A quarter mile into an early morning swim, I felt intense pressure in my chest. I was swimming through the ancient sunken forest in Lake Sammamish in front of my home in Issaquah, Washington. I couldn’t breathe. It wasn’t the first time my heart had struggled during exercise. I felt shortness of breath and a tight chest when running and biking, and the discomfort always self-corrected when I reduced my effort. But this was my first episode in the water. The heart disease that I had repressed for twenty years brought me to the edge of death.
Swimming was a feature of my fitness routine. I ran, biked, and swam, mile after mile, and year after year, to ward off the inevitable and live long enough to be a father to my children. An astrologer told my mother just after I was born that I would die in the water, a fact that lived just under the dark surface with the memory of the diagnosis of my genetic heart disease, passed down to me by my absent father, a diagnosis I tried to forget. I was an athlete in college and a successful entrepreneur as an adult. From the outside, I was powerful and indestructible - a marvel of resilience. But if I didn’t slow my breathing and calm my heart, I was going to drown and die. I made it back to shore, barely. I had just had a heart attack, and within weeks I was scheduled for quadruple bypass surgery.
Bypass follows my story through my heart surgery, from the edge of death through surgery, healing, and learning to live again. The story touches body, mind, and spirit. The surgery story is a personal account of my strained relationship with my body and distrust of the medical system. Every doctor that I’ve spoken to since I began work on this book has told me the same thing: “The patients I see every day all struggle with the emotional aspect of surgery and there’s nothing I can do for them.” The root causes of my condition and the reasons I ignored my disease for decades are brought to light as the reader learns how I coped with my difficult upbringing. I was raised fatherless in a culture where men don’t speak, which led me to shut down emotionally and seek self-worth by creating the external persona of a successful man. I thought the strong man I invented could save me from my pain, but by burying my experiences, I isolated myself and neglected my health. Following surgery, when I failed to fully recover, I turned to science and spirit and began a desperate search for meaning to ease my suffering and help with my depression. I deepened my Buddhist practice, which led me to an awakening, and began a deep exploration of the latest research regarding the power of the body and the nervous system to heal. I was fortunate to have a Buddhist teacher who encouraged me through my darkest days, “Don’t look away.”
After surgery and facing the truth of my body not recovering, I began to see how my childhood and teenage years had wired my nervous system for chronic stress while heart disease ravaged my circulation. In the book, I share painful and intimate details and discover my own story as I reconcile the past and the present. Throughout the story, I unconsciously follow the trail of my father, who I fear has shown me my inevitable fate of isolation and loneliness. The arc of the story will take the reader from my near-death experience to the depths of depression and then emergence through physical, spiritual, and energetic healing. The stories come together to expose the healing opportunity that major surgery has to offer. The healing narrative cites the work of Michael Singer, Dr. Gabor Mate, Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk, Dr. Peter Levine, and others at the forefront of trauma treatment and neuroplasticity research.
As the story progresses, I discover the interconnection and interdependence between my body, mind, and spirit.. The book recounts my spiritual awakening after visiting my Buddhist teacher’s teacher in Northern India and then experiencing my ‘dark night of the soul.’ As I found the path to heal and release my repressed trauma, I learned how it feels to rewire my nervous system. More than a theory or secondhand recollection, I felt the reconciliation in my body.
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