Several years ago I wrote a book – Wing of Effort, Wing of Grace – to share some of the profound teachings offered by my spiritual teacher, David LaChapelle, who came into my life in January of 2004, changing everything. I have decided to disseminate this work through the medium of a blog.

I offer this work not only to honor David, but also because most of his teachings came through his gift as orator and through the model of his own life.  Although David did write several books, he never organized his core ideas into a solid narrative. A few months after he passed away, in December of 2009, I was sitting in meditation when I received an unequivocal message to share my personal story as a vehicle for his teachings. The following day I began to write.

By weaving David’s work with the narrative of my own story, I do not mean to imply that my experience is a common template for all. This is far from true. There is a slogan that says, “Many paths, one truth.” I have shared my path, weaving the personal and the universal; it is up to the reader to untangle these strands.

Over the course of my life, I have been fascinated with the dance between the path and the Truth, the particular and the Universal, form and Formlessness, the human and the Divine. I am learning to more fully embrace the dance itself, learning to accept the seeming imperfection of form. This means receiving life as it is, unguardedly embracing the dual nature of this plane: love and hate, light and dark, good and evil, birth and death. It is this duality that actually holds together form. In this way, to accept the dual nature of reality is to accept life itself. This has been a significant part of my life’s work, and in this book I share this core dilemma, knowing that so many others struggle with the dark side of existence, as well.

The teachings that I share have been spoken and written about for thousands of years. Why am I repeating them? David was brilliant at taking wisdom from multiple traditions and, through his direct experience, distilling his insights into language that was accessible to the western mind. This dovetailed with my own interest in finding the link between that uniquely western body of knowledge that we call psychology, and yogic knowledge that so beautifully languages the path of the spiritual. In this way, I offer this work as a bridge between psychology and spirituality, the esoteric and the everyday, the earthly and the transcendent, in a language that I hope is accessible.

I did not write this book through strategy or planning. I never knew where the book was going nor did I have an audience in mind. I began each writing session with meditation, allowing a deeper and more subtle voice within me to guide the process. It was not until I was laying down the last section of the final chapter that I realized it was coming to an end. When I wrote the last sentence, David came to me in spirit form, transmitting unconditional love directly into my heart. He was my muse, I, the scribe.

Recognizing the profound limitations of writing as a way of elucidating spirit, I write anyway. As well, I offer my deepest gratitude to David, honoring language as an aspect of form that points towards Formlessness but never reaches it, yet, is never separate from it in the same way that a wave is never separate from the sea.

Jan Birchfield, Ph.D.