Denomio: 10. It Got Easier

My life since leaving has been good and bad, up and down, but it has been beautiful. I spent 7 months in Hawaii and it was perhaps the most beautiful time in my life. Day after day of the most amazing beautiful experiences. Part of the programming of the Buddha Field that I received was that if you leave, your life will fall apart. If you go against guidance, life will turn to shit. And part of me was afraid of that happening. But as I went through it, it was so much better than the last few years in the group that, even if it was going to eventually go to shit, I didn’t care because it was so much better. It was actually good! And I was enjoying my life again.

It’s funny… I had always wanted to go to Hawaii. It was the one place on the planet I had always wanted to go. And my mother, years before, was going with my stepbrother and stepfather and she had frequent flier miles… so I was invited to go for free. And I really wanted to go. But Angelo said no. That it was a desire. It was “a trip.” And we had a big fight about it… but this is an example of the fear of leaving thing… he said, “I see into the future and this will create a lot of karma if you get on that flight. It’s going to be bad news for you because I have this vision…” He would do that quite often about trips or leaving the group. “If you leave, you’re going to devolve… You’re going to fall back into that morass… “ Which didn’t happen… but it was a fear that I had to push through. That idea. But when staying in the group became more painful than the idea of what terrible thing could happen… it didn’t matter. Because whatever happened it was better than living this life that was completely outside of integrity.

I would say that I transformed in a positive way from the person that I was when I entered the Buddha Field. Had I not been in the group, I don’t think I would have had the evolution that I did. And I’m grateful for that. For a while, there was a bitterness that was under the surface (after I left)… when I looked back at the things that I perceived as lacking integrity… when the stories started surfacing… It made me angry and I wanted to protect people and defend them from this f.cked up stuff. It definitely raised my ire. One of the things that helped was talking to my cousin (who brought me into the group but had left several years earlier). He talked about how the first 4 or 5 years, he had a huge amount of transformation and that he was really grateful to the group because it provided him a shelter. He didn’t have the discipline to meditate without the group setting and it allowed him to be taken care of and supported and loved and do all the things that it did. And I stopped and took a look at my own experience and saw that I really did transform quite a bit. I grew up psychologically. I experienced love, service, devotion, getting out of myself…. And for that first several years it was really beautiful and then I stagnated. That’s when it became painful. So, looking from the outside in, while I can’t say that I advocate it for anybody… like if anybody was starting to get involved with the group now I would share my own experience with them and say, “Go into this with open eyes.” Then, if they’re still into it… maybe they’re in that transformative stage… because I did transform. I did get something out of it.

But had I known when I first met him what I know now, well, that would transform who I was then so I wouldn’t have had to go through it. If I knew then, what I know now. If I could go back in time and talk to that person, then I wouldn’t have to go through the things I’ve gone through because I would have already had the experience… but I needed the experience to transform into the person I am today. So, no, I would not go through that again because some of it was incredibly painful. And if I could have understood at 21 what I understand now… it wouldn’t have been necessary. Ultimately, I think I had a better life as a result of learning how to meditate and doing this discipline and doing service -- but it came with a price. If there were a way of telling myself that and not going through it, then yeah, I would have skipped it. But I had to have those lessons to get to the point where I am now.

I still have healing to do relative to my experience so I’d say that I’m at an 8.5 on the healing spectrum. When I was in Hawaii, to be honest, I rarely thought of the Buddha Field. Except when people started calling and telling me how the group was deteriorating. There was a point of Angelo doing whatever he could to bring people back into the fold and when it became apparent to him that you weren’t coming back, then you were pushed or got kicked out. It was a bit of a f.ck you because I had seen it happen to other people and I knew it was happening to me. I knew Angelo was probably calling Guienevere and Teresavila when I left and telling them to encourage me to stay in Hawaii. “Hawaii is a really beautiful place for you to be.” And then after I came back to Austin I was talking to someone still in the BF about planning on moving back to Hawaii and suddenly they’re saying, “It’s so expensive… why would you want to move out there” (Because Angelo has relocated there.) I knew what was happening. I had seen it too many times. So, while it didn’t feel good, that was the nature of the BF, so I wasn’t offended like, “How can this be done to me?” It’s done to everybody. That’s the nature of it.