I was 17, about to wrap up my peripatetic high school career—five high schools, four towns, three states—and getting ready, finally, for liberation via graduation. I planned to celebrate by traveling west to California for a couple months of geographic and cultural exploration on my long-awaited first trip to the west coast. The truth is, I was lucky to be graduating at all: my early high school years were a journey through the ‘dark night of the soul,’ as personal growing pains, family crises and too many moves met the crush of adolescent hormones and the lure of sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll.

Fortunately, countervailing forces also entered the equation and helped me navigate what could easily have turned into a dead end road. One of the strongest positive forces was found in my discovery of a small, tightly knit community of souls living across the river in Cambridge, practicing therapeutic massage and a host of other healing disciplines and mind/heart-opening practices.

This group ran the gamut: Harvard students and homeless street-dwellers, kids from wealthy and well-known families and unreconstructed Vietnam vets, activists and therapists, meditators and medicine men, business consultants and fellow struggling high schoolers like myself. It was quite the throng, but all seemed guided there by a common passion for lessons of self-discovery, personal growth, a desire to heal and, on the best of days, for being a conscious agent for facilitating and serving the healing of others.

One of the main practices was hands-on massage work—not the naked, oils, tables and new-age music version, but a social, sit around the living room while a couple folks sat in chairs being worked on by their friends approach. The deal was simple: everyone learns how to breathe and receive, and everyone learns how to offer and give, too. It was my first serious experience of healing touch, the combination and integration of physical and spiritual healing through the vehicle of bodily sensations. I later attended massage school to get my official certification, but nothing I learned at school came close to rivaling the amazing education in healing I learned for free in that funky little apartment above a jazz and reggae club in 1980s Cambridge.

Through my association with that community, and the guidance of the man that functioned as its somewhat reluctant center, I awoke to an entire universe of possibilities. I found myself evolving from a skeptical, life-is-bleak-and-I-want-out adolescent into someone with my own tactile, experiential certainty that, while life in Ronald Reagan’s America was most certainly weird beyond words, underlying all the social peculiarities and pathologies of my time was an even deeper truth: that Someone was home in the universe, and whatever that ineffable energy was, it cared about me. Somehow, all the crazy darkness of both my own life and the “real” world around me seemed to be held and contained within a larger unfolding process of evolution, all of it held in a sort of mystic embrace of universal love that words fail to do justice to.

It was in that context that I first encountered a revolutionary idea: that despite my age, stage and culture, I could be at choice in how to express my own sexual energy. I didn’t need to play the loveless adolescent male American game of seek and conquer that I had absorbed from the relatively un-evolved society I grew up in. I began to learn more about the age-old traditions of various cultures, where a path existed for those who wished to delve into a life of inner learning, rather than householder life. Against the odds, I decided that summer of liberation to renounce the material world as I knew it, to live the brahmacharya’s life, and delve deep into the world of the spirit instead…

Next episode: My life as a monk…