John Robinson’s Journey
For three decades, I practiced as a clinical psychologist in Sacramento. One day my heart fell into atrial fibrillation and I was defibrillated in the ER. The shock unleashed an enormous childhood trauma that changed my life. Unable to hold the pain of my clients, I retired and found the University of Creation Spirituality – exactly what I needed to chart a new life path. I graduated with a D.Min. in 2006, was ordained from the Chaplaincy Institute in 2008, and was privileged to cohost a CSC webinar with Penny Andrews and Gail Ransom on Creation in Crisis and Elder Innerviews for a couple years. I have also been writing profusely since my retirement, first books and articles on the spirituality and mysticism of aging and mystical activism, then finding my mystical voice through poetry (see www.johnrobinson.org). My first book of mystical poetry, I Am God: Wisdom and Revelation from Mystical Consciousness was published in 2024 by John Hunt Publishing. The second volume, Divinity Rising: Beyond Illusion, Suffering and Death in this summer from Wipf and Stock Publishers, and a third volume entitled, Into the Light: Death, Transformation and the Courage to Be, is in process addressing my “near-death” experience and concluding with protest poetry on America’s political crisis. Creation Spirituality informs everything passing through me. I am beginning to read my poetry aloud in workshops.
I include two autobiographical poems for the current manuscript to share my story.
A Shaman’s Initiation
At 14, I woke up during cardiac surgery feeling
hands working inside my heart.
Eyes taped shut in a severely cold operating theater,
paralyzed by chemical agents,
unable to communicate,
I was terrified.
Open-heart surgery felt like
my own death and autopsy.
A trauma of this magnitude can lay buried in
the unconscious for 40 years but
the amygdala never forgets.
Defibrillation in an ER
triggered the entire experience, and
the full force of the PTSD
demolished my career as a
clinical psychologist.
I felt murdered, mutilated, left to die and
then revived only to experience it again.
Mythologists and anthropologists tell us that
death, dismemberment and rebirth
initiates a new kind of being,
the shaman,
whose conscious annihilation parts
the curtain between worlds.
Years of depth psychotherapy,
spiritual direction, interfaith ordination and
mystical poetry sanctified my truth –
I am an edge-walker.
I learned to pass through
darkness into the spirit realm
and return with gifts.
Mystical poetry is my sacred offering.
My Work
I asked the universe
ultimate questions all my life,
seeking God in
the moment and Spirit in matter.
As psychologist,
I found ways to merge
psyche and soul, human and divine,
Heaven and Earth.
Interfaith spirituality led me deeper
into the universal mystical experience.
My ordination was a baptism sanctifying
my life, my aging, and my role as spiritual elder.
I came to understood aging and death as
a journey into God’s very consciousness.
The path of spiritual awakening
then invited me into the next world,
with experiences that surprise and edify.
The book before you represents a
deep inquiry into
the spiritual evolution of
the divine human.
We are being transformed.
With love and gratitude to Matthew Fox and the Creation Spiritualty Community,
John
