Lost love, healing, and Boynton Canyon, Sedona

Boynton Canyon Trail and the Secret Subway Cave in Sedona, Arizona

(That Adventure Life, May 12, 2021) On a trip to Sedona, we made friends with a local. During our conversations, Renanuel told us about his favorite hike in Sedona, which turns out to be the Secret Subway Cave which Dustin and I have been wanting to visit. With Renanuel’s directions, we excitedly headed to the trail. The Secret Subway Cave on the Boynton Canyon Trail is a beautiful place. Photos cannot really prepare one for how magical this place actually is. Out of respect for Renanuel, we won’t disclose its exact location but will reveal a few tips to research.

We, Sun and Moon, were hiking on a hot day in Sedona. The sky was electric with lightning. The monsoon was holding back, August 2022. Psychic Healer Jared, who worked on me at Ultimate Light Mission (ULM), recommended this Boynton Trail, noting that it had male and female polarities which would help equalize toxic masculinity and femininity to help those present become better integrated whole-persons.

As we turned left at the sign, avoiding Mescal and heading toward Enchantment (the modern resort next to the river), an older man blocked the trail. Let's call him Kindness because he was passing out heart-shaped Sedona Stones (red rock slate with natural glitter in it).

He helped shape them, he said, and he wasn't selling them, just giving them away free with this sage advice: Lead with your heart. The heart is the guide. Get out of your head; it only leads to ego.

I asked him to repeat himself to be sure I heard him right, and he did. It was the best advice I could have heard.

Go with a guide. It's easier to find.

I was getting over a long and painful relationship, which I now understood was ALL an illusion, a fake out from the beginning, full of her lies. But she's so "nice"! How could she lie? Survival, a dysfunctional childhood habit she picked up as a only child who always got her way, tricky Southerner. She'd have her way one way or another. Deceit, dishonesty, deception? No problem.

She's a "damaged empath," I've heard say. And visions of the first two times she cheated a few years back were now vividly coming to mind, painfully, and I was full of aversion on the trail. Moon went into the shade with the dog. I sallied forth up the mesa.

The spiritual advice at ULM had been clear: "Accept unhappiness" because, as Eckhart Tolle explains, "it cannot tolerate to be accepted and will go away." It works instantly. Radical acceptance of what is works.

Moreover, Jared added, don't judge her. Let it be. Let it go. Let the Universe deal with the fallout, the aftermath. What's the use of trying to change anybody or make them realize anything?

We won't learn, except perhaps by our own experience and suffering. When we get left behind, maybe then we'll see...

That your reality

Was squashed into banality

Squashed into banality

[For] when you are a Martial Church

Ahhhhh

When you are a Martian Church

Ahhhhh

When the dust has settled

And you're born again

Maybe as a Martian Church

Maybe then you'll see

That your reality was

Squashed into banality

Squashed into banality

Squashed into banality...

Or so sings the anarcho-punk British band Rudimentary Peni. It could be said in a "spiritual" way, but who would listen? Thank you, Kindness. I hold the stone over my heart to activate it. Thank you, Ultimate Light Mission. Amazing things happen there, at the top of Coffee Pot Road by the airport.