September, 2026

For my first 9D Breathwork workshop in 2025 I had set the intention to discover what my “soul” or inherited “essence” was and I had been very surprised, as described elsewhere, to discover that when I was in the womb I was both male and female and that I only became male after my birth by virtue of my genitalia. I felt that experience had been very important in terms of my soul discovery, or my soul retrieval, or my soul access work; that there was nothing more foundational than for me to understand that I was both male and female.

So when I went back for my second breath session a few months later I had the same intention, which was to learn more about my soul, and, for some reason, when I began deepening, I found myself in the company of my my father’s mother’s mother, my great grandmother, Toby Warshavski, the woman I wrote that little poetry book about how she saved my life when I was four years old. And as I thought about my beloved great grandmother, I remembered that she too had been a little child, and that she had had a father and a mother, although it was the father’s line that I was particularly interested in. And I imagined/visualized her father, probably in the 1830s, and I greeted him and actually opened my arms and hugged him. And then I remembered that he had been a little boy and had had a father and that took me back into the 1780s or the American revolutionary times, and I hugged that man and then that father’s father went back to the 17th and then the 16th century and the 15^th century, and as I was following these men and hugging these men I got back to the time of the butcher Columbus’s voyage to the so-called New World, and the fact that I had had Jewish ancestors in Moorish Spain at that time, and that Jews were on Columbus’s ships, and that my ancestors of that time had learned about the New World, and were also expelled from Moorish Spain, and that some of my ancestors were people who had walked to Spain in the middle ages and had then walked away from Spain, often back to the holy land or Northern Africa or eastern European countries. These people, including some of my ancestors had been welcome in many Muslim countries, and the image of my ancestors walking to and fro became very powerful for me, and I went back beyond the Middle Ages, and then I went back to the time of Christ. And I was now not going generation by generation but jumping back centuries at a time, back to Christ, and then back to Moses. And the fact is that I had ancestors who walked with Moses from Egypt to the holy land. And then I was back in the time of King David and young David and Goliath … and my ancestors were there and I hugged them and I was there.

I then went back to the cave people where I’ve often started my autobiography and have often said that I can absolutely and concretely feel that I was descended from people 50,000 years ago making handprints in blood on the walls of the cave. And then I went beyond that, back to the earliest stages of humankind, and I felt that I had walked back millions of years, walking, walking, back to the Australopithecines, to Lucy, and I knew for certain that one of her contemporaries was my ancestor, both a male and a female. And I pictured the primates walking backwards through time. Walking. Walking. And I kept going further and further back… back to when the first animals walked on the land, and then back to being the creatures in the sea who were my ancestors. And then back to the first forms of life on Earth. And then even back to the big bang, to the explosion that had fostered the current iteration of space and time and matter, and I was back at my lifelong obsession with the question of how something could come from nothing … or how it always was – which solved nothing about origins – and there’s just soooo much mass – and I just don’t understand. And I know I don’t know. And can’t know. And I can’t stand that I don’t know the answer to how something can come from nothing and that saying it always was and always will be solves nothing. Whereupon I started mumbling “I know that I don’t know,” and “I know that I can’t know.” And then I started my journey of returning to the present, first as atoms, then molecules, then stars and suns, planets, the Earth and the sun, and the gases that led to the combination of molecules that produced the first life that led to the creatures of the sea that came out onto the land and that were able to walk into primates and Lucy and I was working my way back, and back, and back. And I came back to my great grandmother. I came back to my grandfather on my patriarchal side, a man who I knew, and I came back to my father, and I knew something about my father’s deep deep tension between the soft soul of the man he was and the demand that as a man he be strong and macho and fearless and blah blah blah and how I had directly inherited the part of me that needed to be a man, and needed to be strong, and needed to know what being a father was and then, at this very point in my life, when I realized I no longer needed to be that person, that I had become a spiritual person, that I was on a spiritual journey and even believed in the existence of some sort of higher power which I’ve actually come to “know,” and I felt in that sense that I also knew as much of my “soul” as I would ever be able or capable of knowing, that it was satisfactory, and that although I knew I couldn’t – that I didn’t – “know,” and I would never know how something came from nothing, that I had traced the journey of my soul into my current body and current consciousness where it lives today.