As published in the April, 2003 edition of Light Connection

By the Grace of God Go I
By Dr. Howard E. Richmond

This ancient saying sprung forth from me one day in therapy as I absorbed my patients' negativity, my lower back in spasm from helping them unload their wheel barrels of pain, shame, and worthlessness. In a flash I recognized I could be any one of the troubled souls who came to see me, and the comforting veil that separated me, doctor, and them, patient, forever vanished.

Prior to that, during my first decade as captain of the journey called therapy, I often wanted to abandon ship—or at least throw a few passengers overboard. One of them, a broken spirit named Sonya, came to my door and her sad eyes spoke what her thin lips could not. "Doctor, I am paralyzed in a prison of pain and suffering and I am terrified I¹ve been sentenced here for life."

Sonya's uncontrollable suicidal impulses drove her through the hospital's revolving doors for frequent and extended visits. Despite the best of my traditionally trained psychiatric background, my treatment efforts seemed futile. Why, I wondered?

Before I met her, Sonya had worked many years as a manager of a well-known restaurant chain until the day her life caved in. While helping the wait-staff serve food, she fell awkwardly on her left ankle and unwisely continued to work, despite searing physical pain, through what was to be her last eight-hour shift. Her foot never healed, and as I eventually discovered, neither had her heart.

Sonya was rejected by a malignantly critical mother, herself wounded at an early age by an incestuous father. The details of her buried and painful past, like a lost civilization, took much effort to excavate and uncover. Both of us had to forge a fragile space of trust, which we built ever so slowly and delicately, brick by brick. Sonya taught me how to endure and release my own emotionally charged judgments in order to understand the core of her pain. I learned how to see more clearly through her and others' reality lens with eyes of compassion and a heart of empathy. I saw how emotions such as fear, shame, and rage could amass over time and energetically enslave anyone to a life of misery and unfulfilled potential. There but for the grace of God go I, I thought once again.

Though Sonya eventually moved out of state, she never moved out of her pain. I'll always remember the day she uncharacteristically and courageously asked me for a hug. And how I, at that time, uncharacteristically and courageously responded from my heart. Sonya showed me how her pain was really a manifestation of her Ego crying out in agony to find its source, Love, or Spirit. Sonya had lost her way Home.

Ego plays a game with all of us, no matter what disguise we wear: doctor, patient, president, spiritual leader, etc. Ego's design to edge God out, is to seduce our Self into believing in its separateness. Ego fuels the mind-body vehicle into an alluring quicksand of duality—a me and you, right and wrong, us and them, blame and shame-game.

With the grace of Grace, and embracing Ego through Spirit's viewfinder, we can more readily find our way back Home.

Howard E. Richmond, M.D. is a multi-talented psychiatrist and psychotherapist in private practice in Southern California who recently released his second musical CD, Soul-a-bration, an original 12-string guitar composition. To contact Dr. Richmond, or for information on his CDs, email him @ howard@drhowardrichmond.com