The Lions Roar Begins with a Thousand Whispers

"This is not a memoir.A This is LITERATURE.A You use words the way the best abstract expressionists used colour. You've created a true work of art." ~ Will Johnson author of The Posture of Meditation

From your Galway bloodline you find the world a good Irish stew...so no matter what, you relax into it.

The riots in Paris in '68 flipped you home in 1971, where your country was still shooting into the throat of Vietnam. There you found your mother dead in bed on Easter morning, there your father would be alone after fifty-seven years of marriage. You did not really meet him until you were seven, since he was in the Pacific from Guadalcanal to Iwo Jima he said he was more scared of you and your brother than he was of the Japanese.

You drive cross-country to live at Zen Center in San Francisco. You meet Dr. Ida P. Rolf and become one of thirty Rolfers. You meet Chogyam Trungpa and, immediately after, see his face in the entire sky, smiling down at you. Your mind from then on is challenged to be as vast as his, to be the sky itself.You meet Don Lupe, a Huichol Shaman from Mexico, and go to his desert homeland at Wirikuta to share a peyote ritual each year for six years.

You go to Burkina Faso with Malidoma Some, a shaman from the Dagara tribe, and deep in a cave meet one from the other side who is ancient with elephant skin yet a teenager at the same time.You share the adventure of being married three times.You realize that the lion's roar is the vast silence of the mind as it awakens to itself as this body.

-- Tom Pathe