I was wrapping up dinner with Mastin Kipp, the editor of The Daily Love. It felt like meeting a long lost brother. And both of us being coaches, we offered our thoughts, feedback, advice.  At the end, I asked him his intuition about me… “You have a big heart. You really want to give a lot. But I think you need to focus. I sense you’re distracting yourself. There’s something you really don’t want to feel, and I don’t know what that is.”

That was when I started looking scared. I think I even gripped the table.  I knew he was right, but I had no idea what that feeling was. And I had a sense that even if I did know it, knowledge wouldn’t do much.

He said the only way to really get to the core of what we’re feeling is to eliminate all the things that are distracting us from those emotions. That includes alcohol, drugs, caffeine, sugar, sex, masturbation, even flirting. It includes eliminating wheat, dairy, and taking a range of vitamins, enzymes, and alkaline water. I decided to add to the list:  No TV, and no radio in the car so I can really hear any thought or emotion I may be avoiding.

I’m almost two weeks into it and it’s been quite a roller coaster. The physical detox has not been hard because I tend to be healthy anyway, but my thoughts have been all over the place. I’ve been quite irritable, finding something annoying in almost every situation (or every person).  It’s like all this blame is getting out of my system. I have to be very, very careful not to act on my thoughts because I know they’re very temporary and very misguided.  And I’ve had a lot of thoughts of self-hatred. That’s actually nothing new for me, but my usual strategy would be to immediately think something different, whereas now it’s like I’m watching another person. It’s kind of eerie, but in a cool way.

What’s even more eerie is my sleep patterns. Almost every night I go to bed around 10 and then I’m wide awake at 3am. Often I’ll get a lot of work done, or read. But one night I realized that beyond all the physical vices, I actually have mental vices.  I spent about 5 hours researching crazy business ideas and reading up on economic and alien conspiracies. As the sun started to rise, I realized that while it was fun it made me anxious, tense and I really had nothing good to show for it.

Sometimes I feel totally at peace, especially after a Kundalini yoga class. Sometimes everything makes perfect sense, sometimes I’m totally confused, or my body is just covered in pain.  But the roller coaster isn’t even the hard part. It’s interesting, it’s fascinating. It’s weird…  The hard part is when those emotions end. When it’s just me. Alone. Deeply tired in a way I can’t explain. Wondering what the point is, to anything.

“What are you most afraid of?” Heather asked.  She and David are two amazing healers.

I lied there on the table, thinking of one image… “Buried alive. Definitely getting buried alive. I think that would be the worst possible scenario.”

I went there in my mind. Not avoiding it, but actually visualizing myself there. Lying in the casket as we worked through what that means – Being alone, in the dark, totally constrained, no way out. And facing it, the fear disappeared. I felt warm and relaxed, and she whispered, “What if you’re not really in the casket… What if you’re in the womb?”

And then it was like my world shifted through this paradoxical feeling like I hadn’t gone anywhere but I’m in a totally new place.

I had this incredible feeling that my life is about to begin…

(Click here for Part 2)