Heidi Smith

California, USA

The Perfect Storm Meets a Mighty Wind

The first time I met Ramtha face to face, I wanted to run away. Rumor had it he knew everything about us – every word, every thought, every feeling and action, including the ones I’d hoped were my little secret. Now as I stood in a line of other students on the last day of a retreat in Snow Mountain, Colorado, a line that was drawing inexorably closer to this master teacher, it was beginning to seriously feel like the Final Judgment. Although he’d repeatedly told us throughout the week how much he loved us, I had my doubts. I knew my private thoughts, not to mention words and actions, and “lovable” was not the first word they inspired. Maybe it was a trick, and when I got to the front of the line, I’d be struck by lightning.

Furthermore, as the line inched ever closer to him, my brain chose that exact moment to go haywire and was now sending me thoughts so vile that I couldn’t have even made them up on a normal day. No, no, no. My one moment in front of an ascended being and this is what my brain comes up with? Could I get any less enlightened? Could it get any worse? It could, actually. Now he was looking at me, while my brain screamed odd obscenities and my body lost the ability to move.

Based on my reaction, you might think that I was an axe murderer or petty dictator of some sort by the time I came to Ramtha’s school. In fact, I was a 21-year old girl fresh from my university. I’d finished college one week earlier and,  loaded with champagne and some trepidation, headed from California to Colorado straight from my graduation party (fortunately, my mom was driving for the first six hours, or we’d never have made it). I’d turned twenty-two during the retreat. I’d also learned that my parents were separating. Altogether, it was an eventful week.

I was one of the youngest people there, and the other students tended to project their misguided assumptions about youth and innocence on to me (“you precious angel!”), little realizing that I was already a hardened reprobate. The week had served to confirm my suspicion that while other people’s gods loved them unconditionally, mine didn’t even like me very much. In the spiritual Olympics, I was a non-starter.

Given my attitude, you may wonder what I was doing there at all. I wasn’t looking for a master teacher. I was violently anti-religion and had little interest in “God,” based on the actions of his many followers. It wasn’t any passionate desire for truth or knowledge that drew me. I was there for only one reason: to save my life.

It wasn’t in danger from some mysterious outside force or a squad of hit men. The situation was quite simple. Ever heard that uplifting Nirvana song, “I Hate Myself and Want to Die”? Okay, I’m overstating the case, but only slightly.  

To understand how things got so dire so quickly, it helps to know that for all intents and purposes, I was Catholic. My genetic line is one large collection of smart, talented, well-intentioned guilty people. My uncle was a priest and my dad, in a sincere attempt to understand the nature of God, joined a Jesuit seminary for nine years. The church rewarded his efforts with a chance to participate in weekly bouts of self-flagellation. Thursdays were official “mortification of the flesh” days, which also involved wearing chain metal bands around the thigh with the chains cut and the points facing inward. Nothing says divine love like deliberate self-torture.  It’s safe to say that my genetic code had a few kinks.

After he left the seminary, my dad joined the Catholic Alumni Club in San Francisco, which is where he met my mom, a (Catholic) teacher with a Masters’ Degree from UC Berkeley who had lived in Europe and dreamed as a girl of being a park ranger. Both had skipped several grades; my dad went to the University of Chicago at age 15 and graduated when he was18. Both were older than the norm when they got married in 1963; he was 35 and she was 28. Perhaps most importantly, both had a wide variety of interests and talents and they successfully avoided repeated attempts from their peers to pin them down to just one.

After they’d been married for several years, they decided to leave the church, a decision resulting from my older brother’s impending first communion. My dad considered his six-year-old son; he considered the church. Why would he ever allow his kids to be indoctrinated into an institution that he still had nightmares about? The decision didn’t sit well with either side of the family, but it did free my parents to explore various aspects of the human potential movement that was sweeping America in the early 1970s.

Theoretically, my brother and I escaped Catholicism. After age four, I never set foot inside a church unless it was for a wedding, a funeral, or a visit to a European monument. But in fact, our genetics (which of course, we signed up for) were not going to let us get away that easily. Much later, we discussed some of the basic assumptions about life that we’d had even as children. Number one:  You’re wrong! When in doubt, it’s your fault. Actually, whatever “it” is, it’s always your fault (in fairness, this does provide a comforting degree of certainty: you never have to waste time searching for the culprit). A friend of mine recently told me a story from his childhood about dreaming that he’d committed a crime and had to turn himself in. He woke up, put on his clothes and rode his bike all the way to the police station, only to suddenly realize that he hadn’t done anything wrong. That’s kind of how it was with us.

If I thought about God at all, it was in terms of religion, for which I had neither time nor tolerance. The older I got and the more history I learned, the more inexplicable religion became. It seemed so obvious that all of the wars that had occurred and were occurring in the name of God had nothing to do with him/her/it. Then there were the Spanish Inquisition, the back and forth bombings in Lebanon, and the Saudi Arabian princess getting publicly executed under Islamic law for the crime of disobeying her family’s wishes. It all seemed like madness and hypocrisy, and still does.

On a personal level, I was never a fan of rules, and religion seemed to have an awful lot of them. It wasn’t that I wanted to kill anyone or covet my neighbor’s possessions; I just didn’t want anyone to tell me that I couldn’t. Legislated morality put my back up, and does to this day.

At the same time, I had a huge sense of fairness and justice, and would often get outraged over events that had happened 1,000 years earlier (I enjoyed getting outraged). Anything to do with human rights, freedom, and standing up for truth, regardless of the consequences, fascinated me. 

In my early years, life was going along swimmingly until my parents made a shocking and fateful decision, one that would introduce my brother and me to horrors yet undreamt and eventually threaten our very existence: yes, they moved us to the suburbs.

Anyone who’s ever seen any movie or television show set in the suburbs knows that life there is never as it seems. There’s usually some serial killer lurking behind the smiling face of a soccer mom or a white slavery ring being run out of the scout leader’s basement. The better things look, the more twisted they are, guaranteed. That was bad news for us, as we moved in to a two-story house with a white picket fence, a swimming pool and two palm trees in the backyard. Cue the theme from Jaws.

Los Altos, California sits in the heart of Silicon Valley, which in the late 70’s and early 80’s was just exploding into international prominence. The high school parking lot was dotted with Mercedes, Porsches and BMWs in addition to humbler vehicles. To all appearances, we were living the American dream. But as you might expect, there was a snake in the garden - in this case, a group of ten-year- old boys. Whereas the kids in our old, working-class neighborhood in Campbell had been a nice and fairly harmless bunch, the new crop of suburban kids in my brother’s grade were more like a malignant growth. In fact, many of them have since died from unnatural causes or gone to prison and several were bona fide budding sociopaths. Welcome to the neighborhood! My brother fell in with that crowd and soon he was getting into trouble – at school, at home, and in the community.

I, meanwhile, was a very athletic nerd, obsessed with Greek mythology and interested in things like rocks and vocabulary when I wasn’t racing up and down a soccer field. My teachers wanted to skip me ahead but my parents refused, based on their own childhood experiences. I was the defender of the meek and even beat up the school bully when he was hassling someone smaller. At age eleven, I was the master of my little universe.

But all was not right in our world. My brother was in trouble. His crowd was into drugs and petty crime and his once sunny disposition was turning dark as his view of the future dimmed. Somehow, he didn’t seem to feel that he could escape the influence and pressure of his peers and change his circumstances. In truth, there were very few other kids to hang out with and it would have taken a huge act of will on his part to break with the ruling crowd, especially at age twelve. As it was, he became increasingly sullen, angry and withdrawn.

As he got older, his crowd moved on to harder drugs and more dangerous past times. For me, seeing first hand what was happening was just plain scary. Although I was still in elementary school, drugs suddenly seemed like an inevitable rite of passage – one that I desperately wanted to avoid. I loved my brother and was worried about him, but at the same time cared immensely about what he thought of me. At that time he was the most influential person in my life.   

On his end, several things were happening simultaneously. In big brother fashion, he felt responsible to warn me about the dangers that lay ahead (which effectively scared the shit out of me), but at the same time found my naïve self-confidence beyond irritating, particularly when he wasn’t feeling too hot about himself. As he later told me, “Something would rise up in me that just wanted to destroy you.” Whether consciously or not, he set out to eradicate my self-confidence through relentless verbal assaults. Whatever I did, it wasn’t good enough, and I began to seriously doubt my own worth.

Right around this time I was visited by the multiple plagues of braces, head-gear and acne (I’d like to speak to the inventor of head-gear on behalf of demoralized 13 year olds worldwide). My prior confidence disintegrated into a morass of insecurity and I became chronically apologetic. I slunk through junior high school, praying not to attract too much notice and hoping to make it out without having to do any drugs.

But at 14, a small miracle happened: my braces were removed, the acne medication worked, and the head gear found its way to the trash. I was a new being, or at least I looked like one. And now I had a new problem. Arriving in high school, I began to attract immediate notice from males, some of them substantially older than I was. Perhaps inevitably, some of them were my brother’s friends.

This is where things get a little warped. Although I was afraid of the effects of drugs, I wanted to be cool so I ignored their continual presence in our house. And, while I was too young and naïve to handle the attention that was coming my way, I was also full of hormones. Meanwhile, during the summer before I entered high school, I’d discovered alcohol, and while drugs were never my thing, booze seemed to have been invented just to ease my social path. Intellectually, I was undaunted. Put me in any academic setting and I was the opinionated loudmouth I remain today. Socially, however, my brother’s comments had gotten under my skin. I felt inept and uncertain. Drinking seemed to be the only thing that gave me the courage to express myself in social situations, especially with guys. Lying in wait like a ticking bomb was some unfinished soul business related to being an unworthy female. Altogether, it was a perfect storm.

By the time I was a sophomore, our house had become a mecca for drugs and alcohol. Our parents both worked full time, leaving us ample opportunity to get into trouble. I became a habitual liar (although my mom assures me that I was never any good at it) and a thief, “borrowing” her possessions to such an extent that she put a lock on her bedroom door. Cocaine, acid, mushrooms and pot rotated through our house on a regular basis and it was common to come home during school lunch when I was fifteen and find a group of guys sitting around the kitchen table snorting lines. It was always rather surreal to return to social studies or P.E. after that. Still wanting to be cool, I never said a word and allowed my parents to carry on obliviously, despite the fact that our house was continually being disrespected (by me, among other many others – it was just a matter of degree).

Although I wasn’t into drugs, my teenage years nevertheless became an exercise in self-destruction, including a close encounter with the F.B.I, high speed chases with cops, multiple near arrests, car crashes and an ongoing love/hate relationship with alcohol. In the midst of the chaos, an old soul program got activated that would have repercussions for years to come. For reasons of his own, my brother informed me that, “Everyone is having sex.” The obvious implication was, everyone but me. As it turned out, that wasn’t true but at the time, I believed him and in some twisted way, wanted to impress him. What better way than to lose this pesky virginity? So I did – with one of his friends. It probably goes without saying that his friends were not the kind of guys you want your sister hanging out with.

Before long I’d worked my way through several more of his friends, as well as a number of other guys (moderation has never been my strong suit). It was one of the worst things I could have done to him as a brother and a male, but it was also subconscious payback for messing with my head so badly. The sad part was there actually was some piece of me that was trying to say, “See? Your friends take me seriously. I must really be okay.” Years later, my brother and I could only imagine that we’d made some bizarre agreement before we ever incarnated this time around to help each other overcome some very old and painful attitudes – by experiencing them and inflicting them on each other. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time.

Before long, my reputation preceded me. Far from seeing myself as smart, athletic, funny and worthwhile, by sixteen I believed that the only thing I had to offer was sex. It probably didn’t help that I was reading brain-rotting romance novels at the time. Now there’s an excellent blueprint for how to deal with men! The worse I felt about myself, the more important it was to be beautiful. In the grand tradition of so many California girls, I stopped eating.

That experiment wasn’t destined to last. After a summer of pursuing the skinny, tanned look popularized by refugee populations in Africa, I returned to school in the fall and made a discovery: soccer and borderline anorexia are incompatible. Since soccer was one of the only things that was still working in my life and that gave me joy, something had to go. I started eating again and gave up my ambition to become the world’s most beautiful sixteen-year-old (this was before the onset of chin hairs, but I guess that goes without saying).

The interesting thing is that it didn’t matter so much what I did; it mattered what I thought about it. Many people have done drugs, had abundant sex, and have drunk themselves into oblivion without self-judgment. I doubt that Mick Jagger, for example, woke up during the height of the 60’s after some drunken encounter with a groupie thinking, “I feel terrible about myself.” But I was not Mick Jagger, and I did feel terrible about myself. Everything in my genetics and my basic view of life told me that I was being a very bad person. And being a teenager, I was naturally inclined to take the entire situation much more seriously than it deserved.

My parents were deeply confused and increasingly afraid. Where my brother’s self-destruction was withdrawn and quiet, a white dwarf imploding in on itself, mine was more like a supernova – flamboyant and impossible to ignore. I became the front-runner for the position of Problem Child #1. Should they send me to an all girls’ school? Lock me in my room until I turned 25? They had no answers, and neither did I.

I was definitely no picnic to live with. Swinging wildly between rage and despair, accusations and apologies, I was the ultimate tragic drama queen and I was pissed – at everything. My mom, raised not to express her feelings, had no frame of reference for me, and since she wasn’t constantly emoting like I was, I thought her cold. My dad was more inclined to be a disciplinarian, but they couldn’t agree on what to enforce or how to enforce it.

It’s easy to look back now, after almost twenty years of working with teenagers, and identify what was needed: purpose and a challenge, a good kick in the ass and the opportunity to do something demanding, preferably something that served other people or some greater idea. Also, it wouldn’t have hurt to have locked my brother and me in a room for 40 days until we’d either resolved our conflicts or given them up out of sheer exhaustion. But this was the suburbs, where the common goal was to give your kids everything. So instead, my parents sent me to college. Would the torture never cease?

Despite all the drama, my teenage years had many bright spots. When I played soccer, I could fly. I was strong, physically tough and fast, fast, fast. I still dream about it sometimes. Soccer also gave me my first taste of the power of focus. When I was a freshman, a senior boy from our school won the all-star player of the year award for the county. I decided then that I would own that award by the time I graduated. Sure enough, my senior year it was mine – a long-held thought realized. On the field, I was the captain – respected, admired, reliable. Off it, well.

Then there was writing. I discovered the school newspaper, and with it, an audience. The newspaper room was my favorite place in the entire school and I frequently cut other classes just to hang out there, which as the Opinions Editor I could sort of get away with. Computers were barely coming in to common use, and at that point we would painstakingly cut and paste our copy, using Exacto knives and glue. The day the newspaper came out was like Christmas and my birthday rolled into one. Even the faculty was reading my articles, and I could make them laugh.

My high school employed some of the best academic teachers I ever had. My humanities, history and English teachers taught me how to write and how to think, but above all they absolutely engaged me in what they taught. They were smart, passionate and funny and knew exactly how to deal with teenagers. When I became a teacher myself, their example was never far from my mind.

But at the time, there was some question about whether I would even graduate. By the time I was ready for college, I was only eligible for a few. My test scores were high but my grades reflected all of the chaos of my personal life plus my tendency to skip any class I didn’t like (“Thirty-six absences in chemistry, Ms. Smith? That must have been some flu”). I never much cared about grades, which seemed to reflect effort more than anything else. Several university soccer coaches were sniffing around based on my athletic awards, including one from UC Berkeley, but I finally wound up at the California State University, Chico, a decent but not brilliant school.

The first year was a case study in getting what you resist. At last, I thought, a life away from drugs! Not that I had any plans towards clean living; I just wanted to be able to commit myself more fully to sneaking into bars and going to parties without the distractions that other controlled substances seem to bring.  However, I soon discovered that my new roommates’ favorite pastime was dropping acid and shoplifting (for what it’s worth, they were both vegetarians). My freshman year I made the university soccer team, and occasionally, I’d come home from an intense practice to find the entire dorm room bathed in smoke, a gravity bong in the sink and my roommates chuckling over what sort of pizza to order. Déjà vu!  

My own habits didn’t change much, particularly when it came to liquor and men. Observing my lifestyle, my sophomore roommate, a prudish accounting student, solemnly informed me that I was going to die before I was twenty-five. Although living fast and dying young sounded romantic, I decided right then that I would live longer, just to piss her off. Meanwhile, my parents discovered Ramtha.

Since leaving the church they had explored numerous avenues, including est, which we did as a family, and Wingsong, a spiritual group based in Oakland. On breaks from college, I attended a few Wingsong meetings and listened to channeled teachings. The concepts of channeled beings or other lifetimes made at least as much sense to me as religion, and est was always pushing the idea that we are responsible for everything in our lives, no matter how big or small. In a way, the stage was set for the Ram.

The first time I saw a Ramtha video, I was twenty. As I watched this odd but somehow familiar being jerkily making his way around the seminar room, temporarily occupying a petite blonde body but emanating an unmistakable otherworldliness, I recognized truth. I knew that I was seeing the real deal. It never occurred to me that he wasn’t exactly who he said he was. Returning to school, I never mentioned a word to any of my friends, but he was there, in the back of my mind.

Meanwhile, graduation was approaching, and with it, a growing sense of doom. I didn’t know what I wanted or where I was going. Although I’d settled down a bit and had held a steady boyfriend, like a steady job, for two years, I still felt deeply unworthy. The closer we got to graduation, the more nightmares I had about driving my car, completely out of control, and crashing into a wall. Something was telling me that if I didn’t change, I was going to die – very soon. 

In the midst of that, I received a phone call. My parents offered to send me to a nine-day Ramtha retreat in Colorado. It would mean leaving the very same day that I graduated from college. Did I want to do it?

There was never any real question. I didn’t so much want to do it, I had to. I only learned later that my parents had to borrow the money to send me – and had already decided to separate. But mother’s intuition told my mom that I was in trouble, and she was right.

The event was a revelation. We could have anything we wanted, I learned, if we just focused on it. God lived inside us. We had never done anything wrong and our God had never judged us. Fine, fine, great, but I judged me. When I tried to imagine what I wanted enough to focus on it, the only things I could come up with were completely based on my image. I was confronting my own self-loathing and need for recognition, which at times was almost comical. Whatever story Ramtha told about his lifetime, I immediately decided that I had been a key player. His mother? Me. His soul mate? Me again. His dog? Okay, I don’t know if he had a dog, but if he had, it would have been me.

Now, on the last day of the event here I was, standing in front of my master teacher with all of my self-judgments, convinced that my past had rendered me beyond all hope and taking it all very, very seriously. Standing in front of him, I could barely think, and given the existing state of my thoughts, was afraid to try. Into my mind came the words, "Help me." He looked at me for a moment and said, “Think not of who you are today, but of who you can be.”  I shuffled off to contemplate the dismaying prospect of who I actually was rather than who I was pretending to be.

My life after coming to school was radically altered. I moved to Hawaii, worked with teenagers of all nationalities, ethnicities and income levels (including some who, unlike me, actually had killed people) and traveled the world. I led wilderness service trips with kids and eventually became a teacher. My parents both continued as Ramtha’s students, and my brother came to school in 1992. He fell in love with nature, which is where he’s spent most of his time ever since as one of the world’s premier whitewater expedition leaders. With a lot of intention, truth and effort on both sides, we forgave ourselves and each other, and Ramtha’s teachings have provided a context for understanding what we did. It hasn’t been all sunshine and roses, but we now can see our respective roles in co-creating that reality.

Throughout all of the craziness and self-destruction, I believe that there were three things that kept me alive and kept me going. One, clearly, was an unconscious appointment with a different destiny, one that involved Ramtha. The other two came from my parents. Even though we didn’t understand each other at all at the time, my mom and I did have a bond; when I was really in trouble, she instinctively knew it, and also knew the exact thing to help me out of it. Some of the most satisfying and rewarding experiences I had as a young person were through opportunities that she presented to me. At the same time, my dad taught me about non-judgment. At the height of my wild behavior, when I was convinced I would be severely punished and was ready to resist to my last breath, he would sit me down and ask, “Are you okay?” It was so unexpected that it broke through all of my defenses and I would actually talk to him about what was going on in my life, the doubts and fears and confusion. It’s a lesson I’ve used over, and over in my own subsequent work with teenagers.

And then there’s my teacher. I have never talked with him face to face since that moment twenty years ago, except in my dreams. Yet, somehow, I became the teacher of many of his children, teaching history and English for four years at the Children’s School of Excellence, an institution created for the children of Ramtha school students. I choose to take that as a vote of confidence. Somehow, the wild child settled down (sort of) and became the teacher of others younger but wiser.

As for the Ram himself, he is the ultimate example of unconditional love, patience, clarity, laughter and what it truly means to be a God. He is the greatest inspiration I have ever had, allowing of our human frailties and yet always pushing us forward. His point of view is endlessly refreshing, because it is unconfined by human considerations. I suspect that if I were to stand in front of him today, he would tell me the same thing he did all those years ago:  Focus on who you can be. Because of my teacher, I continue to have a greatly expanded sense of who that person is.