.

As the saying goes, “Home is where the heart is.”