I was with him as he passed, along with my younger sister, Gen, and his beloved partner, Margaret. That was one of the most profound, intense, painful, and strangely beautiful moments of my life. I am so glad I was there holding his hand. And I am so incredibly grateful for the love, wisdom and support he gave me, always.

I feel called to share the tribute I wrote for him, some of which I read at his funeral. He was a private man, but, tough luck, dad, I want everyone to know what a wonderful person you were and how much I love you. You are so missed. Though I feel your spirit continuing to guide me and your eternal love beaming down from your new home in the stars.

Rest in peace and joy, dad. I love you.

“Possibly I am biased, but, my dad was the kindest, most generous, and most brilliant man I have ever known. Perhaps that’s why I’m still single; I’m yet to meet someone who can live up to his example! 

Nicholas… Nick… Nicky… by whichever name you knew him, I’m sure you’ll agree, he was a truly special soul. A gentleman. A carer. An intellectual. A great thinker. A poet. An artist. An environmentalist. A custodian of the English language.  

He could speak legalese, old English, Devonshire dialect (with the accent), a bit of Irish (mostly the rude words), and Cockney Rhyming Slang. Gosh, how he made me laugh. He could spin a hilarious limerick off the top of his head or a tongue-in-cheek song that would have us in fits of giggles. I would share some here but his cunning sense of humour might not be deemed suitable for church! 

Some of my fondest childhood memories are of our road trips, which were lengthy, as he never broke the speed limit, and for a long time drove a Morris Minor Traveller – turquoise – named ‘Morry’. Morry could only get up to 60 miles per hour and didn’t have a CD player, or a cassette player as it was in those days. And so, we made up songs together, played games and talked on our journeys from London to Sussex or to Devon, two parts of the world which he relished in sharing with us.  

When eventually he did fit Morry with a music device, he invited us to play our favourite ‘90s pop music at full volume, never complaining, though surely much of it wasn’t to his taste. When a tune came on that he did particularly like, he’d play it on repeat, strumming his hands on the steering wheel with impressive rhythm, humming and singing harmonies, and tapping his foot on the floor to the beat. Margaret reminded us recently that in his later car, a little green Renault, he tapped his foot so much that he wore a hole in the floor through which you could see the road underneath! Music was, without a doubt, one of his greatest passions.  

So was nature.  

Another reason why our car journeys took so long was that dad always chose ‘the scenic route’. He loved the English countryside, more at home here in Devon than he was in London. It was commonplace for him to pull over into a lay bay, quite suddenly, so that we could all get out and look at the view. ‘Look at the light over there!’ I can hear him say. ‘Isn’t that marvellous?!’ He was enthralled by natural beauty and he wanted to share these simple, serene moments with whomever he was with.  

He taught us the names of the birds and trees. He taught us how to rub dock leaves on our skin if we brushed against a stinging nettle. He taught us to shake our wellies before putting them on to make sure there were no creepy crawlies in there – not so much for our safety, but because he’d loathe to kill an insect, even a mosquito! I remember him being alarmed one day to find me hoovering up cobwebs in his house, halting me in my tracks, and proceeded to carry, individually by hand, a dozen or so spiders from the house, carefully re-homing them in the garden. He didn’t mind their company at all.  

Then there was the time he did an emergency stop on a country lane, quite to my surprise, as it appeared to be for no reason. He got out, walked to the front of the car and peered at the ground. On returning, he explained: ‘Just a leaf; thought it was a frog.’  

Of all his accomplishments, being our father was, in my eyes, his greatest. He was a wonderful dad: caring, patient and endlessly supportive of our wild endeavours. 

I will treasure the early memories of shoulder rides, bouncing on his knee, and him singing to us our very own songs that he made up when we were little. His signature whistle (passed down from his father) which he used to gently wake us up in the morning or call us back if we got lost in the supermarket. The copious amounts of ice-cream. Hide-and-seek in the Temple Garden. And him reading us stories before bed: ‘Billy Bunter’ and ‘Rupert the Bear’ were his favourites.  

He taught me how to tell the time. 

He taught me how to drive. 

He taught me to pick up litter and throw it in the bin, even if it wasn’t mine. 

He taught me how to write (helping me to get a First at university through his impeccable editing skills). 

He taught me how to paint and draw. 

He taught me to smile at strangers and look them in the eye.  

And most importantly,  

He taught me how to be present: 

Here and now, 

Moving slowly and consciously,  

Accepting each moment as it is, 

And at the same time, how to dream a better world into being, 

For he cared so deeply about the Earth and her people.  

I always felt safe in my dad’s presence. His calm demeanour like a warm embrace. His smiling eyes softened my woes. His compassion and curiosity about the human spirit, an inspiration for how I will continue to live my life, in his honour. 

Thank you for everything, dad. 

Tributes from friends and colleagues

“I have so many fond memories of him, his kindness, wisdom and his tireless work behind the scenes on trying to keep things running as smoothly as possible.  He was an outstanding lawyer, as well as being in possession of much more than his fair share of sound common sense.  A problem shared with him was always a problem halved.”

…

“He helped many and was renowned for his courtesy, sympathy and support for many at the Bar, particularly new starters.”

…

“I owe to Nick an enormous debt of gratitude. On a professional level, he instilled in me the importance of attention to detail whilst at the same time putting the client at the heart of the work. He was determined to get it right, and to achieve fairness and justice for all he worked with. Nick’s sense of integrity informed all he did. His voice and example have stayed with me throughout my professional life.

Even when he was ill during the summer, Nick rang me from his hospital bed. Even though he must have been in a great deal of pain, he was the same old Nick – interested and interesting, with a wicked sense of humour.”

…

“Those who knew him at the Bar and on the Bench appreciated his great competence and complete integrity. Of late, as he centred his life in Devon. I saw him less frequently and found I missed regular chats with him. Now, alas, he is gone and I will never again chat to him, nor benefit from his friendship, nor receive his wise counsel. That is a real loss to me, as I am sure it will be to many others.”

…

“I shared the news with many members of my family all of whom were shocked and sad to hear Nicky had lost his battle with cancer. It feels as if he was just too full of fun and laughter to be gone, but I believe such a spirit as his surely persists in a way we will only understand when we too embark on that journey.”

I’ve been writing online for ten years ; it has long felt like part of my soul’s mission to do it. I know this as it lights me up, flooding me with such a strong desire to share I can do nothing but, if I’m to feel whole. I feel the words pouring into my mind from above, desperate to make contact with paper / my keypad. When I resist this flow I get stuck. And when I’m stuck, I cannot share.

It is not easy for my ego to ‘put myself out there’, acknowledging I am susceptible to criticism, judgement, even attack from people digesting my words, a reflection (as we are all mirrors) of my long-accustomed pattern of judging myself, and others. Accepting the responses back, whatever their flavour, without going into hiding and self-hate mode is part of my process of letting go of the outdated versions of my character (ego), which do not convey the truth of who I am, and that no longer serve me. I am a staunch advocate of sharing one’s authentic truth, I’ve just not always had the courage to do it : I’ve played roles, I’ve hidden from my darkness, I’ve denied my own pain.

I’ve played the role of ‘The People Pleaser’ / ‘The Good Girl’ for most of my life. ‘The Rebel’ was always inside, but I pushed her down and down, hid and silenced her for years in an attempt to keep others happy—parents, teachers, boyfriends, society. The psychotherapist I was seeing weekly for six months last year explained to me that adopting this character was one of the early coping mechanisms which I subconsciously used as a child to keep me safe (to receive the love that every child needs to survive). I learnt to be submissive to others’ needs and desires in order to protect myself in a world I deeply feared and did not trust.

For as long as I can remember I’ve been ‘an Empath’ : highly intuitive and sensitive to energies. I can feel others’ emotions and sense things about their beliefs and thoughts, often instinctively knowing what they are really feeling underneath the words they may be expressing, contradicting their true sentiments. This makes it very easy for me to be a chameleon, shape-shifting according to the environment I am in and playing whichever role is needed to balance the energies present and keep the peace. I am a peace-keeper at heart. While this is undoubtedly a useful skill at times, I see now that in always putting others’ first (playing ‘The People Pleaser’), I have denied my own needs, bottled up my true feelings, and dishonoured my core beliefs, causing resentment, frustration and anger to boil up at unexpected times against my will. I have hurt myself, and others, through my in-authenticity.

This is not just a moral issue, I have learned, but affects all aspects of life. Authenticity is fundamental to the healthy development and functioning of a human being on all levels—physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. By playing a character (in fact, various characters), my soul fragmented over time, creating disharmony and conflict in my inner and outer worlds (the latter a reflection of the former). To understand this further, watch one of my favourite spiritual teacher, Teal Swan’s video on fragmentation. It’s time for me to heal this. I believe that in sharing my story I am calling back the parts of my soul which left when I experienced trauma (at conception, at birth and beyond), and thereby subconsciously rejected my true nature. It’s time to come clean. It’s time to accept my wholeness, the darkness and the light. It’s time to grow up.

It is because of these traumatic events, and the nine-month-long period of pain and isolation that followed, that I have come to this deeper understanding about myself. For that I am immensely grateful. During this time of enforced self-reflection, suffering and loneliness, I had the opportunity to reflect on the how’s and why’s of my ‘accidents’ (I don’t believe in coincidence), while diving deep into my Shadow side (subconscious). I acknowledged with harsh clarity the negative thought patterns, limiting beliefs and addictive behaviours that have oftentimes dictated my life experience. I embodied again the un-healed child inside of me who went through a lot in her early years, the consequences of which have determined my rocky path through life so far.

You can read part one of my recent story here.

So, where did I get to?

I arrived back to the UK in April a nervous wreck. After filling the fridge and cupboards with food, my mum, not realising at the time the extent of my trauma and having long-standing plans to go to a family friend’s wedding in America, left the next day for a three-week-long trip. I felt utterly alone and incapacitated.

My right arm was in a cast and sling. There were metal pins poking through the skin of my wrist which aggravated with any slight movement. My right knee was healing from a deep gash making walking awkward and painful. The whole right side of my body in fact had taken a beating, twice, and I felt completely off-balance. I was exhausted, depressed, and anxious to a level I had never before experienced. Pretty much any daily task proved difficult or impossible. I couldn’t cook. I couldn’t wash my clothes. I couldn’t make my bed. Dressing took all my energy. Showering was hard, and not enjoyable. I lost my appetite completely. My mind quickly took a turn for the worse. I could not get over the fact that this had happened twice – two crashes, two months apart, to the day. I felt like I was cursed and/or being punished, and the prospect of months ahead of me of slow and painful healing, alone, was unbearable.

Feeling desperately uncomfortable in my body and terrified of my raging negative thoughts, I upped my self-medication. I learnt to roll joints with one hand and I smoked from morning ‘til night, a coping mechanism / addictive habit which had been part of my life for six years since discovering the calming and consciousness-expanding benefits of CBD and THC respectively in 2014. For the first time though, it wasn’t helping : it was making me feel worse. And yet, I could not stop. Aside from the strong painkillers and antibiotics given to me by the Indian hospital I had also acquired some pharmaceutical anti-anxiety medication—Xanex, or something similar—and soon found myself addicted to that too. At first I limited myself to one pill at night in order to sleep, but before I knew it I was taking one or two a day to keep me feeling ‘OK’. The panic that was lurking in my belly and spreading to my chest and head felt unbearable and I was terrified of what would happen to me, and what I might do to myself, without medication.

I felt an insatiable pull towards my ex-boyfriend, J. He’d never really left my mind, or heart, while I was in India. The longing had intensified a few days before boarding my flight home, and got stronger by the day now back in London. With my ego pride nowhere to be seen I called him. He came to see me and it was clear immediately that our connection was still strong. I felt calmed by his presence, some semblance of my former self returning as his big, strong, grounded energy helped balance my frantic, neurotic mind-space. We didn’t touch much on this first meeting. But when I laid my hand on the back of his heart and felt him soften and surrender, sigh deeply and let some tears fall, I knew he still wanted me, had missed me, and didn’t hate me. I could play this two ways : remember the reasons we had broken up four times already and let him go, or surrender to another chapter in relationship together. I chose option two. The reality was that I could do nothing but follow my heart, my desire, and my need for him at that time.

On our next meeting I knew what I wanted : sex, and all the holding, cuddling and intimacy that comes with it. My body felt like it was shutting down. My kidneys hurt, I was shivering near constantly, could not get warm, and my sexual energy which had been dormant for a while exploded with desire for him. I got what I wanted, on the surface, (the sex), though not what I really wanted (his commitment). He said during our first encounter of sexual reunion what he had often said in our two-year on-off relationship : that he was afraid of hurting me, could not commit to me, and did not believe he was able to be in a loving relationship. Though his body spoke another language : he rocked me, held me, stroked me and loved me back into aliveness. Oxytocin flooded, I was hooked. And so was he.

J looked after me for the next two and a half months. It was beautiful to see him in his Divine Masculine power and his support was incredibly healing for me. He told me that I was allowed to feel what I was feeling, that it was OK to not be OK and that I could take as much time as I needed to heal. I needed his reassurance. I needed his presence. I needed his touch. The Cosmos had aligned : he didn’t have much else to do during this time and we clearly had unfinished business. He told me how sorry he was for pushing me away and disappearing all those times in the past, and for his harsh words over email which had come from a place of abandonment and grief (another unhealed inner child). I needed so much to hear his apology and to see his goodness again. I forgave him. He forgave me. It felt like we were starting again with the heightened perspective of awareness, having spent six months apart.

J had been working on himself during this time : he was seeing a psychotherapist weekly, attending a men’s group once a month, and going to yoga classes regularly. He seemed like the strong, stable, powerful man I’d met on a Bulgarian mountain in the summer of 2017, not the lost, lonely, angry boy I’d left behind to go to India, reluctantly, after four breakups and depressive breakdowns at the end of 2018. Our connection blossomed by the day. We spent days together making love, painting, taking walks in the park, me holding onto him for support, and when not physically together we spoke every few hours. He came to Devon and stayed with me at my dad’s house. He cooked for me. He cooked for my family. He made me laugh. He held me while I cried. The sex was cosmic. It was healing me, bringing me back into my body, and distracting me from my anxiety, self-doubting thoughts, and physical pain. I fell more and more ‘in love’ by the minute. My hopes were raised. Maybe he was my man after all, I thought. I started to believe again in our Twin Flame story and got carried away envisioning our happy-ever-after ending. For him though, the doubts were real.

During this time I started having panic attacks. This was new for me. I’d felt anxiety before and what I might have once described as a panic attack, but this was on a whole new level. The first serious one happened in Devon the day before J arrived. My dad and his partner M were worried. They wanted to take me to hospital. I refused. I couldn’t bear the idea of more bright white lights and waiting rooms, and knew that in truth the doctors couldn’t help me. So I did what I’d been doing for the past few months / years when feeling anxious : popped some more pills and smoked some more weed. It made it worse and I stayed in my room crying, hyperventilating, shaking and sweating profusely for eight hours until I finally fell asleep. The panic vanished when J arrived : proof in the power of the love drug, oxytocin. Though when we would part I felt it coming on again and experienced a dozen or more of these terrifying out-of-body experiences over the next three months.

Panic attacks feel like you are going to die—a truly nightmarish experience that I wouldn’t wish upon anyone. I would feel my energy rise up my body and get trapped above my solar plexus (sternum area of chest). Though I tried to get my breath down into my belly and feel my feet I could not. It felt like someone was sitting on my chest—no space for air to get in. My breath kept getting shorter and faster until I was gasping for breath through my mouth. I’d feel an electrical tingling sensation spread from my head down my arms to my hands getting stronger and more forceful until it was unbearable and I believed my bones would snap under the pressure. My throat felt like it was closing up and the longer this went on the more I believed I was going to die. I would call J and somehow, with his masculine, grounded energy, he calmed me down, suggesting breathing techniques, and just being there. I realised how much energy was trapped inside of me, dying to come out, and knew that I needed to receive some hands-on healing.

I had begun to lose sensation in my right foot making it really hard to ground my energy. I now understand the nerves down this whole side of my body were restricted by the twist in my torso and hip caused by my two falls. The circulation to my foot got so bad that my right big toe bled from dryness (‘coincidentally’, the same toe I broke, aged 11). Energetically speaking, my root chakra was severely disconnected. I became aware too that my hips, ankles and left shoulder (I couldn’t yet move the right) made disturbing clunking noises when I moved them. I had been grossly neglecting my body for years and I hadn’t received a treatment since a few weeks after my first accident.

J, being the only person I felt comfortable with touching me at this time, agreed to give me a massage. He set up the table in my mother’s room at home (she was still away in America). Within less than a couple of minutes, I went into one of the most scary panic attacks of my life. His intuition led him straight to my solar plexus, where we store repressed emotion, in particular anger. After gently resting his hand there, almost immediately I felt my lips tingle, my jaw start to seize up and the electric force spread down towards my hands. ‘Go to my feet’ I instructed him, and he did. But it was too late.

My hands started to cramp with tetany (intense muscle spasms that clasp the fingers and thumbs together and shape the mouth into a small ‘o’). I had experienced tetany a few times before this (brought on by dehydration and during intense breathwork exercises), so I knew what to expect, and I was terrified. My right arm was still in a cast and knowing that the bones were not fully set in my wrist, I freaked out. ‘Oh my God, my arm is going to break again! I can’t breathe. I’m going to die.’ I pleaded with J to help me. He stayed completely calm and told me that I wasn’t going to die and to keep breathing. The pain was intense in both arms, especially the right, as the cramps spread, causing my arms to bend against my will, raging with electric force. My fear intensified as my mouth started to close shut and I struggled to get my breath in and out.

This went on for about five minutes and I saw the fear start to show underneath J’s cool, grounded composure. I really thought I was going to die. Then I remembered what he’d told me about releasing tetany during his own experience in breathwork sessions—of shouting and screaming and becoming an animal. Despite my uncle being downstairs and not wanting to frighten him, or my neighbours, I did what I had to do in that moment : I roared at the top of my lungs, a sound that shocked me with its ferocity. To my surprise and relief, after a few long, loud, guttural screams, the tetany started to ease a little and I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. J continued to ground me and after some time the energetic pulsating eased, my hands de-clawed themselves and I was breathing easily again. We both fell asleep, exhausted by the ordeal. Though relieved I had survived this scary attack I felt overwhelmed knowing how much more I would have to do to release this energy trapped in my being.

A few days later I went to see B, a healer I’ve known for 17 years, a friend, guide and mother figure to me. As I lay on her treatment table, within minutes the tetany came on again, to my surprise, as I’ve had countless treatments with B over the years and have always drifted off into a deep meditative state, then fallen asleep under the magical touch of her hands. I felt her pain seeing me in pain, and my own shame intensified : it’s hard to let the ones who know you the best see you at your weakest. It took hours to feel grounded again and though she offered me another treatment the following day, I cancelled last minute, too frightened to go through the experience again of tetany and panic. I was also ashamed. In all these years we’ve known each other I’ve never had the courage to tell her about my addictions or the extent of my depression. She told me as I was leaving : ‘Now is not a good time to get back together with your boyfriend, Olivia’, explaining that he would always see me as broken. She told me to work on becoming whole first. More shame arose as I knew I was going straight back to J’s arms after leaving her and would ignore the advice which I knew deep down was wise. (We were destined to be caught in the victim-rescuer-villain drama triangle.)

My panic was made worse every time I saw a medic. I’d gone to Charing Cross hospital the day after arriving home, alone, and after an expectedly long wait was seen by a senior orthopaedic surgeon. He scared the living daylights out of me when asking me to perform various movements with my right arm that pushed me well beyond my comfort zone. He said the Indian doctors had done the right thing in both surgeries, which was a relief, but that I must get the arm moving. It would take at least a month to be seen by an NHS physiotherapist so my mum found, and paid for, some sessions with a private physio in West London. Let’s call her C.

My weekly meetings with C left me with sweaty palms and feeling completely dissociated from my body. Her energy was intense : she spoke very fast, had a big forced smile on her face, and gave me a list of exercises to do, none of which I felt ready for. Though I appreciated her reassurance that I was moving along OK and the lack of movement was more down to fear than lasting physical impairment, I felt she didn’t understand where I was on a mental and emotional level and found myself embodying my wounded inner child—full of shame and self-pity about not keeping up.

I berated myself for not being able to do the physio exercises at home. Each time I tried I went into hyperarousal and panic. My arm was not coming over my head, as C said it MUST, if I were ever to move it again. It didn’t want to move at all. My rib cage felt locked from months of immobility and one rib popped in and out of place when I moved my arm to the side. I had a recurring fear that the metal plate would come out of my body and any bit of movement to my right side could send my arm into spasm, just like on the scene of the first accident. My body was trapped with fearful energy and needed gentle, loving care to open, which I could not give to myself at this time. I knew yoga and meditation would save me, but I was so frightened of my internal world, I found it impossible to sit with myself.

I had the cast taken off my wrist and the pins removed a few weeks after getting home. The doctors had told me this was a huge milestone and one I’d been looking forward to, thinking that once the six-weeks they claim to heal a bone was over, I’d feel better. Not so much. My wrist looked, and felt, pitifully weak. I was terrified of moving it, and my shoulder. Every inch of muscle and tendon and fascia from my neck to my fingertips felt tight, sore and lifeless. I was in pain every day, not an acute pain like when I had the accidents, but an extreme feeling of discomfort and being off-centre, which was worse because I couldn’t see the end. My neck, chest and upper back ached to the point I could hardly turn my head, my organs hurt, and I had no sense of grounding under my feet. I felt like my body would be out of whack and broken forever. My energy was all up around my chest, throat and head. I felt dizzy often and like I couldn’t breathe. The fear of having another panic attack had become a source of anxiety itself. I could not for the life of me relax.

Peter A. Levine in his book ‘Waking the Tiger’ explains about the experience of post-traumatic stress, which I experienced daily for the first six months of my recovery process. He says:

“The experience of traumatic anxiety is profound. It goes far beyond the experience we usually equate with anxiety. The elevated state of arousal, the symptoms, the fear of exiting or fully entering the immobility state, as well as a nagging awareness that something is very wrong, produce an almost-constant state of extreme anxiety. This anxiousness serves as the backdrop for all experience in the severely traumatized person’s life. Just as we are more aware of the water than the fish that swims in it, so may anxiety be more apparent to those around traumatized people than it is to them. Traumatic anxiety displays itself as nervousness, fretting and worrying, and in appearing to be ‘high-strung’. The sufferer frequently experiences panic, dread, and over-dramatized reactions to trivial events. These maladies are not permanent fixtures of the personality, but are indicative of a nervous system temporarily, though perpetually, overwhelmed.”

Being with J inspired me to move forward with my healing, even though I was scared. I knew he couldn’t hold my hand forever. By this point the Xanex had run out, making me more acutely aware of my bodily sensations and emotions, both of which terrified me. I’d become frightened of leaving the house alone. Loud noises, road traffic, and crowds of people instantly triggered my panic. I could not go on the tube or buses alone without feeling intense anxiety that I feared would lead to hyperventilating and losing consciousness. Yet I knew I had to get stronger, and that the only way out of my pain was through it.

I signed up to a three-week trial at a yoga centre near my house and tentatively went to some yin and restorative yoga classes and sound healings. Being in a crowded room felt overwhelming and the simplest postures hurt. I realised how much my right hip was out of alignment and I could not bend my knee properly. My mind would not calm. But it felt like progress to be doing some yoga again.

I started to see a psychotherapist weekly. This quickly became an important anchor in my healing journey. I told her about my addictions and history of separation trauma. She explained to me about coping mechanisms and gave me the validation I needed to feel I wasn’t going completely insane. She suggested I ‘make friends’ with my addictions rather than trying to banish them right away, and noticed my tendency to blame myself for everything that’d gone wrong in my life, always quick to protect others over myself. She suggested I work on giving compassionate loving attention to my inner child, finding out what her needs are, and allowing myself to feel whatever emotions came up, be it anger or rage or sadness. I noticed that during these sessions, when she asked me how I felt at that moment, it was hard to pinpoint. I realised how detached from my negative emotions and dissociated from my body I’d subconsciously trained myself into being.

I was still smoking weed and drinking coffee every day, which were key anxiety triggers, sending my nervous system into high alert, disembodying me and rousing the trapped energy in my being. Yet the addiction monsters had sunk their teeth in deeper than ever and I couldn’t stop, despite knowing that it wasn’t helping. I was trying to find some productive daily routine but I found it hard to concentrate on any task. My mind raced from one potential ‘to do’ to the next, followed by self-critiquing thoughts like : ‘I’m useless’, ‘I’m never going to succeed in life’, ‘I’m never going to feel better’, ‘I don’t deserve to be here’, ‘Why does everyone else have this figured out and I don’t?’ I was constantly overwhelmed, spiralling from one negative thought and emotion to the next. The only thing I could do to calm down was paint (with my left hand), though after months of doing this all day, it was starting to feel like a waste of time and it was increasingly difficult to sit still. I wanted to get better faster than my body was allowing and I cried every day with despair and frustration.

And then J broke up with me. He said he was attracted to a girl he’d flirted with in a bar, wanted to be free, and felt overwhelmed and enmeshed in our relationship. His mother wound had been triggered and he did what he’d always done in the past : disappeared without a trace. I should have seen it coming (note the earlier declaration that he never in fact did commit) but it felt like a massive shock. We had been so in love, I thought. Was it all a lie? Was he only interested in sex? I felt used, rejected and ashamed. All the old stories came back which had taken me down into depression before, not only with him but with two prior inconsistently-available boyfriends (‘I’m not worthy of love ; ‘Everybody abandons me’ ; ‘I’m too much for anyone to handle’, etc.). I could not believe he was leaving me again, and at my darkest point. I went down, down, down.

As it became clear to me that I’d been living in an illusion about my romantic relationship, I started to question many other aspects of my life, past and present, including my friendships, my work and finances, my social media presence, and my very identity. I saw fallacy, projection and denial were rife. Deep shame and self-hatred arose. I was completely disillusioned with life and I saw no hope for authentic and loving experiences in the future. In spiritual terms, I was in the depths of a mega ‘dark night of the soul’.

Eckhart Tolle explains :

“It [Dark Night of the Soul]  is a term used to describe what one could call a collapse of a perceived meaning in life…an eruption into your life of a deep sense of meaninglessness.  The inner state in some cases is very close to what is conventionally called depression. Nothing makes sense anymore, there’s no purpose to anything. Sometimes it’s triggered by some external event, some disaster perhaps, on an external level.  The death of someone close to you could trigger it, especially premature death, for example if your child dies. Or you had built up your life, and given it meaning – and the meaning that you had given your life, your activities, your achievements, where you are going, what is considered important, and the meaning that you had given your life for some reason collapses.

It can happen if something happens that you can’t explain away anymore, some disaster which seems to invalidate the meaning that your life had before.  Really what has collapsed then is the whole conceptual framework for your life, the meaning that your mind had given it. So that results in a dark place.  But people have gone into that, and then there is the possibility that you emerge out of that into a transformed state of consciousness. Life has meaning again, but it’s no longer a conceptual meaning that you can necessarily explain.  Quite often it’s from there that people awaken out of their conceptual sense of reality, which has collapsed.”

Thank God my mum was now home and making herself available for me. I told her what had happened and began to unravel in front of her eyes. For the next few weeks I was in total darkness ; there was no light to be seen. I didn’t want to eat. I didn’t want to leave the house. I didn’t want to live. The pain in my body got worse and worse to the point the only thing I could do to feel better was have a hot bath. Some days I had four. The outbursts of rage, desperation and despair that came through me during this time shocked my mum, and me. I remember one day us sitting in the garden and telling her that I desperately wanted to die, that I just couldn’t face one more day like this. She held my hand, squeezing it tight and started praying, something I’ve never witnessed her do before. ‘I pray for Olivia’s heart’, she said. ‘I pray for her microbiome, I pray for her mind, I pray for her body.’ I wanted to recoil at first then watched in fascination and admiration. It was touching that after so many years of feeling disconnected from my mother, here she was, holding my hand, and asking God for help to make me better. I felt grateful and a glimpse of hope washed over me. I wasn’t completely alone.

I knew it was not all J that was making me so upset—that he was triggering wounds of the past which I’d not yet dealt with. (I will talk in more detail about this in my next blog post.) Childhood memories rose from my subconscious and raged like wildfires. I expressed my anger to my mum for remarrying when I was 11 someone I did not like and abandoning me for him, her social life and her work ; for the pressure I’d felt to be the perfect child academically, musically and socially growing up ; for the lack of openness in our family about sex and relationships, which had confused my adolescent mind and made me feel shame about my sexuality ; for the loneliness and isolation I have felt throughout my life because of her frequent absence, which felt like rejection. I’m so grateful she did not react back in anger but listened to these long-suppressed grievances which needed so much to be released. She apologised. Though this was one of the hardest times of my life it was also so healing. I realised it was difficult to let my mum in and allow her to soothe me. But I had no choice now : I needed her. I was on the edge. I was in a constant state of hyper-arousal and hyper-vigilance. Left alone, I wanted to kill myself.

A turning point for me during this particularly low period was attending the Red Tent’s Doula training course. I was catching up on a day I’d missed due to injury when first attending the course in autumn, 2018. Back then, I’d rolled on a foam roller (designed to release muscle tension) across my rib cage and popped out an intercostal muscle the night before the course started. I ‘soldiered on’ and tried to pretend nothing had happened, but it was so painful by day two that I had to leave the course, white as a sheet, and go to hospital. (I see now that this was a warning sign about my health, and also coincided with breakup number 4 with J. Rib injuries, many holistic practitioners say, signify feeling undervalued, and on the masculine side, by a man.) This time around, I woke up on the morning of the course anxiety-ridden and in so much pain I did not want to go. I felt mortified about having to show my vulnerability and weakness again in front of the course administrator, Nicola, even though she is one of the least judgmental people I’ve ever met. It was my own shame holding me back. My mum was having none of it. She helped me pack a bag of blankets and food, put a warm heated rice bag on my shoulders, and sent me off in an Uber.

Swallowing my shame I climbed the stairs of the lovely house in which we were gathering and entered the circle of welcoming women, immediately relieved that I had not chickened out. Hearing the stories of births and deaths, taking in the ancient wisdom and held in loving acceptance by fellow sisters left me leaving with a smile on my face and with a deep feeling of gratitude. I’d turned a corner, remembering that my purpose extended beyond my own story, and that I was not alone. I felt a glimmer of faith that I would get through this painful period and rise again.

Despite this little boost, I was still feeling lost, lonely and in a lot of discomfort. My mum went away again and J ended up coming back into my life for yet another round of ‘love’. It only lasted a few weeks, during which time we did some nice things together and had our usual heart-to-hearts, but the sex was no longer cosmic and I felt his distance. His defences were up. He was no longer in his Divine Masculine and I was certainly not in my Divine Feminine. The penny finally dropped for me when, after days of giving me the silent treatment, he finally answered the phone and said : ‘I can’t help you every time you have a panic attack’, without an ounce of empathy. I wasn’t as surprised this time when he ended it, for the sixth time, saying he just couldn’t do it anymore. The truth hurt but I was finally starting to see our relationship for what it was : two wounded people desperately seeking solace in each other with nothing real to give. He couldn’t help me anymore ; it was time for me to face my pain (current and past) alone.

From Rebecca Campbell’s book ‘Rise Sister Rise’

Determined this time not to sink back into the dark hole of depressive doom, I put all my energy into my healing. I signed up to TriYoga, which became my Mecca, and started going nearly every day to classes and to use the infrared sauna. I tried all sorts of movement practices, starting with gentle Yin and Restorative Yoga, Feldenkrais, Chi Gong and TRE (Trauma Release Exercises), and as I got stronger, Barre, Pilates and other varieties of Yoga. I began to feel safe on the mat again and slowly, slowly, to trust my body. Feeling less afraid of crowds of people, I went to Movement Medicine and Ecstatic Dance events, and went swimming in the Hampstead Heath ponds. I also started regularly attending Kirtan (mantra singing gatherings) which I found deeply healing for my heart. It wasn’t all smooth sailing : some days I felt overwhelmed with anxiety, my body tingling with nervous energy and my mind telling me I wouldn’t make it. But I kept on going, forcing myself to put one foot in front of the other and go to a class, knowing I’d feel better for it. Gradually coming back into my body with the support of a group, and led by a teacher, was my saviour.

I took control over my eating habits and diet. Realising that I’d been under-eating after my first accident and usually relying on others to feed me, I began preparing three meals a day for myself. I found it difficult at first to feed myself as my state of hyper-arousal meant that I had little appetite. I came to see that this was a long-established pattern that began in my early teens and crept in again whenever I felt abandoned and rejected, triggering my primal separation wound (I was taken away from my birth mother as a baby). My subconscious habit had been to wait until I was practically starving to feed myself, and to eat as little as possible, as I  could not  stand the feeling of  being over-full and sluggish. On a deeper level I had been conditioned by the media and society that being thin would attract the opposite sex. My addict sub-personality also enjoys the high that comes with food deprivation. Gradually though, I started to find satisfaction and joy in cooking again, and felt much more grounded with food in my belly.

With my inner strength building I finally found the willpower to stop smoking weed. Unable at first to go ‘cold turkey’, I weened myself off by allowing myself one joint in the evenings, though I wasn’t enjoying it, if I was honest with myself. So I went to spend a week in Devon with my dad without any supply. I also quit the coffee. The detox felt amazing. I started reading books and meditating again, things I could rarely do when stoned as I couldn’t concentrate. I felt a lot more grounded and no longer so afraid of it down here. It’s now been eight months without this daily habit, and though I’ve had the occasional joint, it isn’t helping me like it used to and I’m reminded again and again to stick without.

After J and I broke up I realised that the thing I missed the most from our relationship was the physical touch. To give my body what it needed (/needs) I started having weekly massages from a beautiful soul, Frances, who understands the body holistically and is trained in injury management. Unlike the physiotherapy approach, which isolates just the injured area, she looked at my whole being and realised that the first thing I needed to do to heal was to ground myself. She showed me how to stand on tennis balls with my knees slightly bent, bringing my energy and breath into my lower belly. ‘You have lost your connection with your power centre, that’s all’, she said to me on our first meeting, with such a genuine, beaming, loving smile, I felt reassured. Finally, someone who spoke my language. After a few sessions with Frances and practising the tips she gave me at home I was feeling more connected to the Earth. Week-on-week I was getting stronger and my energy body was slowly shifting back to its centre.

Frances suggested that I attend a one-day Arvigo massage training. She was going. Feeling such trust between us I felt sure it was the right thing. Similar to the Doula course, this was an ancient feminine wisdom-sharing gathering, this time to learn a self-care massage technique passed down from the Mayans. The workshop was attended by a small circle of women. We discussed womb healing, vaginal steaming, spiritual bathing, moon cycles and ancient herbal remedies for digestive and reproductive healing. We learnt how to massage our abdomens, stimulating the digestive and reproductive organs in a way that is much softer and more Yin (feminine) than the approach I’d been taught before. After the course I began practising the Arvigo massage on myself nearly every morning when I woke up, or last thing at night, which helped greatly in bringing me into deeper connection with my body.

While in Devon I came across the book, ‘Awakening of the Western Woman’, by shamanic healer Louise Carron Harris, sitting on my dad’s bookshelf. I’d mentioned it to my dad some time ago, and, considerate as he is, he’d ordered it for me. I read it front to back in three nights, crying in parts as her story resonated so deeply with mine. I felt this was a clear sign that Spirit was guiding me back to my path (the Shamanic path) as I poured through the pages. Soon after I booked a session with Louise. During the shamanic healing session, over the phone, Louise asked me to come up with a few sentences about how I was feeling following the distance healing she’d just given me. It read something like this:

“I feel warmth in my heart. The warmth is spreading down my arms to my hands and feet and all around my body. My feet are grounded. I am supported by the Earth. I feel safe. I feel open to the world. I feel love. I feel my love extending out to the world.”

My homework was to write this empowering mantra in my journal morning and night for 35 days (a day for each of my years on Earth). I did it, bar maybe one or two evenings when I forgot or resistance got the better of me. It was very powerful to connect pen to paper again and to dedicate myself to a daily practice, consisting now of Arvigo massage, Vipassana meditation, and journaling. Though I didn’t feel the truth in what I was writing most mornings—in reality I was feeling fear in my body and resistance in my mind about the day ahead—writing down how I wanted to feel was powerful medicine, and I felt better as each day progressed. By the evenings it usually did feel authentic to write the paragraph, and often more words of gratitude followed, as I felt myself shift out of my needy, fearful ‘Victim’ sub-personality and into my true Self : a Divine Earthly Shakti Goddess.

On 11^th September (I love to travel on auspicious days), I flew to Portugal to stay at Merkaba, an off-grid conscious community in the mountains. My soul sister, Rachael, who I met in India in 2016 on an epic journey of sisterhood and self-discovery, and who was by my side after my first accident in India this year, had been living in and managing the community for 2.5 years. I’d been waiting to get my strength up before jetting off again, and the time had finally come. I could not wait. Living at home with my mother for four months had become suffocating. Though I felt immense gratitude for her heartfelt and ongoing support, I also felt like a teenager trapped in an old paradigm and desperately wanted to be with like-minded Rainbow Warrior souls. The heaviness of London city living was becoming too much and Mother Nature was calling me.

Merkaba deserves a blog post in itself : there is so much to say about this beautiful community and all I went through there. But, seeing as I’ve written half a book already here, I’ll try to sum it up in a couple of paragraphs!

I arrived feeling exhausted by the journey, having had a panic attack at the airport on the way out, then carrying my heavy bags up the steep mountain road, too rocky for the taxi to drive all the way up. I was immediately calmed upon nearing the gates, greeted by Cosmo, the community’s huge-hearted, and bodied, mountain dog, and community owner and co-founder, Dan. When Rachael appeared, eyes shining bright, and barefoot, I knew I was coming home.

There are two huge domes on the site, one for communal cooking, ceremonies and yoga practice, with two bedrooms upstairs, and another dome for sleeping. This isn’t ‘slumming it’ off-grid living ; the beds are comfortable with real duvets and pillows and there is a hot shower. (Thank God, as I was not ready then for a full into-the-wild experience.) For the first ten days I was sharing a twin room with a lovely young volunteer whose company I enjoyed. It felt so liberating to unpack my things knowing I had five weeks to settle into my new environment : 360 degree views of rolling hills, clear blue skies and magical sunsets, and not a sound around, except for the occasional shout from up the mountain from our 80-something-year-old Portuguese neighbour, Anna, herding her goats (which never failed to amuse and impress me), birdsong in the morning, and the hum of crickets at night.

Photo Credit : Catherine Almgren (on the right)

Two days after I arrived, Rachael and Fouad, an Egyptian friend we’d met in Goa, co-hosted a five-day retreat, which I part-joined, while also helping out in the kitchen and with housekeeping chores. It was called ‘Ikigai : Soul Nourishment’—just what the (spiritual) doctor ordered. I felt a massive wave of relief during the opening circle as I shared the story of my traumatic ordeals, and listened as others opened their hearts, shed tears, and shared their own stories. I knew we were embarking on a special journey together and I was in exactly the right place. Over the next few days a real bond was created between the retreat participants, the hosts, and the volunteers (13 of us in total). I felt once again part of a community, as I had in Goa, finally out of my cocoon of miserable isolation and able to connect again authentically with others. With Mother Nature grounding me, through the fresh, organic food I was eating three times a day, and walking barefoot, always, I started to find my love for life again. We drank cacao and took medicinal mushrooms in ceremony, both of which cracked open my heart and connected me even deeper to the land and to Great Spirit. We let loose on the dancefloor in ecstatic dance, and I pushed my body to new limits during yoga classes led by Goddess Catherine Almgren.

Photo Credits : Nat Ma – Healers and Seekers

The introvert in me was somewhat relieved when the retreat was over though, and the majority of our beautiful gathering left. For the next two weeks I got to enjoy some real downtime on the mountain. My first / only priority was to keep up my morning spiritual practice. I got up every day between 7 and 8 and headed to the outdoor yoga deck to meditate, sometimes joined by Cosmo and the two resident cats (with German names I never did get to grips with). After this thirty minutes of silent inner journeying, I joined Rachael, Stefan (a beautiful, young, wise, man who would be there for the rest of my stay), and whoever else wanted to practice yoga in the main dome. It became a ritual, and though I felt resistance nearly always, I kept at it. Day by day I was coming home to my body, trusting in my intuition to guide me into whatever postures and breathing exercises were needed to give me power and ground my energy. My arm was finally coming over my head, tentatively. I saw that I was integrating the teachings which had been drummed into me during the 10-day Vipassana course I took one year prior : patience, persistence and perseverance. Slowly, slowly, I was coming back to Me.

Feeling nurtured by the land and the people at Merkaba, I was ready for my next challenge, and I knew it was a big one : a five day Biodynamic and Trauma Release Breathwork (BTRS) retreat, led by Natalie Keany and her assistant, Miriam. I’d signed up before leaving the UK, feeling a deep knowing that this was one of the reasons the Universe was sending me to Merkaba. The trepidation at what was to come was creeping into my being day by day. I was nervous. But I had no doubt that it was the right thing for me. I was going to go deep within, really feel, and start to release the trauma which I had been holding in my cells from the accidents, from this entire lifetime, and ones before that. And that I did. I faced my fear of breathwork, of tetany, of panic, of shouting and screaming in public, making noise and being witnessed in my rage and in my despair. I roared like a lion, I shook, I cried, I was held, I held. I did more eye-gazing than I’ve ever done and felt a raw and true connection with everyone on the retreat. I was humbled, opened, and filled with gratitude. It was truly transformational.

I left Merkaba with a rather heavy heart. If the weather hadn’t turned colder and rainy, I would have been tempted to delay my departure. But it did, and I had a three-day Arvigo massage training booked, beginning the day after my return to London, falling on my 35^th birthday. Gathering again in a circle of women and fed with ancient knowledge was a beautiful way to land back to the dark, grey metropolis I’ve reluctantly called home for most of my life. I felt proud of myself on my birthday, seeing how far I’d come in my healing journey, now able to move my body with more freedom, and having let go of some of the fearful energy which had been keeping me frozen and trapped. I made a video of me celebrating in dance and posted it on Facebook–a ‘coming out’ moment on social media after a long period in hiding.

Then I started to go downhill again. London has always been hard for me, and the shorter, darker days as autumn turned to winter took their toll on my mental state. After over a month of natural, free living with Rachael and other likeminded souls, I felt lonely. Taking my daily practice to my mother’s living room floor felt far less nourishing than in the fresh mountain air at Merkaba. I felt noticeably less grounded. Fear and anxiety began to creep in again as I sat in meditation and the sensation of tetany often arose during my morning yoga practice. The breathwork had kickstarted a process of intense trauma release and I was soon to realise it wasn’t over yet. But I knew I had no choice but to persevere.

While in Portugal, Rachael, Fouad and I had decided to go to Central America for the winter.  They’d both booked their flights almost immediately and I now had a goal in sight. I felt just about strong enough to work again giving massages and started to put the feelers out to clients as well as agencies I’ve done temp work with before. Soon I had some massage bookings, and a four-day job lined up doing market research at the Apple Store in Westfield. Though the latter was a nightmarish prospect for me, I knew that the income from it would cover my flights. I was determined to get out of the cocoon of my mother’s house and feel again my freedom.

Around this time (late October) I ended my relationship with my psychotherapist, feeling we had hit a dead end. Knowing I still needed a helping hand with my healing process, I joined healer Ben Ralston’s online Sangha (spiritual community). I’ve been following Ben online for six years, since googling ‘Kundalini Awakening Orgasm’ in May 2015 the day after I first really ‘woke up’ (realised I lived in a multi-dimensional Universe), and finding an article he’d written about his experience, which mirrored mine. Ben has always been there in the background guiding my awakening process over the years and I feel a deep resonance with his beliefs about the world and his approach to healing. The private Facebook group and weekly Zoom meeting Satsangs gave me a space to share my struggle in a more authentic way than I found possible with friends and family. (For the most part, they cannot relate to what I have been going through on a spiritual and energetic level.)

Ben gave me personal guidance during this time on how to keep moving the stuck energy out of my body, and my practice evolved in accordance with his wisdom. Akin to the work I’d done on the breathwork retreat, he suggested shaking, shouting and making animal body expression part of my daily routine. He also put great emphasis on drinking plenty of good quality (not tap) water, eating well, breathing slowly and deeply, and taking rest whenever I needed it. During the months of November and December I slept more than I can ever remember sleeping. I stopped setting a morning alarm and slept in until 10 or 11 most days, getting much more than my usual 8-9 hours. Then, after making a smoothie and having a cigarette (one addiction I’m yet to beat), I went downstairs and spent 1-2 hours on my yoga mat—jumping, shaking, shouting, roaring, growling, crawling around, and often sobbing. As I went deeper and deeper into my body, more grief and more fear came up, sometimes more than I thought I could bear. But I knew this was an essential part of my process and with Ben and the group’s support (as well as my mother nearby) I got through it.

I did the Apple Store job, despite great resistance. It was hard. Standing for 8-9 hours in a shopping mall under bright white lights and surrounded by electrical equipment and big crowds pushed me to my limits. I felt frazzled. I wanted to quit on day one but I continued, talking to over 100 people about their experience of shopping in the store across the four days. This part of the job I quite liked ; it felt good to connect again with strangers and I found lightness, humour and common ground in our short conversations. The hours were too long though and by the end I felt drained, my immune system weakened, and my emotions were all over the place. I didn’t work again for two weeks after that (outside work that is ; I was continuing daily with the inner job).

Something Ben said to me around this time really resonated : ‘The only real problem you have, Olivia, is that you have lost your connection to Spirit’. He prescribed ritual as the remedy. I realised he was right. Smoking weed had been a daily ritual for me and the plant a portal to cosmic connection. Since I’d stopped I felt far less connected to the plants, the cosmos, and my higher Self. My yoga and meditation practices also rarely felt blissful since my accidents, rather, challenging and often frightening, as I willed myself to sit still with my anxiety and re-open parts of my body that been on lock-down for many months (or years). I needed to find a new way to connect with my spiritual essence while in the pretty un-spiritual environment of London. Like magic (!), following that realisation, I began noticing events for gatherings pop up on Facebook that aligned with my desire to reconnect to the higher dimensions. A few days later I was sitting in a circle with two shamans sending healing energy to the Earth with my hands. Next was a women’s circle on the Winter Solstice where I sang mantras from around the world and shared my desires and goals for 2020 with the group. I joined a circle that gathered in the park in London Fields to sing the Gayatri Mantra 108 times and pray for the evolution of humanity and the purification of the collective consciousness to support Mother Gaia. I found great strength and unity in these gatherings and a feeling of coming home to my soul and its mission as a Channel of the Light.

As well as joining ceremonial gatherings, I began bringing ritual into my everyday life. This was not something new for me, but like Ben said, I’d lost touch with it. I connected again to my crystals, cleaning them in the full moon and through meditation, then built and activated a grid on my bedside table. I set objects into this shrine that resonated with my desires and core values—pieces of nature I collected on my daily walks, coins to bring in financial abundance, and symbols that resonated with the love and peace I sought in my inner and outer world. I cleansed myself with sage and palo santo regularly, the scents bringing clarity and grounding energy and a sense of nostalgia for the spiritual ceremonies in which I’ve sat over the years. I made myself sacred baths with rosemary and lavender foraged from the garden and Epsom salts, lighting candles and incense and playing mantras as I soaked for up to an hour, massaging my body and practising calming conscious breathing. I made an effort to make time for self-pleasure, though it was a challenge to reconnect with my sexual energy while still holding so much grief. Self-love and self-care, I realised, was key to my physical and emotional wellbeing.

As the close of the year drew nearer I was no longer getting massage bookings or other work opportunities. Part of me was relieved as I had so little energy. I didn’t feel up to it. All I wanted to do was sleep, do my practices (sometimes), eat, and sleep some more. I was worried I was slipping back into depression, though Ben reassured me that there was a lot going on in the collective consciousness and my emotions were valid. I was increasingly triggered by my mother and anyone else who came into the house. I wanted peace and quiet and couldn’t find it. I became agitated and angry, wanting to project this onto others yet knowing it was damaging and unfair to do that. Frustration was boiling inside. As Christmas approached and the house got busier it was harder to do my shaking and screaming routine, worried I would disturb and upset people (The People Pleaser still ruled the roost). I lost belief for a while in my progress, frustrated that I was so exhausted and that the money in the bank kept staying at a level. I didn’t have anywhere near enough to buy my ticket to freedom and fund a few months away with my best friend. I wanted to find my feet again in the world and felt deep down it was what I needed.

On 12 December a big energetic portal opened, allowing for great expansion and miracles to occur, so I was told by Ben and various other astrologers and guides I follow online. This was an opportune time to manifest my desires, they said. I took heed. I created a vision board for my dream life and wrote down my hopes and goals for the upcoming year. In summary : Community Living, Love, Nature, Connection, Freedom, Health and Abundance. That night I couldn’t sleep. My mother and her partner came in late from an evening out just as I was drifting off and I was triggered. (I have a wound stemming from childhood around being woken up from sleep, and when I’m feeling sensitive, I can react with rage.) The anger boiled in me for hours. I punched my pillows, shouted into them, shook my body and eventually collapsed to my knees in tears. ‘I have to get out of here’ I said out loud. ‘I can’t live here anymore. It’s not good for me and not good for my mum’. And then an idea popped into my mind.

A few years ago a famous popular band released an album using an illustration on its front cover that had been drawn by my late grandfather, Charles Wood (whom I never met), without permission. On becoming aware of this, my father took them to court and was awarded a fair sum of money for his efforts, and their misdemeanour. This was to be split between Charles’ living grandchildren, my dad decided, myself included, though he had put the money in a savings account for use when I most needed it. ‘I need that money, now’ I decided. After a quick chat with my grandfather’s spirit, I was sure he agreed, and I messaged my dad asking him to call me the next day.

I explained my future intentions to my father—to build a conscious community in nature and to deepen my service to the world through my healing work—and presented my current calling to move on from living at home and to meet Rachael in Central America, stay in communities and expand my knowledge of off-grid living. I said to him that I was doing all I could right now to get stronger but that I wasn’t able to finance this trip. It felt difficult to admit this and to ask for his help (not for the first time). But, as I explained to him, it was the only way forward that I could see in my current situation. He said he would go away and think about it. I wasn’t surprised when a week later I was granted my wish : one thing I’ve learnt for sure during this long ordeal of recovery is that both my parents love me deeply and 100% have my back. The day my dad transferred me the funds an amazing deal appeared on Skyscanner for a flight to Guatemala (where Rachael was already settled) that hadn’t been visible in all the many times I’d searched in the weeks prior. I booked it immediately, left Rachael an excited voice note to confirm my arrival in less than a month’s time, and cried with gratitude, thanking my father, my grandfather, my spirit guides and my angels for assisting me in the next step of my journey.

The next few weeks passed quickly. I felt a weight lifted from my shoulders and a nervous excitement in my belly for what was to come. I spent time organising my possessions, clearing out old memorabilia from my drawers and sorting through clothes to give to charity shops. At the beginning of January I reconnected with Reiki healing, when, out-of-the-blue, a dear light-worker sister gifted me a space on her level 1 and 2 trainings. I began again my 21-day Reiki self-healing practice, which I’d been first initiated into two years prior. I also continued with my daily practices of yoga and Jin Shin Jyutsu, a very simple yet powerful energy balancing practice taught to me by Ben. Despite the gently simmering nervousness about flying, being on the road again, and leaving the safe nest of my family home, I felt confident that I now had the tools I needed to manage my anxiety and fears, and certain that it was the right decision.

………………………………..

I will pause this story here, and update in a future post about my current state of existence : living in community, in nature, in Central America, in greater presence, acceptance and appreciation for life and myself.

I will leave you with a summary of the lessons I’ve learnt from my experience of trauma, PTSD and Dark Night of the Soul last year. I hope that this story will provide solace to anyone reading who may be experiencing the pain and distress of coping with mental imbalance and social isolation today. I feel blessed to be able to share it. It is with compassion for all beings and hope for our united expansion into Universal Love that I share this. Aho.

Lessons learned …

1. Ultimately, no one will save me, except myself. But help is always available, I just have to ask.

During this long period of darkness, my first response was desperation and helplessness. I embodied ‘The Victim’. I felt the world was against me and I felt powerless to change my state of inner turmoil. I blamed the outside world and people in it (my boyfriend, my mother, the other drivers on the road, God) for bringing me to this dark place. Projecting was one of the ways in which I tried to avoid my pain.

Eventually, I rose out of this state of victimhood and saw that only I was responsible for what had happened and how I felt as a result. I was not fully embodied when these ‘accidents’ happened : I was distracted, living in my head, and in denial, suppressing my negative emotions, in particular, anger. I was addicted to escaping from my feelings through alcohol, drugs, sex, codependent relationships, and social media. I was afraid of showing people who I really was and expressing my truth. I was hiding from my gifts and playing small. I was living in-authentically. Whilst playing ‘The Victim’ I needed ‘the other’ to play ‘The Villain’ or ‘The Rescuer’. I placed huge expectations on my lover, friends and parents to fulfil my physical and emotional needs. When they failed to meet these needs I felt destitute, abandoned and unwanted ; an old storyline originating from birth that was asking to be healed. When I finally realised I was being forced to grow up and take responsibility for my own health—physical, emotional, mental and spiritual—an empowering shift occurred. I realised I have the power to heal myself.

Paradoxically, perhaps, as I recognised that only I could save myself from the suffering I was experiencing, I saw that help was all around me. I realised that people wanted the best for me but it was up to me to ask for what I needed and accept their help. I learnt to speak my truth to my family and peers and to drop the shame of being vulnerable. I found all the resources and guidance I needed to support my own inner work when I realised that I was worth saving and I committed to self-love.

2. It is OK to not be OK.

Before I could get better, I first had to accept that I was in a very bad place, AND be OK with that. ‘It’s OK to not be OK’ became a helpful mantra. One of the tools I learned to navigate panic attacks was EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) or ‘Tapping’. When intense anxiety arose, I would tap different energy points on my face and chest and repeat a variation of : ‘I am having a panic attack, but I love and accept myself anyway’. Learning to love and accept myself, no matter how desperate, pathetic, useless, weak and damaged I felt, was as essential stepping stone in my healing process. After years of spiritual bypassing (self-talking myself out of negative feelings) and dissociating (leaving my body through various methods of escape) I finally learnt to sit still and in acceptance of what was occurring, no matter how scary and uncomfortable it felt.

3. What we resist, persists.

These accidents were a long time coming, I can see now. It is no coincidence in my eyes that I injured the body parts which I did. The right side of the body, from an energetic perspective, is the masculine (Yang) aspect of our being—giving / doing / action. At the time of the accidents I had a lot of work lined up giving massages on retreats, and not a single thing scheduled in for my own wellbeing. I was teaching yoga but not practising it. I was giving treatments but not receiving them. I was moving too fast (metaphorically and literally), motivated by making money to survive and keeping busy to feel valued in the world, without seeing my blind-spots and meeting my own needs. I was lacking the balance of the feminine (Yin)—receiving / integrating / resting.

In Eastern and Ancient medicine, the wrist and shoulder are extensions of the heart meridian (energy line). I literally broke my energetic heart, which in retrospect, makes sense. I’d spent years, on-and-off, feeling depressed and heart-broken by relationship breakdowns and losses, and then carried on living by pushing these feelings into the depths of my subconscious. I had not healed these wounds, which began at birth ; I’d simply plastered over them with various coping strategies, one of which was to over-give to others (playing ‘The Martyr’).

My right shoulder has been a problem area for most of my life. I remember seeing an osteopath aged 11 or 12 about it. He told me that my right leg was shorter than my left which was causing an imbalance in my body and discomfort in my shoulder. The discomfort persisted thereafter, getting much worse during my office work career, when I sat at a computer for eight hours a day. I had daily chronic pain in my back which I had been ignoring. In fact I had been ignoring many imbalances in my being, such as my unhealthy relationship with eating, my unhealthy relationships with men and my own sexuality, my lack of motivation and willpower, my feeling of not belonging in the world, my addictive patterns and my turbulent mental and emotional wellbeing. Enough was enough, apparently : The Universe decided it was time for me to fully see, and take responsibility for my health and happiness.

4. Everything is connected : emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and physical experiences. (As above, so below.)

Though I knew this intellectually before, I have now had the opportunity to thoroughly witness my own experience and discern that my thoughts, my conditioned beliefs, and my physical life experiences are intrinsically interconnected. The outside world is a reflection of the inner. When I was in a vibration of victimhood, for example, I experienced immense physical pain and energetic discomfort. My mind was most active in this state, creating resistance to what was happening—blaming / shaming / escaping what was. When I was in a vibration of acceptance, however, the physical pain and discomfort eased considerably and there was space for constructive action to be taken. And when I could feel gratitude, the discomfort all but disappeared.

I’ve learnt that suppressing emotions is dangerous. When not expressed, they stay stuck in the body, causing disease, imbalance, and injury to manifest. Emotions (‘energy in motion’) must be felt and allowed to move to maintain good health on all levels. I see that in suppressing my emotions and reacting with frustration to negative thoughts (not accepting what is) I created dis-ease in my body. It was when I surrendered to really feeling everything that was arising, and giving it space to be expressed, that healing really began.

5. Loving and accepting myself fully, the darkness and the light, is the key to happiness.

Since ‘accidentally’ arriving on the spiritual path in 2014, through a spontaneous kundalini awakening, and discovering yoga, I realised that my role in this life is to share with others ancient wisdom and the tools passed through the ages by spiritual masters for healing and awakening. Having had a glimpse of enlightenment / bliss myself, I felt an obligation to share my experience and to teach others how to attain it. Little did I know I would fall so far down into the depths of despair after reaching such heights!

It was J who introduced me to the concept of spiritual bypassing. My ego was initially greatly offended and defensive. ‘I am love and light’, I believed. ‘It’s you who’s full of darkness’, I projected. Just as our relationship was exposed as a fallacy, so was this belief. I was forced to accept I too have darkness—manipulative aspects of myself (characters I’ve adopted) that I cannot see, patterns which do not serve, and wounds that need healing. The only way to live harmoniously in the world, I now know, is to accept that, and to love myself for it all.

6. Daily ritual and spiritual practice is essential for my wellbeing.

I had wanted to establish a solid daily spiritual practice for a long time before my accidents. Lack of discipline got in the way. ‘The Rebel’ inside didn’t want to conform to a routine. (Though I called myself a yogi, I wasn’t practising what I preached.) I see now that self-discipline is a key pillar to happiness and a form of self-love. I’m so glad I’ve been forced into prioritising my spiritual practice. It continues to be the foundation of my now more balanced and fruitful daily life. I am grateful, too, for the power of ritual. I am more conscious of the way I eat, talk, engage with others, cook, clean and move in the world, having re-connected with my Divinity. Everything can be a ritual.

7. Everything that happens ‘to me’ in life is in fact FOR me—for my expansion and for the highest good.

Stepping out of the shoes of The Victim has allowed me to see what happened last year as a blessing and a necessary part of my growth. Though painful, it resulted in great personal expansion and a deeper sense of empathy for myself and others. I am stronger, more courageous, and more humble because of it. I see that these incidents woke me up from many illusions which needed to be shattered and my battle to rise from the ashes has given me many tools which I can now share to empower others going through similar struggles.

8. In-authenticity no longer keeps me safe and serves me. It is time to speak my truth and share it with the world.

Aho.

Breaking my shoulder badly and my wrist in two places, cutting open my leg and elbow, experiencing blackmail and hate on the road, dismissal and neglect in the hospital, and going under the knife twice to get metal put in my body and set my bones, far away from home, with no insurance or money in the bank … was bad enough. I had no idea of the mental, physical, spiritual and emotional repercussions months on, which I am still confronted with every day.

On 1st February I crashed my yellow rental scooter (Bee) into a maturing-aged Indian man’s scooter in front of me, while driving at some speed down one of my favourite open padi field roads. I was nearly home, and relieved. It was baking hot in the late morning sun, I wasn’t feeling good, physically or emotionally, and I had a bag of chicken feet sweltering in my boot, ready to cook up broth and feed to my soul sister Rachael’s and my hungry newly fostered puppies at home.

I did not see it coming. In humble retrospect: it was my fault. My mind was not on the road. BOOM. We were wheel to wheel.

In the millisecond I realised what was happening–that I was actually in the midst of having a dangerous accident, and was going to fall off my bike onto hard concrete, at speed, with no helmet or shoes on, and that the driver in front was also in potential danger–my world was over. Panic rose like a long-asleep dormant volcano erupting from the core of the Earth. My first fearful thought: I have killed someone (I didn’t, thank God). My mind raced to Indian prison cells, solitary confinement, institutional and sexual abuse, death penalties, and a life ruined by the worst guilt one could imagine.

My reality in those excruciatingly long seconds of time–until I knew he was OK–was very strange. I had a full out-of-body experience. I had felt this before in my early twenties, when crashing into the central barrier of the M1 and totalling my car (physically, I walked away fine and no other driver was affected). Time slowed down, and I stepped into a weird, warped and other-worldy, perspective. The present moment moved so slowly and with a thick, loud, pulsating energetic force, it felt like wading through mud to cross a field during an electrical storm. There was nothing but the present moment, so crystal clear it was held in space and time. I witnessed from a perspective outside of my body moment to moment being unravelled, like a 1920s film reel, clicking slowly enough to expose the illusion of continuity of time. Snapshots of reality edged across the ‘real life’ picture house screen, while I felt a complete absence of the sensory world through my body. Simultaneously, thoughts and visions of future and past events came swimming through my mind as I watched, detached from the physical experience unfolding, while knowing also that I was right, smack bang in it.

I fell first, felt nothing, jumped straight up again, and stood staring in horror as the man in front careered slowly but directly towards a concrete pillar. Probably that took all of two seconds. It felt like hours. Thank God/Universe, he did not collide, but in comic book slow-motion fashion, slowed down to a near-halt, tilted and graceful veered to the ground on his left. He too got right up.

In deafening silence we stood facing each other, a few metres apart, in what felt like an old Western film scene. The Stand Off. We didn’t blink. We didn’t move. Our eyes were wide, like stunned rabbits in headlights.

‘Are you OK?’ I asked. Still I had not recognised my injury. Adrenaline flooded, I awaited his response. It did not come. He stood and continued to stare at me in shock. I made a mental assessment: he was standing, not bleeding, not hyperventilating. ‘I think he is OK.’

And then it hit me.

‘Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, I’ve broken my shoulder. Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.’ These words I repeated out loud as the pain struck and the panic erupted again. My arm was spasming violently out of control, the shoulder clearly not in place in its socket, and I suddenly felt sick and light headed. I howled into the open road ‘HELP!!! Someone help me!’

The old man seemed to be of no use. In fact after this moment I don’t remember seeing him again. (I later found out that he suffered minor injuries but is OK; and I paid him and his family damages for both his bike and health).

The next person I encountered was my friend’s dad. Like an Angel descending from the Heavens he suddenly appeared directly in front of me, as I stomped around, screaming, gasping and clutching my shoulder. I wasn’t quite sure it was real at first. There he was, on his push bike, staring at me. ‘Are you OK?’ he asked after another other-worldly, empty, vast, nothingness length of time passed. ‘No. I’ve broken my shoulder.’ I managed to say. ‘I’ll go get Tanya’ he said, incredibly calmly. His bright blue eyes and cool composure took my pain away, for a moment. Then I watched, feeling grief-stricken and terrified, as he peddled away in the direction he’d come from. ‘He’s going to take ages,’ I thought. ‘I’m all alone here.’ I was sweating and starting to really freak out.

Then a Russian woman appeared. Kind and compassionate she said she would help me, asked me questions and soothed me. I was desperately trying to stop my arm from moving agonisingly around against my will and could not find a way, in any yoga posture, squatting, standing, or sitting, to get comfortable. Finally the woman suggested I lie face down on the ground, my right arm down to my side to keep it still (the way I’ve since been told I must have fallen.) I realised she was right and surrendered. Face-planted on the Earth the woman shaded me and kept on talking to me, guiding me to breath. I realised I had one option only: meditate. I tuned right in. I prayed. I watched every breath, willed myself to stay calm, stay awake, stay alive. I called in all my angels and spirit guides, Archangels Michael and Raphael, my ancestors, my gurus. I prayed some more. And I breathed. And I breathed. And I breathed. Into the belly, out of the belly. Into the belly, out of the belly.

I kept praying, reminding myself of the miracles I had survived already, my faith in the Universe, my inner power, my resilience. But I didn’t feel strong. I was terrified and voices inside tried to convince me ‘you won’t make it.’ ‘Why is this happening?’ I was already asking, minutes into the ordeal.

And then I realised I wasn’t breathing, was drifting away, and I found again my breath. I was right back in Vipassana. ‘DON’T REACT!’ I heard my teacher scold. ‘Anicha, Anicha, Anicha’, I heard Goenka chuckle.

I watched as my body breathed. I observed as new and terrifying sensations flooded my being: rushes of acute pain, intense heat, sweating, aching, twitching, throbbing, my heartbeat, the ground beneath me.

‘Stay grounded. Stay grounded.’ I heard the voices of my Tantra teachers. And The Siddhas: ‘Grow your roots down low like a banyan tree.’ I felt Swami Sivananda and Swami Vishnudevananda, whose ashram I’d visited two months earlier and had found once more my Kali power. I remembered that there were thousands others suffering like this or worse at this very moment.

‘I’m inside a flower of life. I am safe, I am protected. I give Mother Earth full permission to ground me. I am that I am. I am here breathing.’ My mantras flooded back. ‘Trust the Universe. Breathe. All is well. All will be OK.’

And I breathed, and I breathed. And I breathed.

Many teachers came to my mind while I fought with all my might not to self-destruct and give up hope. I felt my family’s presence and my closest friends, dead and alive. And the medicine plant spirits. Aya, The Mother. I talked to the Earth, focused on blades of grass in front of me, sounds around, and the feeling of Pachamama holding me.

By now there was also a Russian man with me, who seemed to be a first aider and was assertively keeping me conscious and getting the information again which the Russian woman had asked for. He knew he had to keep me talking. These amazing beings, total strangers, kept me alive and calm(ish) as quite a scene formed behind me. My head being turned the other way and down into the Earth, I couldn’t see the group, but heard an aroused discussion behind me–talk of calling the police, where I was from, questions about insurance and money, more talk of the police. ‘I don’t have insurance’, I told the Russians. ‘Call a local ambulance. Don’t call the police.’

I couldn’t talk much after about twenty minutes and was starting to struggle with staying conscious. Then, just in time, three more Angels arrived: my soul sister Tanya, and brothers Rob and Darren, whom I’d met at Tanya and her partner Nic’s place, Wigwam, teaching morning yoga to and hanging out on many a hot, lazy morning. I cried with relief hearing and sensing familiar faces and felt the deepest gratitude as Tanya gently took my head in her hands and gave me Reiki, poured cool water over me, kept me shaded from the sun, and told me everything would be OK.

The police idea was being vetoed by my crew, an ambulance was on its way, and Rob, an ex-fire fighter and all-round legend of a mate, said he would come with me and stay with me the whole way. I recall the guilt and shame that my unhealed inner child felt at putting all these people out and worrying them. I felt the dread of having to call my parents back home and feeling their concern. I didn’t like causing a scene. But I wasn’t going to say no to help now. The prospect of going to a Third World country hospital alone without money or insurance as a white, hardly-dressed woman didn’t entice me.

The ambulance arrived about thirty minutes after I fell, which was some time after 11am (I wouldn’t put it past the Universe that it was 11.11). It took nearly an hour to get to the hospital. The Russian man had given me a strong painkiller on the scene–just as well, as there was no medicine on offer in the rickety old ambulance (think ‘Carry on Doctor’ era), just a steel wheelie trolley to lie on which it took three or four people to lift me onto. I was now on my back holding my arm in extreme pain, and feeling more drained and delirious by the minute. As we set off on our epic journey I saw the terror in Rob’s eyes. Bless him, he stayed so strong, kept me talking, telling funny stories and assuring me over and over that this would be one of my finest tales to laugh about one day soon. I tried hard to believe him. I kept breathing.

Two hundred speed bumps, and a ton of cortisol and adrenaline later, I was looking up at broad daylight again, just for a moment, before being wheeled into the A&E department of Mapusa government hospital. What I witnessed then was exactly what I had been dreading: an over-crowded, under-staffed, unhygienic hoard of people and objects. It was noisy and chaotic. It smelled like death. Rob did a great job sweet-talking the ground staff and fast tracked me into being assessed and x-rayed.

A male surgeon then appeared to deliver the verdict. He spoke directly to Rob, not me, explaining about my injury and that I would need surgery. ‘Excuse me’, I said. ‘Can you address me please? I am the patient, not my friend. I know I’m a woman but I am alive, and I understand English. And it is MY ARM.’ I was not impressed by the obvious institutional sexism. The surgeon looked bemused and finally looked me in the eyes to tell me I would need surgery, but it would not be possible that day. ‘Tomorrow maybe. Or Monday’, he said (it was Friday), and disappeared.

I was given a tetanus injection and a pain killer shot in my ass which I am guessing was morphine, as I started to feel floaty and dissociated from my body. I was taken to a female-only ward. It took a lot more sweet-talking for them to allow Rob to join me by my bedside, as it soon transpired we had stepped back in time into an archaic, patriarchal organisation, which treated its patients as invisible numbers in a system, not human beings.

To my disbelief, I was told a number of times by the female Indian staff (and patients!) to stop crying. ‘What’s wrong?’ they asked. I was astounded. ‘MY SHOULDER IS BROKEN!’ I shouted, outraged that I was being told to control my emotions at a time like this. Then it was suggested by one member of staff that it might be better that I go back to my home country. ‘WITH A BROKEN ARM?!’ I howled incredulously, ‘are you crazy?!!!’ They certainly thought I was, especially when I accidentally ripped the drip out of my arm sending blood spurting all over the floor as I defiantly got up to go to the bathroom and stealthily smoke a joint through the window. Rolling hash joints for me (a long-standing addiction) became Rob’s number one job while we waited and waited and waited for someone to offer me care.

Frightened at the prospect of being stuck in this god-awful place for another 48 hours before a surgeon would be available to see me, I was quickly losing faith in Love, Light and Rainbows. Well though Rob was doing to keep me going with stories, encouragement and joints, I sobbed with relief when my two closest female friends finally arrived. I saw the shock in their eyes and it made me cry more, though they held it together, their Goddess natures shining bright as they gracefully and calmly came to my rescue. Rachael, looking radiant as always despite the deep concern in her eyes, immediately placed a crystal on my chest as Tanya unpacked a bag of soothing comforts–extra clothes, blankets, wet wipes, facial spritzer, natural deodorant, chocolate, fruit, more crystals. My girls were here with me and it meant the world. Tanya had guests to look after back at Wigwam so left after a while, as did Rob, whose male presence had ruffled too many feathers in the ward. He must have been exhausted and had a flight home to catch in 24 hours. Rachael promised to stay the night with me, took over joint-rolling duty, and took charge of the situation, demanding I be given more pain killers, standing up for me when told I should calm down, and getting us food. Reassured by her Divine Feminine strength and love I started to drift off into a drug-induced sleep.

When I awoke the next morning, Rachael’s eyes no longer showed fear, but fierce determination. ‘I’ve been meditating for an hour’ she said. ‘I’ve called in all the Angels. You’re going to be OK. But we can’t stay here. It doesn’t feel right.’ Taking action, she contacted a good friend of ours, Indian, who knew the local area well. ‘Get the hell out of that hospital!’ he said. ‘Go to Galaxy, right now. Get out of there, it’s no good.’ And so we did. Voicing my concerns about my empty bank account (I still hadn’t had the courage to call my parents) she reminded me that money was no object; it always comes when we need it. ‘I can pay on my card for now’, she assured me. With my Sister by my side it didn’t take long to pack my things, discharge myself, and jump in a cab outside.

Stepping into Galaxy private hospital in Mapusa was like entering another world. The stark difference between state-provided healthcare and private was humbling. There were no other patients to be seen and it was pristine. Greeted by friendly reception staff, all we needed was a credit card, to fill out a form and a surgeon would be with me shortly. They could operate immediately, he said, if I opted for a regional anaesthetic. I’d have to wait six hours for a general. ‘Just do it now’, I said. And within an hour I was being sedated and taken into the operating theatre.

I’d had surgery before: aged 14 to have my appendix removed and aged 30 to terminate an unplanned pregnancy. But being half-awake was a new experience. ‘Can you feel that?’ the surgeon asked, after injecting me with anaesthetic which would numb just the arm being operated on. ‘Yes!’ I exclaimed, and he administered some more. The sedatives and anaesthesia worked, thank god, as did his calm reassurance that all would be fine, and I drifted in and out of sleep as I felt (without any pain) my arm being sliced open, yanked around, and metal pins screwed into my bone. I came to, Rachael by my side, in a private room with television and en-suite bathroom. What a contrast to the every-(wo)man’s hell hole I’d been in before. Two male friends came to see me: Eddy, the one who’d advised we move immediately, and another Rob, good friend and part of the Wigwam clan. I felt loved, I felt valued, I felt cared for. And I was determined that I would be OK. I finally spoke to my parents, both deeply concerned but supportive, and before I knew it I’d been discharged and sent on my way with a brown paper bag filled with pharmaceutical drugs. Come back in 8 days for a check up, and take it easy, the doctor advised.

Numbed by the meds, and nourished by the love and support of friends, I headed out in high spirits that evening to my favourite Goa restaurant, La Plage, and gorged on ridiculously inexpensive French food and wine. I felt overwhelmed with gratitude to be alive. I spent the first night at Rachael and my house, and the next day moved to a low-key beach-side guesthouse room, since I could no longer get around by driving. Serendipitously, Rachael’s lover/friend Darryl, who’d been due to arrive at the time we were stuck in the government hospital, had had his flight delayed by 24 hours. Also ‘coincidentally’ (I don’t really believe in coincidences) he’d had the exact same injury–bike accident, broken right humerus, surgery with plate and pins–just a few months before. He gave me loads of encouragement and advice. After settling into my new pad, arranging my medications, clothes, and other possessions as best I could with one arm, I woke up the next day grateful to be alive, and bursting with energy and ideas. Then another Angel appeared, named John, who’d years before had a terrible car accident in which he’d broken his leg, pelvis and spine, and had made a full recovery. He (with Rachael’s not-so-subtle persuasion) committed to helping me in any way I needed for the next two weeks while on his first ever holiday to India.  I felt reassured by these Divine messages, and messengers, surrounded by white light, my guides by my side, and sure the Cosmos was aligning for some profoundly deep healing and transformation.

I thought after the accident I would be fine. I thought I was fine. What I see now is that I was in shock / the ‘freeze state’  / in denial. My mind was telling me I was safe, but my feet were nowhere near the ground. The shock of the accident had brought me out of months of deep Depression and suicidal thoughts brought on by an on-off emotionally abusive and unstable relationship. I was so fucking high!

For the first few weeks my body was flooded with Kundalini energy. I felt connected to the Cosmos, purposeful and excited about a change in my life’s course. I saw the prospective benefits immediately. ‘I’m going to learn to write with my left hand’, ‘I am going to correct my poor posture and chronic pain caused by scoliosis / anxious holding patterns’, ‘I am going to eat more healthily and nourish my gut’, ‘I am going to become a famous author / artist / DJ / spiritual leader’, ‘I’m going to share openly my truth and inspire others’. I felt better than I had in a long time, for a while.

Aside from these birthing personal goals I felt an overwhelming need to connect with my family at home in a more authentic way. I bombarded them with WhatsApp voice notes, picture messages and links to YouTube videos which I felt conveyed the essence of who I was and my journey. (They were baffled.) I also started to feel genuine love towards my ex(es) who’d repeatedly abandoned my needs. I saw and felt their incompetencies and fears, finally not taking it all personally, and spent time meditating and sending my love and forgiveness to those who’d hurt me in the past.

Not for the first time, but with increased frequency, I communicated with the dead. I talked to my ancestors during one powerful Reiki session (given free by a beautiful light-worker, Sveta), first to my adoptive grandparents (all dead and three of whom I never met in the flesh) then my birth parents (dead or alive I do not know). I talked to and felt the presence of other passed souls–my friends Damia and Vicky, who’d both died in motor accidents, and Philip, whom I never met, but who’s picture I saw staring at me every day at Surf Club guesthouse where I stayed for the first two weeks after leaving hospital. He told me I was doing a great job and that I should cause a little trouble with the men who thought they ran the show. (I did!) I enjoyed these other-worldly chats. They were often less challenging than my interactions with embodied humans.

I also received a sudden hit of clarity about my relationships with people, men in general. I realised I had been playing The Good Girl / Whore archetype for my whole life, pushing down my desires and strong core beliefs to please others and keep a man happy. Triggered by a couple of unsupportive ‘friends’, I did something I very rarely did: I stood up for myself, telling them what I thought of their high and mighty opinions, and cut a couple of people out my life with no regret. I became acutely aware, too, of the damaging effects of patriarchy on myself and those around me. The Rebel rose out of me. I stopped playing nice to suit the archaic structures drowning in outdated and sexist religious doctrine. I walked with my head held high, spoke my truth as an awakened feminist woman, and ruffled a few feathers. I found myself angry with the world but without the Depression I was now motivated to be a part of the change towards true equality.

As has happened during previous huge energy surges of consciousness / Kundalini Awakenings, I re-found my gypsy spirit. My mother was the Earth, we were all One, and for us all to be happy and free was all that mattered to me. I downloaded symbols and information from the Ethers about the second coming of Christ, Christ Consciousness, The Chosen Ones. I spoke to the Angels, I spoke to the animals, the birds and the moon. I felt a calling, like I’d had two years before living in Bulgaria, to wave a Rainbow flag and be part of the rEVOLution, uniting people of all colours and creeds in a global uprising led by the Heart.

I had always felt immense empathy for the boys and girls selling largely mass produced tat to Westerners on the beach, traipsing up and down every day in the hot sun from morning to night to take their menial earnings home to their babies. I felt their desperation and their shame. Although in the past I’d been easily annoyed at the intrusion to my privacy on the beach, following the crash my heart exploded out to them. Almost at the bottom of the rung of India’s cultural caste system, I felt them to be true kindred spirits, feeling forgotten, trodden on and unwanted in this world, although I acknowledged that to them I was on some sort of pedestal left over from colonialism which played out daily in their lives as they served us lighter-skinned and more affluent mammalian counterparts. I felt the sting of guilt at my white privilege and gave my energy every day to visualising a better future for my favourite country in the world and all her people.

I sat with the beach sellers nearly every day, chatting about ways they could expand their horizons and use their creativity to give them personal freedom. We talked about motherhood and patriarchy, controlling men, and rules. I felt like Mother Teresa with Kali by her side: fierce and with a pure heart. These incredibly strong women, and men, were my inspiration. I welled up with a rare type of emotion–embarrassment mixed with appreciation, humility and divine grace–when one tough young mother of many, said to me : ‘Thank you. Thank you for coming out to be beach every day and showing the Indian women to be strong’, she said. ‘They would stay inside for months suffering if they got hurt but you are strong.’ It makes me cry to write that now. I felt the beautiful bond of Sisterhood, unmasked by social conditioning. Pure, Earthly, Love.

My non-Indian friends were an enormous support too. Upon leaving hospital one of the first things I did, quite bravely, was set up a JustGiving page. Rachael had paid on her credit card for my surgery and I decided it was time to ask for help from a broader pool of resources than my mum and dad to pay her back. I made a video. I cried. It was raw and real and a huge ego death to share my trauma and my vulnerability and admit I was broken, and broke. The result astounded me. I was overwhelmed by the love and support of dozens of people from around the world, some old friends, some current, some I hadn’t even met. Every message of support felt like a piece of my soul returning home. I raised £1,500, paying for my surgery and allowing me to rest and recover in the place I feel most at home. Gratitude was flowing.

I wrote down my blessings, my mantras, my goals. I meditated. I watched the sun setting every day, a ritual that gave me a deep sense of peace and gratitude and often brought emotions to the surface. The rest of the time I spent drawing and painting, something that had kept me sane during my teens and I was good at, but had tossed aside as a practice for a good decade upon entering the world of work.

One of my greatest accomplishments during this time was learning, slowly, to use my left hand to draw, write, and well, do everything, including wiping my ass. Tasks that required two hands proved far more difficult–tying shoelaces, tying back my hair, heavy lifting and opening bottles and jars, was impossible without assistance. To my sweet amazement, John stuck to his word, and kept appearing with fruit, joints, notebooks and pens, and his working two hands to assist me when I most needed it.

I don’t think I would have gotten through this period, however, without our two puppies, Bubble and Squeak, whose innocent, angelic love fed my body-mind-soul and kept my maternal instinct alive. I think I needed another life to care for while the shock was still fresh, to keep me humble and in positive vibrations. I am so grateful for these gorgeous souls entering my life–though for Bubble it was a bitter sweet ending to her story.

Upon learning about my accident Rachael had taken the pups back to where we’d found them, one of Arambol’s long-standing dog rescue centres, ‘I Love Goa Dogs’, to come and be with me in the hospital. We assumed they would be fine. But by the fourth or fifth day after my surgery, I felt a niggling feeling in my gut that they were not. One afternoon I could ignore it no longer and walked down the beach to check on them. I was devastated to see what affect our abandonment had had on their confidence and, by the state of their flea- and tick-ridden bodies, I knew they had not received enough care. Little Bubble immediately came up to me and I smothered her with cuddles, starting to pull the nasty bugs off her body and soothe her whines. Squeak refused to come near me: my heart broke as he stubbornly sat away from me, hunched down and forlorn. After about ten minutes I coaxed him over, and apologised profusely, kissed and nuzzled him until he relaxed in my arms. Then, holding both pups close to my chest, nestled in the crook of my working arm, I walked straight out of there. I bawled with rage and guilt that these babies had suffered because of my own ill health. I felt I’d failed as a mother and realised with grave clarity how fragile and precious life is at their tender age. (I also saw the stark parallel with what had happened in my own early life, which I saw as a profound Universal lesson playing out in physical reality. I too was separated from my mother as a baby and passed between various foster mothers before eventually being adopted into my current family. But more on that later.)

Though I’d have loved to have the puppies stay with me, the proprietors of my current guest house (and sadly I realised, Indians in general) had a less than sympathetic outlook towards our orphaned canines. They were not allowed. And, despite my high spirits, I was physically in a fragile state. So Rachael took the puppies back to the house she was now sharing with Darryl. A couple of days later, Rachael and Darryl both fell ill with a tummy bug and fever that kept them bed-ridden and running back and forth to the loo every ten minutes. As their health took a turn for the worse, so did the puppies’. Both needed near-constant care and a visit to the vet, an hour away by taxi, which was impossible in the current circumstances. To my dismay, Rachael called me a few days later to tell me the devastating news. ‘Bubble isn’t going to make it babe. I’m so sorry. But we have to let her go.’ I cried and cried and cried but realised this was another test from The Universe, and guilt, shame, anger and self-pity weren’t going to help. She passed away in the night and Rachael brought her to my new lodgings, wrapped up in our old clothes in a cardboard box for us to bury her. John stepped up to the task and dug a hole in the ground in a clearing off the road. Rachael said a prayer, and we sent Bubble back to the stars.

I had relocated, not by choice, but when told there were no longer rooms available (seemingly they could no longer accommodate my Divine Feminine power). I moved just down the road to a slightly eery, but magical all the same, yoga retreat centre by a huge lake. I decided I wanted to keep Squeak with me, and give Rachael and Darryl their lives back. I missed him so much and needed the Oxytocin. Begrudgingly, the owners agreed I could keep him there as long as he stayed in my room.

For the next two months I hardly left Squeak’s side. I adored him, was enchanted by him, and felt a fierce determination to protect his future wellbeing. I wasn’t going to let another puppy die–though there were moments when he pushed me to my limits with his whining and pissing on the floor and I often imagined throwing him into the lake. Motherhood wasn’t easy, that was for sure. Rachael and I had taken on the puppies with the intention of finding them a permanent home with locals.

We soon realised this was no easy task. As I’ve said, dogs are not valued in the same way in India as they are in the West, which is understandable given the far greater economic challenges and poorer social infrastructures (when you struggle to feed your own babies you have less empathy for those of other species). We tried our best, driving around in the early days with the puppies in tow looking for the ideal home to manifest itself, talking to everyone we met on our travels and asking if they’d take them. We had a few leads but nothing felt right. They’d either have been chained up (not an option) or probably neglected. We had to find them the right home.

After two weeks at the lake establishment I was kicked out, again! The son of the owner blamed the fact I had not paid yet for my proposed monthly stay, though I clearly wasn’t going to do a runner. I knew it was something else. Despite explaining I had every intention to pay, I had just had to first sort out the damages I owed to both my bike rental guy, and the guy I’d collided with. I explained I would go right now to the ATM, but with fury in his eyes he declared I must leave in the next two hours! Again I knew this had nothing to do with space, or money, but a personal dislike they’d taken to my ‘out there’ modern femininity, and perhaps too to my innocent little dog who’d done nothing but given joy to the yoga students who passed by and gave him daily attention. I packed my things with no help from the disapproving, judging patriarchal male staff, now (just) strong enough to carry my backpack, two another bags, and Squeak in one arm. I was furious, but undeterred. I felt connected to magic, to my inner power, and had faith that The Universe would have something even better waiting for me.

I was right. I found a young boy on the road and gave him some money to help me carry my bags, and walked to the beach. The first place I gravitated towards was Lover’s Corner, where I was greeted by Ganesh. With his beaming smile, cocky but harmless sexual banter, and a laugh as outrageous as mine, I felt safe immediately. A soul brother for sure. Within five minutes he had offered me his room, free of charge, and  promised to take care of Squeak when I returned to the West. My prayers had been answered.

Squeak soon became renamed as Bruno, which I somewhat reluctantly admitted was a better fit if he was to get any street cred and the respect he needed to survive from humans. Having him there gave me my ikigai (reason for being) every day. For the first month we were together he slept in my bed–as much a comfort for me as for him, I’m sure. I was fiercely protective, perhaps over-attached in some eyes, though I knew deep down that my unconditional love and attention was the key to his survival at this point. I was relieved and touched that an older female dog, Julie, had co-adopted him with me. She turned up every day to see him, showing him how to tussle and fight, and hold his own with the many other stray or restaurant abiding beach dogs. Slowly I loosened my grip and realised I needed to wean him off me a little before I went home. I also wanted to see how well Ganesh would look after him while I was away. So I moved just a few hundred metres down the road to another simple beach hut run by lovely Ayurvedic experts.

I loved my daily routine–waking up alone whenever I felt like it, drinking coffee, eating breakfast and smoking joints while downloading music or writing in my diary in the place I was staying, then heading to see Bruno, Ganesh, and whoever else would turn up at Lover’s Corner to spend the day chatting with, dancing with, and watching the sun go down. The ocean and the elements were healing me. A good friend Robby would often come and sit with me, bringing delights such as chalk pastels, paints and brushes, fruit. An authentic hippy, artist and writer, he was inspiring me to dive into my creative well, reminding me that I wasn’t just a massage therapist and yoga teacher; I had forgotten other passions and had a lot more to share and explore in this world. He, and other male friends, Rob and Paul, were restoring my faith in the male population. They seemed genuinely to enjoy my company, see me for who I was, and had no hidden agenda of getting in my knickers (not that I wear any). This was a novel feeling! I felt stronger in my body every day, and had started using my shoulder again by gently getting back to my yoga practice. I danced every day. I even became a DJ, playing a few nights at Lover’s Corner from my itunes playlists. I loved it!

My contentment, even euphoria, lasted a while–more than a month. Then things started to go downhill. Rachael left to go back to the UK, which was sad, after we’d spent four months together nearly every day. Bruno got sick, a common skin infection that led to swollen glands in his neck and him temporarily looking like the Elephant Man (I managed to get to the vet but felt terrible seeing him not in a state of good health, which went on for a while). Then I went out, got smashed, and lost my bank card. The hangover lingered for days. I felt vulnerable again and ashamed of my addictions and lack of responsibility. Instead of asking for help, I started to slip back into my lifelong pattern of negative self-talk, shame, self-hate and fear of the future. The money in my account was running out again and I didn’t know what to do next. I knew I couldn’t live on fundraising forever nor did I feel ready to go back to work. I then found out that the friend I’d lived with in Bulgaria had been institutionalised against her will in a German mental hospital. She was being abused, she said. I was brought into her drama and felt her pain. Then my ex-boyfriend, who’d hardly communicated with me for six months, except for a nasty message which I’d received just before my shoulder accident, again sent me some cutting words which made my heart ache and my head spin.

After a week or so of feeling low, and running up debts all around my neighbourhood, I realised I had to face the bank card situation and go and see my friends to find out if someone could lend me money in rupees which I could transfer to their English bank account. I was nervous about being on bikes, but with no cash, and an inner voice that said I should be brave and get over it, I walked out to the road and asked the first person I saw for a lift. He was wearing a helmet, had a decent bike and didn’t look like a dick, so I entrusted him to take me down the road to Mandrem. He didn’t speak much English but understood and agreed. ‘It’s only a ten minute ride’ I told my anxious belly. ‘It can’t happen twice.’

Sitting on the back of his bike I realised how nervous I was. I did what I always do when scared: I closed my eyes and talked to the Angels, asked for protection and grounding from the Earth, and put sacred geometry symbols around my energy field. Calmer, I opened my eyes again, just in time to see a car pull right across the road in front of us as we came round a bend. It was a ridiculously dangerous move and there was nothing my Russian driver could do. We were going to hit it. ‘Oh my fucking god, it’s happening again’ I thought. I was not only terrified, now I was angry.

I fell again to my right, jumped up, and immediately grabbed my wrist. There was no doubt it was broken. The adrenaline roared through me and I stared at my arm in disbelief, curved like a snake, throbbing and swelling by the second. Oh boy that fucking hurt! Sweltering in the heat and by the side of a busy road I jumped into action. There was no time to panic.

There was a stall selling drinks with a table and a couple of plastic chairs. I sat down and asked the lady working there to give me some pineapple juice and some ice in a plastic bag for my wrist. I noticed a gash in my right knee. ‘That’ll need stitches’ I thought, but could hardly feel it in contrast to the pain in my wrist. I propped my leg up on a chair, lent my broken arm on the table, and got my phone out. My left hand shaking, I managed to leave a voice note for Tanya, explaining what had happened, though I accidentally sent it to Rachael first, who was by now back in the UK. I realised I had low battery and was feeling very light headed. I looked around for the Russian man. He was standing by the road looking grief-stricken. With his hand on his heart he looked me dead in the eyes. ‘I’m so sorry’ he said. Feeling his remorse, I felt no judgement or anger. ‘Are you OK?’ I asked. He had a bloody t-shirt but didn’t seem to be badly injured. He didn’t reply. That was the last time I saw him.

I soon I realised why he’d fled. A very angry middle-aged Indian man was suddenly hollering at me right up in my face.

‘You owe me money! Give me now money! 8000 rupees. Now! You crashed into my car. We rented this car in Mumbai and we don’t have insurance. I need you to pay me now. You damaged my car. You must pay now!’

I was taken aback. Seeing red, I took a breath. His eyes were dead: soulless, psychopathic.

‘My arm is broken’ I said as calmly but assertively as I could, trying not to project my rage at his lack of empathy and make the situation worse. His wife hovered next to him, saying nothing. Clearly he was in charge. I tried calmly to explain I was injured, showing them my visibly deformed arm, and attempting to get the sympathy of his wife. (It didn’t work.)

‘Can you help me please? My phone has low battery and I need help, right now. I need to go to a hospital, right now. Can you call Galaxy Hospital and see if they can send an ambulance please? My arm is broken. Look, see? I need help now. I was not driving. I was a passenger.’

After a lot of back and forth he finally made a phone call, though I am not convinced it was a real one. ‘They don’t have ambulances today’ he said and then hung up the phone. Tanya was calling me. She was on her way.

‘I need a taxi. Can somebody get me a taxi?’ I could not believe the lack of help I was being given by the people around me and with the guy continually arguing in my face I was losing my cool. The pineapple woman was asking me to pay her for the drink, and the angry Indian man would not stop trying to blackmail me. ‘All they care about is getting my money. Where is their humanity?’. I felt outraged and hurt. Thank god Tanya arrived quickly and helped diffuse the situation. With her patiently listening and calmly responding to the man’s persistent accusatory demands, I called my taxi guy (the one who’d rented me my scooter from the first crash). He couldn’t believe it was happening again and said he’d send someone immediately. With the man still aggressively demanding my cash and trying to stand in my way, I finally got into a cab, a good half an hour after I fell, and instructed the concerned, sympathetic driver to go to Galaxy Hospital. At least I knew the drill this time. But again I knew I didn’t have money in the bank to cover private hospital fees and was worried they would not help me.

‘It’s me again!’ I joked when I arrived, though it was far from funny. I was x-rayed and told I needed surgery. Luckily they trusted me enough to go ahead without the credit card this time. I assured them one of my friends would be along shortly to sort it out. I was back in the same private room, two months to the day exactly, waiting to go under the knife. All my joy, courage and hope vanished. I was in a black hole of despair.

I woke up from the surgery screaming in pain. This time I’d had a general anaesthetic and I was confused and delirious. My wrist hurt, a lot. The doctor came in and asked what was wrong, and then Robby appeared. He stroked my head, soothing me, and told me he’d sorted out the bill downstairs. Grateful as I was for his presence, I could not be soothed. Something in me had died that day. There was something seriously wrong with The Universe, or more likely with me, I now felt. It didn’t make any sense. How could this be happening, again?

I tried to get back to normal on returning home from hospital but it was futile. I had to admit defeat. I booked a flight back to London for a few days’ time, to my parents’ relief. I was devastated, feeling deep remorse for my poor body. More than that, I was harrowed by what had happened. My lovely friends did all they could to cheer me up for the remaining week in Goa but joy and gratitude had definitely left the building. Rob, Robby, and Paul were continually checking in on me. Robby helped me pack my things, settle my debts and move to Wigwam for the last few days. I managed to put a smile on my face in public and even got into the party spirit for the final gathering of the season in which I’d take part, helped by my usual favourite concoction of cocktails, MDMA, and joints. But I was far from my usual self. The pain was almost intolerable in my wrist as I had two metal pins sticking through the skin which screamed with every slight movement. My shoulder ached from wearing the sling, my knee had been stitched and I had to walk with it almost straight. I realised the drugs were no longer working to lift my mood. Nothing was. I felt desperately low, and extremely anxious. Going home with another injury felt shameful and depressing and knowing I’m be incapacitated for six weeks in a cast, at a bare minimum, was overwhelming. My ex-boyfriend was suddenly at the forefront of my mind. The prospect of being in the same city with this hate he apparently felt for me–and my unresolved love for him–compounded my misery.

Serendipity again ensured my protection on the journey home, as I found myself by chance sitting next to Paul on the flight. I took two valiums and slept the whole way. My mother met me at Gatwick and helped me with my bags home–though I’d only have 24 hours with her before she was going to America for a 3 week long-before-planned family trip. Rather strangely, she’d fallen off a push bike a few days before and also hurt her right knee. The two of us hobbling through the airport did make me laugh. And it was a beautiful feeling of relief to see her again.

Arriving back at my family home in what was to me, freezing cold weather in mid-April, was a huge shock to my system. I’d just spent five months in 35-40 degree heat and humidity. Here I couldn’t go outside without fifteen layers on, and my right knee was still very tender. I couldn’t bend my leg properly. It was uncomfortable to walk, to sit, to shower, to go to the toilet, to move at all. I couldn’t get comfortable. I couldn’t cook. I lost my appetite completely. I spent most of the first few days wrapped up in duvets in bed. I was scared, really scared and my whole body hurt.

As mentioned earlier, I thought I was OK after my first accident, but in retrospect, I was not. I was in high: partly from the near-death-experience, partly from the love from friends and little Squeak, and partly because I was fuelling myself with caffeine, nicotine, cannabis, raw chocolate and fruit for most of the day, eating just one cooked meal in the evening –and on occasion drinking alcohol and taking MDMA. This was nothing new for me, and had evidently worked for a while, years in fact. I’d long been in the habit of delaying eating a meal until I was really hungry. I called this intermittent fasting, but in retrospect it was also a hangover from the disordered eating (bingeing, throwing up, starving myself), low self esteem and body image obsession that had started in my early teens. I’ve smoked tobacco on and off (mainly on) since I was 14, and cannabis almost daily (aside from when teaching on retreats, or attending meditation, massage and yoga courses) since 2014. And while I’ve dramatically cut back on alcohol and hard drug binges I certainly still have it in me to go wild and party hard with the help of plant based stimulants and narcotics.

I had been aware of my behavioural and chemical addictions for a long time but as anyone who’s experienced drug addiction or disordered eating will know, seeing it and changing it are two different things. It never occurred to me after my first accident to give up smoking; I felt I needed it, even more than before. After the second accident I was forced to accept that my coping mechanisms (smoking, drugs, alcohol, toxic relationships) were no longer serving me, though this didn’t happen overnight. Before it got better, it was going to get a LOT worse.

But … if any of you are still with me (?!) I imagine your eyes might need a rest. This is the longest blog I’ve ever written, and I am by no means finished with this story. I think I should continue this in another post. I have a lot to share about what happened from April until now (mid-August) including my experience of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), panic attacks and anxiety, realisations and memories of childhood trauma, addiction, attachment and separation disorder, and the very slow and painful journey it has been coming out of denial and back into my body. And, on a more positive note–how I have been learning lessons, facing fears, breaking habits, owning my truth, and re-finding my purpose.

More to come …

With love, gratitude, acceptance, and an ever-growing faith in telling one’s own truth,

Olivia x

Today’s workplace On retreat with @souladventures in #Goa Such gratitude for the opportunity to share the gift of deep therapeutic (Raynor) massage in my dream location Wow, so blessed #love #service #gratitude #souladventures #vibrateatyourhighestfrequency #kubdalini #yogaretreat #massage #healing #love

A post shared by Olivia Wood (@oliviawoodhealing) on Mar 10, 2017 at 12:27am PST

6th trip to #india and I’ve finally made it to the Taj. Two words: beautiful, and busy. #architecture #wonder #tajmahal #agra #palace #beauty #tourism #history

A post shared by Olivia Wood (@oliviawoodhealing) on Mar 25, 2017 at 11:04pm PDT

Mother Ganga She takes my breath away … #ganga #divine #source #shakti #prana #water #life #flow #mother #gratitude #love #india #justwow

A post shared by Olivia Wood (@oliviawoodhealing) on Mar 28, 2017 at 8:52pm PDT

Beautiful spot for Surya Namaskar! #overtherainbow #rishikesh #shiva #shakti #heaven #earth #ganga #source #waterfalls #mountains #nature #rainbows #creative #art #collaboration #community #spirit #love

A post shared by Olivia Wood (@oliviawoodhealing) on Apr 13, 2017 at 4:05am PDT

How many Didis can you fit in a photo? Fun times at Neelkanth Shiva Temple #shiva #pilgrimage #india #mountains #rishikesh #temple #selfie

A post shared by Olivia Wood (@oliviawoodhealing) on Apr 24, 2017 at 2:59pm PDT

Waterfall Kundalini SHAKTI FLOW – 5 mins of bliss on YouTube now https://youtu.be/7Eced-qwG_c #shaktiflow #yogavideo #yogapractice #kundalini #mudra #breath #love #india

A post shared by Olivia Wood (@oliviawoodhealing) on May 25, 2017 at 10:24am PDT

Getting that Shakti flowing I love my life! #dance #yoga #move #breathe #sadhana #prana #kundalini #flow #water #chi #movement #open #breath #connect #letitgo

A post shared by Olivia Wood (@oliviawoodhealing) on Mar 9, 2017 at 2:59am PST

On the move again #india #indianrailway #trains #journey #move #yoga #change #adventure #energy #flow

A post shared by Olivia Wood (@oliviawoodhealing) on Mar 25, 2017 at 6:56am PDT

Sad end to a life. Damaged in a fishing net and washed up on a beach. Estimated by locals 100 years old. He / she (?) was given a burial. Onto the turtle world in the sky. #Rip #turtle #beach #death #life #cycles #circles #man #nature #conflict #harmony #respect #allcreatures #souljourneys #love

A post shared by Olivia Wood (@oliviawoodhealing) on Jan 28, 2017 at 10:03pm PST

Morning from #GOA !

A post shared by Olivia Wood (@oliviawoodhealing) on Feb 2, 2017 at 10:05pm PST

oliviawood_is@hotmail.com

https://www.facebook.com/pg/oliviawoodhealing/

Please note, I don’t like to refer to these incidents as terror attacks, as the word ‘terror’ is, well ‘terrifying’, and the last thing we need in today’s world is more fear. In order to change our world, we MUST stay in the heart. Words and ideas, when internalised repeatedly, have a huge impact on our minds, affecting our belief systems, actions, and reactions, as individuals and a collective. So I would like to change the rhetoric.

If we are to change our world, which I believe the overwhelming majority of human beings on this planet do, we must look to loving solutions to today’s problems. We must change this dialogue of fear, internally (in our minds) and externally (in conversations, especially online). The reason is simple …

FEAR breads hate, separation, panic, poor decision-making, violence, anger, greed, jealousy – all those painful emotions and actions which we KNOW, through our own experience, do not serve us. LOVE, on the other hand, is the absence of fear. Love, the frequency of the heart (which has its own brain by the way!) emits a healing frequency that allows for understanding, compassion, collaboration, intimacy, forgiveness, and unity. It is these values that will shape our new world.

In light of the upcoming UK elections (the campaign though suspended by the incumbent party due to incidents in London) I thought I would write down my own manifesto, from the heart, for our world.

Please try it yourself too! We all live on this planet and we should all have an equal say in determining its future. That’s what I believe.

So, here goes … in no particular order :

My Manifesto for a New, United, Peaceful World

1. AHIMSA. My one ‘rule’ for us as a global society would be for all human beings to practice ‘Ahimsa‘ – non-violence to oneself, or others. Including our Planet. Of course this relies on equal access to resources, free and equal education and healthcare for All, and other basic human rights, which I’ll cover below.
2. NO BORDERS. I never grasped the idea of national borders as a child, and now an avid traveler, my passport is my most valued possession. It would be nice to bypass the long immigration queues, masses of fear-inducing armed guards, and huge walls, and be allowed to travel Planet Earth without restriction. The freedom to travel and live wherever one wants in the world is to me a fundamental human right.
3. FREE AND EQUAL ACCESS TO OUR NATURAL RESOURCES FOR ALL. The World’s natural resources are running out. No seriously, they are about to run out. Oil takes millions of years to form under the ground and it’s almost gone. And no, our governments do not have another solution in place. So wouldn’t it be fair and just for us All to use what’s left on an equal basis? (And then work together to find solutions that last?)
4. FREE AND EQUAL CREATIVE EDUCATION FOR ALL. ‘All’ meaning every Human Being on this planet. ‘Creative’ meaning a flexible, ever-changing approach which allows children the freedom of choice over what they learn, in ways that stimulate their creativity. Creative minds are needed to shape our brighter future.
5. MEDITATION FOR ALL, including in ALL SCHOOLS, HOSPITALS, HOSPICES, CARE HOMES & PRISONS. Because, quite simply, if you do not learn to look inside, you will never access your full potential. Meditation has been proven to reduce stress and anxiety, aid concentration, increase productivity and creativity, and reduce violence and crime. Find out more here.
6. TOTAL DISARMAMENT WORLDWIDE. You cannot fight fire with fire. History and Present Day are a gruesome and real testament to this. We will not end ‘terror’ in this world – in our minds or in our physical world – by talking about killing each other, by owning and using firearms, by allowing the police to shoot-and-kill, and by debating in Parliament about whether or not to exterminate the entire Human Race with nuclear weapons. Enough is enough. Let’s try something ‘new‘.
7. All money currently spent on producing weapons, training the military, and drafting defense policy will be reallocated into the below avenues, for the betterment of All sentient beings on this planet. (See point 8.) In the UK that amounts to 48 BILLION DOLLARS a year. In the USA, a whopping 611 BILLION DOLLARS per yer. Wow. Just think what we could do with all that money for the good of mankind.
   
8. KEY INVESTMENTS (time, money, research) FOR OUR FUTURE: #1 The future of our Planet and life on Earth. #2 Redistribution of our world’s resources to be fair and just for All. #3 Research into consciousness-expanding drugs and plant medicine – to eventually replace pharmaceutical medicine which relies on the Oil industry to survive (Oil is running out, remember). #4 New and radical models to be debated and voted on – by us All – with the primary aim for humanity to survive, and THRIVE.

I like the number 8, so I’ll stop there …

What do you think? Utopian? Unrealistic? Bloody fantastic?! Let me know in the comments. But no hate please. Only love.

I truly believe we can make this world a better place – if we stay in the heart. We must recognise the disastrous effects of fear on our health and our future existence, and learn methods to reconnect with our true nature – love. Change starts within each and every one of us.

Eternal love, O x

Here’s one of mine from back in India in February. I just found it in my diary. It’s been a helpful guide for me today.

I highly recommend putting pen to paper and writing, with your hand (left or right), whatever comes. Your thoughts, your feelings, your intentions, your dreams, your fears. Write it down, burn what you don’t need, and occasionally check in to see where you’re at.

Did you manifest your dreams?

Start with a Gratitude List. 3 things a day. Write them down before you go to sleep.

Then watch the magic unfold.

With love, always, O x

I am grateful for …

1. Bird’s kindness & generosity in helping me settle in & feel at home.
2. Bird surprising me with such a thoughtful & helpful offer to come with me to Goa to collect my things.
3. The Universal Guidance which brought me away from Goa to Gokarna, an opportune place to be at peace, alone / with similar vibrational people, where I can exercise, live simply, make things, practice yoga, work / share my healing journey, talk, write, swim, sing, dance, and so much more (the things that make my heart smile). :)
4. Happy Harry’s yoga class this morning. Reminding me that despite how I beat myself up for my lack of practice, I have progressed a lot since my last class with him 3 years ago.
5. The perspective given on my broken bones, broken heart & other traumas through reading Journey of Souls by Michael Newton, watching various YouTube videos & meeting others who have had similar or worse stories. It’s good to share my story.
6. Bird’s & my shared story. I like having someone I can open to who listens to me and has similar experiences. She empathises and has solutions which make sense to me.
7. The sound of the waves outside all around me 24-7
8. Getting back to writing. This could be the place … I had been dreaming of a beach to start my book hadn’t I …
9. Work opportunities coming up: Trish, Obonjan, Dolores, Meadows.
10. Sylvie for reminding me about gratitude lists :)

Albert Einstein

This is an auspicious time of year for me. Three years ago almost to the day I experienced the first earth-shattering surge of Kundalini energy rising through my Being, which opened my chakras from root to crown and showed me realms of existence beyond my wildest imagination. It was a day that changed my life and perspective on ‘reality’ thereafter. The following year, 2015, at around this time, I became a Yoga teacher, drank Ayuaschsa for the first time, and sent my first soul to The Light. Then in June 2016 Kundalini again came into my life. While in Dharamkot, Dharamsala, the site of my initial awakening and where I did my Yoga Teacher Training course, I was initiated into the Siddha Kundalini lineage by teacher Dani Sher. Three days ago, helped perhaps by the Super New Moon, I finally started the 21-day purification practice given to us during our initiation to activate Kundalini energy and clear my inner Being so that I can step fully onto my path as a healer.

Powerful stuff, I can tell you!

So much change has occurred in the last three years to my inner and outer worlds that it’s no surprise really that I needed time to integrate all that has happened. Being catapulted from the Third Dimension into states of consciousness that I never knew existed was a lot for my thinking, ‘rational’ mind to take in. Because of that, and other reasons (resistance, denial, escape, a.k.a. FEAR), I have found my spiritual awakening difficult to get my head around, and to talk about. Now I feel it’s time. One thing I’ve learnt during this period of ‘silence’ i.e. without sharing my journey to the big wide world web, and even with close friends and family, is that EVERYTHING happens at the perfect time, no matter how hard our conditioned minds try to rush us forward to the finish line (which of course is imaginary, as there is no end, and no beginning).

Let’s go back to 2014, so I can give some context to the journey I am on. This was the year I decided to leave The Matrix, for good. Many years of depression and months of crippling anxiety had lead me to what is known in the West as a ‘nervous breakdown’, and what I now know was the start of the beautiful process of Coming Home.

Rather than kill myself, which I’d considered many times, in a Divine twist of fate I was guided to India and to Yoga, both of which opened doorways to emotional and spiritual healing and gave me the courage to begin life again in a way that was true to my heart. New to yoga and meditation, I began to feel things on a deeper level than ever before, tuning into painful memories stored in my emotional body, and releasing old patterns of thinking that had kept me chained to my desk, technology and material possessions for years beforehand. After the week-long retreat in January 2014 which began this process of self-enquiry, I booked a one-way flight back to India with one intention: to be happy.

At the time of my awakening in May 2014 I’d spent nearly three months allowing myself for the first time to ‘just be’. This wasn’t an easy concept for me to grasp, or to practice in the beginning; there were many mind programmes to become aware of and let go of, particularly the belief that by not ‘working’ I was not a valuable member of society. My self worth for so long had been determined by academic grades, money, and externally acquired knowledge. I had no idea about another type of knowledge that could only be accessed from within.

In Dharamkot I met Sophia La Pastina , who’s powerful awakened Spirit no doubt had a direct impact on my own awakening. After my first experience of her teaching I returned each morning to practice Tantra Yoga, where through Pranayama (breath-work), Bandhas (energy locks) and Kriyas (energy cleansing practices) I began to feel an incredible power inside that I never knew was there. I was learning to stoke my inner fire, the Yang, masculine energetic force, bringing an empowering inner strength and determination to my practice, and positively affecting my thought patterns and emotions once class was finished. I was discovering too about another aspect my Being – the Yin, feminine side, the passive energy of receiving, of holding space – an energy which is demonised in Western society and which I did not fully understand until I was told to stay in one place and ’surrender’ (perhaps the most powerful word in the human language).

Through Sophia’s teaching, and the example of others I was meeting on the spiritual path, I was learning to let go of a lot of what I had thought made me ‘me’. I was taught for the first time how to observe the mind, the body, and the world without attachment or judgment, and to exist without the need to ‘do’ anything. I was beginning to understand I had the tools inside to ‘become’ anything I wanted, while knowing there was no pressure; that everything happens at the right time and place, and all is perfect just as it is. The shackles of my Conditioned Western Mind were lifting and I felt for the first time in my life free to be my true authentic Self.

And that’s when it happened – in a moment of absolute peace and contentment, The Divine Feminine energy which resides within us all, woke up.

I was lying alone on my bed in my room in Dharamkot, naked, in Savasana. After a beautiful long night with friends, talking and sharing with hearts open, I was attempting to get some sleep so that I could enjoy some of the day which had already begun. I felt incredibly horny.  Rather than tend to the urge, I lay flat, eyes closed, and began observing the feeling of sexual energy building in the lower part of my Being.

Suddenly the sensation cranked up a notch, so much so I became a little alarmed. I was distinctly aware for the first time not just of a tingling energy in my physical body, but a swirling force that engulfed and surrounded me. I must be feeling my sacral chakra, Mind reasoned.

I continued to watch and feel what was happening, and then suddenly, it exploded. The swirling intensified and began to rise like a snake up to my belly and into my heart. I was becoming increasingly hot, my whole body now consumed with the electrifying sensation of orgasm and it showed no signs of waning. No longer in control of my movements, I rose out of bed and found myself on the floor performing asanas (yoga postures) and mudras (hand gestures) which I had never before been taught. I was moving as if possessed, with a grace and strength I found astounding.

No thoughts entered my mind for the hour or two that followed. It’s hard to say exactly how long this experience lasted since I had no concept of time or space. I was on a different plane entirely. From the bedroom floor I moved to the bathroom, where I continued to sway and undulate without will, my body moving in mysterious ways, consumed by a Divine force that overwhelmed and moved me. I remember looking at my naked body in absolute awe, seeing it for the first time in my life as perfect in every way. I caressed my skin with tenderness, crying tears of gratitude at this gift of a body I had been given – so beautiful, so powerful, I felt my heart might explode.

Then, as the energy moved to my higher chakras I saw a brilliant bright light through my Third Eye tunnelling away from me to infinity. I knew instinctively that I could move to it, if I wanted. Kneeling on the bathroom floor, my hands in prayer, I stared into the light and started to say out loud, over and over, ‘I surrender, I surrender’.

And then, just as I prepared to leave my body and rocket launch into the cosmos, I heard a knock at my door. It was my friend, coming to see if I wanted to join our group in town to sign up for the Dalai Lama’s upcoming talk. ‘Bring my passport’, she shouted.

At first I wasn’t sure I’d be able to speak. Though I heard the words ‘just a minute!’ come out of my mouth. I glanced in the mirror and was relieved to see my body still in tact, though my pupils were rather more dilated than usual. I grabbed my sunglasses, passport, pulled on some clothes, and tentatively joined my friends outside.

Though in shock about what had just occurred, a profound sense of peace came over me as we strolled down the mountain to Maclaud Gange. I didn’t speak much, preoccupied with seeing, as if for the first time, the world around me. The nature had come alive – the colours so magnificent and the light so bright I was glad to have my glasses. My friends too were glowing iridescently. I could see their auras surrounding their physical forms. On reaching the town the energy became more difficult to take – the bustle of the crowd and beeping of horns was overwhelming in my newfound active state. I felt dizzy, and was relieved when the administration process was over and we returned back to the tranquility of the forest.

Kundalini energy continued to work through me for the 11 days that followed, during which I saw demons, angels, Gods, monsters, and accessed ‘portals’ to what appeared to be past dimensions. Scenes of soldiers in tin hats carrying weapons, for example, appeared to me as I viewed the world with my Third Eye and Crown Chakra open. Ganesha was everywhere – in the rocks, in the clouds, in the trees – and other physical objects became ‘inscribed’ with sacred symbols that I recognised, though could not fathom with my regular two eyes. There was no longer just a physical world in my vision but an indescribable convergence of ‘existences’ simultaneously present in time and space. (Needless to say, neither concept has since made sense to me.) I understood exactly what was this ‘Bliss’, ‘Nirvana’, or ‘Enlightenment’ people were seeking. It was, as Tantric master Osho puts it, “a deep orgasm with the whole”.

“On nothing Mahamudra rests. Mahamudra, the literal word, means the great gesture, or the ultimate gesture, the last that you can have, beyond which nothing is possible. You die, and you become a god. You disappear, and you become the whole. Here the drop disappears, and there the ocean comes into existence.”

It was just as Osho describes. I was One with all that was, ever was, and ever will be. And the feeling was of pure, unadulterated Bliss. On top of Mount Triund, which I climbed after two days of no sleep (so consumed with life-force I had no need), I looked out at the mountains, valleys and sky and weeped tears of joy that, finally, I understood why I was here on this Earth. And the answer was: just, to be.

When I left India the following day however, the visions ceased, the energy settled and I was left again with my over-thinking mind, wondering what on earth had occurred. Naively I had thought I’d stay up there with the gods and the angels, that nothing could ever penetrate the ecstasy I felt in the Himalayas. Naive I was, indeed.

What I now know, three years on, is that Kundalini Awakening is a process. It is a process of un-learning ALL we have been taught, ALL we have believed to be true and ALL we have become accustomed to ‘being’, thinking and doing. To maintain this state of Enlightenment, there was work to do. To live fully in The Light means living fully in Awareness, the true aspect of our Being which exists beyond the mind, beyond the body, and beyond society. To access this, our full potential, takes regular practice. Meditation is vital. It also takes a lot of courage – to face our deepest fears and let go of anything and anyone which stands in the way of our destined path, is not always easy in ‘reality’.

Of course I resisted. My Ego – meaning the conditioned personality I have been given and developed throughout the course of my time on Earth as ‘Olivia Wood’ – clung on, and I soon found myself back to the same old patterns of negative thoughts and behaviours which had clouded me for so long. It wasn’t as easy to merge with the whole when back in London. I was surrounded by people who’d most likely think I’d lost my marbles if I told them what had happened, and whose lives and belief systems were very far removed from those I’d met in India. As hard as I tried to ‘trust the Universe’ and ‘surrender’, I wasn’t yet ready to take this huge leap of faith into the unknown without the guidance of people who understood the journey. I hadn’t yet found my support network or my voice on these matters.

And so, I put to the back of my mind my brief moment of Enlightenment and tried to fit back into the life from which I’d fled. Soon I’d fallen back into old habits and addictions – drugs, comfort food, toxic relationships, social media, and most depressing, ‘work’. After a few months the pressure to do, do, do became overwhelming and I booked another flight to India to begin again the process of letting go.

The same pattern repeated again, and again. India would heal me, and London would break me, although never in a way that it did pre-awakening. Though I’ve had periods of deep sadness, regret and pain in these last few years, a consequence of ignoring my intuition, repeating the same patterns, and refusing to learn the lessons I needed to, never have I given up on life like I did before. Because what that experience in Dharamkot showed me is that giving up on life simply is not an option! Life goes on, and on, and on, for lifetimes, whether I choose to participate in it or not. My body will die but my soul cannot; it is eternal. This 3-Dimensional realm is as illusionary as the images we watch on the television. Time is a man-made notion which distorts our sense of reality. We really are all connected – to each other, plants, animals, and everything else in this Universe. And so, while allowing myself times of despair, self-pity, anger, and resentment, they have gradually become fewer and further between, and each time I’ve returned to India my inner powers have grown stronger and stronger.

This year, 2017, I decided would be different. The number 17 is special to me as it’s my birthday. I see this number often, accompanied with my sister’s date of birth, 11 (11:17) – when I’m one with the whole. This is also known as being ‘in the flow’ and happens during times of intense creativity when I feel I am downloading straight from the cosmos, free from my Egoic Thinking Mind. After making the same mistakes again in 2016 and ending it in low vibrations, I was determined to make 2017 ‘my year’.

I set my intentions to live exactly as I pleased, without any outside interference into my actions. I decided to live purely from the heart, in places that bring my soul alive, doing just what feels good in the moment. I promised myself to trust that all would be OK, knowing that whatever is meant to be, will be. And I decided once and for all to put my own healing process as number one priority. No more toxic relationships, no more guilt-driven actions, no more compromising on what and who I want to be, or more accurately, already am. No fear would stand in my way (of being lonely, of not making others happy, of not having enough money, of not being able to look after myself). With no plans whatsoever, I would fully surrender to The Universe, TRUST, and see what happened …

Well, I can tell you, it’s going better than I could have ever dreamed of!

Since I let go of my fear of money, I’ve been given everything I need to survive, and thrive – a home in Bulgaria, a home in India, food, friends, a new wardrobe, and job offers coming out of my ears. Since I let go of my fear of death I’ve been given good health, free healing treatments, the most transcendent meditations, Reiki, and firsthand knowledge of plant medicine (from the plants themselves). Since I let go of my conditioned need to ‘do, do, do’ and any remaining desire to fit into the Western model of enslaved living, I’ve found that doing even the simplest things in life can be a ceremony and a celebration. From showering, to washing my clothes, to walking to the shops, I find gratitude and enjoyment in every moment. There is no longer a need to get somewhere; the beauty is always in the Now.

The more I surrender, the more I feel Mahamudra: at One with the Whole. Though it is a constant practice. I must catch myself when I become identified with my future-fearing thinking mind, reminding myself: ‘these are not my thoughts’. These are programmes from outside sources; the real me is in my heart. I bring my awareness back to my breath and into my heart, and I arrive again in the present moment, remembering with wholehearted acceptance that everything is just as it is supposed to be, whether pleasurable, or painful.

From this place of inner peace and gratitude I’ve found again my creative spirit. In India this March, while living at one with Nature beside a beautiful waterfall in the jungle, I began for the first time since I was 18 to paint. And I’ve begun again, as you can see, to write. I’m even working on a book.

Doing ‘nothing’ however is still high priority and I spend a great deal of time simply being, and observing. In allowing myself this God-given right to be my authentic self, which is not defined through activity, money or status, but a state of Being, I have come back to the frequency of love which makes life flow so effortlessly. As in fact, life needs not my effort, simply my attitude of non-resistance.

I am eternally grateful for the lessons that this journey keeps bringing, for the people I am sharing it with, and most of all to know that the only place I ever need to look for guidance is right here inside me.

More to come.

With so much love

Olivia x

Healers come in many shapes and forms. I’ve met those who heal with their hands, with their words, and with their eyes. All hold the loving intention of helping another progress healthily and happily on their journey in life. It is unusual though for me to meet a healer who works in situations of crisis; situations in which healing is offered not in the form of other-worldly experiences and transcendent states of consciousness, but through providing food, shelter, aid and a glimpse of dignity to people whose lives, and livelihoods, are under siege. The context of this healer’s story is smack-bang-down-to-Earth, raw, and distinctly human.

Micaela Bogen, a 24-year-old humanitarian worker, has spent the past year volunteering within the Refugee Crisis in Europe. Working mainly in Calais, Micaela witnessed firsthand The Front Line (or one of them) of the devastating war that is being waged in this world by people in power. As politicians debated in Parliament and the media stirred up a frenzy which drove fear and separation deeper into the national psyches of all countries involved, thousands of ‘refugees’ – or as Micaela calls them, ‘people’ – waited in No-Mans-Land, a.k.a. ‘The Jungle’, an ex-landfill site at the French border, for their fates to be determined.

I met Micaela in a very different jungle setting – a peaceful natural oasis in Rishikesh, India called Over the Rainbow. Despite our beautiful surroundings it was clear Micaela’s mind and heart never strayed far from Calais. She spoke of it often. Though she focused mostly on the positive aspects of her time there (‘love’, ‘strength’ and ‘courage’ are words she used often) it was heartbreaking to be reminded that thousands of Human Beings on our planet – men, women and children – having been subjected to horrific suffering, pain and loss in their homelands, arrived on safer shores to face the cruel and de-humanising reality of rejection from our global society.

As we go about our daily lives, lost in selfish desires, fears and worries, it is far too easy to forget the plight of our brothers and sisters, even when so close to home. Their voices deserve to be heard; their lives deserve to be lived. And if not for individuals like Micaela their fates would be even worse.

Thank you Micaela for your incredible strength of heart, body and mind to fight this overwhelmingly difficult fight, and for reminding me that Yes! We CAN change the world. Love will always, in the end, concur fear.

OW: What brings you to India Micaela?

MB: The One Love Project, which is a project that two friends, Iola and Sylvie, set up four years ago.

In my second year of University I started a non-profit organisation which held artistic events and raised money for independent projects and organisations in developing countries. I met Sylvie and Iola through that as I wanted to raise money for them.

I’m now here as one of the core team of the One Love Project which provides education, healthcare and a childhood to underprivileged street children in Pushkar.

This time in India has also been a healing time for me to process the last year spent in Calais and take some time for myself.

Tell me about your work with refugees.

(Laughs) Where do I start?!

I headed out to Calais for the same reasons I headed out to India – on behalf of my organisation for a weekend to understand what was going on. What was going on was that there was a makeshift illegal refugee camp with about 4-5,000 people at the time (November 2015) trying to get across to the UK. And more and more people kept on coming.

In around August 2015 the crisis hit the media, although migrants had already been camping in Calais for twenty years. After the media coverage people started to go over to volunteer their time and money, which is where Help Refugees UK was born. They worked alongside L’Auberge des Migrants, a French non-profit organisation who’s worked in the area for seven years.

When I arrived the Volunteer Warehouse was in full swing. We had a build programme, a clothes distribution programme and a food programme. This was all run on donations and people volunteering their time for free.

After my two days there I decided to stay.

What was your role in the camp?

I started working on the build team. We split into groups of four and built a total of twelve shelters between us every day. My daily routine was waking up at 8, having a coffee, loading the van and then heading into camp, until dark.

What was the experience like for you?

That’s so hard to say in one interview… It was … (She fumbles for the words.)

It’s almost an impossible question because every day changed so dramatically. One day there might be violence and you’d feel unsafe. Other days the weight of the crisis would get the better of you: you felt powerless and helpless and like there was no end in sight.

Most days though were filled with love, strength and unity. The people that lived in the camp and the volunteers that worked there were all incredible people. The Jungle was both a devastating tragedy and a remarkably beautiful place.

How many nationalities did you meet in The Jungle?

There were 24 nationalities when I arrived: Iran, Iraq, Kurdistan, Eritrea, Cote d’lviore, Yemen, Chad, Ethiopia, Morocco, Algeria, Albania, Libya, Somalia, Palestine, Tunisia, The Congo, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kuwait, Egypt, Syria, North Sudan, South Sudan, and the Oromo People, an ethnic group residing in Northern Kenya and Egypt. They all had such different ways of living; so many different cultures yet they somehow came together. It created a lot of tension and also a lot of love.

What kind of tensions did you witness?

There were so many because everyone was in Survival Mode.

The allocation of shelters was tough, for example, because there were so many people. Whilst I was there, two amazing volunteers Liv and Ben worked tirelessly to distribute shelters fairly but as new arrivals filtered in every day, it was near impossible to maintain a fair and equal system. This would then cause fights and disputes if someone more vulnerable got pushed up the list.

There was also discrimination within the camp, both from race and religion. A lot of the people who resided in The Jungle had not before encountered people who were different to them or who had different ways of life. Some had come from countries that were in civil war due to the ‘other’ religion, and naturally this war was brought into the camp.

Everyone there had been through such hardship and experienced such trauma, although violence isn’t justified, in a way it is. These people had likely witnessed their families be slaughtered or watched their children drown in the Mediterranean. It’s not an excuse but you have to have the strength in you to see the other side of it, to understand why many were filled with anger. In this way, the camp had a certain beauty.

In the normal world you judge people easily. You don’t stop to think: ‘Did that person have a bad day?’ In the camp you do. Everyone who lives there has been subjected to trauma and ill treatment. They’re not there because they want to be, they are there because they have to be.

When you live in a once-landfill site, where you have to queue up for your food, ask a volunteer for a blanket to keep warm at night, or sleep in a tent that leaks, walk down mud and piss filled streets day-in-day-out, and live in a place where essentially you have no rights, no freedom and no one gives a shit, of course you’re going to be angry. It’s basic human instinct. Put yourself in that situation.

How did you cope on an emotional level with seeing all this suffering and injustice on a daily basis?

To be honest it affected me in a way that made me stay there. I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t deal with the guilt of going back to a life which I was just given by the luck of me being born in England, knowing that there were over 8,000 people who wanted a home and no one would give it to them.

When you’d see violence in the camp, or someone would be rude to you, or break down in tears to you, it was hard, but because everyone who worked in the camp experienced the same, dealing with it was easy at the time.

When I was in the camp there was no time to think, there was so much to do. A never-ending job. Most people there were unqualified. Voluntary activists were doing the job of two governments. So you didn’t have the time to process and comprehend what you’d witnessed.

You’d come home at night and say to your co-workers: ‘Someone shouted at me today for not having a blanket’ and you’d all laugh and shrug if off – mainly because to actually comprehend that you couldn’t give someone something as simple as a blanket to keep warm was too devastating. We dealt with the situation with humour.

It wasn’t until I got home that all that weight started to release and I realised what I had witnessed, what I’d helped, and reflected on the incredible people I’d met.

It was really hard to deal with the weight I’d carried round for so long, all the injustice I’d seen and the sadness. Mainly it was the guilt though, of having a life better than theirs for no apparent reason.

I realised there is no solution to this problem unless people actually care about humanity, open their hearts and see these people as humans, not ‘refugees’.

What do you think of the media’s portrayal of the crisis compared to the reality you saw with your two eyes?

There were a few that wrote the truth about the camp but many did not. It’s still hard to hear and to deal with some of what is said when you have witnessed so many injustices firsthand.

The one that hit me hardest was about the children. A couple of weeks before the eviction of the entire camp, the Home Office attempted to register children for Dubs and Family Reunification. It was beyond stressful. When the camp was evicted, they left over 1,500 children in a container camp and more than 100 outside with no authority, no food and no running water. The ‘Unofficial Woman’s and Children’s Centre’, Help Refugees UK and our one man legal team / Field Manager, Annie Gavrilescu, fought with the government throughout the entirety of ‘The Jungle’s’ existence to get these children across to the UK. When around 200 were taken through the Dub’s Amendment and were finally picked up by buses (around 750 children from January 2016) the energy rumbled in the camp – everyone was exhausted but so happy! Yes, we had a long, long way to go, but we’d got some across at least!

Then you read in the media that these kids are not deserving because they look older than they are. No one stops to think this is a 12-year-old child from Afghanistan who saw his family slaughtered, his home destroyed, walked for hundreds of miles alone, took a boat across dangerous seas, then lived in a refugee camp for months in dire conditions with no sight of freedom anywhere on the horizon. Of course he doesn’t look 12-years-old anymore.

It’s heartbreaking, and absurd how these people are portrayed because it’s so far from the truth. They were doctors, nurses, lawyers, artists, musicians, mothers, fathers. Just like me and just like you.

When I go on the internet and people are calling them ‘cockroaches’ and demanding to close the borders, you think: if it was on the other foot, if these European countries had a crisis, a war, and the only place to go was the Middle East, I guarantee that any of those men, women and children would open their doors, give you chai, put food on your plate and treat you like their family. I know this because I spent 14 months with these people.

In the camp, you’d walk past their shelters and they’d invite you in, offer you chai and serve you a plate of food before they ate a morsel themselves. They had nothing yet they gave everything.

You mentioned that two non-profits were doing the work of the government. What do you mean exactly?

The French and the English government didn’t want to class The Jungle as an official refugee camp. Because of this, large charities were not ‘invited’ in. It was a political-beaurocratic game. How can a charity based on helping others not be invited to the biggest illegal refugee camp in Europe? That left nothing, apart from independent charities and independent volunteers to do their dirty work.

There were some French charities that pulled their weight at the right times, but not enough. I feel that if the governments had been involved and on the ‘right’ side, they could have stopped the camp months ago, or if not given so much more dignity and humanity to the people living there.

However, the weight was pulled by thousands of regular people who donated items, money, love and time to the people living in Calais. Without that these people (the ‘refugees’) would have had nothing – sleeping rougher than they already were, with no help and no voice at all.

Help Refugees UK and L’Auberge Des Migrants fought with the government in court. They hardly listened. At one point they evicted half the camp (the south side) claiming there were only 800-1000 people there when it was more like 3,350.

The constant battle with both governments was so tiring. Realising they did not care about these people was baffling. They don’t want them there and they don’t want us to help them.

My view of it is, if people continue to help them, they are still human, but by leaving them, stripping them of their dignity and of any rights, they are not humans anymore and we can ignore them.

What do you think is the solution to this?

Open the borders. That’s the only real way these people can gain back their dignity and have a chance for another life.

People need to see that what is branded as ‘refugee’ is in fact just people – your friend, your colleague, your boss. It’s about having love and accepting everyone. Not giving in to the media’s and government’s portrayal of these humans.

If your life was theirs, how would you want to be treated? If you’d lost all your family, your friends have been killed or taken, you had nothing, and you weren’t allowed to get any of those things just because there was a war in your country? If everyone could see it in this way the crisis would be less.

You’re blaming the people?

100%. The power of people is more important than the people in power. The government has created this façade that they control us, that we have no say, no opinion. But if the majority of humanity stood up against the governments that were ripping the rights of these people, they’d have to listen.

What can people do on an individual level to help?

You can sign petitions, write letters to your MP (not one letter; 10 a week), protest peacefully, volunteer your time. Talk to people about it! Spend one hour or one day with a ‘refugee’ and you’ll find the words to tell your friends and family to open their hearts and start caring.

The government is going to shut the borders, tell us they’re ISIS, tell us they’re terrorists. They’re different. They’re Muslim. If we can fight that – stand up and say we don’t care if they’re Muslim or if they’re from a country where the Taliban was created, we just care that they are humans, then eventually the governments will listen. With enough of a fight, with enough voices to stop it, they’re going to have to do something.

There’s no easy solution though. The real solution was stopping our governments from destroying these countries in the first place, but it’s far too late for that now.

Don’t you think people in Europe are too distracted and selfish-minded these days to get in get involved in grassroots action?

No, I think they don’t have the right opportunity and knowhow to give their time to a cause that they feel is worthy. In the last 10-15 years huge charities have been given a bad name (rightly) and therefore there’s mistrust. A lot of people don’t want to give their time to Oxfam, The Red Cross or Comic Relief as they don’t trust them. There’s also a massive lack of information on how to get involved. That’s one reason why I want to create a website about how to help with a list of trustworthy non-profit organizations, templates of a letter to an MP, what’s actually going on in these countries, etc.

I don’t think it’s malicious selfishness that prevents us, it’s not knowing the value of the life that we live: to have food on your plate, a roof over your head, and the freedom to travel. When you stand in front of a man who once had all this and now has nothing, then it really hits you.

We’re not passive people. We have to see it, touch it, smell it, not watch it on the TV. You have to be in the stomach of it to actually care.

Are you going back to The Jungle?

The Jungle was evicted in November 2016. They dispersed people to accommodation centres all across France and the camp in Dunkirk has recently been burnt down. A lot of people are still in the area though, hidden to the public. So yes I am going back to see what I can do to help. But it’s not just Calais, there are refugees all across Europe, and they all need help. In Greece, Lesvos, Bulgaria, Italy, Serbia, etc. There are people helping in these areas but they are desperate for more!

Since The Jungle was destroyed and the media has gone quiet, donations and volunteers have gone down. It’s not on The News anymore. But these people are still fleeing, still suffering. There is still so much to do to help them.

Micaela is writing a book about her experience in The Jungle based around the amazing story of a Sudanese refugee and his journey to Calais. I was privileged to hear a few chapters while in India and cannot wait to read it in full.

Additional Information : GET INVOLVED!

If you want to give your time in Calais, email calaisvolunteers@helprefugees.org.uk

Reliable information can be found on the Help Refugees UK website and Help Refugees UK Facebook. On their website you can find a lot of information about how to get involved.

There’s also an amazing Facebook group called ‘People to People – Solidarity from the UK to Calais’ which has pleas for donations, help and volunteers.

Should you wish to contact Michaela directly : email bogen.micaela@yahoo.com

Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu.

May all Beings be happy and free.

I am Infinite, I am

I am free

I am a dreamer, I am

I am a dream

I am a visionary, I am

I had a dream

I am an artist, I am

I am a dream

I’m an anarchist, I am

I am free.

I am a vision, I am

I was a dream

I am an idea, I am

I am me

I am infinity, I am

I am free

+

I am Creation, I am

I am a dream

I am a fantasy, I am

I am for free

An incarnation, I am

I am unique

A Creation, I am,

I am Me

++

I am a character, an identity;

An EGO, I am,

I am me.

I am a person, a human, a Being, I am,

I am Me.

I am my cells, my memory, my dreams, I am,

I am Me.

I am my history, my journey, my character, I am,

I am me.

I am my blood, my bones, my knees, I am,

I am me.

+++

I am your cells, your blood, your bones, your dreams? I am,

I am me.

I am your cells, your blood, your bones, your mirror? I am,

Are you me?

I am your dreams, your visions, your consciousness. I am,

Am I me?

+

I am.

I am, I am, I am.

+

I am that I am.

++++

I am everything!

(I am Me.)

+

I am you and you are me

And we are it, and we are free.

You are me, and I are you, and we are nothing?

And we are free.

I am everything, and so are YOU !

and yet,

nothing,

And we are free?

We are nothing,

And we are free.

+

I am Nothing,

I am everything,

I am.

+++++

I am void, I am space, I am empty,

I am,

I am that I am.

I am waste, I am toxic, I am poison,

I am

I am that I am.

I am dust, I am dirt, I am IT!

I am

I am, that I am.

From a Star, I am

I am, I am,

I am

I am,

that I am.

++++++

I am Space, I am Time, I am Ether,

I am

I am that I am.

I AM IT, goddammit, I AM, I am

I am, that I am.

I am here, I am present, I am Being,

I am.

I am, that I am.

I am that I am.

I am, I am, I am.

I am.

+

I’m an illusion, I am Maya,

I am dying, I am?

We are?

I am

that I am?

I am Dust, I am Earth, I am dirt,

I am

I am

that I am.

I am dirty, I am

I am

That I am.

+

I’m a vibration, a frequency,

A sound,I am

I am that I am.

I am what there is, all there is,

And what is That? What am I?

I am that I am.

I am IT, I am!

(I am, I am, I am, I am, I am, I am, I am, I am … )

(Tricky, I am.)

+

I am that I am.

+

Thank you Jody Shield for the mantra (and other transmissions). Thank you INDIA for the healing, awareness, and wisdom to surrender.

+

Thank you Universe for GUIDING me to www.thehealingnetwork.org FOUNDER, Akshay, and planting the seed for a very FRUITFUL working relationship,

starting NOW.

All HEALERS in my NETWORK please set up your profile here! >>>

www.thehealingnetwork.org

^ ^ ^

KEEP YOUR SENSES OPEN …

there is much more to come

x

With love, Olivia

Meredith’s strong, calm presence caught my attention early on in the course and I wasn’t surprised when it emerged she was a healer (the more I meet the easier it is to spot them). It wasn’t until the third week of the course that I really got to know Meredith though, when she led a private healing ceremony for a friend and me. This was my first introduction to shamanic medicine, something I’ve been interested in for a while now and was keen to try should the right opportunity arise. It did. The tonic was Kambo – a secretion taken from a green Amazonian frog containing peptides Dermorfine and Deltorfine. This resin, collected without harming the animal, is known to have antibiotic properties, strengthen the immune system and help the body fight infection. It is widely used in Brazil and Peru, and increasingly across the world, to treat AIDS, cancer, depression, Parkinsons and many other diseases.

Meredith’s purpose as a healer became crystal clear to me as she beautifully led us through this cleansing, purifying ritual, attending to all our physical and emotional needs, singing beautiful mantras in Spanish and Shipibo and administering the sacred healing medicine. But more on my experience in another post!

Intrigued about how Meredith came to plant medicine, one evening we shared our stories. I was so moved and impressed by her journey that I had to interview her and share it with you. I hope you enjoy.

HB: How did you become a Healer?

MM: Well, I’m a ‘baby healer’ right now [she grins]. I’m doing a lot of healing work here [Dharamsala] for the first time, although for about four years now I’ve been practising and learning healing on myself. It’s only in the past year that I’ve really been working on other people and feeling that I’m able and wiling to take on the responsibility of having other people’s health in my hands.

Everything is coming together now in a really synergistic way. I feel like a general practitioner of healing – like I went to some sort of whacked-out medical school and now I have something for everything! [She laughs.]

HB: So what first led you to healing?

MM: I was going along in life, I had been working as an architect and was about to finish graduate school in Sustainable Development ; I was 27 and a half. I loved that career, a lot. It was my whole identity. I wasn’t doing office-based architecture – I did community gardens, sustainable herb and agriculture work, outdoor projects. I was just about to go and do my final year internship when I got super sick overnight. I woke up one morning with staph infections all over my body and was in excruciating pain. My whole body was sick.

I knew a bit about healing at the time, so I went on a fast right away but I ended up in hospital. My immune system was so weak. The doctors ran tests in everything you could imagine but they couldn’t find anything. So I continued with self-healing.

The infections kept coming, internal and external. My digestion stopped working completely. I was experiencing body pain, joint pain, fatigue. I was sleeping all day. I gained thirty pounds in a month even though I was vegan and used to run a lot. I didn’t know what it was but my whole body just stopped working.

I went back to the doctors  a number of times but the doctors weren’t listening. I’d show up with infections on various parts of my body including on my face. They said it was acne and gave me antibiotics. They didn’t understand what was going on at all. Pretty fast I stopped going. It was too much stress to try to convince them what I was going through. So I began looking for alternative healers and worked on myself.

I started to do whatever I could think of to improve my immunity and flush this ‘thing’ out of me. I was living in Vermont at the time and saw an herbalist. I spent all day researching online. I tried everything. I totally detoxed from all chemicals – shampoos, soaps, perfumes, toothpaste, Chapstick – anything that could put pressure on my body. I was juice fasting, running, giving myself massage, eating herbs, doing yoga in my room (although I didn’t think of it as yoga at that time), taking hot baths, then contrast showers (to get the circulation going) four times a day…. probiotics, fermented foods… then I got into liver flushes.

In graduate school we’d been doing a lot of self-reflection so I was in this kind of mood. Luckily it was summer vacation and a friend gave me somewhere to stay. I really felt like I was going to die. I tried to accept that I might not have a lot of time left and be ok with that. I spent time with friends and got out into nature, taking a lot of walks, while doing twelve hours a day of healing therapies on myself.

It was actually a kind of amazing time. I found the strength to do all this stuff while thinking about maybe dying. I looked back at my life and was really happy with all I had done, seen, achieved. If that was the end then that was pretty good, I thought. Not everyone gets that much.

I was shedding all this poison in my life and coming back to the basics of what mattered. I realized that healing was really just about going back to nature.

As an architect I was always interested in indigenous cultures and natural, earth-based building traditions . Going back into the arms of the Earth Mother is in every culture, every religion. Although I was an atheist at that time and wasn’t thinking about religion at all, I started to see the Mother Goddess in everything around me. I was taking walks out in nature and getting sunlight each day. Vermont is so beautiful. I tried to let go of stress, and not to freak out and be scared, as I knew it would not serve me in this time.

After three months I stopped getting worse and I felt like I was beginning to come up again – from a very dark place back into the sun. I was feeling well enough to do my internship, although my health was still a full-time job. I went to Asheville, North Carolina to work in natural building and permaculture. Asheville is an amazing place – full of hippies and healers. It was the perfect place to go heal. There were healing herbs everywhere so I was making natural medicines every day and eating from the ground and there were so many spiritual people there to learn from. I was doing dance, earth healing, soul healing, acupuncture, massage – everything you can imagine was in this town! The job was super stressful and my boss was a maniac but the location was perfect. After about another three months (about six months to day I got sick) I felt like I had healed. I was so happy! [She beams.] That was a beautiful time. I was bursting with love, I had great friends. I was understanding Spirit in nature more and more and connecting with that.

I’d been trying to heal myself in time to go to Asia for my thesis – a community project in Nepal. I was so happy to be able to go. First I went to an organic farm  in Thailand to do an Adobe brick-building training  for a month (building with mud, sand and hay). I thought I was all well, that my health was back on track, but then I came down with a big infection – a huge golf-ball sized boil on my ass, which appeared from an infected mosquito bite. I was in bed for three weeks: my whole health collapsed again. Eventually I went on antibiotics, which ruined my health even more.

I made it to Nepal to work on my thesis project, although I was sick all the time while there. I’d have episodes of illness when I was bed-ridden with infection and would have to go on multiple rounds of antibiotics, get better, but not really better, then sick again. I suffered a lot. The illness was bad enough but I also had little support; I was really on my own with what was happening. The people in charge didn’t understand and I felt I had to keep apologizing. I realized then that to support someone and not make them feel guilty and inadequate is such a big part of healing.

When the project ended I decided I had to take some time off to focus on my health so I left my career for some time. I went to Goa with my brother and lived there for two months. I was full-on concentrating on my health. I was pretty emotionally hollow at that time too after everything I’d been through, so I tried to reconnect with people, spent time at the beach, in the sun and salt water, cooked for myself (super healthy raw things and bone broths) and had a lot of healing treatments.

After a couple of months I was feeling a lot more stable so I went to Mysore on my way back to NYC where I met a guy who I had a long-distance letter-writing affair with. He was training to be an Ayahuasca shaman. We had a lot in common. I went to visit him in Germany about three months later. The relationship fell apart (it turns out he was a sociopath!) but I ended up at an Ayahuasca retreat for three days doing ceremonies with his spiritual family. The night before leaving for the retreat I had a vision of the Mother Goddess coming down to see me. I experienced ecstasy: I was crying and laughing and hyperventilating and I had the realization that this experience [my illness] had been a test and a training (because I sure had learnt a lot from two years of self-healing!) and that I was about to go to my ‘initiation’ – sort of a graduation from boot camp, if you want. She [the Mother Goddess] told me the Ayahuasca was going to help me get to a certain state to communicate with higher realms of consciousness and bigger energy than I was used to.

It happened pretty much just like that. At the ceremony The Goddess came and gave me many energetic gifts. My whole practice and understanding of the world was completely changed and elevated, forever. I could feel the veil of the world – the veil of ‘reality’ laying thinly over the true reality of energy and information.

I stayed in this state of trance for three days or so. Actually the experience of trance was not new; I’d experienced it before during my sickness, it was just much stronger now. I recognized that what I’d been doing all along my healing journey was a form of spiritual practice – yoga, fasting, meditation, cleansing and detoxing.

Then I went back to New York and had to integrate all this information, which was super hard. I was seeing God everywhere but was I was also still in excruciating pain. I was so open, I was feeling everything. I feared I would have this illness my whole life and it would isolate me forever.

HB: What about your friends and parents? Did they support you?

MM: I was afraid to tell my parents about what was really going on with me. I thought they would either not believe me or that they would worry. They’re pretty conservative. I thought if I said: ‘I think I might die but I’m going to eat some herbs and have a massage’ they would freak out and cause me more stress. I guess I didn’t know how to ask for support. When I would ask [friends] for support generally I’d get disappointed. It seemed if anyone had to adjust their lives in any way for me they’d become resentful and passive aggressive. In fact I lost a lot of friends during this time. It felt like no one could really ‘get there’.

HB: Did you still think you would die?

MM: No. Well, actually, yes, until after my experience in Germany.  I was still having terrible infections which were really scary. I thought they could easily pass to internal organs and give me blood poisoning, kidney failure or liver failure. Luckily they eventually would respond to antibiotics and fasting and go away.

No matter what though I was getting through it. I’d chase the infection away and regain balance. I was doing so much purification – of my life, of my values, of personality traits – everything. I had this insight in Germany that I was invincible. It was horrible, suffering and lonely but I could get through it, which gave me a lot of pride and self-confidence. I also knew after the ceremony that there was a reason for it [my illness] and that things would change. The worst was over. And it has been that way. That was about two years ago.

HB: And after that?

MM: I went back to NY and began reading spiritual scriptures – from all religions -talking about Kundalini awakenings, magic… everything. I recognized all the concepts in the scriptures that I had been practising in my own healing: gratitude, inner strength and will,  appreciating the connection between everyone, seeing how actions affect others and everything is connected… the whole discourse on spirituality. I realized that this happens to a lot of people actually and that I had a lot more work to do on myself.

Then I came across the concept of shaman sickness. You get sick out of nowhere, it doesn’t respond to typical treatment, no doctor knows what to do, and you just have to deal with it until it’s over. You usually get some sort of vision and experience a sort of death and rebirth when it’s complete  (just what happened to me). In Germany I had a ‘dark night of the soul  – to see that something was deeply wrong. What is so beautiful though is I realized nothing was really wrong: the sickness was the healing. And now it’s done.

HB: So now you’re healthy?

MM: I wouldn’t say that but I am healthier. I am getting healthier all the time. I’ve delved into lots of healing and spiritual systems, understanding lots about energy and the soul matrix – stuff I would not have talked about or thought about in the first phase of healing, which I understood as mostly  physical. Now I see how past lives and karma  affect your physical life and how your physical health is affected by your emotional life. As I learn more I continued to heal myself and I’m doing pretty well. Sometimes I have episodes but I know how to handle it now. I’m getting more into yoga and meditation which is helping a lot and I feel healthier all the time.

HB: What led you to Kambo?

MM: I got introduced to Kambo while in New York. I was getting ready to leave for Peru. I looked it up online and saw it was helpful for cancer, auto-immunity, HIV – many difficult  things. I was still having a lot of physical symptoms and thought it could help. Kambo is a traditional medicine for jungle warriors from Brazil and Peru, used for initiations, for healing severe ailments, for warriors before a battle or a hunt to cleanse their energy. I didn’t do it in New York, but I had my eye out for it in Peru.

While in Peru I spent two months  at an Ayahuasca retreat and later  was introduced to two shamans who I tried Kambo with. I really liked it and thought it would be great to train in it one day for self-healing and maybe to share with others.

Back in New York I was connected to more and more healers and Ayahuasca ceremonies. I met a guy in Brooklyn – a healer who’s been working with Ayahuasca and Kambo for years. I started seeing him once a week to see if things would improve. I saw him for about three months and it totally transformed my health. I still have stuff coming up but it’s much less than it was. I have so much more stability in my life and my health now. The Kambo helped cleanse my energy, opened my heart and helped me to let go of the trauma of this illness and other issues that were still with me. Physically my digestion improved and I felt strong and healthy again for the first time in years.

HB: Wow. And that inspired you to share?

MM: Yes, I told him [the shaman in Brooklyn] that I wanted to learn and to share. He taught me how to mix it, how to lead the ceremony etc. and that was it. That was October last year. My first ceremony was with my boyfriend. Then I did a few with friends in New York and a few more on my travels in Asia. Since being here [in Dharamsala] it’s taken off: I’ve done ceremony after ceremony. I guess it’s just the right time and I’ve been around people who are interested. I feel really comfortable with it now and enjoy combining it with bodywork and other healing practices.

HB: What led you to do the Yoga Teacher Training course?

MM: I was looking for something that would allow me to practise healing in some sort of official, legal way. I’d also been doing a lot of my own yoga. I wanted to make sure I had a good base of the concepts and work on my asanas [postures]. It’s important for me to do the physical work as well as the more esoteric stuff.

I’ve also trained in Chi Nei Tsang (abdominal detox massage), Thai massage, Thai medicine and singing bowl therapy, which sounds like ‘hippy nothing’ but is the most powerful therapy ever!

HB: So what’s next?!

MM: I’m going back to New York after seeing my boyfriend in Austria for a month. He’s also a healer – at about the same stage as me – so we’re a very good support for each other. We’ll spend the month practising a lot of healing work on each other so that’ll be really cool. In New York I hope to start practising a lot more, continue to train in Kambo and yoga, start having classes here and there for friends. I also had the idea I’d like to volunteer at a hospice – to be there for people who are having a hard time and facing death.

I also plan to go to Brazil next winter to train with some shamans and work more with Ayahuasca and Kambo. Actually, a lot of the most interesting plants in the Amazon are other  ‘teacher plants’, which can help you to continue to heal yourself and heal others. Hopefully my boyfriend will come too.

HB: What is a Healer to you?

MM: I think healers heal their own wounds. That’s how you become a healer.

There are so many springing up right now. In recent years  something changed. People are coming back to the Earth and Spirit at a very fast rate, which is wonderful. There are of course problems with it, but it’s good. There are growing pains with the New World that is being created but hopefully it’s all going to go really well with people awakening around us.

HB: What is your view of the Western medical system?

MM: I think it’s very broken. Their priorities are completely screwed up. Too many doctors become doctors because they are looking for a comfortable life, money, and got A’s in school, but a lot of these people are not healers. They lack compassion and understanding and the belief that people have the power to heal themselves. Many  doctors don’t want to give you even basic knowledge about your body; they want to control everything. Even the rare souls that are trying to blossom and want to expand their practice to incorporate Eastern medicine and spiritual practice have their hands tied by the insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies. They’re told to spend as little time with people as possible and open up to people as little as possible.

You’d have to wheel me in a wooden box to get me to go to a Western doctor now, unless it’s for trauma medicine or  diagnostic testing, which can be useful for your own healing. Other than that they are slowly killing people and causing more damage to the body and soul than they are doing good.

[My thoughts exactly.]

HB: What kind of healing treatments can you recommend to my readers?

MM: Man, there’s so much and so much is so good! It depends on you. There’s no silver bullet for healing. A lot of it is healing your own life and outlook on life and what you’re doing with your time.

All healing techniques are really just support for your own internal evaluating and working on issues that are happening  in your life. Aside from all the chemicals in our products, pollution etc. (the sickness of the Earth) I believe that all sickness comes from emotions – old traumas, not living the life you want to live, listening to what everyone else tells you you should do, not having good interpersonal relationships with lovers, friends and families… All that stuff is making us sick. Real healing is working on that, and, realizing that all that is coming from the greater society and the whole world – our economies, our beliefs about gender, class, and the wounds from that, that trickle down through generations… Once you realize that your health is what has personally affected you as well as the wider world you can go out in to the world to work on any issue to fix what’s broken. That is what healing is to me.

In so far as supportive techniques: Yoga, Yoga Nidra, working on the power of your mind, diet, supportive herbs (which are different in every part of the world). I use garlic, onion, beets and carrots as medicine – food  is medicine! Abdominal bodywork  is really good and highly underrated, massage (from people who really know about healing the body, medical issues and what to do with them), acupuncture, dance … I find sauna and fasting very good for me as well – detoxifying and relaxing and clearing out mental and physical junk. That’s probably it for my favourites! Oh and singing bowls. And Kambo! [She Laughs.]

………………………………….

Wow. Thank you Meredith for sharing your incredible journey. It is a relief and pleasure to meet someone who shares my views on the decay of the Western medical system, and society at large, in which by following ‘the rules’ one has little chance of healing or evolving in any meaningful way. Moreover, instead of giving up on life, as one could easily be tempted to do given the circumstances, you bravely searched inside and found the strength and courage you needed to take your life, your health and your destiny into your own hands.

Meredith’s experience of spiritual awakening, the call of the Earth Mother and her desire to go back to basics and to nature is echoed in my journey and that of others around me. Perhaps if you’re reading this you feel it to. This story inspires me to keep peeling back the layers of my own onion and heal myself from the depths of my soul, as I know this is the only true path to happiness, peace and liberation. We are all our own healers. Incredible power lies within!

What incredibly exciting times we are living in – times when we must stop blindly following the rules, look inside ourselves and become the masters of our own destinies.

SAT NAM! x