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- It was very difficult to come back
and start trying to fit in.
I just stopped talking about it.
There was a big, big change
and it was hard to start relating to anyone.
- How's it going Ms. Susan.
I think I have $3 I can give to you.
You can get an all day bus pass.
All right, take care.
I thought about suicide a few times.
And one time I put a round in a chamber.
I was too scared to pull the trigger,
so I just started drinking.
- Come sit with me.
Sit.
I have nightmares.
I take bupropion and sertraline for the depression aspects
helping to control anger spikes and rage,
hallucinations and delusions.
Okay, good boy.
Good boy.
'Cause that image, taking a gun to my head,
it just goes like a real.
I asked God, please just kill me in a natural way,
so it wouldn't be an F-you to the people
like my parents, my sister
and anybody that actually has cared about me.
- The origin of PTSD came from Vietnam vets.
- Totally. - Making a little hungry though.
- Well, that's the idea, right?
And you're supposed to kind of like start freaking out.
Be like, I can't, not eating.
What's gonna happen.
And it's all mental at that point.
- I really started wanting
to just disconnect from the world.
My only way to escape it was to try to drink it away
or try to numb it.
And that's when you get to a point
where you start believing that suicide is a way out.
- What color you got?
- Orange.
- I want eight forks for five people.
- Yeah, yeah.
- I struggle financially and I struggled mentally
and I wanted it to end.
I was hurting because my first wife, she left me,
my oldest daughter had left.
So it was like, there was no reason for me
to even suck up good oxygen smell, go to sleep.
I wanna sleep forever.
I don't wanna wake up from this bad dream.
- From the moment my feet hit the ground from Afghanistan,
The only thing that I wanted to do
was to take a fucking vacation.
And not the type of vacation where the kids
are on the shoulders with a Mickey Mouse
hats on their heads and we're bobbing through Disneyland
or Disney World and not the type of vacation
where there's a tour bus in the background
in the fucking Grand Canyon,
but the type of vacation where I could take my ass
out on the fucking land and dig a hole
and scream into it until I had put down
every fucking thing that I needed to put down.
A brother of mine said, "Mark, it sounds like the vacation
"that you're talking about is a vision quest."
And at the time I was resistant.
I was like, "What the fucking kind of hippie
"fru fru bullshit, drum beating magic wu wu lala stuff
"is a vision quest?"
He was telling me, "Mark, there is a way that you can scream
"into a hole and put the down that you're carrying."
And he said, Indigenous peoples around the globe
would welcome their warriors home
with elders meeting them outside the village.
And there was a certain series of steps and sequence
that they would follow, a war detox,
a spiritual cleansing that involves spending
a time on the land as a community
and then solo with these things called self-generated ceremony.
Ways to mark those transitions, ways to dig a hole
and put things down in a spiritual way.
Ways to mark the ending, like cracking of a snake skin
and the shedding of those things that no longer serve.
If I had not put my burdens down,
including the identity that I had for military service
and mark and claim who I am today,
I wouldn't be sitting here,
I would have blown my brains out.
And I can't help but believe that the 13
of my close personal friends who have killed themselves
post-service, they would still be here today.
- Well, welcome.
My mentor, Stephen Foster, he and Meredith his wife
pretty much brought this ceremony
back towards the mainstream.
- They were working at a suicide prevention center.
They just started talking about why is it
that all these people keep calling in
wanting to kill themselves?
What has gone wrong in our culture that this is happening.
And they started reading about it.
And they realized that all peoples of all times
until very recently have always had
these ancient ceremonies.
- You know that your brothers and sisters
are killing themselves off at an extraordinary rate.
And many of you, I know have been on the edge yourself,
some of you many times.
So I'm just blessed and honored that you're here.
- Clearly something has stirred
in a way that has prompted you to come out here,
whether it was something that you read
or something that you heard from someone else,
a friend called you on the phone.
So I just wanna thank you for answering the call
'cause it didn't come from us, it came from within.
- Just a real quick overview of what we're gonna be doing
for the next 12 days.
We're gonna sit with each one of you
and talk about why you're here and get to the bottom of it.
We'll do that for two days.
And then the last day before you go out,
you'll get your spots, and then you have four days out there
and four nights and come back on the fifth day.
We'll spend that day just kind of recuperating.
And then we'll have a couple of days
for telling your stories and having your stories
listened to very deeply.
My purpose is to help create a safe container,
that's really my most conscious purpose in doing this,
is to create that space.
First off, I'm not a veteran.
When we had our first veteran fast last year,
it was phenomenal learning for me
'cause I'd already been holding these ceremonies
for quite a long time.
The wounds, they carry, this PTSD stuff
from the service is huge.
And it's precisely I can't be left alone with my mind.
And that's precisely what we're doing,
we're throwing them out there into this place
where there's nothing but their own mind.
It becomes terrifying very quickly,
but this land can take that
and it can take the childhood stuff,
it can take the time of service stuff,
it can take it all.
They can actually lay down the burden.
- There's three phases to the ceremony,
severance to cut attachments at home, to separate from wife,
children, family, employment.
To separate from the things of the world back there,
the telephones, internet, distractions.
Severing from pain related to people who have harmed us,
severing from different things that we may have done
to to harm other people, severing from patterns
that I've created in my life that I wanna put in the ground
and walk away from.
It could be as simple as severing from drinking soda.
And it's complex is severing from self-loathing.
What are the things that I wanna put down?
That's what we're out here to do.
This is your initiation home.
Home here and home out there.
- Last night, it was the first time I ever spent the night
in my tent alone.
And that was pretty darn scary.
You would think 61 year old guys shouldn't be afraid
of being alone in the tent, but it's either been me
and my dog or me and my girlfriend or me and my son.
There's always been somebody there.
And last night I was alone and then it dawned on me,
well, I'm gonna be out there alone for four days.
And then I was thinking about the tarp
and I was thinking about with two openings.
And those openings are ways for things to get in.
And I share a little secret with everybody.
When I was 12, I was raped by my uncle.
And when I told everybody, they thought I was lying
'cause I was 12.
And even my own parents, they took his side
because he was mentally challenged.
And I remember going to neighbor's houses
and asking them to talk to me.
But I lived in a really small town in West Virginia
and everybody just slammed the door on me
and said, "You need to go home.
"This is something that is a family thing."
Nobody would ever support me.
I felt like everybody bailed on me.
I been afraid to be alone since then.
I always feel like I have to have somebody around
so that I feel safe because back then,
I felt completely alone.
- Thank you, Chuck.
That's the only way to heal this stuff, is to get it out.
And thank you.
- I hit a point in my life where it was either death,
suicide or figuring this shit out.
- I was raised Mormon in Utah.
Service to others was preached a lot.
I was always a boy scout.
And then when 9/11 happened,
I thought if I don't do something about it,
then why should I expect anybody else to?
I was a port security men in the coast guard,
which meant he did a lot of law enforcement type training.
You come home and you have this feeling of like,
"Wow, this war is happening, does anybody know?"
I feel so disconnected now from the society
that I was trying to help.
I found my way through various different avenues
to start working at the VA representing vets
trying to get benefits.
Our job was to evaluate their claims
and try to come up with a dollar sum or percentage really
of you are X amount of broken.
They're saying like, I sit at home at night
and load my gun up thinking I'm gonna shoot myself
or the neighbors and I'm struggling with PTSD.
I found myself being very uncomfortable
with trying to evaluate other soldiers and sailors
and trying to come up with whether they were in the right
or the wrong and whether we should pay them.
In the two years that I was there,
there was maybe 80 people in our whole office.
And four of my coworkers took their own lives.
- About six years old, I had kind of hit the trifecta
of physical abuse, sexual abuse
and then just years of mental abuse.
I had parents that divorced when I was two
and it was a violent, protracted divorce.
And I was the youngest.
"You remind me of your father," My mom used to say.
And I would think, "Well, you fucking hate my father."
And then my dad would say the same thing.
Of course, he would add that with a couple of fish punts
to the face or the stomach.
And I was always looked at my three older brothers,
like, "Why is this happening to me,
not you guys."
And then I started getting older and started getting mad at them.
Like, "Why didn't you step in?"
And I go home and I just let it eat me
and then I hit the drink or I take pills.
Went and lived in my car. I left my job with no plan.
I just lost it,
but I do not wanna go back to that place.
You don't understand the dark demons that you have.
And when I started seeing them,
I've spent most of my life running
from connection with people.
- I have a voice in my head that is saying,
"You're really not good enough for this.
"You're not gonna be able to do this,
"you are not as good as them.
"You do not deserve this."
I grew up in a college town, Oxford, Ohio.
We were surrounded by trees.
There was a maple tree that was right outside
my bedroom window.
And that was my best friend growing up.
I would cry in that tree and pretend to be Indiana Jones.
I was such a tomboy.
I always wanted to be an investigator
or a police officer.
Coming out of my undergraduate degree,
I had come out of the closet and dated my first female.
And so when I went into the military,
I kind of went back into the closet again.
I chose to join during don't ask don't tell.
And a part of me was like, "It'll be fine."
But immediately it was very difficult.
It was necessary for me to take away the emotion.
It was hard when love is involved
and you're being broken down to be built up as a machine.
It's not safe, it's not safe.
At least like five different sexual assaults and rapes.
I'm left with this loud fucking voice in my head that says,
I'm a piece of shit, I'm a piece of shit,
I'm a piece of shit.
I'm a piece of fucking shit and screaming children.
And I'm also one of the screaming children
every day.
It's like nightmares in the daytime.
- I'm here to see if this shit would scare me enough
to where I can stop being angry
'cause I'm angry all the time.
When I was a teenager, I was going into the store
and three cop cars pulled guns on me.
I felt that they wanted to kill me for no reason.
And a Black man is at the bottom.
That's the order of the food chain in New Orleans.
You could be doing something to totally innocent,
things can definitely change in an instant.
My grandfather was in jail, my biological father
was in jail.
My first meal with him, I was 40 years old.
So it was just three years ago.
If he was there, probably wouldn't have been selling drugs
when I was 13 years old.
And I don't think that's something to be proud of.
How would that look to my son?
How do I get my mind off of anger building up?
As a parent, you don't let your child
know that you're broke.
You don't let your child know that,
"We're fucking homeless now." See what I'm saying?
So you don't let your child know,
"I wanted to kill myself."
I need to become a man again.
- What is that? What would that look like?
- I've hurt a lot of my family members, man.
They distance themselves from me, they barely called me.
- What are you angry about?
- That could be a sign of being afraid.
- Listen, what are we afraid of?
- They say, Black people don't do shit like this.
But we do, you know.
Shit, I'm here and I'm telling you,
I can not do this by myself.
I would have been packed up and left.
No shit, I been to jail a few times
because of fucking anger.
I want that shit to stop here, I wanna burry that here.
I'm not taking that shit with me going back home.
- You're gonna bury it here.
- I'm gonna burry it here.
I'm ready.
- I'm here to have a clear vision
in order to fulfill my purpose.
I'm a dishwasher right now.
And sometimes, people say you have a master's degree,
but you wash dishes.
- I actually grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan
and went all the way to the Bronx in New York
and moved in with my fiance.
Couldn't find a job in New York.
I went to the unemployment office.
"Good news is we found a job for you,
"but the bad news is, is halfway across the country
"in new Orleans, working with FEMA for humanitarian efforts
"helping rebuild."
It was only supposed to be a three month job.
So I took it.
It was kind of lonely because all it pretty much did
was work.
And after about two and a half months
with some money saved up to marry my fiance,
I got a call, they told me she had been deported.
And it made me feel like I wasn't never gonna
actually be able to have one, a wife or something at home.
And I've been here ever since.
A few times I had a girlfriend that wasn't involved
enough emotionally, so they left me.
That just made me feel real isolated.
I was kind of like a person without feelings,
a person without emotion.
I had to shut them off.
My sister ended up dying.
She had cancer, but no one knew about it.
She finally got so sick one day, she called 911.
So the ambulance came and picked her up.
They took her to the hospital.
Three weeks later she was gone.
So it's pretty much just me and mom.
She was such an angel that when she died,
it was like I didn't cry because she was actually supposed
to be the one to accomplish somethings.
I was bad, I was extremely bad during that time.
I died when she was 10.
So that was kind of sad.
- I was sitting here and I was wondering,
what would it look like if you were happy?
What would your face look like if you were happy?
What do you think?
Yeah.
It's been a long time, yeah.
My prayer is that I'll see you coming down that mountain
with a big smile on your face.
That that vision doesn't have to be work,
it doesn't have to be suffering,
it doesn't have to be pain.
But that vision also includes joy.
You know where that joy lives in you.
Lost it, yeah, yeah.
- I no longer gave a damn about anything.
Yeah, I have...
Oh my God, I can't tell you how many times
I've tried to commit suicide and have been pissed off
when it didn't work.
I mean, now I look back and I just see it as a blessing,
but it really took a lot.
It's been ugly.
Lots of hard conversations with myself,
things that I've done and things that I'm not proud of.
I need to be at peace with everything that has happened
and I need to just kind of get back in check with myself
and just remind myself that I am worthy and I am good
and I do deserve good and let go of all the stuff
that I've been carrying.
And just kind of be able to accept that I'm enough.
- I gotta breathe before it came out.
I was really close to killing myself
and I don't know why.
The only thing that kept me from doing it was,
I talked to my therapist and he said,
"Well, you know what happened to you,
"you know statistics.
"Kill yourself, your children increases by tenfold."
So I stayed here and I was like.
So I've said it out loud.
And I haven't talked to my wife about it yet
'cause I feel like she's taken on too much for me.
- There comes a point where we've gotta stand up
or kill ourselves.
I don't want you fucking dead, man.
You got that, don't fucking do that.
You're too important.
Don't fuck with it.
Yeah.
- You go into your solo time. There'll be some taboos.
No food, no company
and minimal shelter.
- You will find someone within this group.
Your partner, teammate, rock buddy.
- My rock buddy and I made a circle out of little rocks
on the ground that was our communication.
Every morning, Josh would put a rock inside
and every afternoon I would come
and I would check to make sure that Josh put his rock.
Yes, he did.
He was alive this morning, okay, good.
And then I would put my rock in.
By the end of the time there would be for Josh rocks
and four Chris rocks.
And if at any point I'd gone to the circle
and he hadn't put his rock, I would go check on him.
You're gonna shoot for drinking a gallon of water a day.
If you're hungry, drink water
and if you're not hungry, drink water.
If you're feeling dizzy and nauseous and overheated,
it's time to get in the shade.
It's time to get that bandana wet
and put it around your neck and try to drop
your body temperature down.
- It comes on pretty slowly,
but then it can be really serious.
You'll start sweating and eventually you'll get
to the place where you actually stopped sweating
and then get dry.
That's a very serious point
- In the unlikely off chance that you are in fact,
bitten by a rattlesnake,
thank it for sharing its magic with you
'cause that will be a rite of passage
in and of itself
and make your way back to camp
or simply sit in place and blow your whistle three times.
- If you have suicidal thoughts out there,
if you start thinking about checking out of this life
while you're out there, that is a medical emergency
just like if you fell off a cliff and broke your leg.
And I know we're all gonna be facing
some really difficult things and some demons might come up
and try to tell us to do things,
that would be a safety issue.
- And so this four days out there
is a journey of self exploration and a journey of spirit.
It is a journey of oneself
and we will encounter the demons.
- What is your greatest fear
and what would bring you back in?
- My greatest fear is to be alone.
- My greatest fear is the unknown.
- I'm very scared of success.
- My biggest fear would be that I'd be too afraid
to step into the person that I'm going to be.
- Greatest fear will be out of everything,
not being able to come back down
accomplishing what I need to accomplish up there.
- Stuff that would bring me back down.
If all the horns start honking in the camp,
I would be hauling ass down here.
- The only thing that would bring me back
is if there was whistles blowing, medical emergency.
- Nothing's gonna make me come back
unless it's a major catastrophe.
I'm staying until I have to come back.
- As far as bringing you back in, I don't know.
The demons are pretty fucking big.
- What would bring me back down is the demons.
I'm hoping that they are friendly than they have been.
- What would bring me down here is the unknown.
- What would bring me back down would be medical issue.
- The only thing that could bring me back down
is if you guys come up here and get me.
- It's gonna be pretty darn serious
for me to come back down, it's gonna be life-threatening.
Other than that, I'm not gonna see you guys
until that fifth morning.
- It's time for some last hugs and saying goodbye.
And once we're done with that, off you go.
- And when you feel ready, one at a time,
step into the circle so that Chris and I can send you off.
Yeah, come on.
Once you're smudged out, collect your things
and make your way up.
- Rites of passage, there's one of those fundamental things
is missing in our culture now.
We've lost that ability to mark important events in life.
And along with that, we've lost a lot of the meaning in life.
We've lost ritual and ceremony.
- Threshold, the threshold where we separate
the wheat from the chaff is painful
and it's meant to be so in some ways.
An opportunity without those distractions and without food
to become closer to ourselves, to turn inward.
- The time of going into the darkness,
going into the deepest part of our psyche.
You're moving from this material world
into that more liminal or spiritual world
where a tree can talk back to you,
a rock and say stuff to you and you can listen.
It is the time of the beginning of the great shifting.
- My plan and goal on this four day fast
is to
emotionally and spiritually
die and be reborn.
- Let me bring you over to my cave.
I have four gallons of water.
I'm using my backpack as a pillow,
got my old TG hat on the go.
Also whenever I need to address real quick,
I got a set of clothes.
Hopefully they stay dry.
That's my home for the next four days.
It's not the prettiest, but it keeps me out of the sun.
- Finally got a tarp up and took a nice nap.
And it's hot.
- I'll pretty much be set up here.
Parent call upon those ancestors in the land
and mother nature for guidance and safety.
The rocks, the hill, the low ground,
the green pasture is definitely a blessing.
- This is peaceful as heck.
Can't say fun, but it's very peaceful.
You take a look around.
As you can see, we're in the middle of fucking nowhere.
- But I just keep walking because sitting around
thinking about food is worse.
- The biblical
and middle Eastern
prophets.
Most of them had the journey through the desert.
Jesus fasted 40 days, 40 nights.
The Buddha, he fasted,
Prophet Mohammed, so many others.
Different religions, different spiritual,
cultural traditions.
- I spent eight years in the Navy,
experienced a whole lot of different things,
that shipwrecks, watching people get crushed
and being part of moving body parts,
pulling the flesh arm out of a socket of a torso,
seeing people chopped in half and guts falling out.
But you don't go down to medical
and say that you haven't dreams of shit.
You know what I'm saying?
If you go down, you're a punk, you're weak.
This is what they'd tell you.
Forget what you just did, there's nothing wrong with you.
You a pussy if you go to the medical.
I just saw this little girl
that appears to be five years old.
I see the expression on this little kid's face
because rigor mortis set in and they were in pain
when they died.
How am I weak?
This guy, his face, his head.
I gotta pick up somebody's head that the last expression
on their face, I'm looking at it.
So how the hell are you gonna tell me
that that's not real?
That forget about it in three days.
Civilians say, "Oh, you signed up for that."
You got dick heads that say that.
"That's what you signed up for, then you deal with it.
"You don't need to get a check every month for that."
- When you become baptized in fire
from being on suicide missions in Iraq,
sometimes you can have a look in your eye
that only the people who were actually on the ground with you
and that survive can understand.
We had been training day and night to cut off emotions,
cut off feeling pain in order to survive.
When those memories come, people look at me
like what's going on.
Non veterans can normalize the veteran experience
by hearing veterans talk about their experiences.
And so then non veterans don't give you the look
out the side of their eyes
when you may have a moment of anxiety,
when you have those combat memories.
- All right, everybody is day one, night one.
It's pretty dark.
I'm not afraid of nothing too much.
I got my Boonie knife
on guard
in case somebody try to come and get my ass.
I guess the coyotes are here.
That shit don't bother me at all.
So that's it for tonight.
Catch y'all later.
Good morning y'all.
Has beautiful morning to make it over overnight.
Last night, it was somewhat little scary
and also somewhat fearful
and fearless all at the same time.
Those materialistic things in the world,
it don't even matter here.
That you appreciate who you love,
who you cherish
and what's important.
- The first explosion was a 1500 pound vehicle born IED.
I froze, I couldn't call up on the radio
that my buddy had died.
And I had to pull security
and do my job when he's dying.
There's nothing I can do for him.
And then on the other side, there were women
that were sweeping their driveways that day
and the children were walking home from school
and they're lying dead.
And they're screaming and crowds are coming.
From that day on, my heart was broken
and it was about just doing my job
to the best that I could.
Pretty shortly after I was diagnosed with PTSD.
I still hear those kids screaming that day.
- Being out here in nature
definitely has taken a different effect on me,
medically reducing my post-traumatic stress.
I haven't had any anxiety,
any depression.
I must admit though, it is a bit lonely.
- We spent a couple of hours talking to him
and really getting down deep into what's the fear,
what is it.
Sitting at the edge of the cliff there,
about to throw himself off, did the best we could
to let him know that this is the place he needs to be.
And if he leaves early,
he's not getting what he needs to get.
At one point it was, "So you guys are gonna try.
"You're gonna sit here and tell you think
"you're gonna convince me, well you're not."
And I said, "Yeah, I get it, man.
"I've been there."
And so we worked as hard as we could a long time
and there was never an inch of an opening.
Told him we'll hold him here in base camp.
And if he gets halfway home and realizes
that he hadn't done his work yet,
always welcome to come back
and finish off the ceremony
in any way that feels appropriate
and just wishing him the very, very best.
That's all we could do.
20 years I've been around this ceremony
and 18 years of actively leading these things.
I've never had anybody actually leave.
And boy, it hit me.
It still hits me
- How are y'all doing?
Still day two.
The sun is hot as hell.
It's burning out hot.
- I wanna get in that water so bad.
Sitting at my little shelter
gets pretty boring.
And then my mind gets all on how I want food
and wonder what am I doing here and all that.
I'm going over a lot of things.
It's nice to be alone,
but not isolated.
When I'm in the city, I can hide
with thousands of people around and uncomfortable
and scared and don't wanna be there.
Out here, I'm alone
and I'm happy.
I think work taught me that people,
humans can be scary, really scary.
I can defend from this
if anything was gonna come this way.
I set this booby trap stick up.
If they knock it down, I hear.
And ain't the best, but I'm damn sure
something better than nothing.
Nature's definitely talking.
Those rocks and those trees over there,
they knew I was there.
I started hearing a funny noise.
I feel something around me.
I always got this thought or something
looking at me watching me.
I can't see it but I can sure make them hear me.
- I've decided to dedicate day three fasting
to find true purpose for me returning
back to United States
from Iraq, Afghanistan, and being placed back into society.
I must admit after 12 years,
it's been very confusing
as to how I was supposed to
go back to the community
to return home.
- It was definitely clear this morning.
I was honestly done on day two.
- This ceremony is 40,000 years old.
Four days, gives time for this stuff to sink deeply
through our heads and our brains and our hearts
and our groins all the way down into the earth.
- I do respect the tradition,
but something inside just feels it's ready.
- What about the peace of coming in with the rest of that tribe?
- I don't know, it's not about them, it's about me.
And as much as I would love to come back in with them,
I feel like it is my ceremony.
- To me, it's becoming the collective theme,
is the self love
and taking care of yourself.
And I really wanna honor that that's where you are
or you've sucked it up enough.
You have sucked it up enough and I trust and honor
who you are and who you're becoming.
- I am a strong leader who is loving,
passionate,
who cares greatly
for those around them,
especially his adult self.
- He's got traumatic brain injuries.
The chances of seizure with traumatic brain injury
are increased dramatically when you don't sleep.
And he wants to do an all night vigil tonight,
so he wants to be closed.
- I wanna say fuck racist.
Fuck you racist bitches in America.
Fuck all you cock sucking son of a bitches.
I swear to God, I wish I can line all you racist,
pussy ass motherfuckers up.
I motherfucking goddamn served my country,
served it fucking honorably and you fuck me
because I'm fucking Black.
Fuck you.
Fuck you, you son of a bitch.
I can't stand you, pussy ass motherfuckers.
Fuck all you racist son of a bitches.
Fuck all y'all, I can't fucking stand y'all.
You don't want a Black man with shit around here.
You give us this fucking much,
but then you take this fucking much.
It's all about money.
We put our life on the line so you can stand up
and fuck us in the ass.
We fucking served our country,
we love our fucking country.
We know we have freedom, but we ain't free.
We're not free in our own country.
I've got some for you fuck ass
'cause I'm gone goddamn make it here, I'm gonna succeed.
If you like it or not, I'm talking to you.
- I don't think I could do this if I wouldn't have found
my own meditation and mindfulness practice before,
and I really helped just being in the moment.
Sometimes even just walking and just focusing
on right, left, right, left, right, left.
Not letting my mind get too far from here.
- The whole time I was in Iraq, I worked at night
and we were mortared all the time.
I worked the volunteer hospital service,
seeing soldiers come in.
Citizens, kids just blown up.
One night we were there and we're watching DVDs
in this waiting room also when we got the call,
okay, incoming, incoming, wounded.
And we'd go out to cart these people off the helicopter.
And one of them is burned with a black bag over his head,
handcuffed, wounded.
And we put him in the corner in the waiting room.
So here's this human, the black bag over his head
curled up in the corner,
hogtied while people are watching a sitcom
on the TV laughing.
That imprinted on me
confusion,
what are we doing.
- When I'm laying down, trying to go to sleep
when everything is quiet
and I don't have other things
distracting my mind from war,
I would say my average hours of sleep,
it'll probably be about four and a half.
When we were staying in Baghdad international airport,
mortars almost used to hit us all the time.
So I began to learn how to actually get sleep
with bombs going off.
One of those mornings actually came in and hit,
I wouldn't be able to wake up.
My buddy Morales he might've been killed,
I might've been killed.
So sometimes I just lay there and think about like
how come none of those motors never actually hit.
Like, damn, why am I such a lucky bastard?
- I was able to meet demons that are following me.
And before I engaged
in battle with them,
I invited them
to a cup of water.
What a cool sunset.
Went for a very long walk
today in the midday sun,
which was probably not the smartest idea
but I just needed to wander
and saw a beautiful hawk
that followed me for about 45 minutes.
Everybody should try to do this once in their life.
Just know that you can.
- Everything is calm.
- I finally made it to day five.
To be completely honest,
I don't know how I made it.
I'm thankful for being able to enlist
in the United States army.
It was actually an honor to go serve in Iraq,
to serve in Afghanistan.
However, I didn't know
that after I was honorably discharged,
I would one day have post-traumatic stress
and deal with more injury.
But if this helped me return home to my family,
friends and society,
then these four days and four nights
would not be in vain.
- And come out of this time of being alone in the dark
just four days and nights.
Light hits this plug that's been in the belly button
of mother earth during this time to hold all your prayers.
Now we're gonna take the plug out
so that mother earth can hear your intentions
as you come in here
and hold all this any time in this next year,
your intention will be here in this land to hold you.
- I'm a brilliant adult man
who loves himself,
who is confident.
Who loves his family, loves his tribe.
Loves his friends,
and loves every living thing,
on this fucking earth.
Fuck yeah.
- I am earth, I am fire.
I am air and I am water.
I'm a strong warrior!
- We encourage the hugging and the coming back in the body.
This is the close of the threshold phase
and moving into the incorporation phase.
You all had very powerful experiences, I'm sure
out on the land.
Everything between the time that you crossed the threshold
to the time that you returned,
to mark that end of the threshold phase is sacred.
Hold it.
- Duck your head, Chuck. - Good call.
- Yeah, I was.
- Incorporation or return to take the things
that we have received out on the land
as a result of putting things down
and begin the process of figuring out
how to incorporate them into our daily lives
and into our walk.
- Into the Corpus, into the body.
So you've been out there on that land
and you've been thresholding and then it's time to come back
into the body as you go back into the world
and you'll be tested.
- Coming home and coming back to this place
and then going back out into the world
that truly can't hear
and can't see what we've been through.
Not all that different from coming home from service
to a world that
can't fully understand or comprehend
or wrap it's mind around where we've been
and what we've experienced.
- We'll spend the day just kind of recuperating,
letting your story bubble around.
We'll go into Coulee city, boy.
We're going into Coulee city for a meal, big deal.
- It's cold, I thought it could be warm water.
Who's idea was this?
- Sun starts going down.
The oh shit factor hit me.
And it was the, "What the hell am I doing?
"I can't do this.
"I'm out here, I'm supposed to what, sleep under a tarp.
"What, no, I can't do this."
I was just scared shitless.
And kind of took a step back and was just like,
"You know what, no, these are your fears.
"You have to grow Sheryl.
"You need to do this, you need to prove to yourself
"that you are kickass because you are."
That first night when the stars came out,
I just broke down in tears.
It was just, it was so peaceful and just...
The next thing I know it's morning.
I couldn't believe it, I slept through that entire night.
I didn't wake up once
and it was the absolute best sleep
I had had in I can't even remember how long.
It did something to me.
I woke up and I was just so confident
and it just kind of restored this little voice inside of me.
Like, "Yeah bitch, I told you.
"Why did you have doubt, like you've got this."
The last time I saw stars like that
was in the middle of the Pacific ocean in transit.
Every night, it was like a bedtime story
or that lullaby singing you to sleep.
One of the most healing
parts happened,
I was journaling and I looked over at a little sage brush
and there was a caterpillar
crawling on the stem
and it just
brought forth this memory from my childhood.
And it was probably the last time that I absolutely
truly remember being happy.
And it's like I had
this long conversation with this caterpillar.
And it's just like, you know what?
It's okay, you can be happy.
I felt like I was using it now as a celebration
and just honoring everything around me
that was bringing me joy.
- So, I wanna start with the word pride.
I spent most of the first day thinking,
what the hell is a blind guy doing out here?
I can't do walkabouts like everybody else.
I was afraid to look for rocks because of bugs
and snakes and whatever.
So I spent the first day pretty much pissed off
because I was blind.
Pride.
I think it was the night of the second night,
I started having light diarrhea.
And then the third day it was pretty rough.
My blood sugars were tanking,
I kept getting low and I was eating glucose tablets
like they were crack.
Sometime in the afternoon, I got really afraid
and I didn't wanna tell the leadership that I had diarrhea
'cause I thought they'd make me come in.
Again, pride.
And I didn't wanna tell anybody that I was...
I didn't wanna tell anybody that I was afraid
because I'm blind and I want everybody
to know that I'm whole.
And then an angel showed up
Chris, I called to tell her about my blood sugar
and something happened to the radio.
And just all of a sudden she was there.
Somehow she knew that I was on the edge.
Somehow she knew that
if I could have come down here, I would have.
So Chris laid down on the ground
and we held hands and we talked and I cried.
I confessed how weak I was, but I was still prideful.
I told Chris that at the end,
my intent was to walk down here by myself.
So then the final morning and I'm sitting there
and I'm so weak and I'm very disoriented
and I'm just, I'm on the edge.
And I heard this voice.
And the voice told me,
you gotta stop being proud.
These people are here because they wanna help you,
accept their help.
And the next thing I know, Ryan,
Tim and Brandon
walk into my camp literally within seconds.
The other weird thing is when they walked in,
I wasn't startled that they were there
because the spirit had told me to accept the help.
And before I knew it, almost all of my stuff was gone.
As exhausted as they were, these three men picked up
all my shit and took it down here without even saying,
Oh, fuck, I'm tired or I don't wanna do this.
They all did it because they wanted to do it.
But I still insisted being prideful.
I told all three of them, I'm walking in alone.
At that point, I had my backpack,
the chair and my water jugs.
Then the next thing I know, lan shows up
and lan just guides me in and I just surrendered
at that point, I just surrendered.
And I said, just fuck the pride,
I just wanna be me
and I just wanna accept.
At that point I think I finally accepted
the fact that I'm blind.
And I can tell you, I've told people for years
that I'm totally okay with being blind,
but I guess I wasn't.
- I can't tell you Chuck,
when I think about you out there on that land this time,
it's just such respect, such love for you, man.
This isn't a story of wholeness, I don't know what is Chuck.
He wants this blindness thing
to go away
so he can be a whole man
and the gods and goddesses are laughing up there
because they know what a whole man this man is.
It's done Chuck, it's done. You hear that?
What you went out there to claim around relationship,
around wholeness, done.
You don't have to do anything 'cause spirit
has a way of working
in this world
and you followed that spirit right to this beautiful man
who needed to know that he can accept help
because he is a blind man and that has nothing
fucking to do with wholeness, nothing.
- It was a trigger of PTSD, it was the sound of thunder
as if it was some sort of explosion.
Prior to that, I actually didn't cry a whole lot
and my body needed to release it.
And nature was working with us.
It was in a safe space that was held by the natural world,
extraordinary guides and these beautiful veterans
that are my comrades.
- I dedicated this fast to my grandmother,
who I didn't get a chance to go to her funeral
because I was in Iraq at the time.
On day one, I didn't know which way to go.
I just started walking
and just got a good feel for the land.
I was hoping I would run into some animals
or a burning bush or something.
I though about my sister a lot.
Decided to look at the stars
and be thankful that
it was so many of them out there.
It would be pretty cool to take a trip up there.
I decided to take day two as decision road.
I ended up walking all the way to the highway.
I thought of just getting on the highway like Rambo,
First Blood, but then I was thinking if somebody picks me up
and takes me down a road into the city
and starts getting crazy,
I don't wanna make the news.
I was walking along the Lake.
I was actually thinking about jumping in there
because I knew if I jumped in that canal next to it,
that current would probably take me away.
So now I start thinking about my veteran experience.
I was in 101st airborne division, the screaming Eagles.
I got all the way up to this other mountain
and there were two eagles just screaming.
It kind of gave me some insurance being clear sighted.
By that time I made peace with the land, with the ancestors.
I've walked the three days straight and know that day four,
I just laid there and rested.
And the only thing that stood in my mind was Psalms 23.
- "Though I walk through the valley
"of the shadow of death, I fear no evil
"for thou art with me.
"Thy rode and thy stuff shall comfort me."
- Thank you for your story.
Thank you for this story of transformation
that we all need to know that transformation is possible.
And there you are.
Thank you.
- Smiles don't hurt either.
- The meaning of my name is King.
Malik, one, that rules.
So I'm gonna rule my area,
I'm gonna rule my land up there.
It became mine.
Spirit told me, "Do what you normally do.
"Aren't you always on guard?"
"Yes."
"Protect your land."
"Aren't you the King?"
"Yes."
"Just keep a close watchful eye on everything around you
"and you'll survive these four days."
Every evening, I'll come look over base camp
in my underwear
as long as my brothers and sisters was okay,
I was at peace
with this, my heart.
Every night I went up to that throne,
sat down and watched that sunrise again.
It's the most beautiful thing
I've ever seen.
I never really formed a good sleeping pattern
because if you fall asleep on watch,
you can get court marshalled.
I really admire the beauty of mother nature,
the way she carved out canyons, the hills, the valleys.
One of the things I needed to clear up was my anger.
I did some venting out loud.
I said, "Well, this is definitely gonna humble me."
I'd rather die up there than die out in the world.
I found so much peace on this land.
- The child in you who had to step up,
who's been carrying his armor and his shield
for longer than he can remember
to protect himself and his people.
A man who has had to be on guard and be on point
watching over himself and his people in theater
immersed in the world of war,
so many years
to face those demons, to face those dark shadows
in those coyotes who came at night.
A man who fashioned a shamonic tool
to drive those beings back to where they come from.
No more, no more.
Put your armor down, drop your shield.
You are protected, you are covered.
You are home.
- Not a lot of people impress me.
This all, you're gonna impress me.
I mean, man, the spirit, deep.
It's deep, man.
I'm glad to be here.
- There's two types of kings.
The ones that rule from anger and power and greed
and then there's the kings who rule with love.
There's the Kings who serve the people.
When I see you telling your story and I heard your story.
I was like, "He is the right kind of king,
"he is the good kind of king."
I want a king with the face like that.
I want to King with love and kindness in his eyes like that.
- The morning that we got up to go,
I was exhausted emotionally
and I had visions of demons
that I was gonna be fighting the whole time.
And I got out to the spot that I had chosen.
I was scared.
Last year that I've gone through coming off
of a lot of medications.
There were things that happened during that time
that truly scared me and I was in safe spaces.
So here I am heading out to the unknown
and I thought what if these things come back
while I'm out there.
What was weird for me as I wasn't scared of the coyote
or the mountain lion or the grizzly bear,
that random murderer that's gonna come.
For me, it was the little things.
It was the ticks, it was the spiders.
It was the ground teaming with ants.
And then about midnight of that night, I woke up
out of where and felt my face.
And something had bit me and my lip was probably
the size of a golf ball, just huge numb with pain.
And I was thirsty. I'll get out, I couldn't drink.
I was just water spilling out electrolytes everywhere.
That was exactly what I needed.
It was a confidence boost because I wasn't dead.
The little guys, they're little.
The nights for me were the hardest.
That's when I can conjure up all sorts of demons.
On day three, I got to the canal and contemplated
jumping in the canal.
I thought I could do this and I think I'm smarter
than everybody else, so I'm not gonna take a gun
and shoot myself.
What I'll do is kill myself another way, slow away.
And I started realizing that I'd been walking
since about seven in the morning
and it's now three o'clock in the afternoon.
I'm out of water, I'm sweating.
Now I'm not sweating, headache
and go about five steps and stop.
And a little voice in the back of my head said,
"You gotta stop this, man.
"You got too much life left to live
"and too much gifts to give.
"And there's a whole bunch of people out there
"that would like to see to stick around."
- It's done.
Thank you for your story.
- I had work to do.
I had Larry's voice
saying something along the lines
of clean up as much as you can and get right at it
as much as you can with, as many as you can.
'Cause I did have some resistant part of me
that was really freaking scared to be up there.
So it was this, this vulture, beautiful wings spread
just flies or it's like, it's done.
I know it's done.
One time I saw a caterpillar
and that was right before I was to die.
And I think that it was doing an impartial night visual
rattling, I always had my rattle going,
singing rattling.
The entire time I was like my inner child, my crying child.
No that adult, that parent that holds hands with the soul
would always be holding that child
that was rattling, rattling, rattling.
And I kept hearing chorus, flute, women singers
that lasted pretty much all night
and it felt like celebration.
It felt like celebration and nurturing mothers
just saying
you did good work.
- Turkey vultures can smell death
a long long way out.
The vulture saying
death is coming,
it's not clear when it's coming or what that really means.
The end of that abuse is here and peace follows,
but only through building good walls,
of being careful with that child,
taking care of the child within.
- I am. - I am.
- A powerful adult. - A powerful warrior.
- Good and loyal.
- A worthy adult man.
- A sober unflinching storyteller.
- With meaningful relationships.
- Who loves and cares for his family.
- And protects the ones he loves.
- With a massive heart.
- My home and my tribe and my heart.
- Deeply connected with nature.
- Powerfully growing and being nourished
by the shit that gives me life.
- A kickass, powerful, strong vivacious,
vulnerable adult woman who is worthy of all things.
- Fuck yeah.
- A spiritual inspiring elder man
and I have fulfilling relationships.
- I am a strong, vulnerable whole man.
- Oh, by God.
Holy moly.
God approved it.
- I picked up humbleness,
I picked up wisdom.
I gathered how to be vulnerable
and also most important, how to listen.
My fear is if I don't use those tools,
then I refer back to the old me of being angry.
That's my biggest fear.
- My greatest intention of going home
is to bring back
the skills and the training and the gifts
that I was able to acquire here on this land
and bring them back to bastion,
bring them back to Gentilly community
and bring them back
to the veteran community in general,
even in non veteran community.
- I've already started slipping a little bit in my mind
of what's gonna happen when I go home
and that's my biggest fear.
I really wanna honor what I've done here
and have it make a change.
I don't want it to slip back into isolation.
- So now it's time to create new habits,
continuing the ritual and ceremony in my daily life.
Now it's time to bring it back.
Otherwise it just flattens out into a story
that becomes a dream.
There is a lot of healing that needs to happen in this world
and I truly believe I've been kept alive for a reason.
And I wanna serve my purpose, I want to serve again.
- Every single one of us sitting in the circle
have been initiated into the armed forces
and have gone through that process of grinding away
the civilian pieces
and the insertion of that identity as a warrior,
whether that's a peaceful warrior
now on the planet, a healing warrior,
a woman warrior, a man warrior,
an LGBTQ warrior.
We are all fucking necessary.
- I just in deep gratitude for the courage
that each one of you have to show up.
People who've been out there on the edge of death
over and over and over again
sit here in front of the rest of us and cry.
Fuck, you know.
Deep gratitude, deep gratitude.
- We will always be a part of that tribe
and that tribe will always be a part of us.
We'd been initiated into our respective branches of service.
We have not been initiated back into community
and the world doesn't know it
and they don't respect it
and they don't honor it after we transitioned
in the ways that it truly needs to be,
but they fucking need us,
every single one of us.
Thank you for claiming and owning who you are
and thank you for walking back into the world
with this fucking light that you're carrying
and these gifts that you have to share
'cause the world needs you.
- Right of passage.
Self centered people,
I hope you learn
a fucking lesson.
This is real warrior shit.