Alan Watts once said that a leaf doesn’t come out of a tree by accident. The tree leafs. The way a wave doesn’t come out of the ocean. The ocean waves.
I used to think I came into this world from circumstance despite everything that shaped me. Now I know I came through it. Every trauma. Every absence. Every construct. Every silence. All of it root. All of it fuel.
I am not a product of that world. I am its transformation.
And that, is the point.
Chapter One
I Chose to Come Back
This is what arrival looks like for me.
The loss of a brother before I could read. A black can of Raid pressed to the lips of a five year old who just wanted the pain to stop. Learning the 12 step program before I learned to ride a bike. Smoke stacks and refinery air as the only skyline I knew. A mother who came home beaten and bloodied and still reached for me. A field where I was on a team but never in the room. A slur in a gym where nobody said a word. A teacher who said I couldn’t have written that. Another who said I stole it. A boy with no safe place after dark except the blue light of a television. A stillness so complete I had to choose whether to stay in it or come back.
I chose to come back.
I now live on the edge of a volcano in Guatemala, where the air is clean, and the lake reflects the sky back to itself every morning. I built this life on purpose. With a woman who looked at everything I was and everything I had been through and chose to stay, to build, to reflect me back to myself until I could finally see what was already there. Two sons who came into the world and reminded me without a single word that freedom is the original state. A healing retreat we built not from theory but from the wreckage we both walked through and the wisdom we found on the other side of it.
I am not who that world tried to make me. I am what I chose to become inside of it.
And for the first time in my life, that feels like enough.
Chapter Two
Smoke Stacks and Safe Places
I entered a world that had already decided some things about me before I became aware.
I was born in Santa Barbara, California but grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana. Not all of Shreveport. The part where you could see the Pennzoil smoke stacks and the back of the Libbey Glass Factory from outside your front door. The part where gang violence, shootings and drug abuse were as common as sunshine. The part you left if you could and only returned to when you had to.
My mother was in and out of recovery. My father was navigating his own darkness. My introduction to the 12 step program came before I learned to ride a bike. My Nana would take me to visit my mother at recovery centers and I would sit in those meetings, small and quiet, watching grown people stand up and tell the truth about themselves. Watching them receive their coins. Lose their coins. Come back anyway. Because it worked when they worked it.
I didn’t have words for what I was witnessing then. I just knew I wanted to be outside playing with my friends instead.
What I understand now is that those rooms were my first education in what it costs to be honest with yourself.
Chapter Three
My Nana Was My Homebase
In a world that shifted without warning, her presence was the one thing that didn’t move. Her home was full in the way that only a woman who had learned to hold on to things could make it. Books stacked in corners. Clothes hanging with intention. Publications collected like evidence that the world was worth paying attention to. It wasn’t tidy but it was safe. And for a boy growing up inside of chaos, safe was everything.
She lost her husband the year before I was born and I don’t believe she ever fully grieved him. Instead she poured herself into everything and everyone around her. Into my mother’s recovery without ever making me feel the weight of it. Into my schooling, my homework, my soccer practice, my becoming. Her hands were always in service when I picture her. Grading papers. Writing. Cooking for us. Always doing. Always giving.
She dressed to impress without trying to impress anyone. Soft spoken but intentional. She walked through rooms with a smile and a grace that never shrank for anyone, including the people she didn’t particularly like. She acted with respect toward everyone because that’s who she was, not because of who they were.
She used to say, “I can’t win for losing.” I understand now what she meant. She was carrying more than one person should carry and doing it without letting me see the strain. That’s not losing. That’s love at its most disciplined.
What she gave me was patience and exposure. She made sure I was never without the tools to move through the world as a respectful, honest person with self esteem. She wanted me to see beyond the smoke stacks. She made sure I could.
I honor her in how I show up for my sons. That’s the only way I know how to say thank you.
Chapter Four
What the Body Keeps
There was one night that changed the relationship with my body and the world around me.
My Nana and my mother were arguing in the back room. I remember turning the volume dial on the TV up a little to cover the sound. Then my mother stormed into the living room and before I understood what was happening, she grabbed me and we left.
I remember a yellow cab. I remember being quietly happy for once, because I finally got to see where my mother went when she disappeared in the middle of the night. I was four, maybe five years old.
I never met this man before. Tall. Slender. White guy in a plaid shirt and hard-frame black glasses. He did a trick, pulling a quarter out from behind my ear. I thought that was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. Five minutes of magic while my mother was still in the room.
Then my mother left me with two strangers.
Everything went black somewhere between when the lights got dim and when I ended up on that bed. Tears soaking into the cover. The tall, slender man with hard-frame black glasses and the ghost of a quarter trick still somewhere in the room.
I was crying for my mother.
The next morning they fed me tuna and macaroni for breakfast.
I told no one for ten years, because I was ashamed for the words to come out. I was afraid the people I loved would look at me differently, so I held onto the pain, not aware how my body would absorb it.
My body held it the way bodies do. I stopped eating ketchup. I used to love ketchup. After that night, I couldn’t touch it. The body keeps its own record even when the mind goes quiet.
I used to love going to bed. After that night, I stopped. Silence became something to fill rather than rest inside. Horror movies scared the hell out of me but they were better than lying in the dark with nothing between me and my own thoughts. I would fall asleep to the TV because falling asleep to the TV meant I wasn’t alone.
I became more reserved after that night. I would hide my pain through laughter and perform extroversion. More hypervigilant, being careful around certain people in certain rooms. More watchful of men I didn’t know.
To every person reading this who has carried something similar in silence, especially men.
There is nothing to feel ashamed of when someone forces their power over you as a vulnerable and voiceless being. It doesn’t make you less of a man. It doesn’t determine your sexuality. It doesn’t define your capacity to love or be loved.
There is only one person to forgive, and that’s yourself. What stays in the body without acknowledgment becomes part of your identity without consent. But with practice, with grace, with the courage to finally say it out loud, you can set it down, take your power back, and begin living the story you want to live.
It was never your fault. And you were never alone in it.
Chapter Five
The Metal Crib
A few months later, my mother left again. This time I didn’t fight for her to stay.
That night, after my Nana went to bed, I sat alone in the dark and wished I were dead. I was five years old. I took a black can of Raid roach spray from on top of her refrigerator, and I sprayed it into my mouth. Not because I understood death. Because I understood pain and I wanted it to stop. Nothing happened except the taste. Awful and chemical and something I still carry on the back of my tongue when I think about it.
I didn’t know then that six years later I would face death again, and this time the choice would come differently.
Then I was eleven. Mosquitos. A collapse. Mono encephalitis. A hospital bed with a large metal crib. One week from being removed from life support.
And here’s what nobody tells you about almost dying... it wasn’t scary. It was the most peaceful and safe I had ever felt in my lived experience. All the questions I carried about God, about where I fit, about why the world worked the way it did... they just went quiet. I felt held. Completely held. In a silence I hadn’t known was possible.
Somewhere in that stillness I made a choice. I don’t know how else to say it. I chose to stay.
I woke up in that metal crib to my mother sleeping in a chair and my Nana across the room. When they saw my eyes open they both said, “Heeey!” with these huge grins I can only describe now as grateful. At the time I just knew I was glad to see their faces again.
From there, like a newborn in an eleven year old body, I had to learn everything again. How to walk. How to talk. How to read and play. It took about six months to recalibrate back into what I now call my fleshy space suit.
The five year old with the bug spray and the eleven year old with the bug bite were the same boy making two different choices six years apart. One from the bottom of a wound that had no name yet. One from a silence that felt like being held by God.
Because something had shifted. I had chosen to return. And choosing something changes your relationship to it dramatically. Suddenly I was responsible for a life I had consciously decided to keep. And I had no idea what to do with that power. So I started asking questions. About God. About consciousness. About whether any of it means anything. About whether I mean anything.
Chapter Six
The Fields on the Other Side
Around seven years old I found one of my first escapes. Soccer.
My Nana and I used to watch ABC Wide World of Sports together. Pelé. That’s what did it for me. He looked like me and he was a force to be reckoned with on a field that didn’t care where you came from as long as you stepped up. She saw how I lit up watching it and signed me up, and I played rec and club soccer competitively until I was twenty.
I was a year younger than all of them and none of the kids looked like me. They had pools. They went to the mall just for fun. After practice sometimes I didn’t want to get in the car and return to my side of the tracks. Not because I was ashamed of who I was or where I came from. But because where I came from had smoke stacks and abandoned buildings and my bike was stolen twice and I was tired of being in it.
I learned early how to mask. How to cross the tracks and not be seen as just another nigger. How to fit the mold just enough to be tolerated in rooms that weren’t built for me. I got good at it. Good enough that I forgot sometimes I was even doing it and it became a part of my survival identity.
There was a moment sophomore year on the varsity team that burned itself into me for decades. We were in the gym after physicals playing basketball. The team captain and I went up for the ball together. His elbow came down hard on my head. I called foul.
He got in my face and said, “We don’t make those jiggaboo calls here, boy.”
I didn’t have anywhere to put that for a long time. No container big enough for what it did to my body. The word. The boy. The casual certainty that I was less than. That my pain wasn’t a foul worth calling. The silence from my teammates in that gym spoke louder than the slur.
It stuck to me like flies to tape for almost two decades.
Eventually I found somewhere to put it. I wrote a television show. I named a character who carries that wound in honor of him and in forgiveness of him and in hope that somewhere in the telling, both of us get something back.
That’s what I do with the things that don’t have anywhere else to go. I write them into stories. I always have.
Chapter Seven
The Boy Who Always Could Write
Since I was seven years old I wrote stories. Full ones. With characters and worlds and stakes. It was the one place where nobody could tell me where I fit or what I was worth. On the page I was free in a way I wasn’t anywhere else.
Then in 7th grade a teacher looked at my work, a fictional story called Looking for Woodstock about three teenagers sneaking a road trip from Seattle to escape their oppressive parents and find their own freedom, and told me I couldn’t possibly have written something like that. Not in those words. But that was the message. And I went quiet.
Senior year of high school I wrote a story called Pigface about a beautiful girl born with a pig snout birth defect whose story ended the way Carrie ended. A different teacher. Same verdict. She said I plagiarized it. Said there was no way I could have made something like that up.
I believed them both. For a long time.
Now I write movies and television shows. Not to prove anything to those teachers or anyone anymore. But to honor the seven year old boy who always had the ability and just never received the validation. Every script is a tribute to him. Every story is the one they said he couldn’t tell.
Chapter Eight
The Cosmology Underneath Everything
The questions didn’t leave me when I left that hospital bed. They followed me home, into classrooms, into churches that couldn’t hold them, into books that got close but not close enough. And my twenties weren’t a spiritual journey. They were a decade of working jobs I hated, moving through relationships that didn’t fit, and numbing the questions with drugs and alcohol because belonging somewhere that didn’t require me to be fully seen felt easier than sitting alone with everything I was carrying.
Then at nineteen, a door cracked open that I wouldn’t know how to walk through for years. One of the most powerful moments of my life happened in an altered state. I saw an elderly man with youthful features sitting under what I now understand as a bodhi tree. Behind him was an old bookshelf lined with billions of DVDs. A new DVD would grow from the tree and extend from a branch into his hand. Each DVD case had the face of someone he knew and loved. He would sit and his reflection would meld with the life story of the DVD he was watching. When he was done he would place it carefully on the shelf and reach for another.
I understood in my body what I hadn’t been able to grasp in my mind. That every life is a story being witnessed with complete and unconditional attention. That the universe watches each of us with that same unhurried care. That nothing is missed. Nothing is judged. Everything is held.
I wept for a long time after that. That vision became the cosmology underneath everything I do today. I just didn’t know it yet.
The thinkers found me along the way. Alan Watts teaching me the universe is fundamentally playful. Ram Dass showing me you can be fully human and fully awake at the same time. Gabor Maté on the body keeping score. Malcolm X and MLK and Che on the cost of dignity. Music working on me the way medicine works, not through understanding but through the body. Jack Johnson. Kendrick Lamar. Maynard James Keenan. Each one a tuning fork for something trying to find its frequency inside me.
Around thirty, something began to shift underneath the surface. Buddhist philosophy had been speaking to me for years. Quietly. Persistently. And I began to meditate. Not dramatically. Not with ceremony. Just sitting. Just breathing. Just learning for the first time what it felt like to be still without the TV on.
Then at thirty one I met Tori. The night we met, the bartender thought we were childhood friends. Two people who had been carrying similar weight, walking similar roads, doing the work in their own separate lives, who suddenly found themselves at the same table. We were mirrors from the beginning. Both with real wounds. Both on a healing path. We helped each other get there. Not that she saved me or I saved her. But that we grew together in the places where we were both still growing.
That was the hinge everything else turned on.
In my mid thirties everything concentrated at once. The plant medicines opening what meditation had prepared the ground for. Each one a different classroom. Each one stripping another layer of the performance I had been running since childhood. What came was forgiveness. Not the intellectual kind. The kind that moves through your body like a tide going out, taking the anger that had been sitting in my core for decades with it.
It was a professor at Maharishi International University who dropped the pebble that changed the water. He asked a question that disarmed the whole room. “Have you heard of spiritual bypassing?”
I started catching myself. Catching how I had been using philosophy and modality and altered states to rise above the human experience instead of moving through it. I had been renouncing the constructs, race, class, politics, money, as though transcendence meant leaving the body behind. As though being spiritual meant I was no longer accountable to being human.
I was wrong. And the correction came not from a ceremony or a teacher. It came on a Tuesday morning through a newborn.
When Sage arrived, something in me that had been performing finally stopped. He looked up at me and reflected back the nature of God so directly and so completely that I had nowhere left to hide. Here was a being who needed nothing from me except my actual presence. Not my wisdom. Not my modalities. Not my credentials. Just me. Fully here. Fully human.
That was the beginning of me actually arriving. River came and deepened it. Two sons who showed me that the work isn’t something you do on a retreat or in a ceremony. It’s something you practice in the sacred ordinary moments. In the Tuesday mornings.
Chapter Nine
The Name That Was Already True
Tori bought me a 23andMe kit somewhere in the middle of all of that.
Nigerian. Ghanaian. Cameroonian. Kenyan. Egyptian. Irish. Asian. A composite of continents. Genetically connected to Pharaoh Ramesses II. A lineage that slavery and colonization had deliberately erased and replaced with a slave master’s name.
Johnson.
But before the kit confirmed it, the dream had already told me. I was in Louisiana in the dream, in a small neighborhood. A little girl on a bike with training wheels stared at me and said one word. “Yalla.” I lifted off the ground and vanished into the sky. When the light returned I was hovering over a bright landscape. A caption appeared.
City of Assan, Ghana.
I descended slowly toward the details of the land. There were tombstones. I zoomed into one that had a colorful figure etched into it. In the center of the palm, a geometric pattern.
I woke in a cold sweat and told Tori. She looked up geometric patterns and showed them to me one by one until I pointed to the one from the dream. Metatron’s Cube. The sacred geometry of Archangel Metatron. Then I looked up the City of Assan. It exists. A small town in Ghana. I had no conscious reason to know its name. No memory. No research. Just a dream.
Tori bought the kit after that. And the results confirmed what the dream had already delivered.
I am TyrOne, pronounced in the Irish tradition, honoring the sixteen percent of me that carries European lineage. And I am Adekoya. A Yoruba name meaning “The King Who Rejects Oppression.”
Taking that name allowed me to put down so much of the attachment to generational trauma and remorse that comes with being Black in the United States. Johnson was never mine. It was a story of ownership and erasure that I had been carrying as identity.
I didn’t take that name to make a statement. I took it because it was already true.
Chapter Ten
Showing Up Is My New Form of Arriving
I became a healer anyway. Built retreats. Studied Reiki and sound healing and meditation and Ayurveda and nonviolent communication. Moved to Guatemala with Tori and Sage and River. Hold space for other people’s transformations.
The moment I felt it, really felt it in my body, was the day I held space for an entire family. Seven people. One day. I was tired before I started. And I gave everything I had anyway. Left nothing on the table except healing. Something about holding an entire family, the threads between them, the wounds they shared, the silence they had all been keeping together, showed me what I actually carry. Not just skill. Not just training. A capacity.
I walked out of that room fulfilled in a way that didn’t need anything added to it. That was the day I stopped questioning it.
My parents are in a different place now, both sober for 20+ years. My mother fed my father cookies in his rehabilitation center recently. I sat with that image on a voice chat and felt gratitude and grief at the exact same time. My brother Korrigan isn’t here anymore after passing a year after infancy. My Nana selflessly gave me everything she could and more.
My abusers carried their own wounds. Those wounds don’t excuse anything and they don’t need to for me to keep moving as I honor that eleven year old version of myself in the metal crib of my heart.
I’m a walking paradox. A materialistic spiritualist. A man who has helped others find their way home while standing in his own doorway wondering if he’s allowed inside. I bring my self doubt along for the ride now. It rides shotgun. It doesn’t drive from the backseat or lay tired up in the trunk.
I still like to cuss. I drink occasionally. I play fantasy football and talk shit sometimes. That’s not a popular take in new age culture among the renunciates and the crunchy. But I’m not interested in performing enlightenment. I’ve seen what it costs to stop being human.
Community matters to me more than paradigms. That’s always been true. I just took a long time to say it out loud.
I set a table in my mind where everyone sits. Everyone who hurt me. Everyone who tried. Every version of myself I’ve had to release. There’s always room.
If the seven year old boy from Shreveport could see this life, the volcano, the retreat, the sons, the name, the work... I think he would feel something he didn’t have a word for yet. Proud. Not because I became someone important. But because I didn’t let life get the best of me. Because I stayed. Because I kept asking the questions even when the answers took decades to arrive.
I’m not healed. I’m here. I’m now. I’m present. There’s a huge difference.
And if you’ve ever crossed tracks you weren’t supposed to cross, if you’ve ever sat in rooms that weren’t built for you and stayed anyway, if you’ve ever chosen to stay in a life that hasn’t fully made sense yet... you already know what I’m talking about.
Pull up a chair. There’s room for you too.
I chose to come back. And I choose this, every single day.
TyrOne Adekoya.
The King Who Rejects Oppression.
Shreveport to Guatemala
taotetyrone.com