Who is Lawrence Doochin?

The following discourse on my emotional and spiritual history may seem somewhat long. I am not doing this to impress anybody. Rather, I want the reader to see that I do not live on a mountaintop. I am a real person living fully in the world, and I hope that by being as honest as possible about my process of awakening, you will see parallels between my life and yours. Hopefully, this will be of some help and comfort to you.  

I grew up in the South, and my parents divorced when I was twelve. Around that time I chose to attend a northern prep school, and although I did not know it at that time, I was escaping from an issue with my mother. I do not have a lot of recollections from my childhood, but I do remember that I felt empty and that I was searching for something. I felt no connection to or relationship with God, and I could not relate to those who did. But as long as I had great things to look forward to when I became an adult, a loving wife and family, an important job, a big house, I didn't realize that there was something missing. Looking to the future for my happiness was my way of staying away from the present moment and having to face the darkness that I feared was within me. I was an unhappy person, but I didn’t see my unhappiness. When you are young, with your whole life ahead of you, that unhappiness can be temporarily ignored or glossed over, because you believe that the world has so much to offer and that you will eventually find what makes you happy. The belief that something outside of you can make you happy is the great falsehood of the world. I married shortly after college, and my wife has one of the most pure hearts of anyone I have met. She has also been one of my greatest teachers. But for the first half of our marriage, I knew none of this. God had not yet sent the spark which would awaken my heart, and without any recognition of my communion and Oneness with Him, I was a miserable, fearful, and angry person throughout my twenties. The blame and guilt that I felt was projected on to my wife, who was in a codependent relationship with me. At around age thirty, I was blessed by God with a spark of remembrance, and I began the long journey of awakening. This began with emotional/experiential therapy, which continued on strongly for almost ten years, consisting of a tremendous amount of hard work with many, many episodes of grief/sadness and anger. My concept of love was very distorted and entangled, and I had tremendous guilt. I was blessed with several very competent and compassionate women therapists who helped me as I shed very entrenched but false beliefs I had about myself. The process was exhausting and very hard on my family, but I was driven to clear myself of this toxicity, as I knew at some level that these beliefs blocked me from experiencing God. We are in physical bodies, and in order to be a complete being, we must clear blockages in all levels --- physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual --- so that we can achieve balance. If one area is blocked, such as being emotionally frozen as if you were still a child, you can only progress so far in your remembrance. One set of issues that I worked on appeared to be related to my childhood, and another set appeared to be soul beliefs that I had sinned against and separated myself from God. But in actuality, they were the same. Before coming to this dream I had chosen a life and childhood experiences that would bring up these false soul beliefs that needed clearing. As you work on yourself, over time you gain a much higher perspective of why you have chosen certain experiences and how it is all good. Everything is a gift that is designed to bring you back to a remembrance of your Oneness and God’s limitless Love for you. As I grew older and peeled off more layers and false beliefs, I was able to understand and be at peace with the "hardships or lessons" that happened. I knew that there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and that metaphor is appropriate, because this process of awakening is like coming through the birth canal and being "born again." You are reborn in the ashes after being consumed by the Divine fire, as everything that is not pure and Divine is burned away.

Throughout my thirties I experienced periods of depression and I was on medicine. I can’t say whether this was the result of my genes (it runs in my family) or the intense emotional and spiritual process I was going through, but it bothered me for several years, as I felt that somehow I was deficient as a person. For many years I grappled with my mind as it produced strong judgments of others, but I finally realized that this was only judgment of myself that I was projecting out. I was able to explore the reasons for that, and ultimately, after moving through many layers of illusory beliefs, I came to the recognition that I held the belief that I had sinned against God and that I had separated from Him. This is the core false belief each of us carries, and one that is very hard to clear. The world appears as it does because each of us projects this belief in sin and separation outward. We see sin in the world and in others, because we see sin within ourselves.

Fear is the by product of a belief in separation, and I dealt with many years of paralyzing fear. There were times that I never thought I would get through the fear, and for several years I had periods with tremendous anger at God. I wanted to do something to punish Him or get back at Him for putting me through this. I had such states of despair that I would have left the earth had it not been for my family. But even in the hardest of times, I was still driven by a deep knowing that there was a purpose behind everything happening and that God loved me. In my early thirties I felt God's Presence, but I felt it outside of me. I could not see the Light within me. As I shed false beliefs, in my mid to late thirties I began to feel God within me. Eventually, I knew with certainty that whatever I was feeling, even if it were fear, that God was within me, and that is when I put the paralyzing fear behind me. When you go through a process of awakening, you will have many times of forgetfulness, but as your remembrance increases, these periods of forgetfulness decrease until you carry that remembrance and communion with God on a constant basis. Also in the early to middle years I experienced a lot of spiritual pride as I thought that I was better than those who did not have this high spiritual knowledge, but this came from an ego which was trying to cling on to the belief that it was the center of the Universe. I also dealt with self pity, resentment, and bitterness. Forgiveness was a key vehicle in the later years that helped me to remember that I am One with everything and everyone. As I offered forgiveness to someone or the world in general, I was acknowledging that I had forgiveness to give and thus it was already a part of me. Plus, since we are One, as I offered forgiveness, I was offering it to myself. I did not need a specific instance to offer forgiveness, although I was gifted with many opportunities to do so with my wife and children.

Spiritually, early on the true teachings of Jesus and his journey to become the Christ, or Love, resonated with me, because we are all on the same journey toward recognition that we are already the Christ. God is Love, and we are one and the same. While I found a core of truth in every spiritual tradition, A Course in Miracles was the most important written word for me. The Native American spiritual tradition also resonated strongly with me. Jesus showed us that God was present in our fellow human beings, while the Native Americans showed us the Presence of God in animals and nature. I began seeing God in everything, and I listened to the messages of how much He loves me, whether those messages were coming from the hawk circling the sky or the words of the clerk checking me out at the grocery. I saw behind appearances to what is Real, to the Oneness and beauty of Life. As I lived more fully in the present moment, I knew that this world is only a dream, and along with that came a lot of gratitude.