The Tour de France Bicycle Race is a 2267 mile grind that takes three weeks to complete. It may be the single hardest sporting event there is. For the last seven years it was won by Lance Armstrong, whose compelling story of surviving metastatic cancer made him a hero. This year it was won by another American, Floyd Landis, who accomplished a stunning come-from-behind victory.


Floyd’s story is as compelling as Lance’s; he is virtually crippled when he’s not on the bike. He limps with pain, cannot cross his legs, and soon will have total hip replacement surgery. Floyd led for most of the Tour, but five days from its completion, he “hit the wall” in the grueling Alpine passes and fell from 1st to 11th place. Floyd made no excuses, said that he would keep on fighting. The next day he shocked everyone by making one of the best rides in the Tour’s history. He clawed his way back to third place and the following day sprinted into first and held on to win.

A few days ago we all learned that Floyd might be disqualified because they found too much testosterone in his urine sample as evidence of blood doping. This saddens me enormously, even if it turns out not to be true, the accusation will taint his achievement. Here is a man who, in adversity, found a catalyst that tapped his inner strength, the heart of a true champion. Someone who doesn’t give up when his pain and suffering (physical or emotional) seems overwhelming.

The weekend before last, I was with such a champion. I spent five days rooming with my friend W. Mitchell, one of the great joys in my life. I may be the only psychiatrist in the world he would ever share a room with. Mitchell doesn’t think much of the psychiatrists he’s known. He says they focus on the sickness and the scars, rather then help you identify your strengths. Mitchell’s inexhaustible joy always balances my inexhaustible angst.

In 1971, at age of 28, Mitchell was in a fiery motorcycle accident that left him burned over 65% of his body. He survived with severe scarring and dismemberment. Physically disfigured, he became a millionaire entrepreneur, respected businessman and pilot. Several years later he survived a small plane crash in which he was left paralyzed from the waist down. He went on to become the Mayor of Crested Butte, Colorado, and an internationally recognized ambassador of hope. Mitchell does not see himself as disabled. He is still “a babe magnet,” and says, “Before I was paralyzed, there were 10,000 things I could do; now there are 9,000. I can either dwell on the ones I have lost or focus on the 9000 I have left.” At the end of a long evening of imbibing, it was I who was disabled and Mitchell graciously said, “Just put your hands on the wheelchair and let me take you home”.


These are the champions of the world, the visionaries who remind us that our successes are a combination of hard work, patience and a dream that makes us look forward to tomorrow. All of us can do incredible things, because we all have a human spirit and its infinite source of dreams.

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It’s that time of year again; the first weekend after Independence Day is the Oregon Country Fair. It is my yearly Hajj to Eugene, where I go away to this Fantasyland summer camp that nurtures my soul. For almost 40 years the OCF Family, a combination of visionary, ecologically conscious, spiritually awakened people, gather by the thousands in a celebratory “love-in” to dream about transforming our culture in joyous and healthy ways.



Founded in the sixties, it has always been a gathering place to celebrate cooperative, artful, and authentic ways to live. It still nurtures the vision of a sustainable earth for us and those generations still to come. I am totally anonymous here; known as “T’s Father” it’s enough to get me into the place and keep me out of trouble. Here I feel free to dress up in costume and play day and night

I get into the blessing that is OCF, as soon as I get to the airport. In the waiting area, reading the morning paper with its perpetual bludgeoning of war and suffering that enrages me. I’m sitting here with a sticker on my chest that says “send me to OCF if I’m lost”. OCF is my annual fix of hope, it dispels my cynicism and reminds me that people can live together in community and appreciate the sacred.

At OCF a businessman, who wouldn’t dream of picking up garbage works on a recycling crew. He wears a mask and rubber gloves as he picks through endless pails of refuse. picking through pails wearing masks and rubber gloves. Here, lawyers direct traffic, teachers are stilt-walkers, doctors are clowns, and musicians parading everywhere. For 4 days we transform my culture in a way that lifts my spirit. I feel blessed here.

At OCF I become “The Truth Fairy”, a 6’6” fairy, dressed in pink body stocking, wig and tutu; I look like a flamingo on growth hormone. I’m accompanied by my Fair brother, “The Merry Berry” who is a retired jumbo jet pilot who’s dressed up as a blueberry and also wearing a tu-tu. The Truth Fairy answers questions that people have wondered about, but have been reluctant to ready to hear the answers to. At OCF people here will talk to a giant pink Fairy, and more impressively, they listen. I told my wife I might try it at the office, and Elaine said don’t even think about it; don’t tell anybody about it and don’t take any pictures.


The cleansing of my soul that I feel here is matched by the body cleansing. Every afternoon I take a trip to “The Ritz”. The Ritz is an enclosed area at the far end of the fairgrounds which contains three multi-tiered sauna’s, showers and sinks with running water. In the middle is a fire-pit around which we sit and cool down. Next to the pit is a baby-grand piano where musicians entertain. Sittin’ in the Ritz the Truth Fairy cleans before he beams.

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I first went to Germany 20 years ago because I wanted to get rid of the anger that I felt for all Germans that bordered on frank hatred. It was part of the legacy I carried as the firstborn son of Holocaust survivors.


It was only after I came to Indian Country that I learned what it was like to be on the receiving end of similar racist judgments, and I decided to re-examine my own. You can’t walk around with that much anger and still be able to call yourself a healer.

On my first trip to Germany, I began to feel at least comfortable with the familiarity of things: the language, smells and tastes, even the thin-lipped coffee cups. But I was never far away from a thinly-veiled suspicion — that if I waited long enough, I would catch somebody making an anti-Semitic slur. Sure enough, one afternoon as I watched and listened to a juggler performing in front of dozens of people, I heard him make such a remark.

I’ve told this story often and also written it, because this experience forced me to re-examine my old certainties. This young German juggler was responsible for helping me heal myself. Because of that experience I have come back to teach colleagues in Germany and each time I have come, it has helped me get rid of more preconceptions.

A couple of years ago, I conducted a three-day workshop in Germany entitled, “The Science and Spirit of Healing.” One of the participants, Brigitta, a psychologist (far left in photo), came up and said she thought she knew that juggler I spoke about. She asked if I was interested in finding him, and I said I would love to. A year later she found the juggler, and in our subsequent discussions confirmed his identity (see Schlagbyte, Feb. 13, 2006).

The sad news was the juggler, Holger “Ernst” Riekers, had died two years earlier from stomach cancer at the age of 40. His widow, Ann, was raising their two daughters, ages 6 and 3. Brigitta said Ann and the girls would like to meet me the next time I came to Germany.

At the end of my recent speaking tour in Germany, I met with Anne and her two beautiful daughters. Anne said that Holger was her soulmate; they had known each other since she was 16 and felt they were two bodies with one heart. Anne is now 39, an artist raising Amalia, a smiling 6-year-old who developed alopecia shortly after her father’s death and whose hair is now growing back in patches; and Cecilia, a lively 3-year-old who was born three weeks before her father’s death. Anne said raising the girls alone was hard, but losing a piece of her heart was unbearable.

I told Anne that Holger changed my life. He helped me get rid of my old preconceptions and let go of my anger. Because of him I came to see another face of Germany;, I have come back to Germany again and again, and the healing he began in me continues. I told her my World Cup experience (see last week’s Schlagbyte) about dancing with the young German who was about Holger’s age when I met him. When the young man asked me to dance, I felt Holger’s healing blessing on me again.

Anne asked me to say something to the children about their father, and my command of the language was perfect for their age. I told them their father once saved my life. That I once was an angry man with bitterness in my heart, even at their father. But he loved me anyway and showed me how to give up my pain and sadness. I hugged their father and thanked him, and I was going to hug them too and leave them with a piece of my heart like their Daddy left me his. I gave them each a little teddy bear clutching a heart and a copy of my children’s book, The Go-Away Doll which I inscribed: I love you . . . everything you love goes away someday, but it always comes back to love you in another way.

We see escalating violence daily, fight against it by loving somebody wholeheartedly today.

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I was speaking in Germany last week during the world’s greatest sport exhibition, the World Cup Games. This is a frenzied, flag-waving, international extravaganza of the world’s greatest soccer teams whose Countries put on a colorful display of national pride. As the host country, Germany had a top-contending team, and they were flying their flags proudly too— from balconies, stuck out of cars, painted on faces — the Country was a moving tapestry of black, red and gold.


Such expressions of nationalism generally leave me cold, but when I see them in Germany, it’s always more uncomfortable. When I see Germans raising their glasses, waving flags and singing songs, I hear the Beer Hall Putsch and see the thinly veiled specter of latent Nazism. It is the lingering influence of being the firstborn son of Holocaust survivors. I have always harbored a mistrust of Germans that bordered on frank hatred. I don’t say that with pride, you can’t walk around with that much anger and still be able to heal people. Over the last 20 years in coming to Germany, I have tried, with some success, to overcome my judgmentalism and rage.

You don’t have to be a survivor child to share such preconceptions. Since World War II, Germans have not made public displays that showed a love of country; it seemed bad form to express ones German-ness. But this year, it was like the Fourth of July; young people draped in flags, faces painted, Mohawk wigs in the national colors, and singing by the tens of thousands. For the first time, instead of it momentarily clutching my chest, I felt good . . . its time had come.

I believe the World Cup 2006 represents a cathartic moment in the modern history of Germany. Young people are standing up to say “I am proud to be German.” I believe they will not forget what happened in their country, but also that they will no longer be defined and enslaved by the sins of some of their grandfathers.

I was in a small town the middle of the Black Forest on the afternoon Germany played Argentina in the quarterfinals. The central square was dominated by a huge television screen, and I stood amidst hundreds of chanting Germans. When Germany tied the score at the end of regulation play, I was chanting along, “We’re going to Berlin.” After a scoreless double-overtime, the game was decided by penalty kicks and Germany won the shootout. It was pandemonium, and I felt neither fear nor rage. We were singing Queen’s song, “We are the champions! We are the champions! No time for losers, for we are the champions of the world.”


A flag-draped young man slapped me on the shoulder and invited me to dance with him. As I danced, I felt the chains of my own enslavement loosen, and I felt like a Dancing Healer.

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