I first heard about the practice of recapitulation in Carlos Castaneda’s book s describing his encounters with a Mexican shaman. In several of those books he briefly talks about the importance of using a practice of going back and re-experiencing life events as an important way to get access to our personal energy.  However, while he mentions it and alludes to its power, he doesn’t give enough details to be able to do it.  Luckily, a couple of his fellow apprentices also wrote books about don Juan and the path of the warrior.  They are much more specific about the importance of this practice, and give descriptions that are clear enough to actually do the practice.   When I met my Toltec leader/guide/teacher/mentor Ramin, he stressed the importance of this practice, and suggested a book by Victor Sanchez, The Teachings of don Carlos, that provides additional details about how to do this practice.  Ramin highly recommended it as a necessary step toward getting access to our personal power.

Sometime around 1996 it became clear that if I were serious about learning the Toltec path to wisdom I would have to do the practice of recapitulating my life.  Therefore, I dedicated a year to it.  My original agreement with myself when I started taking classes from Ramin was to do whatever he suggested for a year to see if it was worthwhile.  I completed this year and found it to be exactly what I was hoping for.  An additional year dedicated to taking the next step seemed reasonable to me.

The idea behind the practice of recapitulation is to re-experience (recapitulate) all of the important experiences in our lives in such a way as to be able to release the energy that we have invested in them.  The point is that all of our personal energy is bound up in these past experiences, and that through the practice of recapitulation it is possible to free up that energy for our use.  The Toltecs claim that we have a limited amount of total personal energy. Therefore, the goal is not to make new energy, but merely to gain better access to the energy that we already have. Our energy is almost always bound up with people that we have known, with the binding connections going both ways.  Sometimes we are holding them with our energy, and sometimes they are holding us with theirs.  In either case, we do not have access to all of our personal energy, and we are therefore not free.  My goal is to be free.

The idea behind this process is pretty bizarre. It involves something that I can talk about and know a little about, but mostly it is inconceivable.  Carlos talks about our “egg” of energy.  He says that people consist of a large egg-shaped ball of energy fibers surrounding our body.  These fibers are our connection to the universe and allow us to perceive the world around us.  We interact using these fibers. Where the fibers come together they form what he calls the “assemblage point.”  This point is located at about an arm’s length behind our right shoulder.  The exact location of the assemblage point on this ball of luminous fibers determines how we perceive the world.  Move it and our view of the world changes – Castaneda says the world actually changes; it is more than just our view of it.  These fibers get “hooked” with other people’s fibers during our life, which means that we lose our ability to use those hooked fibers for other purposes.  Recapitulation is a method for unhooking the bound up fibers as well as getting our egg back into shape, patching any holes and smoothing out any snarls that might have occurred during the tossing and tumbling of life. 

The first step in the process of recapitulation is to identify the important people and events in your life.  This would be a lot easier for a younger person.  For a fifty-year-old like me, it included a long list of a LOT of important events.  Partly based upon directions from Ramin, but mostly from directions from the books of Carlos and his cohorts, I made a chronological list of all of the people that I could recall in my life.  I did this by breaking my life into phases (houses where I lived, jobs that I had, etc.) and then working my way through the memories of these phases.  This part of the process took me about three months working on it an hour or two every day.  Actually, it was most of my waking hours; the hour or two per day was spent documenting what I had been thinking about the rest of the time.  At first I tried to sort out the important people from the unimportant ones, but I finally settled on the idea that if I could remember them, they were important for some reason.  The ones that I couldn’t remember might not be so important.  I tried to identify them by name, but in some instances I couldn’t recall names, so instead I made short descriptions to remind me of them. The names weren’t important, but the memory of them and our experiences together were.  This list ended up including about 3,000 people.  I created the list using a computer so I could sort them and print the list for future use.

The experience of doing this first step was amazing!  It connected my life into a single, whole, experience rather than a long series of experiences. Before making this list I had tended to forget, or not pay attention to, past experiences and was just moving along in the “bubble” of the present.  Paying attention to the present is not necessarily a bad thing, a focus on the present is what I am trying to achieve.  However, the experience of remembering all of my life somehow broke the bounds of the present and made me realize that the past and the present are all here in the moment, we do not really leave the past behind.  It is hard to explain, but I ended up feeling like the past, present and future were illusions – the reality is that it is all one.  Just this part of the process turned out to be an amazing experience.

Then came the recapitulation. I made a wooden box to sit in while recapitulating.  The box was just big enough so that I could sit cross-legged within it without touching the walls or top.  It was tied together with cotton string; I used no metal in its construction.  It was made from 1×6 boards, leaving cracks between the boards for ventilation.  The front came off to make a door and there were no windows or other openings.  The box ended up being rather wobbly in all directions, but was enough to give me a space of my own.  I put the box in a shed out in my backyard, within a grove of eucalyptus trees, to protect it from the elements.  Every day for about a year I would take my list of names, and sit in the box going person by person down the list until I had revisited everyone on the list.

I had a candle in the box with me so I had enough light to read the list.  After reading the next name on the list, I would tear off the name and recapitulate them.  In reality, I wasn’t exactly recapitulating them, I was recapitulating the events associated with them – but these two are so closely connected that I gave up trying to figure out the distinction.  When I finished with a person, I burned their name and add the remains to a can of ashes. 

I soon realized that there was a problem with dealing with the events associated with a person because people that I know well for a long time have hundreds or thousands of events associated with them – many of the events were very important indeed.  I started to wonder if I should recapitulate each event or each person.  I had to decide how to deal with this.  Going back to don Juan’s instructions, it seemed like the idea was that we make connections to people in our lives. These connections are more or less permanent, continuing to influence our lives long after they were created.  In the process of recapitulation, we are trying to disconnect these inter-personnel connections.  Therefore, it is only necessary to go back to the last time that we encountered them – at that time all of the connections would exist and be available to us.  I followed his guidance and concentrated on the last encounter that I could recall with each person.

After a few weeks of working my way down the list of people, I decided that the process is a purely magical one, meaning that it has little or no meaning to my logical mind – it just works.  I had to give up on making any sense out of it and do it with the assumption that something was happening.  The process is pretty simple.  It consisted of the following five steps: (1) I imagined the person and the event surrounding the last time that I could recall seeing them. (2) I then watched that event from the prospective of being outside of the event, kind of like watching a movie.  (3) Then I “jumped” into the event, recalling what it was like, and how I felt, from the inside when it was happening.  At this step I tried to remember it as clearly as possible, including sights, smells, sounds, temperature, etc.  The more complete this reconstruction was the better.  This step involved the realignment of the assemblage point with where it was at that previous time.  The realignment brings the connections that existed at that moment back in a way that allows them to be changed again. (4) I then jumped back out to see the view as in a movie, but this time including the smells and other things, and then finally (5) I breathed to release the energy binding us together. 

The breathing was done in a special way.  I turned my head toward the right shoulder and breathed in through my nose while slowly turning my head toward the left shoulder, retrieving energy that I used to connect and hold the other person.  After that was completed, I then breathed out while turning my head from left to right, releasing energy that the other was holding me with.  I would focus on breathing in, then focus on breathing out.  I breathed like this, imagining the energy being released from both directions, until it felt like there were no more connections.   At that point I was finished with that person, and would light the paper with their name and burn it up, placing the ashes in a can along with the ashes of all of the other names.

Every once in a while I came across an event that contained a special jewel for me.  These were times when I found the source of agreements that I had made about myself and who I am.  It turns out that my self image, and my understanding of who I am, come from a long series of agreements that I have made with myself, usually based upon things that others have told me while I was growing up.  The agreements include things like, “you are not handsome.”  Oh, really?  Ok, I agree with that, I am not handsome.  “You are good at science.” Oh really?  I agree, I am science oriented and good at it.  “You are too stupid to do that.”  Sorry, I can’t do that, I am too stupid.  It goes on and on and on.  I slowly built up the story of who I am, what I can do, what I cannot do, what I like, etc. based on all of these little agreements.  This is not a bad thing; it is just the way it is. The problem is that I made the agreements without thinking about them, based upon assumptions of what was meant (which was usually wrong), and we made a whole set of conflicting and confusing agreements because I got input from many people and experiences all jumbled together.  This helps to explain the mess that we are in when we try to untangle who we “really are.”  We sometimes have a chance to revisit these agreements and change them.

While recapitulating, now and then I came across events and people that seemed to be at the root of some agreement that I had about myself.  I then had the chance to re-visit that agreement and make a conscious decision about whether or not I wanted to keep it.  I could decide right then and there to discard it.  However, I couldn’t just throw it away; I had to replace it with something.  At about this same time I had read don Miguel Ruiz’s little book The Four Agreements.  It turned out that in almost all cases I could replace my unwanted agreement with one or more of the four agreements.  I didn’t have to change from “I am stupid” to “I am smart.” All I had to do was change from “I am stupid” to “I will do the best that I can”.  With this simple change I dropped the judgments and baggage that came with the initial agreement.

This process was hugely liberating!  Day after day I found that I kept feeling more and more free.  I stopped worrying about problems with others, stopped trying to hold others with my energy, stopped letting them hold on to me.  I started being solid and strong by myself.  At first I was afraid that this process would ruin my feelings of love for my wife, family and friends because I was confused about the difference of being attached and being in love.  It is true, I lost my attachments – but that was a good thing.  I could finally just feel my love and allow myself to enjoy them and our relationship, no attachments and no controlling the other is needed. Love and friendship are not based upon holding onto and controlling the other.  In fact, it is just the opposite.  It is involved in allowing the other to be free and enjoying them just as they are without trying to change or control that.  Instead of making me become isolated from my friends and loved ones, it brought me much closer in a much warmer and comfortable way. 

Not only did this process help me to get closer to others, it helped me to let go of damaging agreements that were not useful to me.  It also allowed me to feel much more empowered to be able to use (or withhold) my energy to suit my needs.  I no longer feel compelled to use up all of my energy on things that don’t matter.  I feel like I am now much freer to be me, and much less compelled to be what I think others want me to be.

By the time I had spent a year sitting in my box, burned the last name from my list, and burned the box – I was floating in the clouds.  I now feel peace and joy with life most of the time, even when it is not “fun” or peaceful.  I stand up tall and look life straight on with fearlessness and excitement to see what is coming next.  I find that I am much more relaxed and patient with my friends and loved ones because I just enjoy the time that I am having with them at the moment, there is nothing more important to do than what I am doing.  I find that what people do and say has less impact on me.  I can see clearly that what they say and do tells me a lot about them, but very little about me – so if they say something bad or something good, about me, it is not about me – it is about them.  I don’t need to let them “hook” me, and I don’t have to try to “hook” them. When this happens, then I go back and unhook in a mini-recapitulation exercise.  In order to avoid the extra work later on, I try to avoid the hooks in the first place.  This doesn’t mean that I don’t let myself like or love them, or accept their good feelings; it just means that I don’t accept the controlling aspects of the relationship.

My year of sitting in my box was a true turning point in my life.  I no longer am able to return to be the person that I was before I met Ramin and started on the path of the warrior.  I am now on a path full of love, hope, joy, excitement and mystery.  I will never be able to go back, nor would I want to.