DAY 1: March 20, 2020

My Impossible Life:

Trauma Travel Transcendence

by Charlene Jones

Running from an untenable home life, Charlene finds herself captive to two armed criminals for three days. She returns to her home but shows up wasted and addicted until she meets and travels with the contentious, contemptuous meditation teacher Leslie George Dawson. Dawson was recognized by the Tibetan spiritual leader the 16th Gyalwang Karmapa (think Dalai Lama of a different sect) as the spiritual leader who brings the teaching to the New World, the Namgyal.

Charlene’s outer adventures include escaping tornadoes while sailing the Gulf of Mexico, drinking chang with Mongol men in India’s north, meditating 21 hours a day during a 3-month silent meditation retreat in New Zealand, working and living in the slums of Sydney Australia, journeying through Crete, Cancun, Norway and more all before her 25th birthday.

Yet these outer experiences do not solve her inner struggle. Strangled by persistent depression, struck from sleep by nightmares and aware of the close claw of addiction Charlene knows she lives in a kind of paralysis of her senses.

Will her focus on healing and her Celtic inheritance of Angel direction be enough to guide her through the dark labyrinths of her past and yield a life worth living? How will she weave the paradoxes in what she calls “My Impossible Life”?

Running from an untenable home life, Charlene finds herself captive to two armed criminals for three days. She returns to her home but shows up wasted and addicted until she meets and travels with the contentious, contemptuous meditation teacher Leslie George Dawson. Dawson was recognized by the Tibetan spiritual leader the 16th Gyalwang Karmapa (think Dalai Lama of a different sect) as the spiritual leader who brings the teaching to the New World, the Namgyal.

Charlene’s outer adventures include escaping tornadoes while sailing the Gulf of Mexico, drinking chang with Mongol men in India’s north, meditating 21 hours a day during a 3-month silent meditation retreat in New Zealand, working and living in the slums of Sydney Australia, journeying through Crete, Cancun, Norway and more all before her 25th birthday.

Yet these outer experiences do not solve her inner struggle. Strangled by persistent depression, struck from sleep by nightmares and aware of the close claw of addiction Charlene knows she lives in a kind of paralysis of her senses.

Will her focus on healing and her Celtic inheritance of Angel direction be enough to guide her through the dark labyrinths of her past and yield a life worth living? How will she weave the paradoxes in what she calls “My Impossible Life”?