Daemon Unfolding: The World Finding Me

“The soul does not waste what the ego perceives as dramatic loss.”

Over four decades of practice as a healer, from a young medical student living rough in the Noordhoek Valley outside Cape Town, to building and then walking away from a successful integrative medical clinic in Canada, to losing a magnificent home, a fiancée, and the proceeds of the only home that I had ever truly loved, in the space of a single year, I have arrived at one understanding that altered everything: the soul does not waste what the ego may perceive as a dramatic loss. Every rupture in my biography carried within it what the ancient Greeks called a daemon; a guiding intelligence, invisible at the time, that was redirecting my life towards something my conscious mind could not yet see or accept.

This is the central insight of the Platonic tradition, explored by Emerson, given philosophical weight by James Hillman in The Soul’s Code, and made rigorously and practically applicable by Dr. John Demartini, whose method I have spent years studying and teaching: your biography is not a random sequence of gains and losses, but a calling towards what is termed your daemon, an archetypal summons that pushes you toward your authentic life. Just as an acorn is destined to become an oak tree, you too are called from above, sometimes without mercy, toward the life you were meant to live. The daemon protects and nurtures this blueprint, continually attempting to bring it into expression.

As this story unfolds, what I thought was recklessness and irreversible loss turned out to be the precise mechanism through which I traded a geographical view for a cosmological one and in doing so, found the foundation for everything my healing work has since become. This story emphasizes the primary insight that I still hold to be true, that all the support and challenges that I have experienced in my life have served the unfolding of this daemonic calling.

Furthermore, to add to this insight, this conviction was never tested more severely than when my own professional life began to be questioned. At the same time as I underwent open heart surgery for an aortic aneurysm repair, the Alberta College of Physicians and Surgeons amplified their takedown of my practice of functional/integrative medicine, eventually succeeding in closing down my practice, laying off my 15 staff members and having to walk away from hundreds of patients that I was able to help outside of the traditional health care system. In addition, in cooperation with CTV National News, they attempted to smear my reputation for “double billing” and for practicing private medicine in a socialist health care system. I have never “double billed” a single person in my entire career, as my appeals have carefully laid out, but that saga is a story for another time.

After four decades of practicing medicine, the role around which I had organized my identity disappeared almost overnight.

If I had not been able to transmute these experiences into transformative, cognitive and spiritual refrains as I was able to in this story below, I believe my life’s trajectory and career arc may have terminated in a victim-type mentality, imprisoned by bitterness with no possibility of transmutation. This is not the case.

Therefore, I must emphasize the primary insight of this story below; I firmly believe that everything you do or experience is in service of who you are eventually meant to become. The apparent catastrophes of one’s life are not interruptions to one’s calling but the very instruments through which one’s calling is revealed. Looking back, I can see that none of these events simply took things from me. Each one dismantled an identity that had become too small for the life waiting to emerge.

As the cliqué goes, your wounds become your wisdom and your voids become your values.

This is that story. If this story has any value, it is not because it is unique, but because I believe every life contains moments that appear, at first, as catastrophe and only later reveal themselves as vocation, events that quietly serve a becoming far greater than anything we could have imagined while living through them.