This week as I approach my bleed, I find myself taking stock of my story and some of the pivotal moments that brought me to this work. This week I am going to bring you along for a bit of the ride, beginning with my descent to soul that started in November 2018.
For those wondering, this was around my 27th birthday. Full-on Saturn return madness.
Part 1: The Catalyst
In 2018 I had a pregnancy scare with a boyfriend whom I thought I loved. It felt real and true at the time but looking back through healing eyes I see that he was a beautiful canvas onto which I projected my shadow.
I recall sitting on his bed while we waited for the test results. We looked at each other and said, “I love you. And I do not want to be a parent with you.”
The test was negative, but that was a big wake-up call for both of us. We ended our relationship.
Given the intensity of our time together - fueled by so much shadow, no doubt - the charge of the break-up was excruciating.
But it was a catalyst I needed.
I entered a sincere and urgent home-coming experience. I had already been on a spiritual journey for 5 years at that point, but I needed it to go deeper.
Years of playing with crystals and burning sage felt superficial and ineffective. I began to lose interest in spirituality as an identity, and instead sought after timeless truths and wisdoms that could actually help me navigate this treacherous period.
I was desperate to feel okay in my own life and in my own skin. I didn’t want to fantasize about *transcending* my pain with expanded states of consciousness and escapism masquerading as spirituality anymore.
At the same time, I was struggling with my health. I had gained a lot of weight, I felt stiff, achey and sore all the time, I was exhausted, and I relied on chemical cocktails to keep me functional. I felt like my body was betraying me, and I was betraying it. Something needed to change.
I started with coming off hormonal birth control. Something in me just knew deep down that I could never actually know myself as long as these synthetic hormones dictated my cycle.
The detox phase lasted a very long time and my symptoms were chaotic for many years. I cried a lot, felt hopeless, and questioned my sanity regularly.
I also made the choice to abstain from sex, alcohol and other drugs.
And the wave of trauma and grief that I kept at bay through self-medicating and escaping came crashing down.
No one told me that my home-coming would feel like obliteration, and yet this unbecoming was exactly what I needed. And, it was only the beginning.
By coincidence or magic, I found teachers and guides that helped me learn to be with myself deeply.
I started a Masters program in Consciousness and Transformation and attended a Buddhist-based addiction recovery program.
I attended to my trauma from the ground up, meaning with an emphasis on my body and not just my stories about my trauma.
I learned self-designed ceremony and ritual, I bathed myself clean in nature, I wondered about my purpose, I took responsibility for the ways I hurt myself and others, I found joy in returning to my body.
I realized that in numbing my grief, I was also numbing my joy. I discovered the natural ecstasy of touching spirit through my tears. I discovered that my body was a magic place, full of wonder.
Between November 2018 - April 2019 I dove deeply into my pain and in that I discovered a portal to healing. Nature and body work were medicinal.
Thank goodness, because my life was about to be turned upside down, and I was going to need all of this to keep me afloat.
I found an Instagram post that I shared on NYE 2018. The caption reads:
Wow. What a year. I fell in love more times than I can count, and had my heart shattered twice. I discovered the true cost (and benefit) of integrity. I took action toward radical self-love, and stumbled with radical self-loathing. I created a vision for my life and took giant leaps in its direction. And I felt the losses that are inherent with living a life on purpose. I learned that fulfillment doesn’t happen without pain. Gut wrenching, heartbreaking pain. And also, expansion. Unfathomable expansion.
I allowed myself to truly, deeply grieve for the pains of this year and years prior. I bore witness to the simultaneous shattering of ego and expansion of consciousness as old identities, patterns and ways of being disintegrated. I got in touch with my somatic and emotional wisdom and stopped living life solely in my head. I learned the real power of intuition. I rode the waves of human existence through the highs and lows, and truly felt everything along the way.
I danced in the cosmos and touched spirit.
I watched as depression enveloped me in the heavy darkness of a black hole. I fell to pieces and put myself back together again, many times. I sought refuge in drugs, alcohol, food and Netflix. I found refuge in myself. Through many dark nights of the soul, when the world was so heavy and everything caved in, I learned to turn inward. I discovered the most tender, ineffable love is always available to me, so long as I remember to clear the dust and turn down the noise that keeps me separate from myself. I learned to listen to the whispers of my spirit. I remembered joy.
I’ve started the journey of coming home to myself. And I know the work has only just begun. I am positive that 2019 will bring many painful, beautiful and much needed lessons with it. I am also positive that I will emerge from the ashes every.single.time. I’m ready and committed.
Little did I know how much would change in 2019.
Part 2: The Underworld Abduction
On April 4, 2019 I got the phone call that my stomach warned me about for years.
Dad was in the hospital. I wanted to hope that it was nothing, but I could sense even then that it was the beginning of the end.
If you were around during that time, you might remember how much I shared during that period.
In the middle of the night, while sitting next to dad struggling to breathe, with tears streaming down my face, I wrote on Instagram:
Grief is an interesting emotion. There are so many ways to grieve so many things. The loss of hope, the loss of a habit, the loss of a favorite food. The loss of an idea, the loss of dreams, the loss of spontaneity. The loss of autonomy, the loss of control, the loss of health. No matter how seemingly significant or “big”, we avoid feeling grief at all costs. We layer vices upon vices to help pacify our fear of this important emotion. We resist the loss, thinking if we ignore it or cover it then it won’t hurt so fucking bad. We’re so terrified of feeling the gut wrenching pain of loss as it pours from our chest and throat and eyes in giant rivers with mysterious and powerful currents. We build dams and bridges and fences to block out the roaring rush of water in hopes of respite from the fear of the feeling of the loss. We exert so much energy in avoiding our grief.
And yet grief is one of our most important teachers. Once flowing, it shifts everything in perspective. It shows us what we care about - the very things that make life worth living for us. In a swift release of powerfully flowing energy, we become a witness to that which most enriches our life. We realize what we have to gain by accepting the potential of losing it, and we are presented with the choice of acting through fear or acting through purpose and hope. We are given the opportunity to blow up the dams and fences and bridges and watch the river of life flow through us unobstructed, feeling every gain and loss along the way. We experience the simultaneous shattering of the ego and expansion of our consciousness in our surrendering to the pain of loss.
We fear our grief because it means we must accept the loss, but in the very act of flowing with it we gain that which we have been afraid of losing this whole time.
I’ve experienced many, many ego deaths. Nothing compares to watching my father journey to his death and take his last breath.
Our stories were so enmeshed; his wholeness dependent on mine. My cells literally believed that once he ceased to exist, so would I.
I recall a period right before we put him on hospice. I was my dad’s power of attorney and medical advocate, which was essentially a second full-time project management job. I woke up with despair sinking in my chest every morning.
My body remembers this time; I can still feel the residue.
I kept having this recurring image come into my consciousness: I am walking along a wooded path and someone grabs my ankles from behind and drags me backwards, fast. I desperately grab for tree roots to steady me but it is futile.
My body and subconscious knew: It was an underworld abduction and I resisted the whole way.
On July 12, 2019 - the day we put dad on hospice - I wrote:
There have been times in the recent past where I am nothing but ego, a terrified child waiting for her fears to dissolve her into an ethereal mist of particles and energy.
Unaware of the Spirit that guides her or the Earth that holds her, she trembles with terror as she begrudgingly steps into the unknown, grasping at any branch of control she can hang onto to ease the pain of uncertainty.
She sobs with grief as the world she has known and identified with is dismantled by the natural cycles of chaos and destruction. “Please,” she begs, “let me hang onto anything…any one thing that I can hang my faith on; anything that that shows me that there is wholeness beyond these fractures.” I believe in magic. Not the hocus pocus kind of magic, but the simple, every day magic of meaningful coincidence, of synchronicity. I’ve begged for a sign of faith, for something to believe in, to be reminded of Spirit, to be grounded in Love. And the universe has answered me in unbelievable and mysterious ways.
And the message I’m getting is to let go. Surrender the outcome. Accept that I cannot save them all, and that I am worthy regardless. Trust that no matter what happens to our father, my siblings and I will continue to be held in the boundless love of the Universe, whether we recognize it or not.
On August 2, 2019 I flew back to Montana to be with him while he took his last breath.
Timelines collapsed as I held his hand, told him it was okay to let go, that he did a good job, and he gets to go home now. Some day, I will write about the beauty of this moment. But not today.
What I will say is that my whole system was shocked that I was still alive. I couldn’t imagine a world where I lived, and he didn’t.
But here I was, living. Who was I going to be now, without him, and without the anxiety of being his daughter?
At this point I had over 6 years of spiritual practice under my belt, but the grief invited something deeper to come forward.
I felt the most urgent desire to ground into my body. To find comfort in the divine feminine. To be held in nature. To wash myself with grace. To learn what true aliveness really means.
Philosophy and theory were not going to get me there. The pain of loss was cataclysmic and created tectonic shifts in my being. I needed something Earthy that could hold this composting.
So I dropped out of my grad school program and dove head first into my body and the Goddess.
Part 3: Radical Uncertainty Initiating a Descent to Soul
I continue to journey with grief as a powerful teacher, but the first four months after my dad’s death were extremely charged with Spirit and Soul.
Spirituality is an industry, and I was bought in. But it failed to meet the deep, painful parts of my humanity with the grit and stamina that I needed.
Transcendence spirituality showed me that I am Source in form. It did not teach me how to be with the very real, sensory, embodied experience of despair and hopelessness.
I wrote back then:
I learned that something happens when we invite our shadow to tea, when we allow our souls agony to be felt, witnessed, moved. It’s horribly painful, but it seems like with each agonizing moan, with every trembling weep, we are emptied.
There is a hollowness there that used to scare me, but now I see how vital it is to be hollowed our by grief to be filled with love and gratitude. In every single experience I’ve had where I’ve allowed myself to be fully engaged in my grief, at the exact moment of surrender, just past the edge of that hollowness, when the pain seems most unbearable, is the infinite love and compassion that I am weeping over losing, and it’s within me. In being fully undone, I realize with certainty the wholeness of life exists at these edges. This is where we meet Grace.
It wasn’t until I surrendered to my underworld abduction that I found the body of work I needed to be with this, and I daresay the body of work that I am meant to cultivate in my lifetime.
If you’ve ever lost someone in this culture you will know how extremely inept we are at holding space for grieving people in a way that matters to the grieving person.
Very few people could actually witness the bigness of my pain without flinching, so I kept to myself for most of it, seeking refuge in teachers who have journeyed with grief too.
Michael Meade, Megan Devine, Ram Dass and Pema Chodron normalized what I was experiencing and helped me see that this was a radical opportunity to be initiated.
To be initiated means to embody the essence of our soul. Grief taught me that soul-encounters happen from a place of descent. We must go deep: into the earth, into the underworld, into our bodies, into our wounds.
Grief showed me that the depths of our lives are where the magic is, not only the expanded states of transcendence.
It wasn’t until I began to dig into the very ground of my being with bare hands that I learned what true wholeness and Unity are, and how it’s expressed through us.
It wasn’t until I kissed the feet of my shadows that I realized how utterly perfect this life truly is.
I found solace in mythic stories of the descent to the underworld, specifically the story of Inanna.
Like Inanna, every piece of identity, protection, and spiritual regalia that once defined me was stripped away as I went deeper and deeper into my grief.
I sat naked and vulnerable in front of the Queen of Death and she erased me. Left me to rot in the underworld. To become primordial stew. To remember what life is like before it becomes matter. Inert, but still seeded with possibility.
In January, 2020 - the heart of winter - I did a ceremony to enter into dialogue with the Queen of Death, Ereshkegal. I was obsessively studying the underworld and its connection to our bodies and our trauma. I found a thread and it was leading me somewhere.
I wrote:
I tapped into something ancient today. Archetypal. Primitive. Untamed.
My pain is my portal. I descend, digging deeper and deeper. The darkness used to scare me, haunt me. I would run toward light out of fear of what lies in the shadows. I would light candles in the daytime.Death initiates me. With radical uncertainty I descend to my soul. Unveiled, I see my own mysterious depth. Ereshkigal greets me. An immediate, full, visceral experience of my underworld self.
I am handed the poison of the world; it is labeled “uncaring.” And I must drink to find my communion with the Great Goddess whose wisdom I sought in the light.
My eyes pierce death. They perceive with an objectivity like that of nature itself, boring into the soul to find the naked truth, to see reality beneath all its myriad forms and the illusions and defenses it displays.Objective reality is unmasked. It is nothing, and yet everything. The place of paradox behind the veil of the Great Goddess and the temple of wisdom.
Life stands still. Matter is inert, the slowest vibrations of cosmic energy. Consciousness is coiled asleep.
These eyes see a perception of reality without the distortions and preconceptions of superego. Seeing, not what might be good or bad, but what exists before judgment. The substance of preverbal reality itself.
Nature’s coldness invites me home to myself, and I am undone. I am dissolved. I disintegrate into nonidentity and nonbeing. Preconscious. Preform.I am emptied of all that is me, and in that space I am oriented to the infinite and immortal potentials inherent in the passively received yet embodied present moment.
And thus marked by this kiss of death, I became an initiate into the work of the Dark Feminine and soul-embodiment.
Part 4: Cyclical Initiations
At this point, remembering the essence of my soul and embodying it with courage was my highest priority. I sought teachers who spoke about initiations, rites of passage, underworld journeys, and the dark side of wholeness. I wove what I learned into every aspect of my life. I found great success in my career and fell in love with someone equally committed to their wholeness.
The pandemic happened, which only deepened my initiatory adventure. The natural isolation of this time invited me deeper into myself, and relationships that no longer resonated became distant and eventually ended. More grief, more initiation.
As the layers of my not-self fell away, I became painfully aware of how exhausted I felt. I was tired all the way down to my bones. The initial surge of ecstasy that I felt in my union with Self gave way to the embodied patterns of self-preservation and defense that I developed over my lifetime.
I believe this is a very common pattern: We feel a surge of energetic bliss when we make contact with something sacred, and then our trauma reminds of the ways that we have had to protect ourselves from this vulnerable state of joy. It’s part of the spiral dance of soul-embodiment and cannot be avoided.
This time, the layers of trauma that came up didn’t have to do with a romantic partner or my father, but instead held an ancestral and societal potency to them: an inter-generational shame towards my exhaustion. A fear that if I gave up my perfection and my hustle that I would lose my belonging.
I started to realize there was a pattern to my shame: in the week or so before I started my period, I would spiral into unworthiness and despair. I was exhausted, my brain was foggy, my capacity to be in front of people (which was part of my job) dwindled to nearly zero, and I woke up crying every day.
And then suddenly, as soon as my bleed came, it all went away. In fact, after the initial physical pain of my period subsided, I started to “feel like myself again” and forgot why I ever doubted myself to begin with. Until… it happened again.
This cycle wrecked me. Every period of despair became worse and harder for me to endure. I started to hate my cycle, hate my body, hate myself. I was so angry. I did everything the experts tell you to do to have a healthy, holistic lifestyle and my body was still betraying me. I was desperate for relief that actually worked.
In what felt like a last ditch effort, I searched the internet for spiritual practices that centered suffering related to menstrual cycle pain. If my grief taught me anything, it’s that pain is a portal for spiritual awakening and soulful depth. Perhaps this pain could be a portal too.
I discovered the work of Red School and Aluna Moon and I was catapulted into an ever deeper layer of my initiation.
What I discovered through menstrual cycle mindfulness is that my body is not the betrayal. My body is not the problem. My symptoms do not make me useless, unreliable or unstable. In fact, my symptoms and bodily responses in my cycle are valuable information that provide a mirror to areas of my life that need attention.
Over time I am committed to writing more in depth about all that has moved within me since I began my menstrual cycle mindfulness practice in earnest. In truth my blog and the body of work that I am creating around Embodied Leadership and Cycle Devotion is my attempt to consolidate, synthesize and integrate this work into meaningful action and outcomes.
The more I dig into the ground of my own being, the more I see how vital it is that my personal soul and spirit work is reflected in the social systems that I operate in. I believe our essence is a critical part of the ecology of Life, and an essential component of my personal fulfillment means that my sacred body of work is a service to the world that benefits all beings and the planet.
I don’t pretend to have the answers. But what I do have are what I believe to be very important and meaningful questions, and the commitment to continue asking them as long as I live in this body on this planet.
By simply reading this, you are joining me in these questions and I cannot thank you enough for being a co-conspirator in this work.
More to come.
Soulful blessings,
E
If any of this is resonant to you and you would like some support in your initiatory journey, I invite you to schedule a complimentary consultation call here. It’s a no-pressure connection call where we can assess where you are and consult your deeper wisdom about what your next step is.
And if you are local to Sacramento and interested in developing a mindfulness practice with your menstrual cycle, I invite you to register for my workshop Cycle Devotion happening on June 11th at 3pm. You can learn more and register here.