I walk into the kindergarten class of five year olds where I am subbing today. The silence surprises me. I anticipate noisy chaos since their regular teacher was home sick today. Ten bright moon faced beings with orbed indigo eyes gaze my way and then look down to the ground. I find myself mimicking them, looking down before I become aware of doing it. The feeling emanating from their little bodies, feels so innocent and pure.

I smile and see their handmade journals stacked on top of the teacher’s desk. I call each child’s name to collect their journal. The journals are for drawing, illustrating their way of life. In a few minutes, they are all standing all around my desk gazing into my eyes then looking away, instead of staying seated in their designated chairs. Confidence wanes and I feel at a loss, in how to communicate with Dine five year old children who come to school speaking Navajo. There’s a tape recorder on the desk. I play reggae music, this seemed to calm them and they quietly return to their desks so I could go around and help each one individually.

I asked Carrie for help and she taught me some basic Navajo words and sign language she used to manage her all day kindergarten class. I discovered ways to use my eyes, lips and smiles with these little ones.

It’s the summer of 1986 and I have been living on the Navajo Indian Reservation at Ganado, (Red Earth) for several months. Carrie and I spontaneously met at the Hopi Cultural Center, twenty miles west on Hopiland, where she fills up her water jugs each week. We met again at a community reggae dance near the Cultural Center. She invited me to stay with her. After moving in with my friend Carrie, a bead maker, fellow reggae dancer and nature lover who’s lived here as a kindergarten teacher. I applied for a counseling position at the Ganado Junior High and began immediately filling in as a substitute teacher in the Elementary School and Junior High next door.

Ganado Public Elementary School participated in a pilot program called Whole Language Approach based upon student-generated drawings and creative pictorials crafted into hand held journals. This approach addressed the transition challenge for kindergartners coming to school speaking their native Navajo language. Pictures and shapes can ease the language transition from Navajo — a rarely written native language — to innovative English lettering for reading and writing.

Window Rock capital of Navajo Nation halfway between Ganado, AZ and Gallup, NM

I was hired in the autumn as the junior high school counselor for seventh through ninth graders. The children and I laughed a lot in groups I held in my office, in the cafeteria at lunch and during outdoor games for recreation. I began to develop educational presentations I gave in individual classrooms concerning poisonous substances such as white out, glue and gas sniffing, and how harmful they are to our human brain. I was shocked when the principal called me into my office to say I needed to park my car closer to my window so I could be certain students were not opening the gas cap and soaking a sock in the gasoline.

This sobering conversation impressed upon me how desperate some young men and some women were to attempt temporary relief from emotional pain and had my work cut out for me to address this self-destructive behavior pattern. It rained a lot autumn and winter when I had to drive in deep mud to find out why some children were not able to attend school on a regular basis. I felt more like a truant officer than a school counselor at times. However, meeting family members and the children outside the school began to build a bridge between home and school.

I began offering breathing circles for children to begin to sense how they could relax their bodies and let go of deeper inner tensions through their breath. My intention was for them to be able to experience a natural form of relief from their inner tension and turmoil, a way to breathe into and through it, to realize their breath can become a tool to let go of trauma and make room for more calm and connected feelings of lightness in their hearts and bellies.

Our private or group time was structured aroud breathing, sighing, feeling and crying in an attempt to free the deep pain that was driving them to sniff substances to numb out. It was my heart to help them heal and have more room for laughing and finding joy instead. I feel I planted some seeds as the school counselor.

Before I moved to the Reservation, I had explored various levels of breathwork, hologenetic, Reichian and rebirthing. During my masters program, I’d completed a series of ten rebirths with a certified rebirther. Rebirthing is an active and dynamic breathing exercise that balances the in-breath with the out-breath. This act of breathing brings the body alive, opens cells to clear and clean the dross of the past. Rebirthing breath unwinds your inner holding patterns or energy constrictions by filling the spaces inside with fresh prana or life-force energy. Conscious connected breathing cleanses, cleans and heals the energy body that houses our physical, emotional, spiritual and transpersonal level bodies. Our being can connect and center in all dimensions when we consciously choose to connect our inhale with our exhale; deliberately breathing in a way that brings more life to our entire multi-dimensional body.

My first rebirthing experience with Ross Bruner in Tempe, Arizona in 1981 was challenging, intense and powerfully transforming for me.

Ross has me lie down on my back with a pillow under my head. He guides me to breathe in and out of my mouth in a fairly rapid connected breath. After a minute or two of this kind of breathing, I begin to feel tingling in my hands, feet and around my mouth.

The sensation surprises and thrills me at the same time to be receiving such instant results to all my efforts. My mind relaxes and my heart feels more full and free. I begin to have a memory, like a vision, of a time before I am born into this life, when I am with an angelic realm of beings floating on something like clouds. In this vision, I am with a divine mother and I am bonded and devoted to her. Then, all of a sudden we are called back to earth and I don’t want to go unless I can make a deal that I could come back with her.

I find myself in limbo, in the void by myself. Most beings leave immediately including the being I so longed to be with. The next awareness is that I am in the womb, wondering if I am with her or not, and sensing I probably am not and giving up all the effort it is taking to be born. My mother had told me she had been in a forty hour labor with me and finally had anesthesia, and I’d been pulled out as a footling by my left leg.

I come out of this part of the one-hour rebirth feeling numb in my left leg. I also begin to have what is called tetany (a tingling sensation) showing up in my hands and feet. There begins to be such a tense energy constriction in my fingers and toes that they gnarl and freeze in a position I don’t feel I can do anything about. Ross keeps encouraging me to simply breathe into my legs and feet, relax and let go. But this is challenging for me because my mind becomes worried about the severity of the constricted energy.

He tells me I need to relax and allow more energy to flow through my body and that if I do, the tetany will release. This sensation feels inside like an energetic stream of water turned on full blast and being forced through a very small hose. It takes me 3 or 4 rebirthing experiences before the tetany isn’t one of the main features of the hour-long breathing session.

Once I am able to let go and allow the energy to move more fully through me, I have an amazing full body orgasm just by breathing in a consciously circular way.

Leonard Orr is coming to Scottsdale offering a workshop over the weekend. I drive the six hour trip down from Ganado to Scottsdale. When I arrive, many people are out in the backyard smoking. Shocked about how smoking goes with rebirthing, I wonder what is the point of clearing your energy body just to pollute it again with smoke in the lungs?

Partnered with one of the smokers and feeling I tell her how I feel before we start, I go first as the breather. As I continue to connect my in-breath with my out-breath, immediately I go deeper inside and my breath suspends for a time. In this deeper state, I feel a deep desire to have a child. This surprises me since my earlier decision when I lived in Ganado on the Navajo Indian Reservation as a school counselor was to enjoy my freedom, hermit-hood and solace once I had my own place.

I question that maybe the insight is to rebirth an aspect of myself. Maybe my desire is about needing to be reborn. And yet I continue to feel it is a clear desire to have a child. But I am not dating anyone. Spoke with Leonard about it during the workshop, he tells me to write an affirmation and the perfect person to have a baby with will just come to me. I believe him.

He invites me to come to Consciousness Village near Sierraville Hot Springs in California, close to Lake Tahoe and Truckee to complete rebirthing certification in the summer.

When I return to Ganado where I am a junior high counselor, I begin writing one hundred times a day that I will meet a rebirther with whom I can conceive a child. I write it everyday for ten days. On the tenth day, I receive a call at school from a man named Mich Mann. My heart feels an exhilaration that this is the tenth day and this could be the person to have a child with. He shares over the phone that he lives on Leonard’s property and that he is half-Cherokee, a firewalker who wants to come here to do a fire-walking ceremony.

He asks me to pick him up where he’d hitchhiked near Chinle highway to Canyon de Chelly. There he stands well over six feet tall on the side of the road. His horn-rimmed sunglasses look more like goggles on his angular narrow face. Sandy brown hair grows past his shoulders, pulled into a ponytail with a red bandana covering his crown. Traveling light with a backpack, he looks stoic yet strong to me. No smile, he simply holds out his hand and says his name, Mich.

We decide to drive up north through Chinle, Arizona to Spider Rock Overlook. This man sits silent, no comment about the amazing beauty all around. It is as if his mind is in a different place than his body. I park and get out of the car and sit on a rock watching a red-tailed hawk circle above my head with a clear blue sky above with few billowy clouds further west of us. He walks to the edge of the Canyon extending a sidewalk width after the parking lot bordered by boulders of rock about two to three feet deep.

The pathway down to the bottom of the Canyon descends gradually through the rock as a narrow passageway that continues along the rock wall then spirals down around the open depth of growth of sage, cedar open spaces and wind. The wind whips up around the Canyon walls, changing direction as quickly as you adjust to its current. We continue down until there’s a view of old grandmother Tsotsie’s summer Hogan below at the mouth of the path as it opens in the direction her fenced in sheep area and summer camp near White House Ruins.

The smell of sage and sweet grass calms my mind and opens my eyes to the subtle beauty of the muted green hues of tree leaves glistening in the windy light along the sandy wash where water has left its impressions as the dry land soaked up the moisture. Our steps create a low echo, like a knock so Grandmother T knows we are coming home to the peace of the Canyon flows of mud and rock from the rain and wind.

“You’re so quiet,” I speak.

“Just tired,” he responds.

We return to my one-bedroom apartment on the Ganado public school compound. He sleeps on the living room carpeted floor after he picks up his food staples at the trading post store: coffee, potatoes and spam.

I had just completed a major four-month colon cleanse so all I have in my kitchen is alfalfa and peppermint leaves that I drink in strong doses daily. In fact, just before I’d received the call from Mich at school, I had been in the teacher’s lounge early in the morning smelling the strong aroma of coffee. The smell somehow had triggered this inner release in my colon, doubling me over with an intense sharp pain along my colon’s wall. I’d barely made it the bathroom before a mucous plug came out in one swoosh of black tarry shape as long as my colon. Looking at it before I’d flushed, I’d felt so thankful that substance had released. I’d called to thank Michael Gonzales, a Mexican Medicine man and psychic healer who had been working with me for almost six months of tea with in person physical and psychic clearings. He dedicated his healing to help people clear cancer from their colons. Ironically, I heard years later, he died himself of colon cancer.

There is no home phone in my unit, so Mich needs to go next door to make any calls. The following morning was Saturday. I am in the bathtub rebirthing myself when Michael slips in to say he was going for a walk and to make a call. As my circular breath deepens and widens into my body, I felt this fluttering of light vibrations igniting in my intestinal womb space. The intensity of the sensations in my belly increase and I begin to feel fear around where this experience is taking me.

Mich returns and I feel I’m in an altered state and since he has rebirthed himself, I ask him to help me out of the tub and hold me while my rebirthing experience continues. He lies down next to me and I sink into the firmness of his sturdy frame. Cuddling and being held reassures me that eventually all will go back to normal inside. But he begins to stroke my hair and caress my face. Soon he touches my neck and bosom where my breasts branch apart.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Nothing,” was his only response.

I settle back into being held, he begins stroking my back and hips — it feels more like sensual touching.

“I don’t want to be sexual, Mich, I just want to be held and nurtured.”

He sighs and murmurs into my ear, “Do you have difficulty receiving love?”

I nod silently, having been celibate for over nine months. “I do know the difference between sex and love,” I say to myself silently, but I surrender to the process, feeling that he must be the planter of the seed, even though this is not what I had wanted it to look like. I allow him to get undressed and we come together sexually for just this one time.

My son was conceived that early evening in the late spring, just after May Day.

The next day at school, Juanita my Navajo assistant comes to tell me her Uncle had agreed to allow Michael to do his fire-walking ceremony. She cautions that he follow all the parameters her Uncle sets for him or he will be asked to leave his property.

A few days later, Mich and I go for a walk and he shares, “It didn’t work out with the Tsotsies to use their camp area.”

I ask, “What happened?”

He responds, “We didn’t see eye to eye on a few things.”

I stay quiet, knowing he’d let his ego get in the way.

“I’m not able to make any more arrangements for you,” I declare.

We drive up to Canyon de Chelly one more time. On the way back, Michael is driving and asks me get something out of his wallet. When I open it, there is a photo of a beautiful woman. I know intuitively they are still together. I feel their connection through her photograph. He denies it. On this last walk together, I don’t let him get away with any further lies.

“So how long have you and Lora been together?”

Michael responds, “About a year, but we recently broke up. That’s why I said I wasn’t with anyone.”

I take a breath and blurt out, “But you both still love each other.”

“We do.”

“Then you are still together,” I confirm.

Mich offers, “Ora was my first rebirther.”

I ask, “Did you have sex with her during your first rebirthing session?”

He nods.

I know in a few weeks I am pregnant for the second time in my life. My breasts feel tender and I’d missed my last menstruation.

I call Mich and he responds,

“How do you know it’s mine?”

I sigh and say I know.

The affirmation of meeting a rebirther to have a child with has manifested.

Michael leaves and heads back to Consciousness Village near Lake Tahoe to reunite with Lora, one of the leaders of the rebirthing group, who is also pregnant with Michael’s child conceived a week after his return. I also head Consciousness Village to complete my training. Mich does not want me to stay, so I let Ora know I am also pregnant. I stand my ground concerning my intention to complete rebirthing training with Leonard Orr that summer no matter what.

The temperature training in freezing cold Lake Tahoe mid-July is transformative for me. Leonard has us line up in our bathers and begin the rebirthing breath, consciously breathing in and out in a circular way, step by step. When I get to the immersion of my belly, I have to slow down my breath to breathe through anxiety and panic releasing through my body breathing, and again when I begin to immerse my breasts in the frigid turgid water.

I stay as long as I can in Sierraville Hot Springs hoping Mich would be willing to help me with wood at least during the winter. Leonard advises Mich to be responsible for both children. Mich doesn’t see it that way. He tells me he considers himself a planter of seeds. He shares with me he’d conceived with an Indian woman in Oklahoma.

I want an underwater birth in the hot springs on the property. This is Ora’s intention for her own birth and she doesn’t want to share that experience with me. Mich leaves for a few days after I arrive when I refuse to leave right away.

Lora shares with me that Mich has a behavior pattern of fighting with her then drinking beer and becoming volatile, at times threatening and had hit her that evening when we’d stayed together after he left for Truckee. I feel hopeful that we can work out both having our babies underwater, supporting each other. Unfortunately for me, Mich returns and Ora makes it clear she is not open nor willing for us to both birth our babies under the hot springs waters.

My mind races, my heart feels hollow and hurt that Ora’s competitive selfish nature can’t nor won’t share the healing community waters with me so I can have the underwater birth I long for. During my stay there, my former husband calls me, open to getting back together after his second divorce, until I mention I am pregnant. Then, he becomes quiet and loses his interest in re-uniting with me.

I rebirth myself several times inside the part-tent, part-trailer I am staying in. Feeling an integral part of the hot springs and meadow, I realize the truth: Ora and Mich are not able to integrate me as a birthing single mother. I pack up my belongings and head to my friend’s place in southern California to contemplate my next steps.

Dear darling Grace, this is your Wise Crone Self needing to let you know that you were so strong to stand your ground and stay at Consciousness Village under such circumstances.

You were so brave to stay open to how to heal and integrate you and Lora both being pregnant at the same time with the same biological father. It may not have occurred to you at the time that Leonard Orr likely let Mich know you were seeking a father for your desire to birth a child. Thus, his encouragement that Mich be responsible for both babies and not just his and Ora’s.

It was Ora’s wounding patterns that couldn’t allow her to be open to your soul sister love and willingness to have your babies together without Mich’s support if he wasn’t able to be responsible as a father of both babies. Of course, you let Mich go when you realized he had an emotional dependency upon alcohol and wasn’t reliable as a potential partner. The healing could have been with you and Ora, however she was too attached to her competitive jealous ego patterns.

You could have brought up the lack of integrity in this not so Conscious Village with smoking rebirthers and especially the inappropriate behavior of certified rebirthers having sex with the people they are supposed to be holding a healing space for.

Since Ora held the positions as lead rebirthing trainer and Village manager, you were a threat to her authority and reputation if you had spoken up about it at the time. You chose to stay in your own integrity, complete the training and follow your heart to a higher ground of being and living.

I want you to know that your courage is commendable to continue to rebirth yourself in the midst of your former husband calling and wanting to get back together with you until he found out you were already pregnant with someone else’s child. This has been a pattern of patriarchy for a long time. For men to be willing to love a child as their own requires a willingness to let go of biological attachment to their own genetic identity around progeny.

You have unlimited possibilities of what your next steps will be dear Grace. Stay true to your heart, your intuition, and your higher awareness that is developing in you as you continue your soul journey to heal and integrate your multidimensional self.