I have less than a month remaining until I leave the college life for good and start my trek to Teaching Drum. I don’t think it has quite hit me yet, but it’s starting to. Today I realized that I finally feel ready to take the plunge into the yearlong program. I think I’m ready to learn skills, have new experiences, establish new relationships and continue old ones. I’m ready to immerse myself back into the life of a close-knit, caring community focused on communication and attunement. I’m ready to start living life.

So why am I so scared?

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A few months ago I was initiated into the world of holotropic breathwork. It’s kind of a therapeutic LSD trip, without the drugs. Through only accelerated breathing and music, it enables access to nonordinary states of consciousness — the state in which deep inner healing can occur, or gods can speak to mortals, or the veil of reality can be pierced.

Don’t ask me how it works. I don’t know. But, for some reason, it works.

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From second grade through middle school, I was in the “Gifted” program, a public education effort to make some kids more special than others. I have fond memories of skipping out of normal class to go do it, but it certainly wasn’t anything that “normal” students couldn’t do. It was just more creative and more fun.

My first Gifted teacher was named Mrs. Fitzpatrick. She was mean and made me cry. One time I started crying in front of her and she said sternly, “Don’t do that. Don’t cry.”

I hated her. She had us write in journals every day, and in my journals I wrote, “I hate Mrs. Fitzpatrick.” I didn’t realize until a few years ago, looking back at them, that she probably read those journals …

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I have a lot of interests. I’m not sure where exactly children fall in there, but I know they’re in there somewhere, at least insofar as I want children and I expect to interact with people of all ages (whether I become a teacher, counselor, healer, or whatever). So while I didn’t have a clear-cut motivation, for my last quarter here at Stanford I decided to take Psychology 147: Development in Childhood. It was a class that required a certain number of hours spent as a student teacher in Bing Nursery School, and, having had almost no experience with children, it was definitely something new for me.

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