Chapter 1: Begin Again.
"Drink from the well of your self and begin again"
~Charles Bukowski
There is something devastating about consistently ignoring a truth and deep desire.
It perverts the innate clarity with which we are all born, tangling what originally flowed, caging what was born to fly. And sometimes, if we remain contorted long enough, we must relearn what once came naturally.
“What do you really want,” I asked a client. I knew she knew, for she told me a million times in complaining and creative visioning. Her truths danced when nobody was looking.
“I don’t know,” she half-whined, half-tossed, her frustration spilling through the phone.
”You do know,” I pushed. “What. Do. You. Really. Want?”“I really don’t know,” she insisted. A prickly sensation tickled my underarms as heat crept behind my ears. I placed the soles of my feet deliberately on the floor and breathed into the pause.
“Shall we take it to a vision? Maybe your soul can tell you what your mind isn’t ready to accept.”
“Yeah … that’s fine.”
She did not want to do it, but she had given her Yes. And so we traveled–her reluctant and me agitated–into the space that speaks in the language of truth. When our session ended, I fiddled around the apartment. I rearranged journals that were perfectly fine as they were. I washed two tiny dishes that wished to be left alone. I carried on like this feeling an awareness arising that I would soon be unable to ignore.
I need to stop doing this, I thought. I can’t keep doing this work.
Now, my inner guide replied. Why do you say that?
I’ve taken her as far as I can … we’re not getting anywhere. Now I was whining. I wanted to throw something against the wall. I needed to hear something shatter or break; I needed to make something happen or let something out: a scream, an orgasm, sweat…something.
Where do you think she needs to go? Somethin’ said, ignoring my mood.
Acceptance of her truth… it’s like she speaks it then locks it away again with actions that take her in the opposite direction–my chest hollowed out as my womb space itched for stimulation. It had been too long since excitement visited there. The familiar lump in my throat began to surface, and I prayed it wouldn’t last for weeks like before.
Go on, Somethin’ said. I knew the drill: speak the truth or suffer the consequence.
And I can only take her as far as I myself am willing to go. I have to go further to take her further.
A solemn silence replaced the warring psychological urges and waves of sensation. It pulled itself up on me like a grateful yet weathered woman gasping for air after nearly drowning. I felt soaked with its presence.
I closed my eyes and longed for loving, knowing hands to press on my womb space with a firmness; I longed for the arms belonging to those hands to hold me while I wept it all away.
But all I had was myself.
So I curled into a ball, tucked my chin to my chest, pressed my palms into the space between my belly button and mons pubis, and cried myself to sleep.
Again.
For almost a decade, I had existed behind a kind of energetic plexiglass, not fully feeling life even as I moved through it. Sun risings and fallings, I kept my secret tucked behind smiles and service to others. No one knew the aching to feel, really feel like I used to, but me. My initiatives were rootless and so bore no fruit. And my body felt the same; I had no external place that felt like home, and no internal one either.
There were a sprinkling of moments I felt completely in my life and body, but they were fleeting and far too infrequent. Something was … missing.
And so, after years of self-help books and YouTube advice channels, yearlong initiations and thousands of dollars worth of intuitive readings, filling the space with emotionally unavailable partners and grieving their goings, saying YES to employment opportunities that neither honored my time nor talents in compensation or joy, I decided to do something different.
It was time for more than a quick fix. It was time I go find that missing piece. I called a shaman and scheduled my first ever journey.