Healing Through Wholeness and Heart Wisdom

Greetings Dear Ones,

I am here to share a bit about my personal journey to honor National Mental Health Awareness Month. I hope this finds you in good mental health and feeling supported and well resourced, and if it does not, I hope it helps you to know that you are not alone and there is support available to you should you need it.

This is a long one. If you feel drawn to dive in, may it serve you in your own unfolding.

Some of you already know that I have struggled with clinical depression off and on during my adult life. I am profoundly grateful for the lessons that I have learned through my time in the darkness, the jewels I have returned with, and the fact that I am still alive to share my story.

When I was 19, I began to have symptoms of what I now know is PTSD. At the time, I had never heard that acronym, and did not really know what was happening to me. Back in those days I used to watch Oprah, and she would often interview survivors of sexual abuse. When she would host one of these shows, and a survivor would tell their story, I would go into a profoundly painful and dissociative state (I also did not know the word dissociation at the time). If there was a rape scene or intimation of such in a film, I would have to leave the room. It all began to become more and more intense, to the point where some days I would have to call in sick to work because the physical and emotional pain was so debilitating.

Even though in my conscious mind I had no idea what was happening, I found a sexual abuse survivor inpatient program in my area and took a medical leave of absence from work. During my time in hospital, through art therapy classes, memories of childhood abuse began to arise. When I was released from the program, I confronted my abuser. They denied the abuse, I stopped speaking to them, and the abuse went underground in my mind again and I began to move on with my life.

One of the biggest takeaways from my time in the hospital was meeting a therapist with whome I continued working. She introduced me to a women's group studyingWomen Who Run With the Wolvesby Clarissa Pinkola Estes. She also took me on my first vision quest, in which I saw a vision of Raven as one of my spirit guides. I began the gradual shift from a mainstream, fake nails, make up wearing, mall working 'normal' person, towards the unfolding of my own wild, earth connected, natural, hippie self.

I left my job as the youngest store manager in the district for the Gap, and began working at a new age book store called The Crystal Voyage. I began reading books on meditation, practicing in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh. I even found a sangha who studied with him at Plum Village in France and sat with them for a year. My entire reality began to tilt on its axis in the most wonderful way. During that time, I began to practice yoga, which eventually led to my certification as a teacher and my adventures in India with BKS Iyengar and family, and with the late 90's vibrant forest and beach rave culture of the Goan coast.

I came back from India and studied yoga philosophy, Sanskrit, and meditation in college, but in spite of all my awakenings and growth, I still had not dealt with the depths of my childhood abuse. I eventually dropped into a clinical, suicidal depression as the infection of my unresolved trauma tried it's best to make it's way towards the light.

At that time I had little to no resources at my disposal. I was very poor, could not afford counseling or alternative healing modalities, and so I went on Zoloft, an SSRI, as pharmaceutical help was all that I could access at the time. It saved my life. I hadn't been sleeping much for over a year, and Zoloft helped me to sleep again, brought me out of the deep and ever present desire to die, and helped me to get back on my feet. I am very grateful that I had this support and that because of it I am still here today. At the same time, Zoloft put me in a strange space where I couldn't go down into the depths, but I couldn't rise up either. I was in a dull in between space, with a glass floor and a glass ceiling, and after a year, I stopped taking the meds on my own (which you are not supposed to do).

During this time poetry, writing and reading it, was one of my lifelines. Basho, Whitman, Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, so many voices channeling the divine through poetry helped me to survive during those dark days. By this time I was about 26, it had been 7 years since my original nervous breakdown as my wounds sought healing.

I made my way back to college and work (I had taken a break from everything for a few months and moved back in with my parents as I was completely non-functional). I eventually graduated from college, and at the age of 30, gave birth to my first child, my daughter Heron.

Being a mother helped so much to keep me out of the depths. I was a single mother from the beginning, but had the help of my older sister and brother in law, with whom I lived for my daughter's first three years. During this time I went to massage school, continued teaching yoga, raised my beautiful precious daughter, and mostly kept my head above water. I had moved to Carpinteria, CA from the Pacific Northwest when my daughter was born, in order to live with my sister who was attending UCSB. The beauty of the Southern California sun and the healing ocean waters helped me so much to stay out of the depths of the darkness, but, as Bessel van der Kolk says 'the body keeps the score', and eventually 'the secrets that you keep will find their way into the sun' (Hannah Mayree). My childhood abuse was still unresolved, and still buried alive within me, longing to break out of the womb of darkness and give itself to light.

On the new year's eve of 2012, my family and I all got sick (by this time I was married and had a second child). So, instead of going out a to a party as we had planned, we stayed home and watched 2012: A Time for Change, a film by Daniel Pinchbeck. Pinchbeck is a psychonaut, an explorer of plant medicines and plant derived compounds that allow for a 'breaking open of the head' (the title of one of his many books is Breaking Open the Head, which I later read). When we watched the film, it referenced Ayahuasca. I had heard of the psychedelic Amazonian brew, but after I saw the film, I couldn't shake the desire to sit with the medicine. Grandmother Aya was calling me.

A couple of years later, I went to an event at Yoga Soup, where the owner Eddie Ellner shared his life story and his journey of spiritual awakening, which eventually led him to sitting with Ayahuasca. He had just returned from a trip to Peru and deep work with the medicine. At the end of his story, he shared that he had been sexually abused by his grandfather all throughout his childhood. Ayahuasca had helped him to unearth the repressed memories, whose effects had been haunting him his entire adult life. He achieved profound healing through his work with Aya and at the end of sharing his painful story said 'but I'm ok now, let's all have some food and celebrate!'.

I however, was not ok. Hearing his story triggered my own wound and I completely left my body. I was in the most dissociated state I could ever remember. I had come to the event with my husband, but in separate cars because I had come from work to meet him. I said to him 'My shoes are in the other room, you can get them if you want, or you can leave them, I don't care. I'm leaving right now.' I walked out to my car several blocks away, barefoot and sobbing.

I drove 20 minutes from Santa Barbara to Carpinteria and stopped at the ATM to get money for the sitter. When I left the ATM, I got pulled over by a cop because I hadn't turned my lights on. Some automatic pilot was getting me home as best it could, because Elvis had definitely left the building. It took me about a week and a couple of somatic sessions with a dear friend and practitioner to eventually return to my body. I had been hovering up above myself watching life happen to this being that used to be me.

Within a year, I found my way into my first Ayahuasca ceremony. That night I drank three large cups of medicine, and for anyone who has sat with Aya, you know that this is, to say the least, very intense. I finally remembered, really remembered, the truth of my childhood abuse. I journeyed with the medicine all through the night, and then woke up every night for a week after, still in the medicine space, shaking intensely (I later learned more about TRE and how the shake works to release trauma). I finally began to truly process and metabolize the abuse which I had never been able to digest up until that time because it was absolutely more than I had the capacity to assimilate. As is said in Ayurveda, anything which is not digested becomes Ama, or toxic residue, and with the help of Ayahuasca, I finally began to clear the toxins from my system and traverse the long and rocky path towards wholeness.

For the next 8 years, I sat with Ayahuasca quarterly, usually for 3-5 ceremonies at a time. Every single one of my ceremonies was intense, terrifying, painful, and profoundly healing. I could not have done this work without the support of the amazing community who has helped to guide these journeys. They have helped me to heal, to find my voice, to remember how to truly sing and dance again, but I will say, IT HAS NOT BEEN EASY.

This is not one of those psychedelic healing stories where someone sat with Ayahuasca and completely healed their lifetime of suffering in one beautiful ceremony. It has been deeply painful, and also profoundly healing. I dream of writing a book about my story with the hopes of helping others on their path, and also to let them know, that's it's ok if it's not all beautiful visions and rainbows. Birth is bloody and painful and messy, and so is death, but, as Barbara McAfee sings in her beautiful song 'every time I go into the darkness, I return, with fist-fulls of jewels'. I have come back with so many jewels, but it has been a heroes journey, like The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, I have had to leave my hobbit hole of comfort and good food, I have had to forget my handkerchief and trudge through the darkest and most terrifying of depths. I have not and could not have done it alone. 

Thank you to the medicine, to the lineage of wisdom keepers and healers that have carried these songs and practices to me in this life. Thank you to my friends and soul family who have held me while I vomited the ancient bile of my sorrow and sobbed and shaked, and retrieved the broken parts of myself to put myself back together, like the Japanese art of kintsugi. I have mended myself in the broken parts with gold, so that my brokeness is now beautiful, and useful again. It's all ok, because as Leonard Cohen says, "There is a crack, a crack in everytihng. That's how the light gets in."

After 6 years of working with Ayahuasca and many other healing modalities, the pandemic hit. Even though I had done so much work, the pandemic was a massive trauma trigger, for myself and so many others. It was like a switch was flipped and I went back into the depths of clinical depression literally overnight. This time I had many more resources than I had when I was in my 20's, and with the help of St. John's Wort, family and friends, Ayahuasca, community, counseling, massage, etc., I made my way back to myself once again.

Each time I descend, I return with more compassion, more desire to be a bodhisattva, to help others, to live a life of service.

My journey and healing work continues. It will never be finished. In addition to my work with Ayahuasca, I also receive support from my yoga mentors, acupuncture, massage, psychic readings, many many many books, chiropractic, my friends and family, the generous present moment, viriditas; the greening, healing, renewing power of nature, and of course and always, from the ‘plants as mothers and goddesses', from my sangha and my teacher, from the gurus, from Kali Ma.

Gracias, gracias, gracias, muchas gracias.

If you have taken the time to read this far, thank you for listening to my story. May it serve you. May it serve the highest good of the All One.

In loving service and deep gratitude,

~Liz