The Ruthlessness of Healing

If you want to heal, you have to let go of every attachment you have.

I was supposed to be waking up in California this morning, but nope.

I found out several weeks ago that the place where I’ve done the bulk of my ayahuasca ceremonies was going to be leaving their location and moving to a new unknown location. This may not seem like a huge deal to most. I’m surprised that it feels like a huge deal to me. I’ve moved upwards of 25 times in my life and haven’t been back to my “hometown” in 16 years, so it’s safe to say I’m not very sentimental when it comes to physical locations.

However, this place felt different for me. It was the first place where I ever really felt like the land held some form of sentience and protective intelligence. One of the most defining beliefs I held going as far back as I can remember is that I’m unsafe in the world. Part of that belief was that there was no one was looking out for me or protecting me from the nightmares of existence and nowhere was safe. Yet somehow after enough ceremonies of surviving the greatest horrors I could imagine, I came to feel like that land was protecting me in a way that no one ever had.

For at least the last 5-6 years, whenever I go to my “safe place” in my mind or during meditation, it’s always that land. And whenever I’ve gone there over the last several years, there’s been an immediate, overwhelming feeling of being truly at home on the deepest level I’ve ever experienced in this lifetime.

When I found out the final ceremony dates, I started looking at flights and rental cars. I lined up everything in preparation for saying goodbye to this beloved place and rationally it felt like the right thing to do. But then a small war broke out within me and I couldn’t finalize it.

I mentioned in my last post that I’ve started working with a new health practitioner on healing some of the underlying issues at the root of my health problems. I knew when I signed up for this that it would be intense physically and emotionally, and I planned to commit myself to all that it entailed 100%. Flying out to California, driving many hours out into the desert, enduring an often physically-grueling activity like ayahuasca, and likely not getting the sleep or rest that I’m supposed to, would be the exact opposite of the new healing track I’d committed to.

Even though it felt devastating to not say goodbye one last time to this place where my reality was changed beyond my wildest dreams, a place where I’d died and been reborn into a whole new existence, I knew it would cause me to veer from the current path I was on. This would be going against so much of what I’d learned on that land, which is that healing is an often brutal, ruthless process. If you truly want to heal on the deepest level, you have to be willing to let go of every attachment you have. Your attachment to the good and the bad in your life. You cannot put anyone or anything on a pedestal above you and you can’t blame anyone or anything you perceive yourself to be a victim to.

To play into the belief that if I don’t say goodbye to this land I’ll feel haunted by it or will somehow feel unwhole seemed a bit like giving my power away. It felt like it went against everything I ever learned there, which is that part of my healing was about getting to a place where I was not reliant on anything outside of myself for happiness and wholeness.

While there’s something to be said for just going out there and having a nice final hurrah with some of the people who mean the most to me in a place where a lot of powerful, memorable shit has gone down, I know that right now is not the right time for me to abandon the current plan I’m on and do whatever I feel like. It’d be the exact opposite of the plan.

This past week during an astrology reading I was giving, we ended up going way over time talking about “spiritual gifts” are. After going in-depth into what hers were, she asked what my spiritual gifts were. I’ve been thinking about the answer to that question for years while looking at my chart, but this was the first time I think I’d said it out loud to another person.

I know that a central part of why I’m alive is to ruthlessly heal myself on a physical, emotional, and spiritual level, at any cost, which frequently means questioning every belief or idea of reality I’ve ever had (Pluto conjunct ascendant in Scorpio opposing Jupiter and 8th house Chiron + the moon). My life purpose is to share how I did it with others so that they can do it, too (6th house North Node in Aries). And how I’m supposed to go about getting there is by being transparent and public (a.k.a. oversharing) about everything that I’ve tried and the journey that I’ve been on (10th house Sun, Mercury, Mars, and Venus stellium in Leo).

Part of my frustration lately has been that it still feels like I have quite a ways to go in healing and therefore have no business talking about it with anyone. Sure, I’ve fixed my mental health and don’t feel a fraction of the anxiety or depression I used to, but there’s a lot more to go physically. Those have to go next. And I know that it’s possible because I’ve met far too many people who have completely healed of all physical problems like the ones I’ve had for it to not mean that I’m supposed to do that for myself.

Right now what healing looks like for me is being brutally committed to the work with this new practitioner, even when it feels like I’m moving backward. I’ve had numerous “healing reactions,” since starting last week, including headache, fever, whole body aches, emotional purges, and major exhaustion that all come and go in waves and have required me to sleep and rest way more than usual. I can tell that it’s a healing reaction and not something else because one minute I can’t move and the next I feel the best I’ve ever felt. It’s clear that something is shifting on a physical and emotional level and I’m excited to see where it goes.

Anyway, I know that wherever the future ceremony space ends up being will have its own special vibe, even if it’s totally different from what I’m used to. It’s all good.

A few times in the past, ayahuasca would say to me, “You gotta be loose! In body and mind. Don’t hold onto anything too tightly.” So here’s me doing that. Thanks for carrying me through the craziest interdimensional experiences that anyone could ever have, over and over. Best of luck with whatever your new tenants have in store. ✌️❤️