A note from Karlton Terry . . .

Permit me to clarify the title of this course. The "TAOS Embodiment Course," consisting of four annual classes, is so named because of an event that occurred in Northern New Mexico in a remote setting somewhere near the center of "The Land of Enchantment." This area is proximal to the Taos Pueblo tribal lands and the certifiably magical and sometimes ominous Taos Mountain. Seven years ago, sweating and shivering alone in a tent in the woods near the desert, a convergence of information and experience relieved me of a dim but persistent craving. Up to that moment, for about a dozen years I had indulged the luxury of chasing my own tail looking for the meaning of life, the purpose of my life. Why did I come here? Who am I? Why all this pain, suffering and injustice? Why all this bliss, ecstasy and poetry? In some ways I had come to a dead end.

I started this Journey of trying to figure out where I had come from by assuming that if I went back as far as I could and followed myself forward I might find the things that shaped me and therefore find myself. Ending up somewhat outside of my own postulation, I explored my crazy, colorful family tree, well preserved by the Mormons of Utah. I interrogated my parents, and to my poor mother's dismay, peppered her with unending questions about my birth and her pregnancy (i.e.: my prenatal life). Relentlessly, I pursued details until finally she was driven off with too many questions and the possibilities of blame or accusation, for, all of my personal curses, blindnesses, and suffering, it seems, sprouted during the process of my own arriving into this earthly realm. I developed a rather dogmatic opinion that things were just fine before I got here. Wherever it was I came from, it was surely the woundings from the trip here that shaped me. Now, these shaping experiences are they choices the soul makes or is everything just totally random? Or is it something completely different altogether?

My poor fetal cranium, an inch larger in diameter than my mother's pelvic outlet, was crushed and tortured as I was ignobly squeezed into this world, while my mom, too young and innocent to know what was happening to herself, had no inkling whatsoever of my plight. Within seconds of what my parents considered my emergence on earth I transformed a happy carefree girl into a bag-eyed beleaguered matron and have cursed myself ever since. Did we bond though in some prenatal delirium of joy together, or some anxiety? I never asked her if she felt me kicking though I know now she did.

During subsequent self-exploration, while I was doing a rather good job of impersonating a 30 year old businessman, my first birth regression with William Emerson had a substantial impact on my self-seeking trajectory. Although at the time I was suspicious whether a "birth regression" was possible, what happened was so profound that my heart felt crushed for an hour, and my head ached for two. Worst of all, my vision was blurry for a week as if I was seeing the world through amniotic fluid. After a relieving visit to my eye doctor I happily left with a new set of world-clarifying contact lenses. It seems, to his gogofying amazement, that my vision had somehow reversed to something nearly twice as good as it had been when I first consulted him five years earlier. His own eyes pleaded for an explanation, which I could not easily produce given the unbelievability of the truth. Something had happened.

Inspired, I continued to research my birth with William, regressed to sperm and egg with Graham Farrant, went to psychologists for talking therapy, a licensed social worker for Grof style holotropic breath work, read Freud and Jung, studied Maria-Louise Von Franz's ideas about dreams, fairy tales, and archetypes. I went to acupuncture, meditation, Rolfing, massage, and vegetarianism. I delved deep into the myths of creation and the sacred stories of the Native Americans of the Great Southwest. Images and energies penetrated my psyche and wove through my systems: celestial suns and moons, spirits, multi-armed Hindu gods, giant sperm, Hopi dancers with rattlesnakes in their mouths, ant people, fetuses, adult-sized babies, and my poor alienated mother. Then suddenly all of the brilliant analytic depth of psychology and analysis, the fantasy images of archetypes, and the contracts, mortgages and bank accounts of my day to day life became clutter--an impediment to me finding myself. Fasting like a monk alone in my tent I encountered something. At first she appeared to me as if I were having a hallucination of my female self. Then, abandoning visual language, he spoke to me imparting something so profound that it shook me to the bones. I have no idea what he said, for, one second later I forgot. Now I know it was probably the answer to a prayer I had been chanting, like a mantra, for two years, "What is my purpose? Why did I come here?" Finally, there was a momentary but eternal-feeling dissolution of my self, as I knew it. And there was my soul: invisible, hewn, dense, completely filling me, inside me, looking at me from without, slightly larger than me and absolutely completely connected to everything everywhere including emptiness and nothingness.

A week or so later I found myself, I don't know how, somewhere back in my normal life thinking, "Gee, if my birth had something to do with how my life is, and if my prenatal experiences were perhaps even more profound, then maybe my own conception (with those odd, haploid gametes meeting in the miraculous way they do) is a bridge to the real place I really came from. Maybe I could remember why I came, find out who I am. Maybe conception is something like a portal, a window to the other world, a place where the wall between the worlds is thin. And perhaps, dispossessed of earth's gravity, I can pass like a grain of sand moving back and forth through the waist of an hourglass. Yes, this is the magic mirror, the wishing well…"

The funny thing is, it was all true. I felt like I had cracked the code, for myself anyway, and discovered the door to the spirit world. I had learned how to reach through something and really shake hands with my soul. Can you imagine me trying to explain this, wide-eyed and enthusiastic, to my father who is atheist, skeptical, and scientific by nature and vocation? Out of gratitude to him I must explain that I became compelled to research the known scientific facts about conception, the sperm journey, the egg journey, the pronuclear envelope which forms around the genes in the cytoplasm of the egg, syngamy, epistasis, and everything else I could find. I began doing more sacred personal research (regressions) to this territory, and indeed, for me, the walls between the scientific normal human world, and the sacred personal soulful world, did become thinner and thinner. My own clients began asking for more and more advice as to earlier and earlier regressive stages. I started seeing the journeys of the gametes acted out everywhere in everyday life. The cutting edge of scientific research (funded nowadays most heavily by IVF investigations) began to inform the search for the soul, and for me at least, vice-versa.

Finally, it all came clumsily together in the year 2000 when I had the courage to write my little book on the five stages of the sperm journey, and in 2001 when I conducted the inaugural TAOS Embodiment Class. Since then I have researched the annuls of science, the catacombs of the psyche, and the world of the soul with a view to sharing structures which might assist others to explore their own pathways to their own souls…so individual and diverse. If I can do a good job, then perhaps the web along which others may explore will be unimpeded by directivity or induction, expectations or projections. And this is the purpose of the TAOS Embodiment Course which consists of four annual classes: 1) The Sperm Journey; 2) The Egg Journey; 3) The Miracle of Conception; and 4) Syncronistic Field of the Soul at Conception.