Addiction, Death & Renewal.

Fourteen days since dad died 21 years meth free, 7 spent spinning realities in the Matrix Energetics. Seven home. Seven has always been significant in cycles for me.

Death doesn’t steal dignity. Dignity bows to death. As does stubbornness and everything else, eventually.

Tears poured from what felt like every pore in my body last night, not just my eyes, as I writhed on the bathroom floor.

This was the first “real” cry I had since 17 days ago after I listened over the speaker phone as Dad was carried from his bedroom by a team of paramedics.

My last words to my father—spoken after over a year of him ignoring my bids for connection and communication—were, “Thank you, Daddy, for letting them help you.” That was after begging him to take the morphine that would make it more comfortable for the paramedics to remove him from his basement-like bedroom.

Before begging Dad to accept help, I had gotten to spend a few minutes telling him some other things. Things like: “I love you. I’m caring for your great-granddaughters; they are remarkable beings. I have been wearing the bracelet you gave me for my 30th birthday everyday for the last month; the platinum and topaz one.” I recounted fond memories of taking trips in our 1970’s model orange Suburban. And I reminded him that my mehtaversary was coming up—just a few weeks away—and “I do not think I would have made it into my sobriety if it were not for him, his support, community, and Matrix Energetics 21 years ago.”

Twenty one years ago: 3 cycles of 7.

Seven is significant in cycles for me.

At the age of 8 nearly 9, I moved with my parents to the Royal Teton Ranch, the main property of Church Universal and Triumphant, the “New Age” “cult” in which I was raised. We were there for almost exactly 7 years, moving to Bozeman, MT right before I turned 16 so mom could attend Montana State University and I could moonlight as a sophomore at Bozeman High before dropping out.

I was nearly 17 the first time I tried actual meth, not just some pharmaceutical or diet drug variety of speed. That little foray also lasted almost exactly 7 years (on and off, pausing for pregnancy, birth, and other interludes). I left Montana and methamphetamine behind when I was 23, a few months shy of 24.

Today I sit, a few months shy of 45, having moved back to Bozeman a few months ahead of having spent 14 years in the Seattle area—7 of which I spent on the edges of, entrenched in, and teaching upon the Matrix Energetics stage, another 7 spent recovering from and integrating that experience.

Wait, did I just say “recovering” from teaching and being in the Matrix Energetics world? Why, yes. Yes, I did.

In the years which I have been exploring the “roots”, spirals, and ways my system “out sources” addictive tendencies, it was revealed to me that all I have ever been doing with any addiction was mimmicing and recreating the internal and psychoneuroimmunological “sets” that were established in my childhood—the highs, the lows, the volatility, lack of repair, and lack of structure, the adrenaline, and adrenal crashes. That is the cycle of addiction in a “nutshell”. Whatever we “use” to perpetuate those “states” is just “filler” and catalyst.

How did Matrix Energetics recreate an addictive cycle for me?

In multiple ways. There was the “high” of being on stage, of being in “the field” which anyone who has attended any kind of large event can understand. Being on stage changes that, though. I was the focus of some of that energy and allowed myself to be “possessed” for lack of a better word by “the filed” and various collective patterns to facilitate personal and group transformational processes. Dare I confess: it was a little addictive. Cycles of “catharsis” can generate massive amounts of energy and awe, but may do very little when it comes to actual healing. It can actually become “loosh” or “supply” for various entities that “feed”off of heightened emotions. Those same “entities” often attach themselves to addicts. And, not to push any buttons, but it was pretty common for people who were “desperate” for healing, help, or something to be drawn to Matrix Energetics and other modalities which “promise” some kind of radical and unrealistic transformation.

If I sound a little jaded about all of this—I am.

I now have a very personal experience of death by medical neglect due to the belief in the “physics of miracles”.

I have also seen some shit! Bones mended, cancers disappeared, phobias vanished.

There is a propensity for such phenomenon-based “techniques” to draw the psychologically unstable and even perpetuate the mind/body split. However, there is also the potential for real miracles—mind bending, reality bending, awe-inspiring miracles! I have seen it, facilitated it and been on my knees humbled by the actual “field of miracles” and the hand of grace.

The group’s focus on me was in part because I have a genuine talent and aptitude for the “work”; I have integrated my own expression and interpretation of Matrix Energetics which is slower and more body-friendly (no dropping to the floor to prove something is happening) into my own work now called Senses and Symbols. I am also entertaining and easy to look at. The validation I received from both participants and my father fed healthy and unhealthy aspects of me. There was always a bit of a “crash” (which was also reported from other participants) from coming out of “the field”, off the stage, off the “road”, and landing back in “real”life. And then a week or 2 later, I got to do it again.

Much like when I was using meth, I made real connections. There was something “holding” me that reached beyond the material and “worked” on my psyche in ways of which I was not fully conscious. After the fact, I had the distinct feeling of having “used” and been “used”by Unseen forces both to my benefit and detriment. Coincidentally, that had been my experience when I came off of meth as well.

Dad “used” me, as he did many women in the seminars, business, and personal relationships throughout his life.He “hooked” into our energy through shared wounds.

Dad neither respected nor revered the feminine—not even in his own daughter. Though there were genuine moments of connection and play between us—which was what was widely witnessed by the audience and is part of the glamor that I now find myself peeling off of me—but under the surface the dynamic was extractive. An extractive structure was largely true for the entire energetic structure of the seminars, if not for the field of Matrix Energetics. The energy which was “harvested” from participants powered the phenomenon.

If you are someone who was present at these events and do not like, or are made “uncomfortable” by my description of it, I empathize and understand.

Nobody wants to realize that they were being fed from. And the feeling of being in the presence of something real, which was palpable! was also real. Human hearts focusing on and opening to possibility presented through a model for a far more malleable reality than most of us were “conditioned” to believe is possible. It was convincing. It was beautiful. It was real. And it was toxic. Not unlike my experiences in the reality powered by methamphetamine.

Phenomenon.

Excitation.

Connection.

Drop.

Not fair?

Nope.

But true, nonetheless.

There is a name for the phenomenon: it is called “euphoric recall”. It occurs often with techniques such as NLP that reorganize reality structures, but do not actually allow the body or neurology to encode for a differently “held” somatic reality. It creates a hormonal and emotional anchor to the experienced “phenomenon”, but the body does not necessarily recode deeply and relationally to what is offered. It can be a temporary “injection” of an altered state that can leave the recipient looking for more when the effects wear off… just like—yep! I’m gonna say it—meth.

About a year after I quit teaching on stage, I noticed that I still felt drained around a certain time of day during seminar weekends as I would when sitting on the stage after lunch. While still teaching, I had “chocked it up” to being full and sleepy, but when the phenomenon persisted I took a look at the energetics that were connected to the physical sensation of being “drained”. And do you know what I found? I found my father and the aspects of “the field” which were attached to his egoic structure “feeding” off of me. At that point, I went through and pulled all the parts of me that had been devoted to Matrix Energetics out of it.

Coming to the terms with the dual sided nature of my experience in Matrix Energetics was very much like detoxing from meth. I deeply missed genuine connections I had found made—and my system subsequently took years to recover from the ways it had been hijacked.

I no longer had the high of being on stage. I no longer had the admiration of the audience or even community—not in a way that it was palpable to me. I no longer had the “support” of my father or the adulation that had peppered my career on stage because that became rebukes, private and public, and repeated experiences of “having the rug pulled out from under me”—but that had begun in the years before I quit teaching, anyway.

In the years following, I became acquainted with the consciousness known to some as Wetiko, or what the buddhists referred to as “hungry ghosts”: a parasitic greed that infests human consciousness and seeks to destroy innocence, but who through working with with awareness can serve as an evolutionary catalyst for human beings. I came to see its influence in my father, in his business partner, and in myself.

I “worked” my own psyche, overturning every rock in my being that could potentially harbor narcissistic infection which is almost inextricable from the “field” of addiction. They give rise to each other—narcissism and addiction—as co-creative/destructive sides of the same coin and adaptations and mechanisms which often obscure, soothe, defend the same wounds.

As the daughter of a man who features heavily on the narcissistic “spectrum” and the descendant of ancestors whose relationships with substances most certainly forayed into being abusive and destructive, I have no interest in succumbing to either. I have devoted a surplus of resources: time, energy, and money into breaking the cycle of abuse, addiction, and abdication of emotional responsibility in my own life.

When I returned to Montana, the place where I began and ended my dance with meth, I found “parts” of myself still here, still in her early twenties, still attracted to unavailable and dangerous men. Still seeking solace through substances and dissociation.

I found a “part” of me, young destructive, and beyond redemption, that had to go on the pyre—who had to die, so I can live.

Seven more years worth of soul retrievals and inner child work, of somatic reconfiguring, and rewiring anxiety at the deepest level in my system. Seven more years to bring me to this third turning of this cycle which feels so bloody significant I can’t even fully express it for the immensity and the exhaustion that overcome me.

My feelings yesterday—my 21st methaversary—were complicated.

On one hand: here is this pinnacle of this cycle of 7 in triune form. A celebration of “sobriety” which I celebrated with a tall glass of chilled Pinot Grigio. On the other hand, there is this fresh wound that is my father’s death. Barely felt as of yet. Fresh tears earned. Writhing on the bathroom floor in pain, confusion, and agony warranted.

Where do I stand?

Fragilely.

I feel fucking fragile.

I am impatient.

On verge of tipping into blood and rage—physically, psychically, and emotionally.

I miss my dad, but I have missed him for a long time to be honest.

I miss his laughter and his power—but not his misuse of it.

I miss the fact that in a lot of ways I have never really had a father.

I had an initiator, a “teacher” who taught me the ways of Wetiko, whose treatment of me as a child drove me to seek toxic substances as well as relationships. I had a wound, the poison, and the medicine—not only from Dad, but from our whole bloody lineage, from the ones who treated him the way he treated us, his children, and maybe even worse.

I have a “nose”for the Worm that is the Enemy. It smells like rotten meat.

And I have fucking headache from trying to crawl back into the womb of the Mother via the green mat on my bathroom floor. Wailing into its artificial emerald fibers so as not to frighten the children under my wing.

I also have a lot of memories that are saturated in love, laughter, and grace.

~Justice

Fifteen days since Dad died as of today. It is maybe settling in more. There is, as you can read, so much attached to it. More to come as it is revealed to me.

PS. My telling the truth about my father, about my experience of him or Matrix Energetics or anything else—the rage, the hurt, the confusion, the pain—in no way detracts from my love.

It is just who I am.