Daily Inspiration: Meet Randy Mack

Today we’d like to introduce you to Randy Mack

Hi Randy, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I am a Boomer born in January 1947. As was common in the 1950s, my family had a comfortable suburban lifestyle. I don’t have any significant memories from those years. While I did very well on standardized tests in high school, I was a mediocre student because I was bored with the curriculum. Fortunately, in college, I was selected to be part of a new Intercultural studies program, which I really enjoyed. My thirst for knowledge began and continues.
In the summer of 1968, my life changed dramatically. Like many bright young people of
the era, I dropped out of college, where I was a philosophy major, and joined the hippie tribe. I started wearing bell bottoms, smoking pot, taking frequent LSD trips, protesting the Vietnam War, selling pot and LSD, going to rock festivals, etc. Early on, I had an especially important trip in which I saw how really immature and neurotic I was. Up until then, I thought I was fine; it was others who had problems.
This trip was an awakening into a new life of emotional growth. At that time, a booming
interest in personal development offered many options to pursue. In 1969, I took a heroic 2000 mcg dose of LSD and had a mystical experience of merging with the Mind of God. That ended my atheism and opened a vast new realm of exploration.
In 1971, my life changed again. I met three wise older individuals who helped me move from a random stoner into a more conscious one. They helped me understand the spiritual experiences I’d been having on LSD that none of my hippie friends were experiencing. Once, after getting stoned and meditating with one of them on his sailboat, as we walked back up the dock, our minds switched bodies for maybe what seemed like a very long 15 seconds or so. Many other interesting things happened, too.
Soon after this, I met my future wife, Karen, who became the mother of our two daughters. I took on a more responsible lifestyle. In that era, one could support a small family in a menial job. I mostly did landscaping at an expensive gated golf community. By 1977, at age 30, as I moved into genuine adult life, I was feeling frustrated with my lifestyle. Increasingly, I wanted a more serious adult vocation and couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do. I definitely did not want to go to law school as I had planned.
Through several coincidences, we ended up in our camper van at a Sufi meditation retreat that happened to be nearby. While there, I experienced two significant events. One was given a seed thought to meditate on: The spiritual lion rests his head in the heart of Christ. (More on this in a
moment). The other was seeing a man doing body work at the little health center area. I thought, maybe I could do something like that. I didn’t know anything about that world other than there were people doing massage.
When I got home, I talked to one of my mentors, who told me about his positive Rolfing experience.
I called his Rolfer and liked what I heard. The Rolfers respected both esoteric traditions and modern science. Given my situation, it was also vital that it was taught in relatively short, deep, immersive modules. Still, I had no idea how I could ever afford to do that.
One evening, I returned home from an errand I’d run with my girls. Karen was in the
living room giggling, which I’d never seen her do. She told me that she had taken a dose of LSD. I was surprised because we had given it up, and were just using the organic mushroom and cactus ones instead. It was a very intense trip. As I really got off, I felt a strong feminine presence in my mind. I
looked into it and saw Karen’s mind, my feminine part, the anima, and the projections between the two. Soon this turned out to be very important. Later in the trip, I was told we had completed our relationship and couldn’t go further together. That sounded crazy. We were only 30 years old and had two little girls. A couple of days I came home from work and found Karen having an asthma attack which she hadn’t had since being a teen. We moved in with her nearby parents so her mother could help her with the children. Karen, after going to a doctor who diagnosed her with bronchitis and gave her an antibiotic.
The next afternoon, when I arrived back at my in-laws, Karen was giddy, had slurred speech, and was uncoordinated. We took her to the emergency room, where she went into a coma. She died two days later from a systemic staph infection. It was Feb 14th, 1977. The girls were 18 months and 3 years old,
This was when, even with my grief, I had a spiritually coordinated series of events, an Act of Grace that let our new lives move forward in a manner I couldn’t have imagined.
Two nights after she died, the night before the funeral, some of our closest friends were at our home. We got stoned, and I talked to them about what had happened. When done, I turned off the lights and put on an album I’d gotten at the retreat center. I wanted our friends to have a time and place to feel their grief. I sat in the corner, and a wave of raw grief came up. I scrunched up my face and screamed silently, and then another and another. I went to a place where I knew I was feeling all the grief there is to feel.
Then suddenly, a brilliant light arose in my mind that said Jesus. While I’d had many spiritual experiences, I wasn’t interested in Jesus because I thought so many Christians missed the essence of
his teachings. I sort of laughed, knowing my recently born-again in-laws were going to love this story.
His presence was so precious, so rich with empathy. He told me that the recent LSD trip was our souls saying goodbye. He told me she had come into this life to fulfill a karmic obligation to have these children, and now it was time for her to come home. He said the illness was to facilitate this. He talked to me about my life and told me that he didn’t care if I read the bible or went to church. He simply asked that I have a kind heart and be good to his people, who are everyone. I made a holy vow at that moment to do so. I’ve done okay.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I had been caring for an older woman’s yard for a few years, and we had become friends. When I saw her a few days later, my grief really touched her heart. In passing, I told her about wanting to become a Rolfer. It turned out her youngest son had been Rolfed the previous year and really benefited from it physically and emotionally. She then offered to provide all the money I would need to complete my Rolfing training. My in-laws lived nearby and watched the girls when I was away at school.
First, I had to get Rolfed, and it was great. It eliminated my chronic lower back pain and increased my sensitivity to my daughter’s needs. I didn’t pray for Karen’s life, let God’s will be done, but I did pray for some help with my parenting and was given that. Amen.
I became a Certified Rolfer in 1979, and an Advanced Rolfer in 1985. I worked in Washington, D.C., for a couple of years, and then in 1981, when the girls were 5 and 7, I knew how important their peers would be to their development, so I moved us to the Farm intentional community in Summertown, TN. That worked out extraordinarily well for all of us. That was one of the best decisions I ever made.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Ida Rolf PhD was a unique genius, bringing something brand new into the world. Dr Rolf, grandmother to us, called her work Structural Integration and didn’t like the terms Rolfing and Rolfer but got stuck with them because our brains want to keep things simple.
Rolfing Structural Integration is a unique way of helping improve people’s physical structure and functioning. Rolfers carefully manipulate the tough fibrous connective tissues of the body in an orderly ten-series sequence. The goal is to better align the clients’ bodies so that the pull of gravity supports rather than stresses them. I also do isolated ‘fix -it’ work on shoulders and knees, etc.
Without being on an ego trip, I can say for certain that Rolfing helps more people with the most common structural complaint. You know, the low backs, sore necks, gimpy knees, and other complaints than any other modality. That said , other modalities can do good, even great, work, and every situation is unique. It is intense at times because changing the body requires significant pressure in especially tough areas. As soon as the pressure is removed the affected tissue feels better, not sore.
I started my Rolfing practice in Nashville in 1983. The rest is history. I’ve now done approximately 30,000 sessions with some 4000 or so people over the last 46 years. I love doing this work. Integrating a client’s body into a higher order of structure and function is an endlessly interesting process. Rolfing clients are people of different ages and lifestyles who are committed to doing the necessary work to have a better life. It is a privilege to work with them. I’m now 78 years old, have no chronic pain, and have no interest in retiring any time soon. I’m having too much fun meeting so many interesting people.

Do you any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
On reflection, I have no outstanding memories. It’s interesting how our early experiences, while often wholly forgotten, can so affect the rest of our lives. I had some grievous emotional trauma as an infant and toddler. One was as a six-week early 4 lb preemie, spending the first two weeks of my life in an incubator back when they didn’t know how important it was for us to be held. How lonely, how awful, how wrong it must have felt.
When I was 18 months old, my 3-year-old sister was killed, and my parents were guilty. In the midst of all the awfulness, I knew that I had killed her, and if ‘they’ ever found out, they would kill me. Decades later I was gradually able to work on this trauma. I used MDMA therapy to go into this dark abyss of the soul. As I tried to go deep into that grievous space, I kept getting distracted. Then suddenly the same beautiful p divine presence was in my mind again. This time, he announced himself as the Christ and spoke into my mind, saying: “You don’t have to go there. That’s not in you anymore.” I sobbed and cried and laughed in relief and gratitude for the gift I’d been given on that journey.
I am now blessed with a flourishing life. I have wonderful adult daughters and a couple of extraordinary grandchildren. For the last 6 years with my MaryAnn, I now know the precious mature love that I somehow intuited must be possible. I’ve even just published a book Ecstatic Aging.

Image Credits
In chronological order: me and mom, the VW door, the family with Karen holding baby, Karen on the couch, me at Poetry Slam. Less relevant are the one of me and the girls at an anti-nuclear power rally, and hairy me standing in the woods on the Farm.