Waiting for our real lives to begin
Our interview with Bernadette Pajer | Children's Health Defense
If you want to be reborn,
let yourself die.
If you want to be given everything,
give everything up.
-Tao Te Ching, Verse 22
Last Friday
and I had the privilege of being interviewed by Bernadette Pajer of Informed Life Radio, in collaboration with and TV.We shared our stories of personal transformation, and how the struggles we braved as a couple forged our relationship with light.
As newlyweds, we both brought our own baggage to the party of Life. But it was only by dumping those crusted suitcases out onto the dead end streets of our past, that we were able to look forward to the future.
How did we learn to create a new life, and become people that our 30 year-old selves wouldn’t recognize?
We took radical responsibility for our own health by never feeling sorry for ourselves.
We embraced an unknown path fraught with sickness, but wrought in health.
When our feet touched the ground after a long flight to our sunny honeymoon destination in Italy, all we yearned for was a dark room where we could shut ourselves out from the world, and its expectations - the same expectations that had been driving us mad, and forcing us to live on a trendy yoyo diet of blue pills and luke warm comforts where you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.
The trick to departing Hotel California is knowing that you have the power to walk through the exit door - only if you have the balls to cross the doorman. You see, the keeper to the Gates of our personal Hell of pleasures lets us in easily, but won’t let us leave without a fight. The devil is pretty good at making us fall in love with a Self-image that doesn’t mirror back anything but a mirage of fear. Fear that makes us believe that we’ll never be thirsty in the soul-crushing desert of the real, as long as we drink from the springs others tell us are safe - the same waters that spring guilt, obedience, and “it’s just a small piece of cake - everyone’s having it…” upon us.
In these endless, mindless expanses of empty promises to our Self, and unrelenting sandstorms that whither the prettiest desert rose, there is no rain, only pain. Only torrents of tears from a merciful God can sprout those dry seeds of a forgotten Age. But we must be the ones to make the levee break, with a small crack of light, so that The Flood of life can come to crush our demons underfoot.
How do we start chiseling away at gargantian dams that could drown us before we’re able to escape to new lands?
By letting the light take away our pain.
If all you have is a chisel, every problem looks like a stone.
I was still dealing with addictions at the time I met Bohdanna, and knew I needed to end them to not only have a fulfilling life, but to be able to help fulfill life for my wife. Instead of making a deal with the devil, we made an agreement with the angels of our better nature. I ripped off my mind’s bandaids, and vowed to never play online games or be in chat rooms ever again. Bohdanna made a plan to quit taking SSRIs (specific serotonin reuptake inhibitors), and we both were on our merry way, waiting for our new life to begin. Or so we thought.
After galavanting through the streets of Rome for a few days, we had arrived at a family’s home where we could both work on their farm as part of the experience. We would eat lunch and dinner with them, and would eventually become friends. However, upon arrival, we were both tapped out physically and emotionally, and dragged our heals in being social - Bohdanna especially so. She blamed this on being burnt out from wedding planning, people-pleasing, and overachieving throughout life. But these reasons didn’t explain why she couldn’t stop crying, dreading going on, yearning for a stop to the adventure.
Where was all this anguish coming from? We called it “honeymoon burnout” but it was really so much more.
The burnout was a rolling undercurrent of cold blue flames that had been building in a noxious house where dreams and letters from friends were returned-to-sender. The fire that had scorched our psyche was made with twigs our parents had snapped off special - just for us - laden with sugar, pharmaceuticals, and video games. Then came the logs that we both helped place all around that not-so-bon fire. The stumps of pleasing Big Daddy, and the timber that we thought made us look cool in the eyes of other children who were just as lost in the Black Forest.
We may not have started the fire, but we certainly kept it going. We would continue on our honeymoon blaming ourselves for overprescribing a busy schedule. But we both humbly forgot that our brains were undergoing a massive reconstruction project as our feet beat the cobblestone streets. Bohdanna wasn’t burning out, but changing. Years of psychopharmalogical drugs had altered her nervous system and hormones, and now without their numbing influence, she was building a Brain Colosseum to last the test of time.
All our lives we were standing too close to sacrificial flames, which not only got us burned from people who didn’t appreciate us, but blinded us with a blaze of self-hatred that didn’t let us see the council of friends we had sitting around our fire. Eventually, we’d learn how to use those flames as fuel. The choices we were about to make would spark the match that would set us alight with unextinguishable joy.
Many of us are stuck in fiery psychological shackles not because we don’t know how to cross the rubicon of the soul, but because we don’t want to. We like our company of misery, and blaming our failures and fate on “genetics.” We’re afraid that if we let too much light in, it may burn down the essence of who we thought we were, and reveal our true nature to dark woods that see right through us.
But when we know better, we do better.
This type of knowing doesn’t come from a book, it comes from the heart.
A heart that never quits beating,
only keeps yearning
for a life of light
that will crush our night.
How did Bohdanna and I strike out together into the light?
We realized…
We are more powerful than we know.
Roman & Bohdanna
You can also support us at The Power Couple Bookshop - dedicated to all ancestors who carry a torch for humanity.
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Wow, y'all are like some Power Couple or something.
I like your perspective on burnout symptoms and how they can be a sign of change.
What a wonderful interview. You two are an inspiration. High science blended with common sense and such intimate honesty about your own life experience really empowers others to listen and learn from you.