L.A. Guru

By Marina Ginn

Reviewers state it best: "No glossed over self help piece this..." and "I would highly recommend this book before spending the big money required to attend intensives, boot camps, or retreats." 

Fans of superstar gurus like Tony Robbins or Eckhart Tolle will love this inside look at the culture of Hollywood gurus. 

The imagery is raw, vivid and captivating in this autobiographical account, leaving you fully invested in the outcome for the characters: a small group of spiritual seekers that sign up for a Hollywood guru's Intensive, and their teacher, a man who has devoted his life to spiritual leadership. 

If you're curious about what it would be like to work with a Hollywood spiritual guru to the stars, but you can't relocate to Los Angeles, or you don't have $50,000 and several years to devote to focusing on your personal growth, then this book is for you. 
Instead, live vicariously through the author, with humor and tears, in this accounting of her experience as a student of, and then assistant to, one of the top ten non-allopathic healers in North America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marina Ginn
• Release date: Jan 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9781524252298

Book preview

Disclaimer

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Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.  This book is meant to give general information on a variety of subjects, but is not an exhaustive treatment of those subjects.  I have tried to recreate my experience from memory, a journal I kept during the class, a binder of handouts I received in class, and the video footage that was recorded during the class.

For Nick

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to my two amazing daughters.  I wouldn’t have spent years trying to be a better person, and so this book wouldn’t exist, if you hadn’t inspired me to want to give you the best life I could.

Thank you Karl, for patiently helping me work through my stuff.

Thanks Nick, for the ongoing spiritual boot camp.

Thanks Mom, for setting the example.

INTRODUCTION

They say that when the student is ready, the teacher appears.  This is the story of my teacher.  My mom came to visit me in Los Angeles when my firstborn daughter was less than a year old, during one of my many crises.  She met a Doctor of Alternative Medicine named Doug Curtis at a health fair near my loft.  I felt like I had been there, done that with healing modalities, having been around New Age healers since my teen years.  She came home very enthusiastic about his work, but it was months before I would try it out for myself.

It was life-changing, making it easier to manage the stress of my unwanted separation and unprepared-for single motherhood.  I became a regular client at Dr. Curtis’ office for years.  I came home one day after an appointment with Dr. Curtis, and on that day I had a strange reaction to his work and called his office for help.

His secretary, Nina, answered.

I’m having a bad reaction today, I thought I should call you.

Is it physical, or emotional, dear?

Physical.

What’s happening?

Well, my feet feel nailed to the ground like they weigh a thousand pounds and I can barely walk.  And my vision is really blurred.  I feel very sick.  I can see my life flashing before my eyes.  I see that I’ve been blaming everyone else for my problems, but really I’m the one creating my life.

Nina chuckled.  That would be emotional.  Hold for the doctor.

Dr. Curtis came on the line and asked me to reiterate.  I can’t help you with this, but I know someone who can.  Did I ever tell you about the rollerblading guy?

No, I said.

I’m going to give you a phone number.  This guy is awesome.  He has worked with a lot of celebrities.  He was working with Nicole Brown Simpson before her death.  I’ve seen the videos, they were amazing.  He was warning her that he could see a knife to her throat, right before her murder.

I got chills.  I had never spoken to Dr. Curtis about my personal life, but he did know that I was going through a divorce.  What I hadn’t told him was that it was an abusive relationship.  I also hadn’t shared with him that we, too had a connection to the O.J./Nicole case.  I could feel that this synchronicity was important.  He gave me the phone number to Dr. Karl Wolfe.  I hung up and called him right away.

Hello, said a soothing male voice.

Hi, Dr. Curtis gave me your number.  He says you can help me.

What kind of session are you interested in?

Actually, I don’t know anything about your work.  I had a bad reaction today to Dr. Curtis’ alignment and he told me to call you but he didn’t tell me anything about what you do.

Well, the usual starting place is a skating session.  Why don’t you start there.  If you’re really ready to see the truth, this is very helpful.  If you aren’t ready, it can be upsetting.

Oh, I’m ready, I said, and scheduled with him.  He was booked a month out, but he could sense the urgency in my voice.  He added me to his schedule for the following week.

He gave me the link to his website, and after we hung up the phone I had a look.  What I saw impressed me.  He had appearances on Oprah and 20/20 that chronicled the lives of his students before and after his training. There were photos of students who had been healed from cerebral palsy and other illnesses, people who had come out of wheelchairs, and a long roster of celebrity clients.  He had a rich resume of achievements in the real world for many years before he entered the personal growth arena, with listings in various Who’s Who directories.

He was even featured in a book by Stanley Krippner as one of the top ten non-allopathic healers in North America, for his unique abilities.  He had a philosophy of stopping.  He didn’t teach healing or consider himself a healer; he taught stopping.  In the beginning I didn’t know what the difference was, what stopping was.

I left to pick up my daughters from childcare, my oldest was 2 1/2 years old, and my youngest was only a few months old.  I was determined to heal myself; the girls were my motivation.  All that week I had the feeling that my life was about to begin.  I could sense my impending rebirth.

I attended a music festival with the girls and was unable to eat for days.  I wasn’t at all hungry.  I felt my body was quickly throwing off toxins.  I hadn’t done anything to bring on this spontaneous detox, yet I could sense that it was happening.  When I urinated it smelled like jet fuel, and I had the sensation of releasing thousands of lifetimes of butting my head against a brick wall.

If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to work with and assist a spiritual guru to the stars in Santa Monica, California, but you don’t have fifty thousand dollars, five years of spare time to focus solely on your personal growth, and the ability to relocate to Los Angeles, then this book is for you.

1 skating

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I arrived at the beach parking lot in Santa Monica as per Karl’s emailed directions.  I parked in the lot and paid the parking fees.  Then I looked over at the adjacent lot where the instructions said Karl would be and I saw him smiling and waving at me, along with his assistant.  I headed towards them.  I knew from Karl’s website that he was in his late 60’s, but he could have easily passed for 40.  His appearance was youthful and vibrant to the extreme.  (Later he would explain to us that his work with energy and DNA caused his bald spot to fill back in and his greying hair to turn brown again.)

His assistant was a tall, pretty blonde German woman in her 40’s named Brigitte.  Karl and I were wired up with microphones, and then she grabbed a video camera, and followed behind us.  She videotaped Karl and I as we walked to the rollerblade rental shack on the beach.  Karl was already wearing rollerblades.

So the way this works is, how you do anything is how you do everything, said Karl.

We chatted as we walked.  I told him how Doug had mentioned his connection to Nicole Simpson. I told him about my own connection to her, having known a psychologist who worked with O.J.  This psychologist got my husband out of court-ordered counseling for domestic violence, as he had done for O.J. in the past.

Doug told you about Nicole?  Oh, he shouldn’t have done that, that was confidential, I’ll have to speak to him about that.

We arrived at the rental counter and Karl stepped aside to allow me to rent my skates.  The camera was rolling.  I requested my size and they also brought out knee, elbow, and wrist pads with the rollerblades.  Karl motioned to me to sit in a chair and put on the skates and gear.  He and Brigitte sat in chairs across from me and kept the camera rolling.

I was quickly outfitting myself until I ran into a problem.  The wrist guards were very complicated, and I couldn’t figure out how to get them on.  I asked Karl for help. 

Try to figure it out on your own, said Karl.

I was perplexed;  I tried putting my hand through at all angles.  It took me awhile but I finally figured it out.  Then we were ready to skate.  Brigitte kept the camera running while Karl led me through various skating exercises.  He had me skate in a circle.  He had me face him, take his hands, push him backwards, and he did the same to me.  The entire sequence was over quickly.  Then they announced it was time to view tape.

Karl had his Jeep set up with a sunshade to block out all the light so that we could see the flatscreen he had set up.  Unbeknownst to me, they were audio-recording our feedback session at that point.  Karl sat in the driver’s seat, I in the passenger seat, and Brigitte sat in the backseat.  They began playing the videotape.  It started with Karl and I walking, with a view of the backside of our bodies.  Karl and Brigitte pointed to the screen, making observations, and Karl would pause the tape occasionally when we needed to discuss something further.

Do you see how collapsed your body is as you are walking, your posture, and how hunched over you are?

Yes, I answered.  They were not the first people to tell me I needed to stand up straighter, so this was not news to me.

Compare how you look on tape when you’re walking, to how I look.  Do you see how coherent my energy field is, and how chaotic yours is ? It’s from a wall of shame you’re enclosed in.  It gives the impression of shyness.

I’ve always been shy.  My whole family is shy, so is my husband and our daughters, I said.  Besides, shyness is genetic, there is nothing you can do about it.  I was just reading that in a book about raising children.

Shyness is not genetic, it’s epigenetic.  It’s learned behavior, passed down in families.  Epigenetics is the latest field of research, and there is so much being discovered right now, that the Science journals are practically obsolete by the time they are printed.

Well, the book I was reading said it is genetic.  There is nothing to do about it other than to accept your children as they are, and that some people are more introverted than others,  I retorted.

People write all kinds of things in books.  Doesn’t mean it’s true,  said Karl.

That comment struck a chord in me.  I considered myself well read and up-to-date with knowledge.  I felt my body jerk a little.  I didn’t like what Karl was insinuating, that maybe what I thought I knew, wasn’t true, or that I couldn’t necessarily learn things just from reading books on a topic.  I skipped over that and moved back to defending my shyness.

I have always liked shy people, and been attracted to shy men.  This isn’t really something I am looking to change.

At this point Brigitte chimed in.  Listen to how many times you have said the word ‘shy.’  It’s like you are addicted to this shyness, she said very matter-of-factly, in her thick German accent.

Look at how you’re sitting, she continued, just like you are standing in the tape.  You’re all hunched over, with your arms crossed.  Can you even hear me very well, sitting like that?

I can hear you, I said defensively.  As I strained my neck to turn towards her, I felt something ripple up and down my spine.  The only way I can describe the sensation that came next, is that it was like a paper bag full of air, crumpling and decompressing inside me.  I could feel that it was futile to keep fighting and defending my need to stay so small.  As the energy went up and down my spine, I felt my spine elongating and I was sitting up taller and taller, of my body’s own accord.

The rest of the tape viewing was much easier after that.  I no longer felt the need to fight, argue, or defend.  I just took in the information as they gave it to me, and made a correction.  The process didn’t take much longer.  Each time they showed me something on the tape, I felt myself flash back and remember when I had decided to take on that particular behavior, and why.

They pointed out that I appeared to be playing dumb when they asked me to try and figure out how to put the wrist guards on myself.  I recalled doing this in junior high to make the boys more comfortable around me.  I could see how what might have worked then as a strategy, was not going to serve me going forward.

Karl explained to me that I was in the top tenth percentile for functionality in other ways.  Many people showed up late, or got his instructions mixed up and ended up at the wrong parking lot, etc.  Also, until the wrist guard, I was able to put my skates and gear on rather quickly.  He explained I was taking zeroes off my income with the shyness and the playing dumb.

He showed me that I was operating mainly from intuition and feeling-female energy, which made my left side swing much more freely than the right (the left side being the female-intuitive side of the body).  This was also evidenced by how I looked away while putting on the skates and gear, doing it all by feel.

When we discussed my pending divorce, I said the word child support and my whole body crumpled.  Even the way I said the words child support was with a completely different, deeper tone of voice, and my mouth turned downwards.  Brigitte quickly pointed this out to me.  I tried to say the words again, and my body crumpled back down.

You don’t need it, they both said at the same time, and if only I had taken their advice right then!  The topic was clearly collapsing me, but I didn’t choose to focus on this for many more years.

Then they showed me how my head was jutted forward in relation to the rest of my body.  (This is common in the United States, most people seem to have some degree of it.)

That is you leading with your rational mind, not your heart.  Also, your rational mind is completely disconnected from your emotional body.

As they spoke I felt my body correcting itself further as my head pulled back and lined up with my spine, sending an explosion of pleasure up into my brain.

After we viewed the tape, he asked me to step back out of the Jeep and skate again briefly, to get a videotape of the after.  When I stepped out of the Jeep, it was like looking at a whole new world.  It felt like I had been in a very dark cave all my life and had just been let out.  The beach looked so different that I couldn’t believe it was the same beach.  I could have sat for hours staring at the beauty and wonder of the sky, the water, the colors.

When I skated, it felt like an energy pulled me around, and was skating for me.  I did nothing, and the skates skated me.  I heard Karl say, Isn’t that a beautiful correction? to Brigitte.

They explained that they would mail me a DVD of the footage we just viewed, the tape we were recording right then of the after, and the audiotape of the feedback session in the Jeep.  Oftentimes, clients who were unable to shift onsite, would shift later when watching the tapes alone in the non-threatening environment of their own home.

When I received my tapes, the before was like watching a girl I had known once long ago.  She had been doing the very best that she knew how, and I felt deep compassion for her.  The after looked to me like a celebrity on television.  It was amazing.  By the time I received the DVD’s in the mail a few days later, I had already gone on to a whole new life.

When I got into bed that first night after skating, I could feel the energy bursts up and down my spine.  The intensity was increasing, and it felt like little orgasms in my spine.  I felt high from head to toe.  The feeling of joy kept increasing.  My body and soul felt so much bliss that night, but then I began to worry about how I would care for my two young daughters.  I felt so high that all I could envision myself doing was lying on a mountain somewhere.  There was no way to make myself feel any better than I felt, so where was the incentive to do anything at all?  I didn’t know what I was going to do.

I was in the middle of a divorce that wasn’t my idea and