How it all began

As a young boy, I had out-of-body experiences. As I would be lying in bed before going to sleep my body would become very heavy and I would start to feel a gentle pulsing throughout my entire body. The pulsing would become quite strong and increase in frequency, and then begin to subside until it was gone and I had absolutely no feeling of being in a body. This happened with some regularity, but not every night, and I somehow knew it was nothing to fear. Sometimes I would just float around the room or go outside the house and float through trees, and sometimes I would feel a “call” to go somewhere. Sometimes that somewhere was a classroom-type setting where I would be taught things or be given information, and sometimes it would be a meeting with a group of other beings seemingly in the middle of nowhere. At such a young age, I never thought to write any of the experiences down, and never shared them with anyone until much later, not even my parents. There was a “knowing” that my very Catholic parents would not understand.

As I grew older, these conscious out-of-body experiences became less frequent and by the time I was in university, they only occurred a few times a year, and typically soon after I exited my body my normal waking consciousness would slip away, and the next morning I would have no recollection of what I had done in my nightly journey. I had confided in my best friend, who happened to be my university roommate, and one day while he was walking through the university bookstore, he was drawn to a book titled “Journeys Out of Body” by Robert Monroe. He told me about it that night, and the next day I went down and bought the book. As I read it I was amazed that someone else was having the same experiences.

That was in 1978, and it took until 1991 before I signed up for the introductory weeklong Gateway Voyage program at The Monroe Institute (TMI), and between then and 2005 I took a total of six TMI programs. The latest of those programs was a short weekend-long Shamanic workshop. TMI uses a patented sound technology called Hemi-Sync to produce altered states of consciousness, so there was none of the typical drumming associated with Shamanic journeying. A few people at the workshop had brought their drums, and on the last day they drummed for us for about fifteen minutes and I was amazed how profound my experience was. The drumming awakened and touched something deep inside me and I knew that short introduction to drumming had altered my life course.

I told a good friend, who had also attended the Shamanic workshop about my experience with the drumming, and he gave me Hank Wesselman’s book, Spiritwalker, and even before I had finished that book, I knew I was going to attend his Visionseeker workshops.

I have now attended the three Visionseeker workshops, and can say with all honesty, that just as each of the TMI programs changed my life for the better, so have the Visionseeker workshops.