My path
When I was 29 I ended a beautiful 14 year relationship. We’d travelled the world and created an idyllic home together in Lisbon. Life was so good but something wasn’t right. I’d get these spells where it was like everything I loved turned to dust and I could find no joy. When I went back to the UK one summer, I started seeing a talking therapist and my world started breaking open.
One session she said something so simple - you can do what you like and I felt lightning strike me. I had been so scared of breaking things but at that moment I knew I wanted to be free.
I didn't know what I was like on my own.
I ended things and I moved back in with my family. It was like going from the frying pan into the fire. All the unconscious dynamics I hadn’t been aware of flared up. All my friends were friends with my ex and I didn’t want to muddy the waters so I isolated myself, getting a new job and starting a new life but in the nest of my family dynamics. Things hotted up. I was in a car crash. I badly scalded my leg. My boss was mistreating me. I started a new relationship with an unstable person and got pregnant. I didn’t tell anyone and got an abortion but bled continuously and was fainting at work. I began to lose my hair.
At this point I found a podcast called The Future is Beautiful (now All That We Are) which had this golden thread of following your intuition.
It felt like the only resonant thing in a world of which I was increasingly distrustful.
Things continued to fall apart and came to a head when my parents broke up. My mother felt attacked by my need for honesty and openness and gathered her community around me and called me a liar. I went into a state of shock from which it would take years to recover.
I didn’t know anything about the nervous system so I had no idea what was happening to me or how to take care of myself.
The rug was pulled under my feet again and again. So much had gone wrong and I was the common denominator, so what could I do but blame myself? There must be something wrong with me that I couldn’t see but others could.
I moved many times. One day, I heard the term ‘nature facilitation’ and got a place on a course starting the following week. For the first time things clicked into place and I felt like the glowing and free child I had been growing up in Africa. I wanted to connect people to their wildness and give them this feeling of blissful connection, of being at home.
From a chance meeting in a park, I began being coached and I could feel the veracity of a completely new reality. I remember feeling like I was a whale and all of the waters of my experience were weighing down on me, telling how life is.
This time, I had a tiny fish in my ear whispering that I could see things differently.
All too soon things started to change. I wanted so badly to feel loved and connected but I had lost my navigation and support system. I entered a relationship that was confusing, controlling and invalidating. At the end of a year, I had an excruciating earache that kept on ringing.
I knew something was really wrong and I had to use my other senses. I had to listen to my inner ear.
I ended the relationship, but I had become scared of life. I no longer knew myself. I went to a doctor and was diagnosed with anxiety, depression and anaemia. I felt like I was full of holes... I was just a hole. I felt completely unsupported. I had internalised so much negativity. I thought everything had been my fault and I was full of shame and doubt. I was terrified and desperately wanted to be rescued… Surely someone could see me? All I could think was to escape. I travelled with a new man around Europe and when this chapter ended, I realised that my unconscious thought had been ‘if I can make him happy then everything will be alright.’ I had to change my thinking.
By now, trauma had rooted itself in my body. My jaw felt like it was in a vice and I began shaking and tremoring when I relaxed. I would wake up with my body jerking and spasming. I had to start putting myself first. I found a somatic therapist specialising in trauma and I began doing a coaching swap.
Holding space for other people was the medicine I needed. I had to lean back and trust my intuition.
I slowly began to practice living from a place of trusting myself and speaking my truth. When I was in different environments, I started growing. I felt parts of my self coming back. Regular breathwork, ecstatic dancing, coaching and somatic therapy have helped me go 'there' and release trauma as well as finding relationships that offer me the freedom and support I crave. I started to understand myself as neurodiverse and to work with my gifts of empathy and clairvoyance.
Slowly, I am stitching myself together, finding what has been missing and the holes are becoming a unified whole.
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My experience with darkness feels like I have been into the underworld, where time and reality have a different density. I have been overshadowed by people and entities but, more importantly, I realise I was giving myself away. I know how to hold myself more fully now and I know how to hold other people. Persephone was abducted into the underworld and she became its queen, able to guide to others.
Demons are only demons until you have met them. We all cast shadows and wholeness comes when we unite with our own darkness.
My greatest wish is to unwind patterns where trauma is passed on through relationships and generations.
We don't have to live with it. By turning to embrace our own darkness - our unconscious, what we are afraid of - we can liberate ourselves and create a different story, one in which we have choice.
This is how we own our power, choose our path and start truly living.
If there is a kernel of truth in my story I believe it is in embracing the discernment and courage needed to trust. We all have darkness in our fears and the conditioning that tells us we must be a certain way in order to be acceptable. I didn't believe I was enough. When we can discern what is coming from outside ourselves and what is our inner truth, we awaken to our potential, holding space for the miraculous.
