This unfolding journey of personal liberation and healing in my life began with an  outpouring of curiosity and questions. I was seeking clarity and understanding of my own personal experiences, as well as our collective stories and narratives.  Why had I experienced so much pain? Why do we inflict so much hurt and suffering on to each other; on to the land? Is there a connection? Where do these patterns of exploitation, oppression, repression,  abuse, and violence come from?  Has it always been this way? How did it get this way? Are there other ways of existing and moving through the world? 

 

I challenged myself to question everything, to refuse that which did not serve, and to seek my truths. I believed that in doing so, I could untangle the mangled wires of social conditioning and reveal a more authentic existence. I wanted to become a being who operated out of love for the sacred and freedom of spirit, rather than out of the fear and dejection that was so entrenched within my family of origin. 

 

I sought answers to my questions of "why" in the wilderness, coaxing that wild woman sleeping deep inside the marrow of my bones, to wake. Together, we deconstructed and reconstructed our relationship with worship, prayer, and meditation. We found love in the mountains, lakes, rivers, streams, deserts, and cloudless, unobstructed horizons. We found truth in blood red sunsets and silver moonbeams. We found awe and wonder under a dizzying canopy of stars. We found purpose and place in roaming the bellies of epic canyon lands and towering forests. We found sorrow and joy in music and dance. We found grief and praise on the seashore, pleading with grandmother ocean to hold our tears for us.

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 It has been many years of continuous personal growth and transformation, made possible by the willingness to shed obsolete values and perspectives. Not only a willingness, but an eagerness to surrender what I am for what I might become. This practice of surrender has not been without challenge, chaos, or failure. There have been many occasions where my practice has collided with my shadow. Those old traumas that refuse to budge because they have yet to be spoken, witnessed, and integrated. 

 

This journey into the shadow, into my sacred truths, is an expression of my commitment to growth and connection. A desire to learn what others have learned, and to share what I have learned. I ask that this journey lead me to a place of shared explorations of vulnerability, grief, praise, and integration.  I pray that I may walk this path with others who hold a deep yearning to explore the whole beautiful and tragic spectrum of this human experience.

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Grief, Trauma & Healing Work

 In many ways I have begun to transition away from using the term "healing journey" to explain my work around trauma.  This transition in the use of language to describe my process has been incredibly helpful in interrupting the unhelpful cycles of internalization and discouragement that come up around my grief and why after so long, it still sits with me. In unpacking my associations with certain words, I found that the term "healing journey" implied, at least for me, that the trauma wounds would eventually become benign, which I have not found to be true. This imposed a constructed idea of how and what my process "should' look like, as well as this idea that there was a final destination at which I was supposed to arrive; healed and unaffected by the trauma that I have experienced. This is not my truth, and holding it did not serve me. 

 

 What I have found to be true, however, is that the more I open myself up to the pain, and allow the grief to rise in my body, the more integrated the wounds become. The more integrated the wounds become, the more I can hold, express, and offer my grief as a source of soul and spirit nourishment.  An expression of the deep and primal relationship between myself and the Great Mystery.

 

I have acquiesced to the reality that the pain and hurt from trauma may never "heal", just like a broken bone may never set to the way it was before the break. So I stopped expecting to stumble upon a final destination in which I would finally get everlasting relief from the wounds. This acquiescence has allowed me the space to just keep working on integrating it all, working with what I've got, what I've been given, and holding hope for what is to come.

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My story unfolds bi-regionally, in the Unceded Territories of the  Willamette and Okanogan Valleys. 

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