February 27th, 2020
2am
“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant”. –Martin Luther King
It is just another night of fitful sleep in cell 104 on K-block at the West Tennessee Detention Facility, Mason, Tennessee. Lying here thinking, my body aching all over — prison is a young man’s game; these metal bunks and thin mats, called a mattress, were not meant for comfort, of that I am certain. Just another intentional part of the experience of incarceration. As I lay here fighting a new wave of anxiety, I realized how very tired I was. I can’t remember anymore what it is like to sleep a whole night through. Perhaps it is the lack of sleep and tension over time that is working on my nerves. I stopped myself, taking a couple of deep cleansing breaths in an attempt to refocus my energy (this has become a nightly ritual). Consciously drawing in the warmth and radiance of positiveness brings a feeling of calm and peacefulness. As I closed my eyes taking in more deep breaths, concentrating on positive thoughts and controlled breathing, I began to perceive something different. In not giving in to rage, anger, and resentment over my circumstance, I’ve begun to feel compassion instead of confusion, despite still having more questions than answers.
I am confident in the fact that the measure of whether or not the power of positive energy is flowing through us is — the feeling of Love, unconditional Love. Love is the background emotion that stays with us as long as that energy is flowing. As I lay there focused on this feeling of Love, I slipped into a daydream of home. In my mind’s eye, I could see everything so very clearly: my son, my family, my friends, my practice, my patients — this is what I was fighting for. I was caught in a battle I had not asked for, but, because of the stakes, was unable to avoid. At that very moment, I purposed in my “heart” to not only forgive those who have hurt me, but to embrace a feeling of Love and compassion towards them; thereby elevating their energy where they are incapable of their insidious plans.
There is an inevitability about the outcome of my case, it is just a matter of going through the paces to get there, documenting the journey along the way to be used for the greater good down the road. That is a satisfying feeling to me, so in that sense, I already feel success. The allegations against me the prosecutors know to be false, but they pursue it anyway for their own political purposes; irrevocably ruining lives and careers in the process, but I have forgiven them as well. In doing so, I have felt a comforting sensation, one reassuring me that all was going to be OK.
I have always felt my journey was one of destiny. I’ll never forget the key chain my baby sister gave me for my high school graduation, it read, “Destined for Greatness”. I always felt I had something to live up to (in her eyes if no one else). I carried that key chain for over a decade before it finally broke and then kept it in the desk drawer at my office thereafter as a constant reminder. Living in a destined direction makes one feel alive and I feel alive as much now as ever. In the isolation of incarceration there is a unique clarity and aliveness. This may seem counterintuitive, but accessing one’s own ability in vulnerability gives a higher clarity and in this flow of higher consciousness, a renewed strength and sense of purpose is found.
I choose to find the positivity in this seemingly all negative situation, if not, my future, my son’s future, and the future of his children go in an entirely different direction — that is what is at stake. The daily individual choice is mine and mine alone. I choose to not give up and find the flow that comes with positivity. We ALL have the inner strength to overcome anything, it DOES exist. All I have to do is remember to remember this. That is all takes to make it through this — it is really that simple. Even writing these very words invigorates me.
Writing has kept me centered in clarity during my circumstance. Writing for me has been like dropping a well into my deeper life-force. Yes, it has been as simple and as hard as all that, sometimes more hard than simple. But, there is a definite energy and strength that comes with vulnerability, honesty, and absolute truth. I am convinced more than ever that things DO happen for a reason, a numinous sense that this time in my life is immensely important to that which is to take place in the future.
I know all of this seems so superficially subjective given that I was trained and ingrained to deal in objective scientific measures. Subjective, being what someone says or feels. Objective, being what can be measured or observed. The tangible vs. intangible. This argument is again WHY I am here. I am here for treating a subjective condition. Pain has NO objective measure, ONLY the patient’s subjective symptoms — I was taught, “Pain is what the patient says it is”.
Being an idealist and empath led to imprisonment in a time of pharmaceutical McCarthyism. However, those two traits, empathy and idealism are also responsible for many of the successes in my life as well — so I’ll keep them. Call me sentimental or even superficially subjective, I’ll take either or both. I’ll call it centered charity!
Many times over the past nine months I’ve found myself drifting into intense contemplations over the weaknesses of my personality. I would still choose sentiment over cynicism, always devoting myself to the betterment of mankind. At this critical point in my life I’ve had to make a critical psychological decision, abating the uncertainties of my circumstance by striving to find answers to higher questions. Like, “What is the true purpose in this peril?”
I, like so many out there, have been guilty in the past of partaking in obsessive behaviors trying to repress what really haunted me. Religious fanaticism is no different, zealots concentrate on dogma or doctrine, but all of us use these frenzied distractions to keep from confronting our deeper selves — remembering what really haunts us. There is something about the collective human psyche that lends itself to the comfort of preoccupations as opposed to self-study.
Yes, fate has dealt me a bad hand, but in the transforming moments of imprisonment the isolation of incarceration has allowed me to explore myself outside the rigid parameters of conventional life — the ironic freedom found inside the confines of cellblock K. These epiphanies have shattered my obsession with success and my wide held beliefs about life. Despite the negativity and adversity, I am alive, renewed with a great passion and tenacity for life. Many of our beliefs about ourselves are false, misleading, and definitely self-limiting. As for me, I will forever be grateful for the insights I have found in incarceration. Instead of retreating and becoming reclusive I am feeling more and more energized with each passing day. My distress and my destiny are intimately intertwined — this is magic, the magic in the mystery that is life.
Life always finds a way to make us feel small, but more importantly, life always finds a way to make us feel. I choose to feel Love. I choose to focus on Love in a world that is for the most part — loveless. The beauty of this world view is that Love is immortal. I choose to Love as I once did as a little boy, unconditionally.
One of the things I miss most about childhood is the one thing I tried to foster in my own son as long as I possibly could — unconditional Love and the joy in believing in the things we find out later in adulthood to be “untrue”, like the belief in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, Puff the Magic Dragon, the Boogeyman, Trix Rabbit, Mickey Mouse, and Ronald McDonald. I used to believe that Justice was blind and the Law was just. As a child, I was allowed to simply — Believe. As a child, my “heart” was still able to overrule my head. As a child, the Tooth Fairy left monies for teeth, the Easter Bunny brought chocolate and laid a prize egg hidden somewhere in my family’s home to be found in a “hunt” on Easter morning before church. As a child, the courts worked like they did on Perry Mason and Matlock — silly rabbit, tricks are for attorneys.
Oh to believe as I once did, the land of forgotten childhood fantasy — where the myths of the mind always trumped reality. But sadly, change comes, logic and realism assert themselves, age settles into our eyes and Puff the Magic Dragon goes the way of the dinosaurs, Peter Pan is forced to get his driver’s license, and Wendy heads off to college. The death of childhood brought to us courtesy of rationalism and life circumstance. That isn’t just age that settles into our eyes. Get up and look in the mirror, look closely, it isn’t just age that has settled into them — it is loss — the loss of innocence and imagination. It is a look that says, “You’ve lost your pass to Never Never Land”. Don’t believe me? Stop reading, get up, and go look in the mirror, look deep at what is there, or even more tragically — what is NOT there.
This is why Love is so very vitally important. It is the one thing that can make us, at least for a time, feel like a child again — believing in what our “heart” tells us is true. Love is magical, it sparks excitement, like a bright new shiny toy of childhood. Love awakens the child inside of us once more. Love is, if nothing else, in one word — Magic. Magic, a word the child inside of us recognizes and respects instinctively. Love is, simply, Magic. Rationalism and realism be damned.
The power of Love is the one thing we can rediscover as adults no matter how old we are, it is the truth we find in the eyes of our own children, or in the eyes of a lover — the innocence, the imagination, the magic — the Magic of Love.
Lying here, locked in cell 104, deep inside K-block, in this most of unlikely of places, I choose Love, to believe in a world where truth does triumph and evil is ultimately punished. I’ve found, hidden in the shadows of this abyss, the beliefs of my childhood. Along this highway of Hell, I’ve found (in Love) the strength and power of mental fortitude to make it through this night, and then from one day to the next, and that is — well — there you have it . . . It’s Magic.
Addendum from Doctorsofcourage:
Jeffrey Young, PA, had a 4 day trial March 27-March 31, 2023. He, his friends, and supporters thought that the Supreme Court decision US v. Ruan would work to acquit him. He spent almost 4 years in jail pre-trial. As I keep warning people, the District courts don’t pay any attention to SCOTUS. It’s all about the money. Jeffrey was convicted on Mar 31.
If you want these abuses of the law to stop, you must join Doctorsofcourage, learn the truth–that no drug causes addiction–and share that everywhere so we can offset the government propaganda that is putting innocent people in prison so government agents, DOJ, and law enforcement can make money off of the backs of compassionate medical providers.
