The Lost Years

One of the many things I’ve learned with age is that there are lots of peaks and valleys during one’s life. When I left San Diego, I had reached a significant peak. Little did I know I was headed for a very deep valley.

I didn’t know what I thought I would do once I returned to Washington. Things seemed to be going OK at first. I had managed to line-up some venues for teaching t’ai chi, but since this wasn’t enough to make a living, I needed to have a “real” job.

In the Navy, I’d learned how to type. That was my one marketable skill. After a relatively short time back in my home town, I knew I couldn’t go back to living there. I felt I didn’t belonged there anymore. I had changed–the town hadn’t. So I started looking for work and a place to live in Seattle. I got a job at the UW as a receptionist for the Health Sciences Department at University Hospital. Cool, I was working in the U-district! I found a little cottage to rent in West Seattle right across from Lincoln Park and the ferry terminal to Vashon Island. Another score! Seemed things were falling right into place.

Life took another good turn 6 months later when I got a job at Boeing. For someone with no real skills, a high school diploma, and one year of college they were offering what–at the time–was more money that I could imagine. Like most newbies at Boeing, I moved around a lot. It seemed like every 6 months or so I was moved to a new location with a new job and new shift. Teaching t’ai chi classes was no longer possible with all the Boeing moves, so I ended them after less than a year.

Working at Boeing was stressful. Because of all the moves, I was always the new guy and just about when I figured out how to do my job, I’d get moved to a new one. Alcohol became my very close companion. I started living for the weekends–going out to bars and taverns. I was over 21, alcohol was legal, and I was able to drink a lot of it. Problem was, more often than not, I couldn’t remember what happened when I woke-up (more like “came to”) the next morning. I later learned these are called “blackouts” and an early warning sign of impending alcoholism.

Since I liked drinking, but kept having blackouts, I came up with what–at the time–seemed a perfect solution. Cocaine was at the height of its popularity during this time (late seventies). It gave me lots of energy and kept me awake. It seemed to counteract the alcohol. Unfortunately, like coffee on steroids, cocaine doesn’t sober anyone up–it just leaves you wide-awake AND drunk. Worse yet, cocaine has a very short half-life. This means it wears off quickly–more quickly than alcohol. So the cocaine keeps you up and you drink even more because you don’t notice the effects of the alcohol because the cocaine is temporarily masking them. The cocaine runs out, the bar closes. Time to drive home. Halfway home the cocaine wears off and the full wave of alcohol hits the brain. Nighty night!

Do this long enough and, if you’re lucky, you end up in a jail cell charged with DUI. Guess what, coming out of a blackout and finding you’re in jail REALLY sucks. It also gets your attention. A few weeks later and I’m off to rehab to avoid having a DUI on my record. 26 years old and fresh out of rehab. I think this safely qualifies as a “valley” and a pretty deep one to boot. Three weeks in rehab gave me plenty of time to think. How did I get here? When did it all go so wrong? What’s next?

Well, the good news is that there’s only one direction to go when you hit bottom. Fortunately Boeing has an employee assistance program, so by telling them I had a problem and getting help they didn’t fire me. I still had a job.

I tried going out a few times after rehab. No drinking, but it was also no fun–in fact–just the opposite. Socially and emotionally I was back in Junior High when it came to dating. In my mind I was rejected before I ever even asked someone out, so why bother? It was so much easier when I had a few drinks and some lines (not the “do you come here often” kind–the coke kind). Misery and disappointment seemed to stretch out as far as I could see. Well, if that’s the case I’ve got nothing to lose. Maybe it was time for another reinvention.

Sometime between kindergarten and first grade, I developed a pretty serious stutter. It stayed with me through most of Junior High until I found something that not only got me over it, but took me to the opposite end of the spectrum. By the time I graduated, I received my high school’s drama award after acting in every school play since my sophomore year. The answer was simple–if I could be someone other than me, then I would be OK.

About this time, punk rock/new wave was taking over the music scene. A subgroup of this was the rockabilly revival (remember the Stray Cats?). My stage was set. Shy self-conscious me became a rockabilly rebel. DA haircut, white sportcoat with fake leopard skin lapels, sideburns, shades–I was a real cool daddy-O! After seeing me jitterbug to the boppin’ beat, girls we’re asking ME to dance! I had learned how to have fun with being chemically altered. All I had to do, was not be me. But, I was starting to crawl out of the valley.

California Dreamin’

After a year in Virginia Beach, I was transferred to San Diego, CA. This came at the perfect time as I now had a direction for my spiritual quest and was heading to the center of the new age spiritual universe–California. I was assigned to the administrative staff of the Rear Admiral in charge of all surface forces in the Pacific Fleet (basically everything except submarines and aircraft). I was stationed at the Naval Amphibious Base at Coronado–home of Navy Seals basic training.

San Diego was paradise for someone who spent his first 18 years of life in rainy, gloomy Western Washington. Nearly perfect weather every day. It rained in San Diego about as often as it snowed in the lowlands of Western Washington. The other 360 days it was sunny and in the 70s during the “Winter” and in the 80’s during the Summer. Next door to a warm Pacific Ocean that you could actually swim in and only a few hours drive away from the San Bernadino Mountains and miles of desert that included Joshua Tree and the Coachella Valley.

I began reading every book I could find on Buddhism and Taoism (and there were a lot of them). I also began taking yoga classes along with practicing Transcendental Meditation (something I picked-up in Virginia Beach). In my readings, it seemed that the general consensus was that spiritual experiences via psychoactive substances were not the “real” thing–they could be a catalyst for beginning a spiritual journey, but they needed to be supplanted by more traditional practices if one wanted a permanent transformation. As Houston Smith–the great scholar of world religions–said, “Having a spiritual experience is easy, living a spiritual life as a result of that experience is what’s hard.”

During this time, the one writer primarily responsible for my initial understanding of Buddhism and Taoism was a popular interpreter of Eastern philosophy–Alan Watts. I liked Watts because, like me, he was a mostly self-taught religious scholar with a strong affinity for Eastern philosophy. Born in England, he served as an Episcopal priest for 5 years before moving to the United States in 1951 to accept a teaching position at the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco. During his lifetime he also had a teaching fellowship at Harvard and was a frequent speaker at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Watts had a way of taking the most complex philosophical concepts and making them easily understandable, which was a big part of his popularity.

Alan Watts was close friends with a fellow British expatriate–Aldous Huxley. Like Huxley, Watts experimented with Mescaline, Psilocybin, and LSD in America. But unlike Huxley, Watts came to reject these substances as valid tools for a spiritual seeker. Ironic, because Watts died at age 58 due to heart failure exacerbated by his lifelong alcoholism.

Armed with a foundation of key concepts in Eastern philosophy thanks to Watts, I was able to gain a better understanding of source texts in Buddhism and Taoism. I found myself particularly drawn to Taoism. I think this was because I had not yet learned to separate the teachings of the Buddha from the religion that sprouted up around them. Later on, I would discover that the quickest way to destroy a spiritual teaching is to make it an organized religion.

Taoism led me to t’ai chi–the ancient Chinese slow-motion martial art based upon Taoist philosophy. Since learning Transcendental Meditation, I had experienced ongoing difficulties with seated meditation. For one, no matter what position I tried to sit in after about 5 minutes my lower back hijacked my attention leaving little left for meditation. Also, I seemed to have hit a wall with seated mediation and wasn’t getting much from it.

T’ai chi was often described as a “moving” form of meditation. I was ready to give it a try. All I needed to do was find a teacher. One Saturday I was strolling through Balboa Park, when I saw a group of about 10 people doing–you guessed it–t’ai chi. They were led my an elder Chinese man who simply went by “Mr. Leong.” All I needed to do to join the class was show-up on Saturdays and give Mr. Leong $5 when class was over. Sounded simple enough. I studied with Mr. Leong for about a year, learning Wu style empty hand and short staff t’ai chi forms.

The more I practiced t’ai chi, the more I wanted to learn–not only of t’ai chi, but of its sister arts. This has been a recurring theme in my life–if I decide to get into something, I jump in with both feet and don’t look back. I realized that continuing with Mr. Leong was no longer enough for me.

About this time, I met an interesting fellow from Oklahoma. He professed to not only teach t’ai chi, but many other Chinese martial arts. His name–Mike Brown. Mike had been into martial arts for quite some time before meeting a petroleum geologist from Taiwan, Her Yu Wong. Dr. Wong had studied Chinese martial arts since he was a boy in Taiwan. Since moving to the U.S. he continued his practice, but never took on any students thinking no one in this country would be interested. Mike was interested and soon became Dr. Wong’s first student.

Eventually, Mike Brown and Dr. Wong had started the Ching Yi Kung Fu Association to share Dr. Wong’s knowledge with others. In so doing, they set minimum standards for what anyone wanting to teach these arts needed to be considered proficient. So, if I wanted to teach t’ai chi as an instructor certified by the Ching Yi Kung Fu Association, I had to learn all the Ching Yi martial arts. This way, even if all I ever taught was t’ai chi, I would have a well-rounded background and understanding of the tradition from which t’ai chi emerged.

This was just what I was looking for. Now I could get a more comprehensive training in these disciplines from both the Taoist and Buddhist heritage. Through t’ai chi I had found a physical discipline that combined gentle exercise with meditative focus. Since I found the Taoist philosophical teachings so compelling, I wanted to see how the physical practices born of this philosophy could further my spiritual development.

After being discharged from the Navy, I stayed another two years in San Diego. During this time my life consisted of eating, working (just enough to pay expenses), sleeping, and practicing kung fu. I was learning everything I could from Mike and, eventually, helping him teach as an informal assistant instructor. At the time, I thought I would never return to Washington except to visit. San Diego was my new home. But shortly after passing my test to become a certified Ching Yi Kung Fu instructor, I decided it was time to head back North. My four plus years in the Golden State had come to an end. I loaded everything I owned into a VW Super Beetle and began driving North on I-5. The moment I crossed the border into Washington, it started snowing (this was in April). I should have seen that as an omen and turned around. I didn’t.