Tavish Carduff

 

When I was a kid, I thought I hated antiques and old things because they made me feel sick. Sharing this insight with my family members invited a fair amount of grief and speculation. That's how my family rolls. I never actually got sick, I just felt dizzy and queasy like it was imminent, so I was never able to prove my feelings. This wasn’t the first, and certainly not the last, time in my life that family and friends would challenge the things I claimed to be true, but it is definitely one that I couldn’t explain with any rational facts (even to myself) for a very long time. It would be close to 30 years later before I would finally recognize those feelings as energetic vibrations that I was barely able to perceive -  like trying to recall a dream as it slips from your consciousness.

 

All Saints Episcopal Church, circa 1979, was the first place I ever encountered a community of people who felt like an extended part of myself and it was wonderful to feel so heart-connected to so many other people. I believe the unconditional love I experienced at the many youth events I attended taught me a lot about cooperation, friendship, leadership and quite frankly, did a lot to keep me actively engaged in something soulful, as it steered me away from real trouble. 

 

In my twenties, I came to the stark realization that I didn’t take the stories in the bible as literally as the rest of the church. In truth, my interpretations went beyond even the loosest fundamentals of christianity.  When it came down to it, I just never felt like I needed to go through Jesus for a direct line to ‘God’. That may seem presumptuous to say, but that feeling comes from a voice deep within and it has never wavered on the matter. 

 

I have always been interested in people, both their similarities and their differences. In the 6th grade, I received a diary with astrological descriptions in the first few pages. I began to ask people “when’s your birthday?”, and to this day, some of my elementary classmates show up as symbols in my current readings and energy sessions. My mom had Linda Goodman’s book  ‘Sun Signs’ and for some reason that is still a mystery to all of us, I was forbidden to read it (Seriously, why mom and dad?). I used to sneak it out of her room when she was at work and put it back before she got home.  

 

I have studied more astrology charts over the last 30 years than I could even begin to estimate, ramping up my interest in my late 20’s with a nudge from my ORM Partner and Astrologer, Quan Tracy Cherry. I’ve read the charts of most of the people close to me, and the people close to them, my clients, interesting celebrities, serial killers (I mean, don’t you have to?) and countless historical events.

 

I come from a lineage of strong personalities and opinionated thinkers, many of them ‘progressive’ and ‘metaphysical’ in their beliefs. My mother is certified in Breathwork, and introduced me to concepts like EFT (Tapping), Holographic Repatterning, DNA Recoding, Alien Walk-ins, Sweat Lodges and several other ‘metaphysical’ modalities, way before I was ready to appreciate them. A few of my aunts also had similar interests and one of my grandfathers spent his last years in the deep energetic work of trying to heal a spine injury with his mind and intention. All of it seemed peripheral when I was younger. Connected to me, but not…

 

I got divorced the year I turned 40, and my world turned upside down. I had spent the previous (nearly) 10 years raising kids, playing disc golf, doing astrology readings and generally enjoying my life. I never went to college, so I felt I needed more education in order to find a job that would support me, and I began looking for a nutrition curriculum. What I found on my first search was a school, Core Star, that taught healing and energy work. I was instantly intrigued… 

 

As soon as I walked into the office of Jim Crabtree, I felt a magnetic pull from within myself to become a student. My divorce was contentious from the jump.  didn’t have any money, and I hadn’t secured a job yet. The school was more than I could have afforded pre-separation, so by all rights, it should have seemed completely out of the question. Something pushed me hard to believe I could make it happen and two weeks after my separation, I found myself in a weekend ‘intensive’, trying out energy work for the first time, and hoping I was making a good investment in my future.

 

The universe has given me no real choice on this path. It has put conditions in front of me where I have no control over anything except the boundaries I am able to set within myself. Time and again, I have learned that it’s hard to affect what other people believe. I must simply show up as my genuine self every single day and see what happens. To my delight, the more time I spend in allowance of my own ignorance, the more space I have to accept the unacknowledged ignorance in others. From there, it has become joyful to do the work of clearing the stores of energetic debris that I pick up along the way.

 

As the opiate crisis was reaching a pinnacle and I felt very strongly that the best path out of addiction was found within our being, starting by accepting all of our experience, good or bad, as part of our Wholeness. But how? We start by alleviating the lasting effects of shame on our psyches. I spent the next several years helping out at Results Chiropractic and watching instant healing happen with regularity. I began to see the energetic difference between physical and emotional pain, even though they can/will both present as physical pain. 

 

I began to focus on the  space between the medical field and self-healing. My interest in ‘the laws of man’ and ‘the laws of the universe’ continue to grow, leading me straight to the ORM Arena. As the idea gained form, I felt like an  energetic archaeologist, mining all of the self-help books and programs for their ‘bones’. I had ancient writers showing up in my dreams - Thomas Payne and Cicero headlining the list - and I began to pull the most basic natural structure from our ‘laws’ as a basis for practiced thought, as well as the ‘tools’ that are available to each of us-- Water, Breath and Alignment (what we now call H2Om). 

 

Several people have helped me flesh out the ideas that have sparked from this perspective, as the pillars of the Our Raw Material Arena gathered practical shape and form. They have done so much to support this practice: helped me plan and host a meditation retreat, created and recorded meditations with me, shared their insight and opinions (doubts too!) while listening to me expound about these same concepts over and over as I endeavored to breathe life into this ancient approach to healing the wounds of modern living. I live in gratitude with my experiences where I can, positive and negative, and I enjoy helping others find the same joy in their own Wholeness. I now have several antiques in my home and am fully able to appreciate their energies. At 55 years of life, I’m able to show up for the journey, wherever it takes me.

 

Happy Healing!
Tavish