My path

When I was 29 I ended a beautiful 14 year relationship. We’d travelled the world and created a 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 'our' 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 started bullying 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 I had been standing up for something my family and community didn’t want to hear. They gathered round me and called me a liar. I went into a state of shock from which it would take years to recover.

a woman looking out of a window, from the dark into the light

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.

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, trying to create a life amid the chaos. 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 and I had a tiny fish in my ear whispering that I could see things differently.

I did my coaching training and I began seeing someone who treated me like a goddess. It was a golden time.

All too soon things started to change and those golden threads disappeared. I wanted so badly to feel understood and loved and there is a particular type of person that sees vulnerability as opportunity. I had lost my navigation and support system and I was in trouble. 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 was now scared of life. I had put my trust in someone who had used my openness to wield power over me. I no longer knew myself. I went to a doctor and was diagnosed with anxiety, depression and anaemia and started taking sertraline, an anti-depressant. It had immediate effect - I just didn’t go ‘there’. I started doing nature facilitations and loved the empowering feeling of doing work I loved in nature with adventurous and courageous women. I went to Africa for a project and felt so in the light and in my purpose that I stopped taking antidepressants.

I wanted to feel myself and felt that the only way to get through this was to actually go through it.  

As soon as I returned, the darkness came back. I felt like I was full of holes... I was just a hole. I was terrified and desperately wanted someone to rescue me. I wanted to be anywhere else than where I was. 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.

The trauma had rooted itself in my body. My jaw felt like it was in a vice and I began shaking and tremoring when I let go. 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. I was amazed that friends I hadn’t seen in years wanted to see me. When I was in different environments, I started growing. I felt parts of my self coming back. I knew I had to leave where I was living. A friend suggested staying with her and I felt my body say ‘yes.’ Regular breathwork, ecstatic dancing and massages have helped me go 'there' and release trauma, alongside coaching and somatic therapy. My friend and I hold space for each other to be who we are and where we are. Not long after moving in, I felt myself come back into the room. I couldn’t believe how young I looked.  

I feel like I've died a thousand times. I have come back to life from places where I felt there was no return. . Slowly, I am stitching myself back together and the holes are becoming a unified whole.

I feel like I’ve lived many more lifetimes than I have. 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 there she became its queen, a guide to others.

I have so much to learn and in some ways I feel I am only at the beginning of my journey but I realise my time in the darkness has given me many gifts.

I can see from many different perspectives and through many layers. I can navigate in the dark. Monsters are only monsters until you have met them. We all cast shadows and wholeness comes when we unite with our own darkness.

I am finally trusting myself above others and can see that I can love at my full bandwidth, regardless of what I receive.

If there is a kernel of the mythological in my story it is to invert the power structures of mind over magic. Mind to me represents the fears and conditions that have institutionalised us. It believes that we must be a certain way to be acceptable. Magic is in the miracles that happen when we feel loving and trusting - when our hearts are open to living and we listen on a deeper level. Trust awakens our potential, holding space for the miraculous.

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.