My journey with my medicine
I spent most of my adult life burying it.
Trying to dress it up as something else.
The little girl who talked to plants and her awe and wonder for existence was not enough.
I wanted to be sex.
To be darkness.
To be something more purple, black, red, dripping pink.
When trauma happened I latched onto it.
I would be the one who knew death
the cool one
the mysterious one.
I wanted everyone to want to be me.
I wanted to talk about things that were intense or flashy
like polarity and blood and orgasm.
And year after year I would hear it sneaking up anyway.
This tiny voice that would not go away.
Saying, ‘You’re still not doing it and you know it.”
You are still not serving it.
You are ignoring it.
You’re so good at pretending
and it’s still not it.
I remember doing a session for my business a couple years ago.
I hired a man because I wanted to give a TED talk about male sexuality.
I wanted to be famous.
I moved to LA because I so wanted to be famous.
He led me through a process
and I ended up with tears streaming down my face, arms outstretched
saying out loud how the earth was speaking through me and that was the message I was meant to give to people.
I desperately wanted this to go away.
I would acknowledge it for a moment and then push it to the side.
Maybe write some poetry.
And then go back to my “real” work.
And even though I wanted it to go away, each time it came up it would bring me to tears.
Because when I considered it
I always reached the same conclusion:
That no one wanted it.
People bought the other things.
They would not want to buy my connection with the world around me.
Nobody cares about that.
Last year I reached my limit with this pattern.
I did not want to have the successful business if it meant that this just kept happening over and over again.
And in fact I could not.
Because that was the first time I realized my body was a hard no.
That I would actually get sick if I ignored it.
I’d like to say I just chose it but it didn’t feel like a choice.
It felt like the only thing that mattered, or I would die.
I felt like I “didn’t know” what my medicine was.
But that was never true.
I just didn’t want it to be what it was.
Last fall I got the hit to channel 33 days of messages from nature.
I wanted to throw up.
My communion with nature was the thing that was just mine.
The thing that has carried me through my entire life.
That has held me through everything.
Talking to the plants and the trees and the rocks and the ocean.
To share it felt like the most achingly vulnerable thing I could possibly do.
The worst part was that I felt like I couldn’t even do it well.
There were so many layers of “no one wants this” and “this is stupid” and “do I even believe this in myself fully” and “this isn’t enough” that I knew I wasn’t even fully accessing it.
It felt like I was wading through heavy mud and I still had to do it, and in public.
But that practice led me into eating more food and healing an eating disorder I didn’t know I had.
If you told me last year I was going to gain 90 lbs I would have laughed in your face.
But gaining 90 lbs made my system realize I was no longer in a famine.
And with the reversal of that scarcity I opened more and more to where else I had been restricting.
Jordan and I were looking for a house and I had already deep down locked away somewhere decided I could not have my full desire around a house and would have to settle for a lesser version of it.
And then in a journey I felt my full size and saw myself amongst mountains, walking, singing, playing a drum.
I hadn’t owned a drum since doing shamanic work in my early twenties and then shutting it away when I decided to make social justice my main identity.
For months I heard: sing.
And each time I rolled my eyes.
I don’t sing, I’d have to learn to sing, I don’t have a good voice, I don’t want to do that.
I live out on an island among the mountains now.
Where I sing and play my drum to the creek that flows through our land.
I live on land that is full of deer and raccoons and mink and wild herbs and fruit trees and a lilac tree and a family of eagles that you can see every day when standing on our deck.
In a house that feels like it was dreamt up just for me.
I decided to serve my medicine
To actually bring her out and listen to her
And it feels like my life now is me surrounded by the physical manifestation of my own medicine.
My business wholly shifted.
Before it felt like my business was a creation of my mind.
Now it feels like my business is just a reflection of me.
A year ago I didn’t want much responsibility.
I didn’t want to do anything.
I didn’t own much of anything
I lived in a nice apartment in Vancouver and spent most of my time laying in my bed.
Jordan and I had a Daddy/little girl relationship
and I never once touched the trash.
Now I look about twice as large
I have a house and a pickup truck
I live on an island surrounded by farms, Jordan and I take turns dumping our poop buckets into our compost, and my days are completely full of things that fulfill me in a way I’ve never had before.
This is the version of myself who can carry what I was born to carry.
I can’t tell you how much I lost this year.
My relationships with my family either ended or shifted radically.
I look unrecognizable and I sound different when I speak.
I said goodbye to my hot gym girlfriend self and became a well-fed quite round engaged woman who goes for slow walks in the forest near the ocean.
I live in a new place.
My business and bank accounts are different.
My driver’s license is in a different country.
Almost all the friendships I had last year ended
and I made new ones.
And at the same time
When I think about my life now I just want to laugh
Because what is still here is just a greater more obvious version of what has always been here.
I can see the common thread when I look back through my life.
The way I have always trusted how I speak to the earth above everything else.
The girl who loved growing things and fermenting food and learning about herbs and farm animals and poop.
The girl who felt most at home singing and playing her drum.
The girl who would sit in the back of her parents’ car feeling how she just wanted to roll herself around in the strip of woods dividing the highways.
The girl who channeled poetry from staring at the moon.
That part has never left
but I never made her first.
The deepest thing in me has never changed.
She was just allowed to actually come out all the way.
If you liked this piece, you might also enjoy:
– Why having a funeral for yourself is the ritual you need in your life right now
– Having it all the way, writing the future, & my current life
– Taking responsibility for your desire