Red Rock Redemption; The Unlikely Healer

This time it came from an unusual suspect of massive proportions… a former iron worker named Scott Medeiros. Scott has travelled all around the world, been to every continent, and built towering masterpieces in the sky on many of them. He’s a man whose bones have shattered multiple times, and whose legs separated from his pelvis so bad after a massive injury from a fall that he was told he would never walk again. He has been in a coma three times, has held no less than 10 dying people in his arms, and saved the life of at least 4! To say that Scott is a unique and fascinating individual, is an understatement. He is certainly a guy people meet at their crossroads.

Being that he isn’t versed at all in the healing world, the fact that he was clearly some type of Sangoma, alluded Scott. One of the prerequisites of being a Sangoma, a Shaman of sorts, is surviving the brink of death and then preceding to help many others at their crossroads. He was a phoenix alright, and Scott seemed to do what he does, nearly unconsciously.

I kept telling him.

“You’re a ferrymen. A bodhisattva. Someone who helps people cross, someone people meet at their brink.”

“Whatever you say kid!” Was always his response… or sometimes I’d be met with, “I’m about as shallow as a puddle kid.”

But having studied with teachers and healers from all over the world, I knew Scott held a lot of very unique medicine… and our connecting seemed kismet.

He was tour manager for the band, “Kung Fu” when we finally connected. I’ve actually known Scott for many years but we’ve both been kind of on the periphery of each other’s scenes. We’ve always been amicable and admired each other‘s presence and contributions to the music scene, but not really ever talked beyond the occasional smiles and short-lived greetings here and there.

It was after his last career-ending injuries in the iron-working field, that he became deeply involved with the music industry. Most of of which has been spent in both stage production and sound engineering. His contributions have enriched the Northeast community in particularly, greatly.

People on the scene call him, “The Captain.” Other nicknames include, “The Aggressive Tour Manager.” He is a real take-charge kind of guy who exudes leadership, and though he is extremely playful, in a mischievous prankster-sort-of-way… when it comes to his work he is a real pit bull. An advocate for those sensitive-empath-creatives whose brains are so overly developed in the virtuosity of their art, that they need such handlers to look out for them and function in other respects. Simple tasks such as getting them to a show on time to navigating the more complex intricacies and hassles of the music industry, whose proper handling results in a successful tour or overall career of a band… are what Scott seems to manage with ease. His diplomacy is masterful and his ear for the impurities in recordings when mixing down music, lends towards perfectionism. Incidentally, heightened, sharpened subtle senses- is another sign of a skilled empath. While possessing the skills of (empathic) sensory sensitivity OR strong protective advocacy are not uncommon, excelling at BOTH is.

Just from listening to his…”unabashed” (if not hilarious) dialogue with U-haul over the phone, (which resulted in a free rig) to hearing him tediously ensuring micro-details with a given venue were in place for his band to have a seamless experience, I quickly learned that he was the kind of guy you want on your team... and certainly the sort of guy you want by your side in a desert. 

It all started when he posted on social media that he was looking for a partner in crime to go out to the desert with, to Utah. More specifically, Moab, to see the towering geological Arches and vast expansive Canyon Lands.

I didn’t know it at the time but this was to be a healing trip for the both of us. For him, he had been sickened for a while by the toxicity that is associated with the music scene and wanted to get away from it. Now here I am, self-proclaimed Medicine Queen Muse of all the Wild Things, a writer, and a yoga instructor. A healer’s healer. Like Scott, most of the deeper healing stuff I do is not intentional, it’s just something that I can’t seem to even help… that seems to flow out of me, born from a deep love of others. I’ve worked with everyone from musicians with creative blocks, to elderly people, people recovering from MS, schizophrenia, invasive procedures, trauma, depression, and everything in between. I have 80 unique students in my classes each week for the last 20 years that I’ve been teaching yoga and healing modalities to, not to mention countless friends and comrades I provide support to.

This journey however, wouldn’t be about anyone else. It would be about me. I was in deep need to recharge my own batteries, to reclaim myself and reassess my life. I was lost and while I’m great at helping others, I’ve told myself for a long time that because I give so much, when it is me who is in need, it’s too much to burden anyone with the task of filling my cup. Over the years I’ve learned to give myself the medicine I needed, with my various yogic and Buddhist practices. It’s a lonely way though… and I was tired. And not to sound sanctimonious, but I had studied with so many teachers and healers… that I KNEW there truly were few people who could fill such a cup as mine. Tapping directly into Truth was my healing… that and the playfulness of my extra-ordinary imagination. The desert however, seemed like the perfect place to find answers, solace, if not perhaps… rebirth.

There is something primordially ancient and healing about the desert. It’s where all spirit questers, medicine masters, and shamans go when there is nothing left. When answers are needed that can’t be granted any place else. It’s an arid, shade-less and barren place where death is met boldly. Where the piercing sun’s light blazes up all shadows. In that blaze, fears and impurities perish… revealing to us the True.

So I responded to Scott’s message telling him that I had a little blue school bus named “Banjo!” and a desire to sprout some wings to journey with him. My last road trip with my 2 girls this past summer left me hungry for more adventure and addicted to the freedom, clarity, and independence that “Banjo” brings.

Little did I know how much Scott and I would hit it off! I soon learned just how much he too…. was tired. Bored. Disillusioned by the soul-sucking Americana clock-tick. When you have peeked behind OZ’s curtain, stared unflinchingly beyond the veil into the abyss, and drunk deeply from enough TRUE BLUE experiences that have real meaning… it’s hard to settle for anything less. That which is empty of real substance becomes intolerable; the mundane, simply unbearable. I “got” his kind of boredom.

As a powerful healer by the name of Jen Ward has said, “Being a victim in an empowered state of awareness is just too much of a transgression to reasonably tolerate… This is what so many of us are grappling with right now... We are learning the blueprints and instruction manuals of this empowered self. To shrivel up and cower on a wind glider or soar into the setting sun sniveling on ones knees is too ridiculous for any soul to wrestle with. Stand up and operate the equipment that you were equipped with…”

Yes, the conformist illusional veils of the world around us, seemed to be slipping off so fast, that all either of us wanted to do was to pour gasoline on anything that wasn’t whole and true in our lives. Smash the patriarchy! Burn it all down! Make Mutiny Grate Again! And whatever remains is worthy of reseeding and rebuilding from there.

So together, on the Sunday after Thanksgiving of 2018, not knowing a damn thing about each other, we took a leap of faith! Banjo-bus was the perfect pirate-ship chariot for a Captain and this Queen mythological mermaid-muse… and like renegade pioneers on the brink, we were out on a quest for inspiration and direction.

In leaping we found real friendship in each other as perfect strangers.

The trip was long and arduous out west. We were hit by every possible obstacle thrown our way…

Snow, ice, and overturned cars in Iowa! Pounding rain, fog, and sleep deprivation through Nebraska! Sabotage, drama, and loose ends that beckoned back at home! On and on… but despite the barrage of obstacles we had to plow through, we made light of the work of driving those long and trying 32 hours to Moab, with our unwavering determination, grit, and sheer giddiness. In fact, Scott’s Ganesha-like “don’t take no for an answer” way about him that seemed to allow him to accomplish seemingly impossible tasks in the 3D linear... matched my own. It took us only 2 and a half days to make it to Moab, UTAH!! …from Scott’s house in Connecticut! And this included an oil change in Denver, and a long rest at the famous Glenwood Hot Springs, tucked between Vail and Aspen, for a well-earned soak to celebrate!

It isn’t surprising to me to learn only now, that the therapeutic spring waters we were soaking in were called “Yampah,” or literally “Big Medicine” by Ute Native Americans. The Utes were the first known visitors to the mineral-rich hot springs, later discovered by Captain Richard Sopris, where he and his party of geographic explorers indulged in this healing spot in 1860. It is now… the largest hot springs on Earth.

I won’t beat around the bush though. It’s not like Scott and I got along perfectly. We are both alphas, have tempers and plenty of other flaws! I quickly learned that impatience was one big one we both shared. But they say, that your strengths are also your weakness flipped around. We both get a LOT OUT of people in this way, as leaders.

But here he was gruff and at times merciless with attaining our trip’s “goals”… and here I was, the primordial little medicine wolf queen who preaches that art, beauty, love and truth is found in the medicine of what each moment requires… presented IN the journey… and not in rushing towards some fabled destination. What I’m learning a lot about this year though, is the INCREDIBLY Healing and fortifying BALANCE found between loving-divine feminine-energy and that sacred-grounding, masculine-energy. I am actually learning that there is this amazing and essential connectivity in the pulse of that synergistic partnership.

What I think a lot of my lady peers and I are learning, is that for very powerful, highly creative, Yin-type women… there is very little that can “ground” such a charge EXCEPT a very strong sacred masculine ground.

I believe this sacred partnership has always been so, throughout the ages… but I think that along the way power was abused and corrupted. This created a sort of mistrust. In that broken trust, Sacred Masculinity became distorted, at times even seen as toxic-masculinity, pushed away by Divine feminine… Ultimately true sacred-masculinity perished and we all suffered.

But I think that only now... in this “me-too” savvy time, there is a Repairing happening… an amends… a recognition and a re-awakening for Masculinity to reclaim itself as the SACRED ROLE OF PROTECTOR. As more protective Sacred-Masculine role models emerge, TRUST is being restored… and with it the BALANCE that makes our Sacred Communities strong.

So I accepted Scott’s humor and powerful leadership, I forgave him for his bulldog ways, and I opened myself up to receive all the incredible medicine that he had to offer me.

What he gave me was a lot.

“Kali Yuga” is the name yogis give to the age we are currently in… The Iron Age. It’s a trying age of corruption and desecration that takes real fortitude to navigate through. So it sort of made sense to me that despite having travelled all around the world and worked with some of the best healers and teachers, THIS Guy, an ex-iron-worker might be EXACTLY who could teach me all about how to assert my strength and power to metaphorically bend iron, set boundaries… move mountains. A Golden Age of balance is said to follow the Iron Age of strife, beginning somewhere in the middle of the 21st century…. soon.

We were both disgruntled though. We have both lived a few! very full lives just in this one lifetime alone.

God’s soldiers in the trenches are never what we expect them to be though… all with golden harp and pristine milky white robes floating about on some cloud. They’re warriors. They’re damaged and bruised and are no strangers to the nitty-gritty. They got dirty mouths and big giant hearts and they know how to bullshit their way to getting the assholes out of the way. They are in the trenches, and they are champion angels. They’ve pulled back the curtain so many times in so many ways, that they have sharpened their subtle senses with a heightened clarity of perception to sniff out the bullshit from TRUTH. It’s “life in disguise” for them… and most don’t even know how much they are the only things holding all the light in this world from blowin out. They’re trudgin through trying to desperately STAY AWAKE in this limited, mind-numbing, sleepy paradigm and they’re all fucking exhausted. This world is exhausting.

Yes, God’s soldiers are tired and they’re all licking their wounds… God’s soldiers are like heavenly gargoyles on holy temples. They’re working tirelessly to keep the primordial fires lit… and all the hell demons away from blowing them all out.

Yes, Scott was just the motherfucker I needed. It was an unlikely partnership.

So on that blessed Sunday that we set sail to travel across this sacred Earth, we got to know each other as deeply as you would have expected two warrior-angel strangers to, after 7 straight days together. We became comrades, confidants, and we gave each other the downloads we both needed in that desert.

I can’t assume to understand fully what I gave him, but I know I gave him a lot too… I’d like to think I replaced his disillusionment with some soft grains of light, of compassion, of faith… perhaps in magic, in humanity, perhaps towards something whole. Perhaps in the music again… We joked that we were both married to the music… but that he was filing for divorce with it… but the bitch wasn’t haven’t it!

He kept alluding to how disarming I was and how open I made him.

What did Scott give me more specifically?

I was sickened by and desperate to get away from the hamster-wheel grind… the domesticated life that kept trying to pull me down into submission. I hungered to awaken my inner wildling wolf again… to run free. I thought I could find escape traveling the open road once again. That it would be like it was in summer. Some shred of joy and light… Yet even here on that romanticized road were constant reminders of what I was trying to get away from. Yes, every forlorn rest-stop splattered with profiteering Christmas peppermint mocha vomit… every bone-chilling, tiresome wind, snow, and ice storm… and every over-priced, Earth-sucking gas pump- reeked of it. And Scott? He had been down that road looking for the same gold I was… but he had been there and back 1 thousand times over and he understood where the real treasure was…

…in the eyes of his almost fully grown daughter. Meanwhile my two little angels at home with their still, baby-soft skin and eyes full of sunshine… were waiting for their mom’s return. Not just her physical return, but for her to feel settled again, in knowing where her place was, wherever that may be.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m the best they come as far as moms go. I say this with absolute confidence and humility. I pride myself on having educated and raised two of the most brilliant, compassionate, fierce, and capable queens. The time I spent on the road with my two daughters, they consumed so many novel-thick books on our trip, we had to stop at bookstores SEVERAL times to replenish Banjo’s stock! It was the happiest time of all of our lives, out on that road. We learned so much. Banjo is our pirate ship and represented freedom… but the girls had school, I had work, and that trip ended too soon.

I was also facing a lot of hardship in my marriage and for the first time in my life, boldly forging my own identity. I was determined to forge a life with my girls closer to that joy… more integrated with a lifestyle that allows that freedom. I just didn’t know how.

To even contemplate such flight from a cookie cutter life, might seem like a disgrace for a mother… but existential crisis serve a purpose. To follow them through is a rite of passage that must be pursued. There are so many who would go through their life with bitterness and regrets. Who would be happy to resign themselves to a half-assed, not truly present life full of resentment. The cowardly resign themselves to misery and to the chains of their own oppression in this way. They scoff at such rebellion to conformity… labeling it as “a midlife crisis,” but it’s a renegade healer’s journey to follow spirit. Shattering oppressive illusions is a truly awakened being’s journey. To seek out what’s real is not for the feint of heart. To be an explorer and to excavate a path of integrity takes great courage. And as king and queen breakers of complacency, and as devotees to freedom… those of us awake at the captain’s helm are required to drink quite deeply of inquiry and exploration.

So the download he gave me, to simplify it, was to shatter this illusion that I could protect the softness of divine feminine by running away from anything or anyone I perceived was threatening it.. Shattering the illusion that in being stationary that protection afforded was jeopardized. The download he gave me was in truly understanding that the same oppressive bullshit… exists everywhere. There’s no escape. So the real victory towards preserving that flow of light and freedom… is won by being strong, wherever we make our stand in right in our lives and communities. Making a stand as both nurturers AND fierce protectors. Doing it for each other but also finding that balanced contained within ourselves. That we indeed, must be like heavenly gargoyles on the holy temples within all our hearts and sacred communities. He gave me courage to face what I had to.

So where I belonged wasn’t as I had imagined… on some endless-summer seeded second-childhood winding road… safe from harm… running away from all my scars, battles, and all the unfathomable fantastical monsters chasing me… but found in standing my ground. Firm. With capable ALLIES. Not so stubborn alone and disconnected as I had always been, but JOYFUL with community I could count on, to “have me,” to have my back.

In truth I didn’t exactly come to this conclusion in the desert at all… in fact, it wasn’t until we were in a wind and hail storm in Nebraska on the way BACK home, (that incidentally landed us stuck in Omaha where we caught a Motet show unexpectedly!) that I had understood the great lesson the desert had given me. Banjo was sliding all over the place and there were trucks turned over on their sides all around us! It was terrifying. The song “FOMO” by Fruition kept echoing in my head and I was weepy all day. I cried and cried missing my babies, my children. I was truly scared for our life. Sometimes you need a good near-death experience I guess, to knock a lesson into you. That storm did that.

As Edward Albee said, “Sometimes its necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.”

Bryan Elijah Smith has a new song “In Through The Dark” that goes,

“I’m Goin away… turn out the light…

Going in through the dark and into the night…

Singing our songs all in reverse…

Give it more time and you won’t get burned…

You’re nothing like me.

I’m on the edge when you need me the most…

When you’re dying inside I’m haunting your Ghost…

Free from the fire burning all that ain’t whole…

When you break it in TWO…

Staring back at your soul…”

Burning all that ain’t whole… That stuck with me for some reason… the illusion of TWO, of that duality… masculine… feminine… sacred mirrors healing balance… helping us become whole again… and if that ain’t clear- throw it all into the fire… let it all go! Let go of everything in order to return correctly. Scott had been literally pieced back together so many times… body and spirit. He’d “been broke so many ways that whatever he held just spilled… much like the Sun’s rays spilling their sagacious beams right on over the hills…”- Surprise Me Mr. Davis

The journey of “un-learning” absolutely results in liberation. It’s a shattering, though. But Leap nevertheless… to come back to what’s real. To what’s waiting beyond that broken tainted stained-glass fogging up our mirrors… needing shattering. To get straight to the Light itself.

Like Holy Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita it takes courage to LEAP in this soul seeking quest. Don’t settle for abusing every which escapist substance or means towards a soul-numbing pseudo-liberation. Rather be BRAVE… go FURTHUR… because the leaping IS the fire… burning all that ain’t whole… and just on the other side of facing every pain square in the eye… till they all fall away… an undeniable fortitude and peace is waiting.

I think Scott and I were both sailing in the wild wind when we found each other… Ships at night… seeking that kind of peace and somehow tossed together by it.

He needed my light, my nurturing and sincere ways like I needed his fierce protection and strength. Perhaps the entire point of life is to INHERIT BACK out of our own FREE will and CHOICE- The path and dharma that has inherited us, WHOLE-HEARTEDLY… So we can return back deep into our lives with commitment and resolve. But to arrive at this, we must first find the ones who can show us all that we lack so we can see this, like a mirror. Scott was just the mirror and captain I needed to help steer me back home.

And I couldn’t help but understand that this healing wasn’t just about us. It wasn’t just about healing our own personal journeys… but that we were as if divine archetypes weaving the mythology like pioneers on the edge… tackling the quintessential task at hand of these times!! In repairing the Divine sacred partnership of masculine and feminine, for the purpose of strengthening ALL our communities. Pioneers don’t just go on quests for their own benefit. They bring the knowledge of the land and resources, updated maps and blueprints back to their homelands. Just like shamans don’t go to the desert for spirit quests simply for their own progress and enlightenment. They go to bring the updated medicine and wisdom of Sprit’s message back to the people.

When we returned from this glorious trip of adventure, learning, and resilience… I was undoubtedly changed. As was he. I was stronger. He was lighter. I felt more balance in wielding my strength and BOUNDARIES. He felt fed, more peaceful, and opened. It took an iron-worker, a very unlikely masculine spirit guide to give me the balancing healing I needed. And it took a feminine muse healer to give him the one he needed.

“I've never been a Captain… Always been a sailor
And until the sea releases me, a sailor I will remain
Well you worry about your mama.. Worry about your babies
And you dream about a love that only comes your way when you close your eyes at night…

…They may come to you with diamonds
They may come to you with roses
And then they come to you with promises, but darlin' I promise only this:
It's a sad old world, Sad old world,

Gotta to keep on trying That's all I know All I know
If you're lucky enough to have her You hold that pearl Hold that pearl

If you're lucky enough to have her
You Hold her Hold her Hold her…

We all come here as strangers
Beggars at the table
But we leave here arm in arm, laughing at the morning light”

-The Barr Brothers; “Never Been a Captain”

I hope you enjoyed this soul journey!

These stories hope to serve as downloaded breadcrumbs feeding birds… leading us always, advancing back home!

Love and Light,

Lara Wahl