Destination The Journey

Last week I had the pleasure of a cup of tea with Lisa Jones, author of Broken- A Love Story. Speckled with a yellow-gold hue, her blue eyes sparkled as she talked about her experience coming to know Stanford Addison, a renowned spiritual healer who is a quadriplegic, Native American, Traditional Healer, Horse-Gentler, who lives on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming, and is the subject of her debut book. This is a memoir you want to read. It will move you. It is a gorgeous account of  how the rawest bits of life come to transform you-if you let them. If you have four minutes, watch the you-tube trailer below. It brought tears to my eyes.

Some years back Lisa was a veteran journalist living on the Western slope of Colorado in Paonia, when she heard about this quadriplegic horse-gentler who leads these amazing clinics in Wyoming.

“I pitched the story to Outside magazine three times,” Lisa said, ” and they just didn’t get it. I was thinking, if you don’t get this, why do I keep asking you. He’s a traditional healer, horse-gentler, quadriplegic, Native American. What’s not to get? Then I pitched the story to Smithsonian magazine. They said, ‘Go there now. Go right now.’ So I went. That’s how I met Stan.”

“The minute I laid eyes on Stan I thought, Oh God. I’m in trouble. Things are going to change. I just knew it–in my body. It wasn’t anything he said or anything mental. It was absolute body knowledge. But it takes a while for those seeds to plant. I didn’t think I’d break a horse and the next thing you know, I’m breaking a horse and flying through the air. I completely trusted him. And that’s not my specialty.”

Me: Completely trusting someone?

“Completely trusting men. Living in Colorado most of my life I’d done alot of scary things like white water kayaking. Men would try to tell me what to do. And it wasn’t very pleasant for me. But here I was like, ‘Whatever, I’ll get back on that horse.’

“You have these amazing experiences and then you go home and write your little article and go back to your regular job. Almost a year later I was like, Oh my God, I’m going back [to the Indian reservation].

Me: You knew you weren’t done?

“It took me many months to realize, I’m so not done. And all of that cultural conditioning of ‘no, it’s so far away, and it’s a little bit scary, and it’s so foreign, and there’s the horrible weight of history everywhere.’ It took me a while to clear those vines away enough to just ask him if I could write a book about him. And he was fine with it.”

Me: In the book you mention that the experience changed you. How does that manifest?

“Stan fixed the Daddy problem. I had quite a strange father. Not evil, just strange. A weird dude who happened to be a psychiatrist. Not a perfect combination for little girls. I had an impressive house built on a shitty foundation. I was very high-functioning, had alot of friends, a good job, I worked hard, and dated lots of men. And there’s the operative thing–I dated lots of guys. I didn’t stick with one because I thought they were untrustworthy people in general. And Stan has this healing field. No matter what’s wrong with you–whether it’s a serious disease or your Dad is a weird psychiatrist–it’ll shift if you hang out with him long enough.”

“It is so intense on the reservation in every way, every way. I really needed someone I could trust and here’s this man, and that’s my issue right there. It was a scary place. Alot like childhood, maybe, where everything is big and uncontrollable. The reservation is like that. You need someone you can trust and he was that person, and he proved that, again and again. And that almost slipped this whole foundation under me. I learned to stop hating. The faith thing increased enormously. Probably in other ways than with men, but that was the place in my life that it was completely lacking.”

“The minute I met him I was like, he sees me. My first response was fear. I didn’t want him to see me because I’m so flawed. But he saw everything in me. And I got better. He saw me do some less than perfect things, but he sees what he sees. It makes you wonder about God and childhood. What do we need to be a whole human being? I think that as a child, if your Mom and Dad see you–if you feel they really see you–something relaxes and clicks into place. Things can grow normally. If that doesn’t happen you become clenched in a certain way. I was clenched in a certain way. I think that’s almost the same thing with God. If God can see me–everything–then I’m good. I don’t know what the difference is between a little kid and their parent, me and Stan, and someone and God. I don’t know if there is a difference.”

“It was really interesting watching Stan in Jackson Hole the other day [at the reading at the Center for the Arts, a theatre with 500 seats]. Stan absolutely commanded that audience. It was so beautiful to see. Here he is in this afflicted body with his voice, and his amazing sense of humor, and his way of putting everyone else at ease. And here are all these folks from Jackson Hole, and you could just see them falling for him. People need this so badly. The hunger is so deep. And I shouldn’t be surprised by that. I felt it myself when I said, ‘I’m going there now [to write the book about him]. He offers a little bit of a window. What’s coming through him–you want it. It’s like he is a hose, and you want water. You want to be at the end of that hose. I could see people really be affected by him. He is offering himself up.”

To have your name entered in a random drawing to win this book, Broken-A Love Story, e-mail me: molly@destinationthejourney.com, put “Broken” in the subject of the e-mail. The drawing will take place on Monday, July 6. And yes, I’ll ship the book overseas.