Follies of an Awakening Fool

By Wind Walker

Im not one to share many stories of my past, other than what might fit into a general conversation. So here's my memoir, a story of a "normal" human life and its vast dramas, secretly hiding a very enlightening Awakening, or activation of my Kundalini. Ive lived many lifetimes just in this one incarnation, in Truth.

So heres a list of what, you might say, makes me very good at helping almost anyone through almost any struggle, 3-dimensional and far, far beyond. Ill keep it as specific and brief as possible.

Ive survived an abusive childhood, from both parents. That life lesson followed me far into my adulthood and has proven, in fact, to be one of the Grandest Gifts ever.

I later had to confront my family, and have come to full recognition of the gifts they gave me, though also realizing those relationship doors are of the past and no longer serve my highest good.

By the time I was 18, and leaving my adolescent home behind, I had been in sometimes living in about half of the United States.

My 20 years in the Navy from then forward enhanced my quest for adventure, bringing my travels to nearly all of the United States in some form. I lived in Italy, on 2 remote islands off the CA coast, on a small island in the Aleutian Chain nearer Russia, and sailed many of the worlds oceans, visiting a multitude of countries.

Ive lived in, or traveled to: Japan (lived there as a kid, then several trips via boat and plane in the Navy), Thailand (in the Navy then on my own with Allison later), Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore (also several times), Australia, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Indonesia, South Korea, Peru, Ecuador, Spain, Portugal, Amsterdam, Bahrain, UAE, Italy, Greece, Laos. Theres a few more that I cant recall now.

I excelled at running everything from 100 meters to 26.2 miles, and suffered many injuries including a fully ruptured Achilles from it all.

Ive tried polygamy in a marriage. It never worked.

A Native American shaman/elder came to me tangibly though in Spirit form when I was just 22 and young in the Navy.

A 9-mile long island has shaken heavily from explosives that I detonated.

Ive flown high over all parts of the Pacific Ocean, and very low in a Navy helicopter loaded with explosives.

Ive jumped out of the same kind of helicopter in flight, to be hoisted back in with full snorkel gear on.

I have SCUBA dived or snorkeled off CA islands, in the Mediterranean (Italy and Greece), and in the Gulf of Thailand.

I spent a month in the toughest training in the world: SEAL training. 3 years later I attended EOD (bomb disposal) school, only for one week.

In Italy I almost had to shoot a man running his vehicle at high speed towards the gates of the base where our families lived.

In that same line of duty I helped people with many horrific injuries, almost passing out myself at times.

Many car or motorcycle accidents have happened as Ive watched. Ive stopped to help them all and seen a lot of trauma.

Ive almost flown out of a rigid hull inflatable boat a couple miles off the CA coast into very choppy waters.

My pistol and rifle skills were expert level.

I spent years running, surfing, snowboarding, and longboarding (skate) at near-competitive levels. None of them helped the lurking pain deep inside.

I have a Bachelors degree in Psychology, a Graduate certificate in Public Affairs and Non-Profit Management from a Big Ten school.

And thats what threw me into the real journey of my life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Oct 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9781452583112

Wind Walker

Wind is a Scribe, an Angel Messenger of Light, Love, and Peace. Reiki/Energy Channel. Author: Follies of an Awakening Fool. US Navy Retired. Wind retired from the United States Navy on January 31, 2010 after more than twenty years of active and reserve service. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Psychology, and a Graduate Certificate in Public Affairs and Non-Profit Management from the University of Minnesota's Hubert Humphrey School of Public Affairs. In 2012, Wind certified as a massage therapist from the Sedona School of Massage. He primarily performs Reiki and other intuitive energy modalities. Through these, workshops, and mindfulness he is here to bring Peace and Light. His life experiences have made him a surfer, snowboarder, longboarder, marathoner, and general adventurer. Now he spends his time trekking the globe with his wife, learning and philosophizing.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

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Do you know what your Truth is?

~Melmin

I am about to share my story with you. It is a story of life, my particular story. In it I walk as best I can step by step through obstacles, failures, successes, and ultimately a total destruction of self that led into a very confusing spiritual awakening.

Sometimes my emotions are very angry, and other times they are boastful. Not always, though. My goal is to lay myself down humbly and show that as a human, this life is often hard…confusing.

Maybe you will want to throw the book into a fire, or maybe you will want to scream obscenities at me. Maybe you will want to call me crazy. This is our life, and I recount the horrors of what our creation as such has caused just one of over seven billion beings. I do so in my own grammar, by my own rules. There is a great ending. I am currently living that latter path, which is still rough yet rewarding.

The first half of the book was hard for me to write, as it relives some of the most arduous times in my journey. The first three chapters in particular are written in the voice I would’ve used during those years, as a way of walking through the experiences vice simply recalling them. I hope you will find the transition from old to new exciting as it is meant to be an experience of growth; of transformation. As I stated above, it is a story of life. Life, that is, in a New Age of consciousness.

CHAPTER ONE

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Don’t be surprised if small crowds gather around you today, because you’re so clever. People sense that they can learn something from you. Of course, you’re learning as you go along, too. The kinetic free-associations you make so easily are a great tool in brainstorming sessions at work or with your friends. Don’t be afraid to see where your ideas flow, even if they take you in amazing directions.

~Today’s Horoscope

I t’s not just a job, it’s an adventure boasted the U.S. Navy back in 1988 when I enlisted so proudly. That was what I was seeking, after all, as I headed out just six days after turning eighteen into the great wide open. I can still recall the picture that went with the motto on all the recruiting propaganda: an aircraft carrier gliding so gracefully and powerfully over the mysterious deep blue waters of the open ocean. At least, that’s how I remember the ads that fueled me with so much adrenalin. And adventure within the na vy is just what I got, with just over twenty years of riding many waves—metaphorically and literally.

Scratching at the scars from stitches in my right paw, I am taking a very long walk down memory lane of all the events in my adult life and how exactly they all led to right here, right now, in this time of the greatest shift of my life…perhaps of my entire soul’s journey. I am distracted by the coffee seekers coming in and out of the shop, and the different age groups and seemingly varied social statuses. Over half are looking down at their cellphones, even while attempting to navigate person-to-person conversations. I hear a few mutter concerns about pictures posted of them on social media. This is our world, it occurs to me. Through them, I contemplate rather confused, I may find all the answers of this puzzle called life; through them I can recall my own stories more clearly. All I have to do is sit and listen.

My mind wanders to the listening to plants, animals, and unseen forces that have been speaking to me lately. Truthfully, I know they’ve always been speaking to me. I know that I finally got the joke that many before me have. Thoreau, van Gogh, Shakespeare, Dave Chappelle—yes, I said Chappelle. It seems that the madmen and madwomen are the ones who are actually onto something.

They say it is lonely at the top, and perhaps that mentality is why I have long avoided reaching higher within myself. I haven’t met many who have reached this level of sorcery. It may be because of the old illusion that they will be dressed in a way that we can easily recognize. We’ve been told that we are searching for gurus who wear sarongs, wizard hats, or some sort of neon sign that they are enlightened enough to teach us. But those who get it are invisible to the naked eye, because the naked eye isn’t trained to see what is really in front of it. And those who talk of being wise, enlightened, or on the path typically are just the opposite.

Wandering further into my mind, I can’t stop thinking of a few months ago when in the deep Amazon jungle of Peru I finally experienced an entheogen-aided foray into the abyss of the psyche, courtesy of ayahuasca—the Vine of the Soul. With people like Doc also taking part in this experience along a feeder river into the mighty Amazon, it became quite clear that those we (in this case, I) judge as crazy are actually carrying a more fascinating piece of the puzzle.

Most of us have been conditioned to dismiss the wild-looking and wild spoken ones. Doc fit that mold 100%, and that entire experience brought me full-force into the psyches of Beethoven, van Gogh, Mozart, and the wildest of characters of this planet’s history. What a ride, this life.

CHAPTER TWO

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A sailor’s boy born and bred

salty tears this life has shed

A pirate’s life is all it be

home is always with the sea

A drifter has become well-read

winds in the sails til the day I’m dead

~Melmin

I t was always a bit of fun when I would tell anyone who would listen that I was in the navy for thirty-two years, thirty-five years…whatever age I held at the time of the telling my personal sea stories. Or, as I liked to sing in my craggy salt-refined voice, I’m the ‘son of a son of a sailor’: quoting a favorite song of the OG himself, Jimmy Buffett. Dad was a Vietnam vet, an air traffic controller who had some great stories of planes crashing right above him while aboard the aircraft carrier on which he steamed during the mid-‘Nam years around my own infancy. Grandpa was an administrative Yeoman Chief in WWII, and set the tone for a real sailor legacy to be passed down through the ranks. Grandpa had four wives, dad had three, so with only two exes at the current moment, I must be doing pretty well.

The past few weeks I’ve discovered how we are all capable of poring over our past events and turning any pains or regrets into valuable lessons. Ruminating about this newfound empowerment to take control over my mind and the events in my life, I have exposed the ability to laugh or even shed a tear over areas that caused me deep pain up until very recently. Alchemy isn’t just brewing chemical experiments for witchcraft, it’s as simple as creating and recreating our movies, I said to my twin flame, Adara.

Alchemically-altered pasts aside, I’m not exaggerating while recalling my earliest days of deep desire to be among the uniformed heroes of the world. Though my parents separated when I was just six, those formative years when I had a dad in my life blazed a yearning in my soul to be some kind of new age hero. That fire would carry me through the difficult times yet to come as I navigated the terrors of high school. It would also set an almost frantic pace to do as much as possible in life in as little time I could manage.

Setting out into the navy just days after gaining the recognition of adulthood, I said some quick good-bye’s to a few high school friends and my family and boarded the plane from Boise, where I had completed four long years of high school adolescence, and set my sights on boot camp in my childhood home of San Diego. Other than being slightly disappointed in the small amount of physical training required of us, I was totally enamored with the fact that daily I could watch the planes land and depart from the San Diego airport right next door to the threshold of my adult existence. Shooting rifles and pistols, marching incessantly, a gas chamber-induced snot filled face, shipboard firefighting and so many other forms of awesomeness were the catapults upon which I would now view living to the fullest.

For two months I proudly strode my way into a future that promised titanic adventures. I absolutely was going to milk this life, through my naval service, for all it was worth. I wore the uniform as if there was no other clothing in the world, saluted with a snap that could make an NFL center proud, and absorbed salt from the ocean breeze deeply in order to form my gills. I even almost took the screening exam for SEAL training, but I chose to remain with air traffic control (ATC) instead. I had no idea that the SEAL path was lying stealthily in my future.

It was not too shocking to me that my five months following boot camp spent learning the ways of being an air traffic controller were almost completely disappointing. I chose that program because my test results to enter the military were high enough to take any job I wanted, and ATC promised a lucrative post-navy career. It might have been a bit of divine intervention as well, since during the summer between my sophomore and junior years in high school my dad called me out of the blue and persuaded me to consider the navy and his former occupation. This was quite timely since I was actually talking to the Marine Corps recruiter about going infantry. I wanted to be a grunt, that was all there was to it. In retrospect, that was probably the best thing my father could have done for me to compensate for his long absence from my life. Cold War and the ensuing Gulf War aside, my quality of life was far better in the navy. And as with my later pursuits in Naval Special Warfare, it seems that the universe wanted to keep me alive beyond the uniformed service.

Though the ATC thing wasn’t my gig from day one, I shined in school in the deep-south Memphis hometown of Elvis and Justin Timberlake. My consolation prize wouldn’t be quite clear to me for a while, but I think it very fortunate that upon completion of training I got the chance to head back to sunny southern California again, in what would a couple years later become the birthplace of my little star child.

Ventura, CA was a bittersweet home for me. Los Angeles is a gorgeous jaunt down the Pacific Coast Highway along some of the most amazing and Hollywood-famous stretch of coast in SoCal. North takes you through the wealthy expanses of Carpenteria and into Santa Barbara, again along some of the best stretches of beach which I still consider home.

It was this agriculturally rich beachside area where I met my first wife, wrecked my Ninja 650 at about 80mph, and even gave modeling and acting lessons a crack. The adventures were just starting to gain steam, and were compensating for my general boredom from the rigors of trying to keep lots of tin and its occupants safe.

Point Mugu Naval Air Station, as it was known then, is practically sitting on top of Mugu Rock, a rock that is sliced away from the Santa Monica mountains by the Pacific Coast Highway, or PCH, or Highway 1. This rock is a hub for those trying their skills at bouldering and serves as the backdrop for many a movie and commercial. It sits about three miles as the crow flies from the Naval Air Station’s air traffic control tower and is in fact a checkpoint for ATC purposes to help control the flow of air traffic in and around the air station’s jurisdiction. I loved having pilots report at that point simply because it gave me yet another reason to glance at its beauty many times each day while honing my skills as an exceptional air controller. When my wife told me we were expecting our little angel, it was upon this rock that I was gazing from the phone call she made to me during a lull in air traffic. It was near this rock that I would soon spend many daddy-daughter dates with chicken nuggets, french fries, and BBQ sauce, feeding the resident chipmunks and walking barefoot in the soft, gritty sand.

I was a newly turned twenty-one year old sailor when I received that phone call making me an official daddy. It was a mixed blessing, as my wife had just recently confessed to cheating on me with my adolescent brother. It wouldn’t be the last time she would enjoy the company of others during my absences. To be certain, I wasn’t even totally sure that this little blessing of a child was mine. For all intents and purposes, she is and I will never think of her as anything else. I know certainly that that special little child was brought to me regardless of what the DNA may have said should we have pursued it. And because I chose to leave that testing alone I was rewarded with the most precious little being in the world; one who would often save me from some very dark places, and would also later pay heavily in her own happiness for having taken too much of my own anguish.

The cheating, combined with the blessing of a new life coming forth, brought me to face-to-face with my worst nightmares of marriage: do I stay or do I go? Whichever choice I made was certain to haunt me, or so I believed. I chose to keep trucking along in the marriage because I couldn’t handle the thoughts of not being the real father or worse, of leaving the courts to decide with whom this little divine creation would be raised. So, I went through the pregnancy embittered and also very anticipatory about what the universe would have in store for my own precious addition to the world.

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Having to depart SoCal because of navy requirements shortly after my daughter’s birth, we packed up and headed to Adak, AK in the Aleutian Chain for some cold-weather explorations. But we couldn’t head to such a distant and isolated island without first taking a trek north towards Yellowstone, by way of places like Yosemite, in hopes of taking in as much continental United States beauty as we could first. It was a year after all the good and not-so-good news surrounding my wife’s pregnancy, and we didn’t have much money. The journey, however, was a wonderful foundation for our daughter to gain early appreciation for the outdoors, camping, and road trips.

It was during that trip where I would have my first moving and somewhat frightening awakening experience in Shoshone/Bannock country. Though I wouldn’t know what that meant or what to do with it for a very, very long time and without a lot of loss and heartache, it was a part of the journey that would easily replace the fact that we had run too low on funds to continue into Yellowstone. Oddly, it would also launch me into exploring the darker sides of spirituality through taking gothic music and that lifestyle a bit too seriously for the next few years, a fact that probably helped bring out things in my relationship that would slowly add to our deterioration. For instance, my wife would spring on me during our isolated island tour that she was bi-sexual and wanted to explore that side of her more. That left me with an ultimatum: opening our relationship up in a way that I wasn’t prepared for, or losing the marriage and possibly my daughter. I became very upset at having such confusing and painful things in my life since as long as I could recall.

So many things during our time in Adak had my head spinning, including problems with both of my parents and my siblings, that I was spiraling into what felt like a place of no return. It is no surprise really that I would find myself having such a myriad of troubles at work that I felt the only option was to separate from the naval service, from my heart’s deepest desire, in order to try and seek a higher happiness. With my head down, I left behind my uniforms, my dreams of exotic locations, and my yet untold desires of becoming a true warrior.

During the next year and a half while I was a mere mortal my wife and I both had to work in order to make ends meet, another layer of financial struggle to add to the indebtedness and bounced checks that we had already been known for over the past two years. The kicker was that our combined pays in my absence from the navy was still less than what I made alone in uniform when you took into account free medical, dental, housing, etc… So now we found ourselves struggling just to give our little thriving cherub a decent birthday and Christmas. This really hurt since she was determined to come into the world six weeks early, jaundiced and under-developed in the lungs, and we instantly learned to value every minute of her precious life.

In order to help make some extra change and to satisfy my emptiness from no longer being able to access the confines of my first duty station, NAS Point Mugu where we were again residing near, I entered into a contract with the local Navy Reserve. Though it wasn’t full time, it gave me some pretty cool adventures that active duty had never promised. I took a trip to Korea for a couple weeks, finally got to shoot the M16A1, and rode on the hovercraft known as LCAC’s at the Marine Corp’s sprawling training grounds of Camp Pendleton.

Once in a while my reserve unit had to venture to our parent facility down on Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, across the Coronado Bridge from downtown San Diego. This put me in the midst of a bunch of guys running in utility greens and large green seabags on their backs filled with fins and other requirements for their day: I was surrounded by SEAL trainees on this base in super-wealthy Coronado, CA. This was too much for me to handle.

Suddenly I was filled with new life, as I discovered that I had the opportunity to apply for BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL) training. Since my separation a year prior from active duty I had lapsed into a depression that left me without a tan for the first time in my life save for snowy winters, had shrunk from about 140 pounds to a sickly 120, and could not even do ten pushups without feeling dizzy for an hour. My wife was continuing her promiscuous ways, being caught doing inappropriate things with coworkers, and I was trying to hold together any shred of dignity I may have had remaining.

Through the Navy Reserve I found a light at the end of a very long and dark tunnel. It wouldn’t be the last time I went into the dark corners of my soul before finally succumbing to the universe’s calling, but it would be the first time I learned some things about discernment and about the powers within that I contained. With BUD/S as the only goal imaginable, I hoisted a new flag on the mast and got my diminishing ass into gear. Rediscovering the empowerment of being athletic and in charge of my health, I was finally bathing in the power of my inner fire. Setting my mind on a goal was as simple as clearing the weeds from my path and setting in motion. I was becoming at long last a creator, a Sorcerer of my own destiny.

Mile after mile of running in pants and combat boots on the beach I was redefining what I formerly believed was possible. In high school I had been a sprinter, one of the fastest on the track team. Through my first few years in uniform I kept the story close to my heart that I was born to run fast, and not to run far. It was one of many stories that I was breaking through by perseverance and the refusal to be told any further that I couldn’t do something. I learned the value of not buying stock in other peoples’ projections of their own insecurities and doubts and fears. No longer was I simply a dreamer, I was now a master of my life, a development in my consciousness that made my wife act out even more through more frivolous spending and cheating. And for every negative projection she and the others in my life placed upon me I found a bolstering in the fire within to succeed at all costs. I quickly put on almost thirty pounds of lean muscle and went from barely breathing after twenty-five yards of swimming to open ocean swims of several hundred yards with the dolphins.

It was almost a year of Navy Reserve time when I had had enough of this ridiculous mortal life and reentered active duty with a blaze in my soul that my greenish eyes could barely hide. To celebrate this leveling up of my mastery I took on my first tattoo, a small incognito talisman to show my motivation to become a SEAL. I had to give the navy another eighteen months of what we called sea duty on a small island off the coast of what was now called NAWS Pt Mugu (or Naval Air Warfare Station) where I would find myself doing physical training up to four hours at a time, mixing in tons of calisthenics, runs, and swims.

I even brought my little daddy’s girl out in pajamas (her typical choice of outfits) for a full weekend in order to play in the sand dunes and shoot the M60 automatic rifle with a small group of visiting SEALs to the island. I strained harder against those who tried to get in my way, which were many, and took back for the last time my powerful voice. Never again was I to allow anyone to tell me what they thought about my life, my words…my actions. If I failed, it was my own lesson and not the warnings of the feeble-minded.

And to be sure, my new voice pushed harder on my wife who was feeling me pull away from the world we were creating; the world in which everyone was the enemy, including ourselves. By that point it was all falling on deaf ears. See, I had decided earlier to stay in the marriage because I didn’t feel the courts would view things my way in my daughter’s infancy while I was in the navy and subject to long hours, even months, away from home.

Until now, I had spent five long years of marriage barely keeping my head above the water. Now that I was learning how to be a strong swimmer, metaphorically as well as physically, I had reached my boiling point with the plague that was my marriage. To her credit, my wife did remain somewhat supportive of a few key things along the way, but it was too late in my book and my life was now totally in my own hands. Naturally, this caused her to keep bringing other women and men in during my long weeks spent on the island where I was morphing into an empowered man.

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It felt almost overnight that I transformed from a skinny and angry daddy to the next class of SEAL wannabes. After donning my navy dungarees full time again, I was almost dizzy from now walking through the SEAL compound as fresh meat. That was the proudest day and the saddest day of my life all in one fell swoop. Long had I dreamed of this very day, from the horror stories my old man would tell me when I was little to the videos I would watch of SEAL training for two years in mental preparation.

For the next two weeks I would experience the euphoria of freezing swims due to the year’s harsh el Niño weather, running and shuffling everywhere I went, and late night raids by the instructors. It was the most amazing experience of my life, even better than the heavy demolitions and jumping from moving helicopters into dark waters that I was able to do for a few short months prior to my arrival at BUD/S. And yet I couldn’t quite get a grasp on the other reality, where I was essentially leaving my very young daughter at a time when all she cared about was