Killing the Sweet Torment: About R. Lee
Self-Portrait, Age 52
I started building toward this moment before the crash in 2008. I have spent nearly 20 years honing my craft.
This is the first time I can tell you what I am and what I do.
It’s the first time describing my work doesn’t feel like unsuccessfully trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.
Why?
Because I didn’t try to get rich from marketing.
I assembled a new reality in myself block by block—while also fashioning the blocks by hand.
And that’s what I do.
I assemble new realities in people. So they can assemble new realities in the world.
R. Lee: Mage, Soothsayer, Mutation Magic with a Pen in My Hand
I wasn’t born this way. I built myself block by block while fashioning every block by hand.
I didn’t begin with an empty slate. I began mired in more trauma than you could shake a stick at.
Suffering became like a drug.
I didn’t have adequate language for that until someone painted the little hole-in-the-wall dive bar outside my front door pitch black and then named it, “El Dulce Tormento”—The Sweet Torment.
Hello darkness, my old friend!
That’s exactly the ironclad law that was written in my own darkness:
thou shalt spend thy life in The Sweet Torment.
By whom? We may never know who etched those words in place first. The details don’t matter anymore anyhow.
But back then? The suffering kept compounding like interest on a usurious loan I would never be able to pay back.
The day the bar appeared, I had never before been in such a Sweet Torment! Yet there was even more to come.
I spent years trying to manage The Sweet Torment with healing, soul reconciliation, coherence work, nervous system regulation, and grit. But the barkeep at the metaphorical dive bar of my life just kept pouring more suffering with a side of ooh-la-la and I kept taking swigs—not delicate sips, SWIGS.
Every method at my disposal failed utterly at the moment when The Sweet Torment finally delivered an overdose. I could not imbibe anymore suffering and I knew it because the next thing on the horizon was just plain torment, nothing sweet remained at all.
And I was not willing to take even another micro-dose of agony—at least not without putting it to the only good use suffering ever has:
To end it.
That’s when I got furious at long last. It’s also when I met Death. Trust me. I took his lessons VERY seriously.
Death was the first block I laid as I began to reconstruct myself (from the wisdom of an ancient tradition instead of the folly of my own best thinking).
Death’s First Lesson
Thou shalt spend thy life in The Sweet Torment.
That was the year of my initiation into the Mexica tradition within which I practice now. But I had foretold the moment years ago in a book I wrote—a book I would disown today, at least in part, for simply not knowing enough.
I got this point exactly right: facing Death, I would assemble a new reality.
When the moment of assembly arrived, death was everywhere. The streets routinely erupted in gunfire. People were regularly assassinated. As I fell apart, my bank account fell nearly to zero and stayed there. My cupboards were frequently almost empty. The water tap was often dry.
I was a long way from the gilded cage I had once known as a lawyer at the top of the U.S. financial system. Even my clothes were rags by then.
Most people thought I was going to die right then and there. To be honest, so did I—a slow, agonizing death that would leave me not even my dignity. A more complete fall from grace would be hard to imagine.
None of that is what I mean when I say “facing Death.” This is a critical distinction. The death in my environment and my near-death life forced my hand.
The initiation gave me the means to do something I had never done before:
face The Sweet Torment as a warrior instead of a victim trying to heal.
I foretold that in the book too. I may not have known how. But make no mistake. I designed the course to deliver me right to Death’s doorstep.
The Xipe Totec resides in the West. He is the Mexica force of renewal. His colors are red and black. He is the combined Lord and Lady of Death and Lord and Lady of Life.
With the power of Death awakened inside me, I finally learned to do what had to be done.
I killed The Sweet Torment.
And I began building something new in its place: flourishing in my best possibilities.
Let’s not be romantic about that! It’s not like I received the initiation, performed some rite over the evil done to me by myself and others, and walked out of hell the next day.
Oh no. It was not going to be that easy. That belongs in a New Age Fairytale and this is decidedly not that.
An old teacher of mine resurfaced. She delivered a message. I was so disturbed by the beggars in town because I knew I was about to be one. She was wrong. I was already living as a beggar which meant everyone I knew was treating me like a failed project and running interventions.
Thou shalt live as a beggar.
That’s when I invented beggar’s alchemy. One simple line to reclaim the one power beggars are not allowed to exercise:
Beggars must be choosers.
By the darkness of the night, I wielded Death’s power to kill yet another facet of The Sweet Torment. By day, I chose. I made every choice available to me, including the most dangerous one of all:
turning down all help that came with conditions of conformity.
If I had to starve in the process, I would kill this latest version of The Sweet Torment one choice at a time. Because loss of agency leads to very bad places.
And so on and so forth it went until real material change became possible because I evolved myself AND my circumstances.
The old me had to die—along with The Sweet Torment—one Death command at a time. That meant acknowledging the perilous and liberating truth: I was made by The Sweet Torment.
There was no more original self to go back to before suffering became my drug. No truer me to uncover. Nothing to be healed other than a few battle injuries in my physical body.
And so I built myself into the person who stands before you today with one mission:
Find and train the people who will give Death to The Sweet Torment of this world AND give Life to the Evolutionary Intelligence Systems that will allow us to flourish in our best possibilities.
The work begins when you are ready to face Death and find its power within yourself. You wield that power first in your own life. It takes both magic and discipline.
Are you ready?