I’m downloading photos of houses being consumed in flames — huge wild oranges and yellows screaming in the black of the night. I wanna burn this shit to the ground. This bullshit life. I am so fucking done with the patterns of fucked up people in my life. People who lie to me, abuse me, take my money, take my home, take my sex, take my attention, take my love. People who say they love me and don’t follow through on their word. Whether friend, family or lover. Michael’s betrayal was the last straw. Whatever it is in me that keeps taking these people in, it ends now. I am not going to keep living this way.
But for once I’m not suicidal. I’m going to try a different route.
It’s January 10, 2016. The 36th anniversary of my father’s death. I have his ashes. They’re in this rattling box wrapped in brown kraft paper. No one ever opened it. My brother found it in some corner of Mom’s garage after she died. I ended up with it along with a bunch of furniture. I’ve understood more about him and forgiven him over the years, so it’s ok to have his ashes. But I still have troubling or weird things happen to me on this anniversary. This one’s a doozy.
You see, I don’t want to die but I don’t want this life any more. I believe in reincarnation. I don’t want to do all the work I’ve done, survive all the shit shows, have these visions I want to realize, just to trash it all and start over as a baby. Start again with the shit shows and the recovery. No. I’m going to do an experiment instead. I want to try starting over without changing bodies. I don’t mean just moving to a new city with a new job and new clothes and new friends. Oh wait I am moving though. This apartment in San Francisco suburbia was a valiant try but it’s killing me. It’s a noisy filthy smelly expensive hell for this feral forest creature. Anyway. Tonight I’m going to do a ritual to launch me into this move in a way that doesn’t just carry my patterns with me on repeat. It’s time to change them. That’s what the burning house pics are for. Houses can be symbolic for the unconscious mind, same as night and darkness. Fire is transformation, warmth, light, companionship, the spark that sets things in motion. To burn the house down is to bring light of passion into the darkness of the unconscious and become free from structures that no longer serve me. I want to burn this life of suffering to the ground of my being. But do it metaphorically rather than the shit show of doing it physically.
I’m going to hold a funeral for myself.
Evening approaches. I formally invoke my intentions to end these patterns that make a heartbroken mess of my life. I feel it down to my soul. I’m burning with determination and resolve. I absolutely refuse to fail at this endeavor. I look at the burning house photos. I pour the tequila. (Fuel for the fire.) Then, I put on one of my favorite pieces of music ~ Mozart’s Requiem. In the kitchen I play it loud and sing it loud, with gusto. Oh my god I love this transcendent music. I get lost in it. Hoping and praying my downstairs neighbor with zero tolerance for even my singing bowls will leave me alone this time. As the music ends, the funeral morphs into more of a wake. I’m drinking and singing and toasting goodbye to myself in good cheer. I thoroughly, devotedly, believe it.
God that was fun. I burned through that wake and I’m ready to move on to something else. I go into the living room and pick up the brown paper-covered box. I rattle it. Is that the bullet fragments that rattled around in Dad’s head for all those years? You know what? This is funky funeral night. Let’s do one for Dad too. I carefully open the box. I put aside my squeamishness in favor of curiosity, and reach into the grainy, bleached-white cremains.
People call them ashes but that’s not what they are at all. They’re actually the ground up bones left after the cremation. The rattle is from a few bone pieces that weren’t ground all the way down. They’re small thin shards among the dust. I pick one up and look closely, deeply, into the white marrow lattice of what’s left of my father.
Well, that’s not really all that’s left of him of course. There’s all of his effects echoing inside me and my brother. I turn to the boxes of his belongings that have been sitting in my living room since I moved into this duplex over a year ago. We found all kinds of things Mom never showed us. Photos, letters, newspaper clippings, journals, artwork. Some going back to his early childhood. Tonight I want to look at his art. I find well done pencil portraits. I find color linear abstracts. I remember him doing art projects like those but I had no idea he was this good. One piece captures my attention. It appears to be some sort of multi-dimensional or shape-shifting bedroom? How apropos. It’s drawn across three pieces of paper taped together and meant to be folded somehow. I place a bone shard on it and make an alter to him, to see what may be revealed. Eventually I close the night’s rituals and fall asleep.
February 1, 2016. I’m on a plane to my next home: Hawai’i Island. I have a window seat in an empty row. As we start to taxi, to my dismay, crying descends upon me. Hard crying. I’m sure people can hear me. This is definitely not my M.O. but I can’t stop. I somehow manage to let it be OK to cry in public. Michael and I had planned to move to Hawai’i together. I’m the only one following through. Thank god, actually. He had turned into a weight heavier than I could bear, but I had no capacity to kick him to the curb, to abandon him in his time of need. Luckily he did something that upset me over the cliff again, and he showed himself out. Now, as I look through the portal out of this room of seats about to jet across an ocean, the sorrow and the relief and the way I carry myself to my future all churn together into a chaos of emotions that have no way out but through water pouring sobs from my chest.
A nearly perfect home found me just days after I landed. I had called about an ad for a rental, but upon talking to the landlady, we decided it wasn’t a good fit. She then said she has another property she doesn’t advertise. She just finished restoring it. “It’s not for everyone, but it might be for you,” she says. I meet her there and take it on the spot. It’s beyond my wildest dreams. A 100 year old plantation house on 6 acres of lush jungle trees and flowers, with only one neighbor a good distance away behind the ginormous banyan tree. The rent is much less expensive than that sketchy duplex I just left behind. This isolation is what I need right now. I can play my musical instruments without bothering anyone, and city noise won’t bother me. I’ll be left alone as I engage my reset. When I moved in to this place, taking it all in from the huge lanai, I fell to my knees, overwhelmed and humbled that all this was for me. I am incredibly fortunate.
It’s April 2016. I’ve been relishing sitting on the lanais overlooking the forest. I’ve been walking through the forest, picking fruit, and picking up shards of glass rising to the surface from when this place was treated like a dump. But I can only go out when the mosquitoes are not plaguing me. I’ve been practicing thinking of this new life as being across an invisible line I drew at my funeral. In my closet, I look through my clothes as if they are new to me, and get a whiff of how desires and inclinations perpetuate across lifetimes. I get a whiff of karmic threads.
A few months later I stumble upon a random Facebook post linking to an article about human-fairy hybrids. I eagerly read the article and discover that someone recognizes my existence! Holy Wow! This woman offers private mentoring sessions and recorded classes. I sign up. Shortly into our introductory session, going on little more than looking at me, she says “You have a lot of trauma. No wonder you can’t stay in your body.” This is not the direction I expected this mentoring to go. But it strikes a chord. I’m 52 years old. I’ve always held the position that the shit that happened to me as a young child was not as bad as what kids endure in war zones, so I can’t be that bad off. Don’t worry about me. In my 30’s and 40’s I saw a variety of western therapists and doctors to help me with my pretty severe difficulties, and not one of them asked me about my childhood or investigated any trauma. They just marked me down as troubled with an alphabet soup of psych acronyms, did talk therapy, and gave me drugs to try to level my emotions. None of it did any good. I had to pull out of my tailspin myself. Divorcing an emotionally abusive spouse turns out to be a miracle cure.
Well, it wasn’t a cure-all of course. My patterns of bullshit are indeed my own. I’m better off than I was, but still not where I need to be. I’m on a mission of deep change and this new mentor has a hot lead. Finally. After some discussion, she recommends that I seek Somatic Experiencing Therapy. She refers me to someone. Six months from now these two practitioners get to a core issue from different angles. This is one of the central healings my soul was after.
I told you I believe in reincarnation and that things stick between lives. And Karma, whatever that means to a westerner exposed to imported teachings. My mentor and I spent most sessions burning my soul contracts, breaking the karma sticks, and sending entities back to their kin. The stuff patterns are made of at spiritual and unconscious levels. I hadn’t intended to do that work with her, but that’s where my Fae kin led me. Thanks fam.
The Somatic Experiencing Practitioner worked with the trauma as my body expressed it. It’s not about the stories, it’s about letting the nervous system complete the trauma cycle it’s been stuck in, and return to proper regulation. He taught me skills to let my nervous system know I’m safe, so it can stand down. He taught me to let my body move the way it wants to move, but to go slowly to let the nervous system really feel the release rather than just get more wound up. He taught me to re-enact crises with different outcomes, in which I defend myself and smash the other people — in my imagination. My amygdala doesn’t give a shit about compassion and forgiveness, it just wants me safe. This was a way of achieving that without the drama of taking it out on someone for real. He guided me into interoception, allowing me to feel parts inside of my body I had never thought about, and making space or releasing tension. One of my chronic medical conditions had a severe pain component that was untangled and permanently relieved.
I was seeing progress in my worldly life. Absolutely loving living on this mound of volcanoes in the middle of the ocean. Being braver about who I am and what I want. Experimenting with more things that make my soul sing. I had an epic week with a visiting friend. Culled a fake friend. My daughter finally wanted to live with me. I even stood up to my ex-husband to fight for child support. I volunteered for the local hospice and began training as a death doula. A community of us formed around the desire to serve people at this precious time of life.
In the spring I brought something up to my spiritual mentor that led me to telling her about a scene from a movie that affected me to my core. I somehow identify with it. In Alien 3, Ripley realizes she has been implanted with an alien egg. She knows it’s about to hatch out of her chest. She gets herself to the catwalk above the cistern of molten steel. As her chest begins to crack, she crosses her arms over the beast and dives backwards into the steel. She takes it out with her. And I realize that is my M.O. across lifetimes. Battle the bad guys to the death. Kill myself to kill them. A pattern of killing myself. I’ve struggled with suicidal ideation since I was at least 6 years old. No therapy or meds helped. But this… this shifted something in me. I’ve learned that fighting wars, battles of light vs dark, good vs evil, is not the answer. It only causes suffering. Good and evil are not so easily delineated. Dark has been vilified and light exalted, ignoring their many facets. Entities and enemies have been similarly vilified. For all the killing we’ve done for eons, we’re all still here, only with more baggage and suffering. That is not the way. I release this pattern of self-sacrifice ~
That same spring I was on Maui for a death doula conference. It was phenomenal. 120 of us who had never met, recognized each other. The speakers were deep and informative. There were practices and rituals. I wanted it to never end. But after a couple of days my body started breaking down. On the third day I was so riddled with cramps in my legs that I could barely walk. Instead of staying at the room, I insisted on pushing myself to the conference because I didn’t want to miss a thing. On the last day, we went to the beach for a ritual. I was so freezing cold I wore long johns under heavy jeans, and layers of sweaters. At the beach. On Maui. I have a long term health problem being cold, but this was far beyond anything I had experienced. Then came the point in the ritual where we were supposed to go into the water in groups of three. There was no way I could go into the water. Technically, my doctor’s orders are to not go in the ocean because my blood pressure could drop too low and I’d drown. But sometimes I go in anyway for a short time and never let it get that bad. This day I couldn’t even bear to put my feet in. The only thoughts in my mind were repeating “It’s not that cold. I’m not going to die. I’m not going to die. It’s not cold enough to kill me.” I convinced the other two people in my group to go in without me.
When I saw my Somatic Experiencing Practitioner a few days later, I told him what had happened. He proceeded to explain to me in some detail about how my nervous system feels a threat of death, goes into freeze, and releases a bunch of adrenaline. When the threat is over the nervous system is supposed to return to normal functioning. Sometimes it doesn’t get to complete the cycle and gets stuck in freeze. It becomes a long term stuck trauma response. The way he went over the whole arc in one sitting, tying it to my experience at the conference, clicked in my understanding. I recognized this pattern throughout my entire life. I was stunned. It explains so much. The adrenaline rush is associated with a death threat, and my brain misconstrues that into “I have to die now.” The suicidal ideation. Holy shit. With this information, I was able to train myself to not believe the stories and emotions running through my mind when I have an adrenaline rush from any source, including surgery and mosquito bites. I just have to be patient for 20 or 30 minutes for the rush to pass. Then I’m fine.
And just like that, between the spiritual and the somatic therapies, I healed my lifelong suicidal patterns.
My funeral experiment is working. This continues for the next 3 years.
November 2019. I see a specialty therapist for one session. Some years earlier I had come to realize my social and relationship skills were stuck at the level of a desperate 5 year old. (I had a wide variety of untreated personal and family trauma I experienced as a kid.) That’s what was wreaking so much havoc with me and people. This therapist wants to talk to my unconscious mind. She mildly hypnotizes me and asks the little girl in me three questions: “Are there any walls?” “Thousands,” I reply, seeing a vast field covered in ancient stone walls, like those in Ireland. “Are there any windows?” “No,” I say. The third question was irrelevant because that was enough to send me into the blackness and begin to locate my lost inner child.
It’s April 2020. The world is in the madness of the covid pandemic. I happen to be in an ideal living situation. I’m living in my van, in a campground along a river, on the edge of a small town in British Colombia, Canada. There’s been about 10 of us living here all winter during the off-season. We’re visiting from various parts of the world. At this point, some people literally can’t get home. If I were to go “home” to Hawai’i Island, I would have to travel through Seattle, which at the time was one of the world’s worst covid hot spots. I absolutely did not want to risk picking up the virus and taking it to the island. Other people did, of course. I didn’t have a place there to stay either and prospects were dire. Just a storage unit full of my treasures I’ve been missing while traveling. I decide it is best to stay put. The management lets us all continue living here into the peak season since that’s not happening this year. Hanging out around a campfire at night has been our way of life. We just keep 2 meters apart now. The town doesn’t have any cases of covid. We can keep getting our groceries and doing our laundry. The pool down the street closes but arranges to let people in for showers one at a time. We’re ok.
I am doing shadow work. While the virus is wreaking havoc, I am unraveling my own. One day, I realize I finally have gathered enough clues, have developed the right skills, and have the freedom to do the Big Quest. I do a soul retrieval for myself.
I set my space and my mind with safety, intention, confidence, and a call to my spirit helpers. The process comes to me. In my imagination, I go back to the stone walls my inner child was trapped in. It is a room with no light at all. Complete blackness. But I know where she is: sitting in a corner, head in her knees held to her chest. She had never left because the floor, and footsteps, terrify her. (An element of my childhood trauma.) My “higher self” arrives. She is larger than life, wearing a white dress. Unfettered by my worldly troubles, she is radiating joy, softness, and kindness. I see the room standing like a cottage in a delightful summer meadow. Yellow flowers are blooming, and sunlight shines through branches and dandelion puffs. Birds arrive to help us. My higher self skips elaborate rituals and just lifts the roof off of the room. Her bright but gentle smile shines down on my scared, sorrowful inner child. With a little encouragement from all of us, my 5 year old self stands up and walks into the beauty all around her. We all hold hands and revel in being with each other. The room is gone. Mission accomplished.
A big change like that takes time to ripple through all the aspects of my life and my psyche. There are a lot of adjustments to get used to: Fears, assumptions, habits, identity all begin to shift.
In the summer I return to the U.S. and slowly work my way down to the southwestern states for the upcoming winter. I visit a few people. I visit many national parks. I camp on public lands. I find myself in epic places I am so grateful to be with. Quiet places too. I deeply enjoy life and beauty on this Planet Beloved as I continue to work on my issues with myself and with people. I practice boundaries. I cut ties with people who don’t treat me well. I cut ties with people who have turned to QAnon. I navigate a heartbreaking family crisis. I turn down opportunities that don’t align with my newly developed sensibilities. I still make mistakes but overall I’m doing pretty well. Eventually, I feel it’s time to leave the wildlands and try living among people again. See if I can make friends and earn money. You know, normal middle class life.
I have a yearning for the Pacific Northwest, were I lived from ages 5 to 25. The type of forests there imprinted “home” on me. So I head that way and start planning. I want to try opening a practice where I can set up my gongs and singing bowls full time, and offer sound therapy journeys and related services to people. I wasn’t having any luck finding an appropriate space in my preferred cities. Then an ad caught my attention. It is for a place quite a bit farther north than I intended, but it is promising enough that I decide to check it out. It is close enough to ideal, including being affordable, that I want to take it. That same day I find a place to live. Just like that, my life falls into place.
Six moths later, I am in a community of like-hearted people, I have genuine loving friends, I start dating someone, and I fall into an unexpected career making enough money to support my low-key vanlife expenses. I even like the town, which is a major shocker since I usually can’t tolerate city life for more than a few hours to get something I need. I wasn’t sure this level of beneficial social structure could ever arise in my crazy life. But here it is. It found me through small leads people offered and I followed. All of it, except the dating, continues to this day 4 years later. The office space for the sound therapy practice did not pan out, unfortunately. There was a reason it was so affordable: no client traffic despite the promise it was a bustling office. My advertising alone was not sufficient to get enough people to come to this part of town, despite lots of interest. So I gave up that space. I returned to doing events at my friends’ homes or for the occasional private client. It remains a service of my spirit rather than earning income, but that’s no surprise. I’m doing ok, finding success in things that matter beyond money, and still paying my bills; so all is well in this endeavor. Blessed be.
Now it’s time to return to focusing on my health and spirit, but more integrated into a balanced life rather than going feral again. We shall see what arises next ~