Freedom’s Just Another Word For Risking to Find Your Song
September 23rd, 2006
During my senior year at Harvard, two weeks from graduation, I walked into the room of a friend who lived down the hall. He was knee deep in backpacking and mountaineering gear. I asked him what his plans were after graduation. (Most of us were already slotted to go to med school, law school or graduate school.) He told me that he was off to go mountain climbing in Nepal. “What about after that?”, I asked. “Who knows?”, he answered and got back to arranging his gear.
As I walked back to my room, it occurred to me that he just might be on the right track. Three months later, I had dropped out of med school, on my way to Berkeley, California where I spent the next five years living in communes and experimenting with psychedelic drugs. Eventually, I went back to med school, but this time it was my choice. During my third year in med school, I became heavily involved with a kind of yoga, moved into an ashram and started wearing all white and a turban. My colleagues and teachers at the hospital were shocked, to say the least, but my patients loved it. They thought I was some kind of Indian guru and opened all their most intimate secrets to me in a matter of minutes.
That journey too became stale. A friend introduced me to a human potential training called, “Lifespring”. Halfway into the seminar, the teacher said to me, “I don’t know what kind of trip you are on,” she said, “but, in my opinion, it’s not spiritual at all. You are serious, totally disconnected from your feelings and sexually repressed.” And that was the end of the white clothes and the turban.
I went into therapy and discovered that working with healing mine and other’s troubled souls was my calling in life. After a residency in psychiatry, I left a budding practice to go to India to visit a radical spiritual master and ended up living in his commune for almost ten years.
Eventually, I began leading workshops, wrote some books and have become reasonably successful in my work. After many dysfunctional relationships, I managed to find “the one” (perhaps as a result of much inner work, perhaps, as my mother says, just good luck.) We have lived and worked together for the past fifteen years and nothing turns me on more than helping people find love in their lives. And that has become my song.
by Krishnananda (Thomas O. Trobe, MD)
Founder and Director of “Learning Love Seminars”
Sedona, New Mexico, USA
Learning Love Seminars
Thank you for sharing your experience. I admire your courage and determination to continue searching to uncover what was truely right for you. Congratulations on finding your song!
Your honesty paid off - sounds like you remained willing throughout - I admire that - your humility (still not saying ‘I have arrived’ but rather, ‘this is as far as I have gone to date’) is very appealing. I like your metaphor of the song because even when we have begun to sing our song, it can become stronger and surprise us with a new note we didn’t know we could offer. Thanks for your humour about how we are stuck in revering holy men.