With the completion of The Healing Pathways facilitator and companion manuals, I am cleaning out my notes used along the way. Below, is a transcript of a conversation I had with David Boothe in 2001. I was in Cali, Colombia where I had just finished the final version of This is How it Feels to Heal that was released the following January on Amazon.com, which is the topic.
David was one my closest friends and was with me through much of the content of the book. He travelled on in late 2023 to be forever missed. Thank you, David.
David Boothe: We’ve just been warned that there’s a recording in progress—yay! This afternoon, exactly this afternoon, I’m joined by Steve Patterson, a good friend of mine and a fellow traveler on the spiritual journey, and we’re here today to talk to him about his new book coming out. I believe it’s called This Is What It Feels Like to Heal. Is that correct?
Steve Patterson: It’s This Is How It Feels to Heal, but yes, This Is How It Feels to Heal.
David: This Is How It Feels to Heal, so I’m gonna let that reverberate and settle for a second. It’s an excellent title. I love it, and it has healing possibilities within. This Is How It Feels to Heal. All right, Steve, so do you have a boilerplate? What’s your brief introduction to why you wrote this book?
Steve: Well, two reasons, really. First off, it’s the result of a personal—I guess you could say midlife crisis. I don’t know how early to describe it as that for several years, but because of the fact that a lot of people were following me through the journey, particularly the last couple of years of it, and even the title of the book is something that came out of that process. When it was over, I just sort of left the blog that I’d been keeping about it. People asked me if I was ever going to put it together in some kind of document or something, and at first, I was resistant to that because I didn’t want to just have another personal crisis story. But it resonated with me, and it’s been almost two years now since the thing ended, and so in the last few months—because we’ll get into what actually went on—but because of the nature of what went on, there’s still some uncertainty about the longevity that I have. I’m looking back over it; I saw how it transformed me, the journey, and what came of it, and how it helped other people. So I figured, why not jot it down? This way, perhaps somebody down the road might be able to pick it up if they’re in a similar situation, and perhaps it could help them through a similar crisis. And really, though, it doesn’t have to be exactly the same; it’s sort of being up against insurmountable odds and how to change your mindset in the face of so much and get through it and believe in yourself. And so that led me to decide to finally do it.
David: Let me pause you there. I just want to say I had a firsthand seat for most of this journey, and I’m grateful and excited that you’re putting it down in book form. I want to tap into a little bit of both the healing potential of this as a work of future work for other people, and also I want to tap into a little bit of how much I actually witnessed of this. So, I’m gushing on the inside when I think about this project or this book, and I’m also a little humbled by it because it was an epic story, almost an epic adventure. It was difficult. It was authentically difficult and challenging, and it included dark nights of the soul and near-death experiences, and you name it—all kinds of really interesting stuff, or at least from a spiritual perspective, really interesting stuff. So let me get to some specific questions because I know you’ve been immersed in this topic. You know it backward and forward. And one of the things I want to do is give people a sense of a few specific points of your journey along the way. So, do you want your softball question now or later? Do you want your hard stuff now? Just tell me what you want.
Steve: All right, let me get to the glasses.
David: So, my take on this is that it’s a story of spiritual evolution that embodies all levels of being—mental, emotional, spiritual, energetic, certainly physical. One of the things I want to toss out for people that are on a spiritual evolutionary path is what I witnessed in Steve were seasons of growth that involved very many unique spiritual approaches that included runes, Celtic shamanism, ancient Irish mysticism, and his own personal deliberations on consciousness and being. At times, these seasons of spiritual growth overlapped a little bit, and at other times, they were very distinct, and sometimes there were quite remarkable shifts where Steve would go from one version of “This is how I’m engaging with the universe, and this is how I’m engaging with my personal growth and process,” and then it would change. So, my first question about those is, do you have anything to say specifically about any of those things that I mentioned—the runes or Irish mysticism, ancient Irish mysticism, or Celtic shamanism?
Steve: Well, first off, I have to thank all of them for somehow entering my life, and when they did, I was open enough to embrace it with open arms without any preconceived notion that it was going to save me or anything like that—that it was just another way that I could try to view the world. To sort of back up as to what happened, you know, in 2011, I was completely successful by the book life. And suddenly one day, I was given the news that I had between six months and three years to live with terminal liver failure. And on that day, in the opening chapter, I uttered the phrase when I was told that, “I don’t buy your myth of death.” And so I pretty much left everything—left the corporate world. And so for those first few years, it was really difficult because of my physical body. My liver started to fail; I started to encounter severe bouts with hepatic encephalopathy, which is a build-up of toxins in your blood that renders the synapses in your mind to not fire correctly. And so imagine a traffic jam in Atlanta, where random stoplights just go off and come back on. And so there was never—you couldn’t really tell what it was going to be, but it put me in this space where I was very distant. I had a hard time speaking; I had a hard time making conversation, and that went on for the first few years.
To set the stage for what happened next: early on in the process, I read a book by a man named Lujan Matus, The Art of Stalking Parallel Perception, and it was a Toltec shamanism view of the world and consciousness and a separate sort of way of looking at reality, sort of echoing Carlos Castaneda and things like that. And I didn’t dive really deep into it, but it set the stage for exploration into more of what I discovered to be was called shamanism. And so that went on all the way through till 2014 when a big shift happened. Then, in 2015, a drug came out that helped clear my mind a little bit of the HE, as we’ll call it for short—hepatic encephalopathy—and that allowed me to return to about 80% cognitive ability most of the time. And at that point, I started to explore working with teachers. I had already done a little internship, you could say, an apprenticeship with a local woman who was teaching and sort of shamanic stuff, particularly in Celtic and things like that. So I’d already had my feet wet. I’d been introduced to the runes; I went through a year-long process where I carved my own runes and got to know them individually without looking into what they meant, and sort of figured it out on my own and then later went back and read older books about them to learn more about it. So I was sort of making my own way through that.
At the same time, because I was able to sell my company, I didn’t ever have to go to work. I was at home throughout this entire time, and I think it was in 2014 that I met you, also right around this time. And so I started to get back out into the world and to mingle with other people in the spiritual community, for lack of a better word, and started working with teachers. So that was a big shift into that. It made me proactive, and I also started working in recovery with people in drugs and alcohol. So those parallel paths sort of went on for some time—me exploring more with teachers and shamanism and taking coursework to become a recovery coach for my work that I was hoping to do one day when I was through all this, knowing that I was going to get through it no matter what. Of course, the whole time still having the diagnosis of six months to live, and now it’s four years into this.
So that went on until 2017, when a friend of ours there in Athens, Robert Black Eagle, a fellow veteran, suggested that I contact the VA and see if they could help because I didn’t have any medical care or anything like that. I’d gone vegan and changed my lifestyle; I’d given up watching the news. I completely sort of shut off the outside world as far as the negativity and only embraced the good things out there—only positive things, things that were going to help me live. And so when I went to the VA, they learned that it had developed into liver cancer, and that changed everything. They, of course, were able to give me more powerful drugs to help clear my mind, so it was up to about 90–95%, though I would have bouts of it where I’d be out of it for a couple of days. But I was able to get through those last two years.
It was during those years that I picked up a lot of traction—people started following my blog and talking about it. During one of those tests one day, the pain became really, really excruciating, and I suddenly realized that these people were trying to help me, that these machines were not trying to harm me, these doctors were not trying to hurt me. My resistance to traditional medicine—I sort of gave that up. I was accepting everything, wasn’t blaming anything, not myself, not anything. And as I sat there preparing for a particularly painful experience, I said to myself, “This is how it feels to heal.” And from that moment on, it changed the way that I processed in my conscious mind the way that my physical body was receiving the message of pain. It dramatically reduced the resistance I had, and even the detection of the pain—for instance, when I’d get IVs, I wouldn’t even feel it, whereas before it made me apprehensive. Certainly, there were procedures that hurt, and that was pain, but it changed all that, and it helped with my acceptance of it.
And through those stages, or what you’re talking about, it allowed me to explore more in-depth in certain areas. It allowed me to let go of some things that I’d learned before, all the while not really getting attached to any particular brand of spirituality, just sort of absorbing it. And then, ultimately, in 2019, I got the call, and they replaced my liver, and we managed to keep the cancer within the liver. So on that day, I got rid of all three conditions, really. I ended up taking medicine for about a month or two months afterward to get rid of the original cause, which was hepatitis C. So in the first couple of months from January 3rd, I received my transplant; I got a healthy new liver. I no longer had cancer; I had a new liver, and then I was free of hepatitis C. And that was pretty much the end of the illness. Then I started to reinvent myself in the sort of spiritual, “What am I going to do? Coaching or am I a counselor? What am I?”
David: Let me pause you there. There’s a lot to unpack, and I’m grateful for the inspiration. There’s a lot of healing in your story and a lot of invitation for other people to take whatever bits and pieces resonate with them and apply it to their own circumstance. And what I’m being intuitively nudged to draw your attention to today, perhaps for the benefit of others or just perhaps for my benefit, is that I have an image in my brain of two runes glowing brightly. The first is Algiz. So, what is your immediate understanding of Algiz?
Steve: You know that, as you know, it’s always been important because it was one of them that resonated the strongest with me in 2013 when I went on the so-called rune quest that the woman asked me to do, and that’s how I was introduced into the runes. For a couple of reasons: because, A, if you know it’s the outstretched arms, it’s the head, it’s the antlers down, messages of power, energy—however we want to look at it—and it’s also associated, at least in the way that we look at it today, with the Nordic spirit god, or whatever you want to say, of Heimdall. And I was very much attached to that notion because he stands on the Rainbow Bridge and can see all the nine realms. I was really trying to be away from the world like he was. He wasn’t on Earth, but he could see, and he could process; he was there. So, he was one of the ones that, when I would do my individual ceremonies, I would sort of tap into that energy the way that I did. And so that rune still being present to me just shows that there was validity in that. If that comes up for you in this moment, regardless of how hocus-pocus somebody might feel about it, none of that matters. What matters is if it means something to somebody that can help them through a tough time, and that rune particularly did.
David: Well, in this moment, we’re engaged in a version of community that will resonate with some and perhaps not with others. Really, I’m addressing the people it’s meant for—the people it resonates with. I do want to pause for a moment and say I’m so grateful that you are surrounded by life. I am approaching the Celtic holiday of Samhain, essentially Halloween, where the veil is thin and everything is dying or going to sleep, and you’re surrounded by bird noises and greenery and warmth and light. You’re surrounded by the energy of spring, and it’s amazing that we can connect, bring both of those two energies together, and alchemize them, and have your truth be your truth and mine be mine. But I digress. Okay, so the second rune was Kenaz. What’s your first impression of Kenaz, and then I’ll explain my interpretation of how those two runes are acting together?
Steve: You know, again, it’s similar to Heimdall’s rune of Algiz in that it shows the way, shows the possibilities, shows the openness, the approach. I would say that the two runes together, in this moment, what they mean to me and how it could help anybody else who’s watching this is that regardless of where you are, you can find that inspiration. Whether you’re in Athens, Georgia, for Samhain and it’s cold, or you’re sitting in Colombia like I am, where it’s always summer, it doesn’t matter where you are—that is there for you if you’re only willing to accept it, if you can be shown what is there and see it without taking a preconceived notion. When we think of our reality, we’re really looking at our memory because we’re justifying everything that we see based on what we believe it to be, based on what has happened before. And so, if we can sort of check out of that looking and see the fine edges of all things and sort of learn more about it—don’t judge it, just accept it for what it is—we can get the most positive energy out of it because we’re not bringing anything into it. We’re just accepting it for what it is.
Much like Heimdall stands on the Bifrost Bridge—the Rainbow Bridge that connects Midgard and Asgard—he doesn’t have an opinion. His only job is to stand there, and if somebody presents themselves, they’re not worthy to go in. And how he knows that? Who knows what he does. But that’s it. It’s a form of judgment, we could say, on his part, but it’s not. It’s basically a reflection of the person. And so, the reflection of reality is a reflection of your memories of it—believing things to be—and they’re not necessarily always that way. It’s a difference between looking and seeing.
David: One of my favorite things when we used to do journeys within our spiritual community in Athens, Georgia, years ago, was to have a little sharing moment where people could express their personal experience of what had gone on. In this moment, my experience of Algiz and Kenaz combined was both very prophetic in describing both your past and the path that you walked. Algiz represents not only blessings but the unvarnished truth of what is. For me, I always see Algiz as a little bit of a Tree of Life, and Kenaz looks to me—I always see it as a greater-than symbol where it has the wide opening and then narrows to a focused point. If you put the energy of Algiz—the good, the bad, the everything—and then you focus it with Kenaz into some form of focused practice or focused experience, that perfectly encapsulates, in the weird runic sort of way, the path that you walked to get to where you’re at—where you are alive, still in 3D, balanced, and integrated, and you’ve woven together these things through skillful practice. And so, I’m grateful to witness that. And if it’s prophetic for your future, may it continue.
Steve: Let me add something briefly about Kenaz. When I was doing the rune quest and didn’t have any opinion of what they meant, the first thing that I thought of when I saw it—you referred to it as a “greater than” sign—was like a light, like a flashlight or a headlight or something. Ultimately, it does have—you know, again, we have really no way of knowing for sure how these things were originally viewed by the Scandinavians, you know, prior to Christian times when they started writing stuff down. But in the way that we talk about it today, it does sort of show that light of truth, things like that. And so, yeah, it gets back to, you know, seeing it in the light of day. That is what is shown to you. Are you willing to accept it, or are you going to use your own judgment to deny that which is available? Like when we say, “Oh, the universe needs to send me something, I need help from wherever.” Well, are you ready to receive it? That’s the question the universe gives us all the time. We have everything we need, frankly, within us, but can we actually see that? So just looking at the world around us and coming up with excuses. And if the light shines on us long enough, I can’t help but say, at some point, we might ask the question, “This is what it feels like to heal.”
David: You and I can get lost in the weeds of those areas of exploration that you did because that’s what we do. We naturally enjoy those areas of inquiry and find meaning and significance in them. I’m also welcome and happy to ground. I do have a framework for this interview, which I’m being gently called to return to—reluctantly, I might add. All right, so in the theme of this is—the first theme is, this has been a spiritual evolution, using my language—not necessarily yours—or an evolutionary track, or even you could just use the word journey. All of those, I think, would be accurate. Right now, you have integrated and balanced a lot of what I would consider the shamanic illnesses—the cancer and the dependency and a few other things—and you are rocking out just being. And so, to the extent that that is true, congratulations, and that’s a little pinnacle that I would like to point people to, that when we get through our tests, our trials, our challenges, we get to enjoy, we get to rest, we get to reap the rewards of spiritual practice, of difficulties, and all those other things. All right, so we’re back to a question. So, either how long did it take or what did it feel like to integrate a new liver into your being?
Steve: That is an interesting question because that’s still ongoing. I think what I’d like to do before I jump into that real fast: when I learned that I had cancer in 2017, somebody started covering me. I mentioned on Facebook—I don’t know if you recall the post—but I came on, and I said, “Hey everybody, I’ve got some heavy news, but it’s encouraging. I have cancer.” And what I meant by that was that I was finally probably going to be able to get my score up high enough, you know, to get a liver transplant. It’s kind of a selfish way of looking at getting cancer, and I treated it just as good news. But then, within a day or two after me posting that, a friend of mine, Jonathan Hurwitz from the Scandinavian Center of Shamanic Studies in Sweden, contacted me. And you’ll remember this—he asked me to stop calling it cancer and to refer to it as “my teacher.” And so, from that point forward, I never referred to it as cancer again. I only referred to it as “the teacher,” which almost became the title of this book, by the way. And so, the teacher taught me as much about dealing with the sickness as it did about my own choices that led to my liver being in that position in the first place.
You know, I’d been doing a thing called the Ceremony of the Body for a few years where I would have this sort of meditative space where I would imagine all the parts of my body there. And that was—I had seen the movie The Lorax, and the guy says, “I speak for the trees.” And so I was like, “Well, who speaks for the liver?” So, I spoke for the liver at that moment. And so I went through this thing that I started doing in about 2012–2013 called the Ceremony of the Body. So when the teacher came along, it taught me more and more to be thankful to my own liver and not to feel any negativity towards that and to have parts of my body stream healing into it at the end of the day if it didn’t need it that night—things like this. And so, as it came time for the transplant, we sort of turned it around. We said, “Thank you and goodbye” to the liver in those ceremonies of the body and to announce to my whole entire system that we were getting ready to welcome a new member of the family. It was not going to be somebody else’s liver any longer, though that means nothing to discount the gift that I received from the donor. I’m talking specifically about how I was going to receive this.
And so, the teacher taught me, and I taught myself—how do you want to, you know, as Christie Gray says, “The teacher and the taught.” So during that process, heading into that fateful day of January 3rd, 2019, I was already in a position where I was gushing with thanks for this liver that wasn’t even mine yet. And so afterward, I immediately integrated it into me in a way that it was me. It was not anything else. You know, I didn’t have to act as if I had another liver. You know, and my body was certainly not going to reject it. I didn’t use the word “rejection,” even when I talked about the medications that they gave me for that purpose, because it was not going to happen. Just like I didn’t buy the myth of death, I didn’t buy the myth that my body was going to reject this gift that I had been given.
And so, during those first few months, it was all about giving thanks and welcoming it into my body. You know, for the fact, when I woke up that first morning after, I was able to see my ankles for the first time, my fingernails were white, my eyes were white, I could think clearly, I could see—it was like the world was amplified with trouble, like it wasn’t muffled, like I wasn’t living under a cloud anymore. And I was as grateful as you could possibly be, and I still am to this day. Now, since then, because of the lifestyle that I’ve chosen—we haven’t talked about that—and partially the fact that I’m in Colombia right now. I did find out that the person who donated the liver—I found out the manner in which she died. And it being a she, I remember that was a huge thing. I was like, “How perfect! How perfect!” How not my normal world this goes—this is excellent! I mean, of all the things that happened to me, it was like every time a new odd thing—and that’s not truly odd, but you know what I mean? I’m a man, and now I’ve got a woman’s liver. That, I was like, “That’s great! That’s just another gift!”
So when I learned how she died, and that was, I guess, an overdose, and I look at myself today having traveled Latin America, mostly in Mexico and Colombia, for the past 13 months, I feel that she, wherever she is, she was wanting to escape in the wrong kind of ways, I would say—not that I’m judging her—but if you take enough drugs to where you overdose, you’re trying to get somewhere else. And so, I’m not living that lifestyle; I’m not doing those kinds of things. But I did sort of get away in a way, and chose to travel the world and go and experience, like I’m sitting here at an ashram in Cali, Colombia, where they mix Mayan tradition with yoga, and I’m finding out about the Mayans for the first time. And when I was in Mexico, it was the first time I ever really did yoga. And so, it’s just a continuous process of continuing to explore and learn and be open to new things and not judge them. And I really hope—and I believe—that my donor would be happy with that. And I’m not going to say that at least I’m not sitting in a cubicle somewhere because there are tons of liver transplant and all kinds of transplant people living wonderful lives. It doesn’t matter what they’re doing—they’re alive, that’s great. But, of the gratitude, I think she’s probably looking down like, “You keep going, keep going, keep going.” So, to answer your question, I’ve fully integrated it into me.
David: Wonderful. Thank you for sharing. I love the gratitude that emanates from you. And thank you for modeling, thank you for being, and thank you for continuing on. Those are all part of our journey here on Earth, as far as I can tell. All right, last question—time for your hardball question. It comes in two parts. How useful has humor been for you in your journey?
Steve: Absolutely essential. I’ve laughed at the folly of this from day one, you know? The worse the news got, the more hilarious it became because I started saying things like, “I’ve never met an odd I couldn’t beat.” You know, there’s a little bit of humor in that, yes, kind of cocky, but you need that. You have to have confidence in yourself. Nobody is going to come and save you. You know, I don’t want to step on any religious toes or anything like that, and certainly, I had help. There’s a lot of people that helped me—the medical community. I couldn’t have just done this liver thing. No, certainly there probably is some other mystical place I could have gone and healed it myself, but I think that in the end, it happened. So, regardless of how it happened—I’m sort of sidetracked there talking about it like that—but had I not, from day one, said, “I don’t buy your myth of death” when they said I had six months to live, I probably wouldn’t be here. So, I laughed it off. I sort of poked death in the eye. In fact, that was a thing at one point—you might recall this—that I actually had journeys where I went to death and challenged it. I was like, “Fine, let’s do this now.” And I didn’t do that out of not respecting death—I embraced death. You know, in a way, a part of me died that day on the operating table when they had all my organs out, you know? I was under for eight hours, and I’m not making light of that; I don’t mean to sound like I’m bragging, but, you know, it can be done. You just have to believe in yourself and not take it too seriously, either. You have to laugh your way through life. If we don’t laugh, we don’t live.
David: And that was the second part of my question. How has humor helped you get more into your heart?
Steve: It opens it. I think laughter itself, you know, you want to talk about people say raising your consciousness—just laughing, in and of itself, elevates you. You know, you’re able to see the folly of life. Even if you drop something, and you walk into the table and you drop your spaghetti and it goes flying everywhere, and you say, “Oh, that was a dumb move,” you’re not truly calling yourself stupid. You’re not shaming yourself; you’re laughing at the folly of it all. So what? So now you have to clean up, you know? Or whatever—it might have been the first time you swept the floor all week. You’ve got to find the hidden gem in everything, you know? Look at me. I was a person that had been highly successful in the dot-com world since the ‘90s. I’ve worked remotely now for 23 years, or whatever it is. I was miserable by the time that this happened. I wanted to get out of it. We had merged with such a large corporate entity that I no longer felt that I really had a role. The creativity was gone in the early days of the late ‘90s, and I was looking to change. I’d been talking already about moving to Iceland with all this stuff, and then boom. So it was like, “Hey, this is the first stamp on your ticket to the world that you’ve been saying you want to go on.” And then, so as you recall, throughout the entire illness, all I did was say, “I’m moving to Iceland. I’m leaving as soon as this is over.” So in the summer of 2020, when I got the final clear bill of health, I was on the first plane to the first country that opened, and that was Colombia. Landed in Medellin a year ago, October 1st. Yes, so I did what I said.
David: That is quite some welcoming, and highly magical. If you can convert pain into lightness of heart, then that’s to be admired and emulated. All right, thanks, Steve. I think we should end it here. There’s, you know, you and I personally can talk about so much for so long, but for—thank you for our listeners, and may you get what you need.
Steve: Thank you, David. I hope that people out there take something from it, just like with the book. That’s really what I’m doing. I’m not going to be here forever, and so maybe it’s a tale that somebody can pick up one day if they find themselves like I was in 2011—against insurmountable odds. It’s all what you choose to do—all about the journey.
David: Thank you, Steve.