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What’s Up With the Whole Beware of the Doug Thing?
Like most, I’ve experienced my share of suffering. Also like most, I turned to the usual suspects for help: psychoanalysis, drugs (legal and not-so-legal), sex, money, adventure, career, family, and so on.
Some of it worked. Until it didn’t.
I suppose because a stretch of my childhood was particularly rough, my brand of suffering may have been more intense than most. Which is why I invested so much time and energy in avoidance strategies.
That worked too, for awhile. But like a good game of whack-a-mole, no sooner did I pound one type of suffering back into the dark than two more emerged to haunt me anew. By my early 40s I was exhausted and ready to call it a life.
It was around this time that the thought occurred: “Death is going to come eventually regardless of what I do. So why not just go for it in the sense of shedding all my old skin and trying some really new modes of self-therapy.
Which is how I ended up in a remote Utah canyon on a self-prescribed vision quest. And then a month or so later, in the Amazon drinking ayahuasca with a shaman. Then weeks after that, in New Mexico with a healer. And so on.
Beware of the Doug isn’t really about those experiences. It’s about that process of skin-shedding, of unlearning so much that was taught to me. And it’s about the mystical teaching that tells anyone who will listen, that the person we think we are (in this case, Doug) is itself the problem. Ergo, beware of the Doug.
Lots of people think they have something to offer others. I’ve certainly made that mistake. So my goal here, instead, is to simply share my journey along with any resources I’ve collected along the way.
It seems to me that most folks these days are pretty anxious if not downright miserable. I don’t think it has to be that way. In my humble opinion, that’s the only reason for a spiritual journey: to seek that promised peace that surpasses understanding. The peace that exists DESPITE what’s happening in the world.
If you’re interested in my story, you can start here and then follow the progression accordingly.
