THE FIRE CHOSE ME

There was a time in my life I felt like I was dying inside.

Not literally “dying” in the classic sense, but every day felt like suffocation. I walked through the world like a ghost haunting my own existence, disconnected from everything that should have mattered.

I couldn’t ground myself. 

I couldn’t be present.

I couldn’t connect authentically with another human being if my life depended on it, and vulnerability….yeah….like many I was convinced it was a sign of weakness.

The numbness I felt inside was suffocating.

So I did what lost souls do.

I reached for anything that might make me feel alive again. Drugs. Alcohol. and even rebellious acts of civil disobedience and extreme adventures where I intentionally risked my own life.  Anything to escape the prison of my own disconnection.

But rock bottom has a way of clarifying things. Sitting there, spiritually bankrupt and emotionally hollowed out, I realized I had two choices: stay buried in the wreckage of who I thought I was supposed to be, or burn it all down and start over.

I chose fire.

What followed was a journey that defied every expectation I’d ever had about my life. From Silent Retreats to Ashrams. From Sacred ceremonies to Breathwork Journeys in distant lands, and then to Teachers who saw through my masks before I even knew I was wearing them.

I wasn’t looking for Tantra specifically.  I was looking for life itself. A reason to live, something to live for.

I was a refugee from my own inheritance, fleeing a legacy that had left me spiritually starving. I didn’t know what I was running toward, but I knew exactly what I was running from: a tradition that had taught me to conquer instead of connect, to shame instead of celebrate, to numb instead of feel.

And then I found it. Or maybe it found me.

The path that would teach me that the very things I’d been running from, that my body, my sexuality, my authentic self, were actually the doorways to everything I’d been searching for.

But I didn’t just stumble onto Tantra. My spiritual journey was… complicated.

For years, I was a proud atheist. Facts over faith. Proof over possibility. Only what could be seen, measured, understood.

When that worldview crumbled, I threw myself into Buddhism for nearly a decade. But even then, I was always window shopping, dropping into spiritual circles, sampling churches across different religions, studying Taoism and Jainism, Hinduism and Sacred Geometry. I even traveled to Thailand at one point to study with a Taoist Master thinking this was somehow going to be the end, as if meeting the final boss in a video game.  Little did I know, this wasn’t the end. It was just the start of yet another path.

I was spiritually promiscuous, always seeking but never quite landing.

Until Tantra. The moment I encountered this path, something clicked. This wasn’t just another spiritual experiment;  this was home. This was what I wanted to dedicate my life to teaching and offering to the world.  

It’s hard to put into words and make it make sense. But even when I first found Tantra, I wasn’t actually immediately pulled in. In fact, I mocked it.

I made fun of people who believed in things like chakras. I laughed at words like lingam and yoni. I rolled my eyes at anyone wearing linens or crystals. I was that guy; the spiritual seeker who somehow still had a superiority complex about other spiritual seekers.

Looking back, I’m not sure what the final straw was, but I suddenly found myself somewhere I never thought I’d be again. I was homeless. For the third time in my life.

But I didn’t see it that way. I saw this as an opportunity to get away. To travel, to be a nomad for a while, to go on some adventures and to answer the call I’d been ignoring for years.

And somewhere in that nomadic wandering, with all my old identities stripped away; the successful businessman, the married man, the guy who had it all figured out….. I became open to possibilities I’d never considered before.

Including the very spiritual path I’d once mocked.

I remember getting a text from my old friend, Chandrika, asking if I was okay. She’d had a vision about me, she said, and wanted to know if I needed anything.

Sheepishly, I agreed to a phone call.

Four hours later, she was telling me she saw me as a powerful leader. A role model for men. A man of integrity who should be teaching Tantra.

I laughed at her. “Are you insane? Did you not just hear me tell you I’m homeless?”

She insisted I was in my own way. That this was what I was meant to do.

I hung up angry, feeling completely unheard. Like she’d missed everything I’d just shared with her.

The betrayal was coming from every direction. My marriage had imploded. Lifelong friendships had crumbled. I was fighting for custody and visitation with my kids while being publicly dragged through the mud on social media for my personal failures.

My storage unit had been robbed. My second unit flooded.

And then the coup de grâce – I was T-boned at an intersection, my beloved truck destroyed in an instant.

My home. Gone.

I sat in the wreckage – literal and metaphorical – and realized I had finally arrived at the place where there was absolutely nothing left to lose.

Sometimes the universe has to strip away everything you think you are before you can discover who you actually are.

This time around I didn’t chose the fire.

The fire chose me.

As I sit here writing, attempting to tell you my story, reading and editing, proofreading and reviewing, I realize there is no way I can accurately tell my story in anyway that will give you the full picture.  So instead I will just share what I believe to be the most relevant, and share from my heart.

But first, I need to honor the teachers who helped forge me in this fire.

Starting in the early 90s, there was Khadija, Radion, and a number of people whose names I’ve forgotten, but whom I have not forgotten. Whether it was a Kundalini Yoga class, a breathwork session, a psychic reading or tarot interpretation, or just a kind-hearted conversation – these early encounters forged the start of a lifelong journey I had no idea I was taking.

Then came my greatest teacher, my lifelong friend Chandrika, who never once used the word Tantra with me but taught me about Shiva and Shakti. She explained that her family heritage was of the Shakta lineage – words that went completely over my head at the time, but still live with me today.

Over the next two decades, I would be blessed to study with some of the true pioneers and masters of these arts – Charles Muir, Mantak Chia, Dr. David Frawley, Shivakti Ma, Chris Luth, Shawn Roop, Guru Dev Singh, Francoise Ginsberg, and others whose wisdom helped shape not just my practice, but my very being.

Other notable mentions: Monique Darling, Peter Peterson, Cathleene Cienfegues, Lawrence Lanoff, James Stevenson, Taina Ixchel Jorda-Cid.

This list is not comprehensive.  It’s just scratching the surface.   If I were to include all the mentors, coaches, academic professors, and authors whose wisdom shaped my path, the list would be endless.

And I must acknowledge my greatest teachers of all – the women who opened their hearts, bodies, and souls to me along this path. Their names I will keep sacred and private, as they deserve, but their teachings live in every breath of this work. They taught me that the feminine is not something to conquer but something to worship. Not something to possess but something to serve. Not something to understand but something to surrender to.

In Tantra, we say the guru appears in many forms. Sometimes as a robed master in an ashram. Sometimes as a lover whispering truth in the dark. Sometimes as your own broken heart, finally ready to heal.

I never felt like I belonged anywhere. I was always the lone wolf, never satisfied with the status quo, always pushing beyond the comfortable boundaries that kept others contained. I left people behind who couldn’t understand my restless seeking – some who still feel wronged by my refusal to stay small.

But through all the wreckage and rebuilding, I discovered something unbreakable: I’m resilient as a cockroach. I will never stop trying to become a better version of myself. Learning and growing isn’t just what I do – it’s who I am.

To that brooding young Goth kid who felt so disconnected from life – I would tell him he’s on exactly the right path. Don’t change a damn thing. That dissatisfaction with the ordinary world? That’s your compass pointing toward something extraordinary.

Because here’s what I know now that I didn’t know then: I don’t just live life anymore. I get to experience it. Fully. Completely. Without the numbing filters that once kept me trapped in my own existence.

On a shamanic vision quest, somewhere between the desert stars and my own dissolved ego, I realized I wasn’t just on the path anymore. I was the path. There was nowhere else to go, nothing more to seek outside myself.

My teachers had been right all along. It was time to stop running and start teaching. Time to stop seeking and start offering what I’d found in the ruins of everything I thought I was supposed to be.

That ghost haunting his own existence? He’s finally come alive!

But the journey isn’t over. It never really is.

I must also honor my Kundalini Yoga teachers who opened doorways I didn’t even know existed, and finally, my current Guru from the Kashmir Shaivism Tantra lineage – a teaching more pure than any other I have found.

He has agreed to be my teacher, but with a condition that cuts to the very core of who I’ve become: he will not acknowledge me as his disciple so long as I hold multiple lineages. This is a pure lineage, he says, and it must be kept as such. .

It’s an internal battle that has kept me awake at night. Everything in my gut tells me he’s right – that if I truly want to serve at the highest level, if I want to claim this lineage that calls to my soul, I will have to honor it completely. That means letting go of everything else that brought me to this moment.

Yet one more fire I will have to pass through.

But perhaps that’s exactly the point. Perhaps the path never stops asking us to surrender what we think we need in order to become who we’re meant to be. Perhaps this lone wolf who never belonged anywhere is finally being called to belong completely – to one path, one lineage, one truth.

The choice is before me now, as clear and terrifying as every other crossroads that led me here.

Some fires we choose. Some fires choose us. And some fires… we have to walk into with our eyes wide open, knowing they will burn away everything we thought we were, one more time.