Ascension: Book One: Me Vs. You

By Dr. Simone M. Bahou

In the compelling memoir Ascension, Dr. Simone Bahou details his journey to spiritual awakening and how he found his way back to joy after experiencing the overwhelming power of a controlling father, the depths of depression, and a lack of independence.

Dr. Bahou, a doctor of chiropractic, defines ascension as a spiritual journey that helped him aspire beyond what was expected of him, in order to find a clear purpose in life. As he narrates his lifes journey to date, he relays how dealing with his fathers rage and fear as a child inspired him to reevaluate his life at his darkest momentwhile lying in a hospital on suicide watch. As he shares his reflections and contemplations using personal anecdotes and the stories of others, he illustrates how he has come to comprehend various spiritual concepts while exploring the doubts, fears, and perplexities he relied on as he gradually developed a new understanding of life.

From a childhood filled with emotional challenges through his battle with alcohol abuse and finally to his realization that he too could live a blissful life, Dr. Bahous story will inspire others to seek more peace, love, and joy in their own lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450211666

Dr. Simone M. Bahou

Dr. Simone M. Bahou was born in San Francisco, California, and majored in Biology at San Jose State University. He attended Palmer College of Chiropractic-West where he received his Doctor of Chiropractic in 1989. He owned two private practices in California before his retirement in 2008.

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Hospital 1

This chapter starts when I awaken in the hospital after paramedics found me in my car, unconscious. The unexplainable anguish and desperation prior to being in the hospital had been leading me in the direction of suicide. As I lay in the hospital on suicide watch, I contemplated my life and what had led to this point.

During this first life review, there were periods of deep reflection about my life, which included family, friends, spirituality, and my life as a doctor of chiropractic. The result of this was an understanding about what would be next for me. Although my knowing at this time was vague and elusive at best, the revelations experienced were too strong to ignore or disregard. This experience was for me, and although it could look bad to the outside observer, it was not necessarily that way for me on the inside. The understanding of this outside inside, The way it looks on the outside, isn’t necessarily the way it is on the inside, became a mantra of mine at this time and is also throughout this book.

This was a piece of knowing that comforted me during this very essential period. In addition, during this time and particularly Thanksgiving holiday week, I would call no one to be by my side. In other words, if I had I died, I would have died alone, and that would have been perfectly fine with me.

I came to understand that if I were going to fulfill my purpose, I would have to do it on my own. With that and with nothing to lose, I embarked forward. I also made the decision to speak about this and the experiences to come to no one for what ended up being the next six months.

During all of this, there was a strong sense of peace in knowing that finally, it was just me. The only requirement was safety. I found this safety from myself and others at my next stop. I realized this next stop for me as I lay in the hospital bed with a consoling whisper in my ear, I felt an ensuing warm rush followed by playful tingling sensations in and around my body. This realization came with all of this, and the smile I felt on my face as a result of my knowing.

So there I awakened in the hospital. It was November 20, 2006. I couldn’t believe where I was. My immediate thought was that this can’t be happening to me. This wasn’t my life. It’s not supposed to be going down this way. I tried to get up, but there was a catheter inserted in my penis, so obviously I was not mobile. I was also in a patient gown. There was no one in the room with me. I could hear voices and the rumblings of a busy hospital all around me. At this point, I was still in disbelief that this was my life, and since I had forgotten the razor blades from my final trip to Vons for liquor and what was to be the finality of my life, all that was left to do was jump off the hospital’s top floor. My thought was, There has to be at least five floors to this hospital, so all I have to do is make it to the top, and all the suffering over the last forty years of my life on this Godforsaken planet is over.

I slowly sat up in the hospital bed; not too bad, I thought, then I stood up; easy does it. I was weak, but in control of my body enough to make it to the top floor. One problem, the damn catheter, so with one swift strong and deliberate yank, I pulled it out. I immediately started bleeding profusely as if urinating on myself; no problem, I just got to make it to the top floor.

I had been a doctor since September 22, 1989, and had no idea in that moment what a catheter actually did as far as implantation was concerned. Now I knew for certain it was more than a little tube put inside for urination.

So I came outside the curtains around my area, determined to make it to the top floor, and I was immediately stopped by hospital personnel. I was swiftly ushered back onto the hospital bed. Now they had to reinsert the catheter. I was in a lot of pain, as you could imagine. Screaming during this process, as I was held down by another aide, I decided the top floor of the hospital was going to have to wait, for now.

I awakened again hours later, as they gave me medication for the pain that knocked me out. Now I was in a single room with a little old lady sitting at my side, reading a book. She smiled and said hello. It was comforting so I smiled back. I was now officially on suicide watch for the next seventy-two hours. Something about having her made me feel safe; if nothing else, I couldn’t let her down, so the suicidal thoughts seemed to be idle for now.

Those thoughts were just that, thoughts; I tried acting on them and got nowhere. I decided to ride this out for the time being. Because I was in a lot of pain, they had me on an IV drip of saline solution and morphine. I dozed off back to sleep until the next round of interns would appear periodically for vital sign testing. My vitals were stable so I was finally left alone until the morning.

Now when you’re in the hospital and on suicide watch, there is always the same round of questioning for coherence as well the vital testing. Name and date, do you know where you are, do you know who the president of the United States is, name the two previous presidents, and so on.… Needless to say I passed that questioning, and then there was always the final question about whether I was still suicidal or not. My reply was always, Not today. Little did I know that would become another mantra for the next six months. With each passing hour, I became embarrassed with the suicide questioning and started asking in contemplation, How in the hell did my life get to this point, suicidal thoughts? That was never the plan; I mean I’m confused about divinity right now, but suicide? Geeze!

The following six days gave me time for reflection on the current state of my life and what was next for me. I mean, I really was determined to end it all, and nada! Nothing! There was not even a scar as a reminder of my state during this important period. So while the hospital personnel put me back together, I rested and contemplated.

As I lay there, I soon became hopeful this would be the last of whatever it was that was going on in my life that led to this predicament. At this point, I became hopeful that when I finally left this hospital, I would have a semblance of something that would make sense of all this, and that this would be the last of it. I say last because I had had times prior to this one where I would check out of my life for a time, three to five days.

Generally, when things in my life were in order, I would stop at Vons on my way home from work, buy supplies, which consisted of finger food, large quantities of alcohol, and cigarettes. I would be highly agitated and there would be anxious days before, and it would reach a peak of relentless anguish that left me with no other choice but to numb out as fast as possible. Soon I would be on the couch, watching a movie, and sipping a very strong cocktail to numb myself.

If I ran out of supplies, I would somehow almost willfully get more. Toward the end of a binge, as you can plainly call this, I would wake up and say, That is it, and over the next few days, I would painfully let my body or system detoxify. The withdrawal symptoms were horrendous. It was utter hell to me, as in, if there was a hell, this would be it!

In a few days, I’d be feeling good enough to get back to the grind of my life. I’d hit the routine and work for about a month, give or take, and then it would all happen again. This was the routine that seemed like a cycle of life I had become used to, even if those around me had great disdain for it and me. As if they knew what was going on with me. Those elusive mind-reading pills I always would forget to take that everyone else had a prescription for.

This last binge looked similar from observation to others on the outside; however, it was anything but similar to me. I have always contemplated life as a generality. Sort of an innate attribute or curse, depending on your perspective, and like most people, I resisted some thoughts and desired others. However, this contemplation had innocence to whatever I found or discovered unknown to even me. It was the first time I contemplated respectfully. I felt safe for the time being, and that was all that mattered.

So while the hospital nurtured me back to good health, I contemplated many aspects of my life up to this point, very deeply. As I replayed scenarios that soon became themes over and over, my predicament became clearer as well as my apparent life cycle. The more of this I experienced, the more peaceful I became.

Interesting to note is that for the first time, I was finding levels of peace in all that could look horrible to the outside observer. I soon understood that this experience was anything but horrible. Imagine that! With all this reflecting and contemplating going on within me, while I was so graciously being put back to good health, I realized that at this point, my work for the day was complete. However, I knew there was much more reflection and contemplation to traverse through in the coming days.

Chapter 2

Family

Iam including a little family history to give you a basic understanding of how we operated the way we did as a family unit. We were traditional in a sense, but not conventional.

My father was born in Palestine. He was one of eight children. To my knowledge, they were a relatively wealthy family. Although I know nothing of their political aspirations, religiously they were Greek Orthodox Christians, as opposed to being Muslims. Their religion created tension between the people of the region as well as the Jewish occupation at the time. Holy stone throwing was as much a part of life at that time as it is today.

Palestine was a British mandate. They were a people without any real military protection of their own. My father was the youngest of seven boys and had one younger sister.

In 1948, the United Nations gave part of Palestine to the Jews in an attempt to give them a home and aid stability to the region. As it turned out, the Jews never intended to be content with a part of the country and, in fact, took control of the whole country, which became what is Israel today.

The Palestinians were defenseless militarily, and as my father’s story goes, Palestinians were ordered in single-file line out of their homes, walking out on one side of the street as the Jews walked into their vacated homes from the other side of the street. After being forced out of their home, my father’s family left for what at the time was stated to be a vacation to Beirut, Lebanon. In reality, they left to protect themselves from the war.

My father’s family left early on in this process, and to this day, there is tension between Palestinians as it relates to the departure time of the region, meaning some stayed longer than others, and that means something to those who did stay longer despite the end result, which was the loss of the country. Very me vs. you of them.

As if religious diversity wasn’t enough division among the Palestinian people, they needed more, which came down to a timeline for this inevitable result. The United Nations did nothing to stop the takeover. My father’s family fled to Lebanon, thinking one day they would return to their home, but after six months they were left with the realization that this was never going to happen.

Soon after this catastrophe of family loss, my father’s mother and father died. At the young age of ten, he was left in the care of his older brothers. He also had to begin working, as the family had to fend for themselves. As a result of this, he never attained a formal education beyond grade school.

At the age of twenty-one, he journeyed to the United States, leaving his immediate family in Lebanon as well as family on the East Coast of the United States for his final destination of travel to San Francisco, California, to be with his best friend and cousin, Fred. He would rather have been with his cousin than be with his older brothers on the East Coast, where they had settled.

I can still see the travel lines in red ink on his world atlas map on the wall in the extra bedroom of our house in San Jose, California, where I grew up. He was very proud of his journey to the United States and that he accomplished this all by himself.

About ten years later, he met my mother. They both worked at I. Magnin, a high-end department store in the city of San Francisco. He sold women’s shoes, and she worked in cosmetics.

My mother is from Havre, Montana. She was the oldest child in a family of seven children. She was for the most part raised on a wheat farm, as that was my grandfather’s predominant occupation. For the most part, they were a middle to upper middle class family. They were, and still are, a devout Catholic family by religion. Aside from this, my grandfather was very strict and a bottom-line man. She left Montana soon after high school and attended an all-girls Catholic college in San Francisco and thus met my father through their mutual work environment.

My father proudly waited until my mother was twenty-one years of age for marriage. Apparently, she was a Catholic virgin, as this was very important to him with respect to his own familial ideology. Soon after my parents’ marriage, my mother became pregnant with me.

As I ponder my mother’s path, I understand that it must have been tough to leave the freedom of college after her strict family life in Montana, to get married soon after and then be a new mother to boot.

Geographically, our family was far from intervention from either of my parents’ immediate family, and as a result, we as a family predominantly kept to ourselves. It was always the four of us, including my younger brother.

My brother and I fought periodically, as brothers usually do, about almost nothing. He was usually the instigator of such activity, and although he would probably dismiss this as a fallacy, that is how it was for me. I wasn’t allowed to hit him, so in the heat of fighting, it usually ended with me holding him down so as to avoid being hit by him, and that almost always coincided with my father walking in to witness this. The end result of this would be an ass kicking of me by my father.

Because of my father’s difficulty with trust, he never believed much I said. Trying to convince him that my brother was the instigator was futile, so I just got my ass kicked and that was that. My father’s motto for survival was, You can’t trust anyone! This was always conveyed with his thick Middle Eastern accent.

My mother and father fought periodically, usually lunar in cycle and perhaps always coinciding with the end of the month and his accomplishments for the month that spoke to him of his own manhood. He was very good at beating up on himself and then transferring it to someone else.

Throughout his life, this insecurity never lessened. Respecting him despite his tirades was always the theme. Acknowledging him to whatever degree was needed at the end of this cycle despite how the receiver of his tirade felt. This was a must for the cycle to be complete and for the wrath to be over for now.

The unwritten rule was that you had to compromise yourself for it to be over, and for him to feel better. Then family life would flow nicely until the next time. When things were good, they were truly wonderful. It almost made up for the bad times.

As if resentments were never allowed, they did carry over into my adulthood with respect to my freedom and how I would relate to him, as well as my mother and my brother, and how they would relate to me.

Chapter 3

Reflection and Contemplation/Death

My father’s death on April 22, 2005, seemed like an obvious place to start, as this would become what I now refer to as my first life review. Although at the time this process was unknown to me, my guides were showing me the path I had been looking for. With my eyes closed, but completely aware of everything happening in and around me, I began looking into anything and everything that had potentially led to my present-day circumstance.

My father’s death had been my first real brush with this finality, as we are led to believe, about death. While reflecting on this period subjectively as well as objectively, I decided to roll with whatever presented itself in and around this event. I also took on exploring everything before as well as after in timeline manner.

The energy at the time of his death was very tense because I had cut off ties with my family dating back about six months. The night before his death was my brother’s birthday, and for whatever reason, I was compelled to call my brother and wish him a happy birthday.

My brother’s wife answered the phone and immediately handed the phone to my father, instead of my brother. I hadn’t anticipated this maneuver on her part and, as a result, was very shocked to hear his voice on the other end. As if still the old wise one in my life like he so desperately needed to be for his own survival needs, he started in quickly with his usual barrage of what he considered appropriate and very personal and edgy questioning.

I was very clear that it was not his business to pry as he always did with respect to particular specifics. It was always disconcerting to me that he would ask questions as if he were a best friend and then end up put off as the elder parent because you didn’t respond according to his indoctrinating beliefs.

As a human being, certain things are sacred. For him, nothing was sacred, unless of course it pertained to his own personal specifics. As a double standard on his part, he told of nothing personal and demanded that you tell all with relentless pursuit as if he was sure you were lying or hiding something, even if you knew you were not.

His own personal understanding of lying perpetuated this belief, so as he hid the truth and lied, others must be doing the same. Funny how that works! The old adage, If you want to know what people are up to, listen to what they talk about. He desperately hid his own indiscretions and assumed everyone else did as well. It’s really too bad he never understood that I was always telling the truth; maybe he could have learned something useful.

The barrage was as relentless as always, even after six months of no contact. When he finally stopped to breathe, in an attempt to let me know who the boss in this scenario was, I calmly stated, I just can’t do this with you anymore. After a silent pause on both ends of the phone, I hung up.

That would be the