A STORY FROM ’68 and ‘94.

About 25 years ago I was on the east coast, in a retreat center participating in a training to become a teacher of Zero Balancing. It was a wonderful experience punctuated by a few unusual encounters. One in particular was with one of my fellow trainees, I’ll call him Louis. He was, of all the students, the most sensitive and he let us all know that repeatedly. He seemed to react to the slightest discomfort and could be quite assertive in confronting the person or people responsible.

So one afternoon we students were in the lunchroom eating and relaxing together. People came and went. Suddenly it seemed the only people remaining in the room were me and Louis.

He was sitting across from me and looking at me with his penetrating eyes and his beak-like nose pointed directly at me.

He said, “David Lauterstein, you are all these things. You’re a teacher, a writer, a therapist, a musician, a school owner, a workshop presenter. But what are you really? Really who are you?”

And I thought, “Oh my God, Louis has found me out! He knows that underneath all these roles and activities of mine, there’s really nothing there! He’s found me out! Deep down I’m nothing, a phony, with nothing at my core.”

But then I remembered a story that I had really never thought about in years. I’d never really taken the experience too seriously, but Louis’ question had me access it at a depth to which I never had gone before. So I basically told him the story below. And, like most good stories, I hope you enjoy hearing it and maybe get something out of it for yourself

Here’s what happened.

It was on a snowy, cold day in Chicago in 1968. I was working at what they claimed was the largest record store in the world, Rose Records. Rose Records was downtown on Wabash Avenue nearly under the dark and dirty old “el” tracks. From the front entrance to the back it was a half a block long and maybe as wide as a pyramid.

That day I was working stocking records toward the back of the store when I heard someone upfront asking about albums of John Coltrane. Being the main jazz buff there I rushed to the front to help her. As I got closer I saw this person was a young beautiful black woman in a white fur coat. I was momentarily speechless.

Finally I asked her what Coltrane she was looking for. She smiled at me and said, “You know.”

I said, “Oh no, actually Coltrane has a lot of albums. Ascension, Love Supreme, Ballads, Olé, and many others. Do you know which one you want?”

She said with a smile, “You know.”

I said, “No I don’t know. There are so many. Let me take you to them and you can decide.”

She said, “No. You know.”

I said, “No, I don’t know.”

She said now more pointedly and standing in front of me, looking into my eyes, “YOU KNOW.”

I felt the shift in our conversation and was confused.

“YOU KNOW,” she repeated.

I said with some embarrassment and disbelief, “No I don’t.”

But she repeated herself and I felt she was speaking to a deep part of me she somehow saw, as if she were psychic. And I began to acknowledge something inside of me. I looked around, “No, I don’t know.”

“YOU KNOW” she smiled.

And something inside of me felt seen and acknowledged perhaps for the first time in my life.

Maybe there was something in me that knew! Some inner knowing that had no name, but which had been deep inside me my whole life.

She said it again, “You know.”

So I felt that something inside almost breaking open or shining, and I said, as if giving up the illusion of not knowing, “OK, I know.”

Now at this point of the story if I tell it to anyone, what happened then turns it into a kind of joke – but I realize periodically this is no joke – it both delights and illuminates me every time I really let myself sink into the memory of that experience and the inner evocation it brought forth.

She gave me her name, Penny, and wrote her phone number down and invited me to a party. Then she said, “Tell your boss you’re going to take a break.”

I was mesmerized by now and so told my boss.

Penny and I walked outside. She had me go under the “el” across the street to a parking lot. She opened a car door and had me sit in the passenger seat of this old car. She closed the door and then I saw her talking with the parking attendant. I thought, “Uh oh, what have you gotten yourself into now?”

Shortly thereafter she came back and sat in the driver’s seat. She now was holding a big joint of marijuana. She lit it up and we smoked it all together. I don’t remember much after that, except I remember going back to Rose Records feeling like I was floating about a foot up in the air.

I never went to her party, but the memory of that encounter, re-evoked by Louis confronting me, to this day allows me to feel or at least remember that I’ve had the experience that “I know”, even though I can’t say what I know. I think it’s something connected to truth and to soul. When I feel it most is when I’m teaching Zero Balancing or Deep Massage or playing music and I say or play something unexpected that touches and comes from a deep place.

In Lewis Hyde’s book, “The Gift”, he says, “Our gifts rise up from pools we cannot fathom.”

I don’t know that I know anything more or other than anyone else. I like to believe that YOU KNOW. Every person knows they have something deep inside of them that is worthy, that loves and deserves love, that can recognize and access the truth, and that is good. I’ve had the good fortune to have friends and teachers who recognized something in me. And in some ways it’s really similarly my job to recognize and perhaps awaken in my readers, students, and clients that they know. It is a big joy of mine to communicate to people through words or through touch, “You Know”. Maybe that’s what I know – that you know!

And perhaps that knowing is the most important thing we can tap into and draw from in our lives. As humans, we KNOW, and what’s more, we know that we know, and that makes us capable of creating the world as we know it or as we want it.

You know?

YOU KNOW.