Charles was a chiropractic student whom I met when I was living in Portland.  I was having problems with my back and neck and went to the chiropractic college for inexpensive treatments.  He was sharing a rented house with three other students including Jim Said (pronounced sigh-eed’) who was “MY chiropractor,” and had offered me even less expensive on-going sessions in a treatment room in their home.

Charles and I became good friends and are still in touch today although he is retired from his long chiropractic practice in Ojai, CA. and is living in Costa Rica.  Once he told me the story of an interesting time in his life before he became a chiropractic student, but after he was out of high school and had been working for a while.  He was a devout Christian at the time.  He met a person who told him that he lived entirely by “concentration,”— that is, by repeating a mantra of his own choice. 

Charles was living in southern California at the time.  He had always wanted to travel, so on his vacation from work he decided to try out this method and go up the coast to the Colombia River and back without any money and “the clothes on his back.”  He took his bible with him and a few items in a small waist pack.  He chose a simple mantra: “God will take care of me,” which he repeated all day long every day. 

Without asking for a ride, people picked him up and people offered him food.  At first, he didn’t accept food because he was a vegetarian and didn’t want to explain about that or put them out by “looking a gift horse in the mouth” so to speak.  He had thought that he would simply find food somehow–like finding fruit trees or edible weeds, but he became very hungry and so he apologetically explained that he didn’t eat meat. 

 After that, he was amazed that some people even went out of their way to find a vegetarian restaurant, and then they thanked HIM for the experience saying that they had just been eating junk food and this was the first good meal they had had for a long time. 

Charles made it all the way to northern Oregon and back.   So, after a few more trips, he quit his job and spent two years traveling around the United States.   He said, “There were times when I was hungry, but I was never too hungry, and there were times when I was cold, but I was never too cold.”  He explained the process by saying that repeating a mantra was a way of programing your subconscious.

I think this Is what made Charles so appealing: he was so relaxed and calm and gentle, with a shy little smile and sly humor.  I think he was without the kind of fear that drives most people.  He knew that if worse came to worse, God, or the power of the universe (Spirit) would take care of him.