Anyone who needs to know, you are not alone.

Experience has taught me that life burns with an intensity of heartbreaking beauty and overwhelming pain that mere words can only whisper of. The most courageous act we humans ever commit is being born and seeing it through. I believe the questions, the confusion, the struggle of the journey, is hard for everyone . It required a dark and difficult path for me to understand, we are all alone feeling scared alone.

The foundation years of my life were filled with chaos. Addiction, abuse, neglect, poverty, and all the accompanying scars. So many years were spent feeling alone, I ran out of tears. I gave up on hope. I buried myself in territorial and compulsive behaviors. I raged against God and everything beneath his stars. I was determined to destroy every grace God gave me. I have deliberately rebelled against all authority. I have relinquished over a decade of life to incarceration pursuing a lifestyle of self-destructive rage and addiction. I am the father of three amazing children, who have had to encounter almost their entire lives without me. I am the husband of an absolute angel, who has suffered me and years of my selfish stupidity. I have lost loved ones while incarcerated. I have taken an innocent man’s life. I have stolen from my own family. I have asaulted anyone who stood in my way. I have abused everyone who has ever loved me.

This was the life I made for myself. I tell you this because I want you to know you are not alone. You are not alone in the ache. You are not alone in the trauma. You are not alone in the shame. You are not alone in the loneliness. There is hope for us. 

Returning to prison for the fourth time, I realized that if I did not change my behaviors, this circus is what I would be remembered by. Chiseled on my tombstone by those that knew me best, “Here lies a good heart wasted on a selfish life “. Not the ink I want stitched into the heart and the mind of my wife, my children, my species, my God.

So I prayed. “God, I don’t want to be here. I am tired. I hate prison. I hate myself. I hate the past. I hate all the trauma and the regret lurking there. I hate feeling like the failure sobriety reminds me I am. I don’t understand your process, but I don’t trust mine anymore. I give my life to you. Please God, help me.”

Deep in self reflection, I searched. I can be here and now. Maybe even design and hope for a better tomorrow. But what about yesterday? What am I going to do with all these bleeding memories? Humbled by desperation, I discovered “The Art of Soulmaking.” The insights therein awoke my soul to purpose. To gratitude. Not just an intellectual understanding, a comprehensive resonance. We are all in this together.

For many years, my wife, whose own story of tribulation and resilience is heroic, has patiently and compassionately loved me. When I read about adversity being a battle trained horse, about spiritual alchemy, about the becoming of a Shaman, the amplitude of her life and her love became clear to me. When those that have walked in the darkness and found the light decide to remember those of us still lost in the darkness and help us by sharing themselves, the love of God becomes knowable. It becomes real. To know we are not alone may be the greatest gift we can give each other.

The passage about the goal being incarceration, not ascension, illustrated the value of having experienced adversity to me. Ascension, leaving the world and everybody in its shadow behind in darkness so I can live alone in the light is to miss the point. It’s not about me, it’s about us, love, and grace from others. Introducing me to hope, to belonging, to purpose, teaches me the significance of being a vessel of experience and inspiration, that to incarnate down from the realm of God into the hearts and minds of all those beautiful and broken children still wandering around in the belief that they are alone, that they are forgotten, that they are unloved and unlovable, that adversity and trauma in regret means they failed. As others like the Unconditional Freedom Project extend insight and hope to me, I am invited to extend that love to others. To keep it, I have to give it away.

When I remember living there, that feeling, the suffocation of suffering, I am compelled to help others escape that place. If I can share my experience and inspire even one soul to believe that they are not alone, I will have lived a worthwhile life. I see them and I feel them and I remember, they are me. We are not evil, we are afflicted.

So if I possess the articulation to convey any message through the darkness from me to you, I want you to know, you are not alone. You and I may never meet, but I know you, and you know me, and I know this, because we both know the depth of the human condition. Whenever you are cast into doubt, remember the experience of drilling into your favorite songs. That sense of being understood. Music is the proof that none of us are alone.

Hodaya,

Luke Hundley