My Healing Journey
Like every woman’s story, there is what feels like an infinite amount of details to describe how it is that I came to unfurl. But I will begin the story at the ripe age of 21.
During my first sweat lodge experience in rural Pennsylvania at a women’s festival, I was gifted with a sacred object from a native Lakota elder. This object had been passed down through 4 generations before me, of female healers, and I was told that I was to be the 5th generation of healers in the line. I had not even the slightest idea of what this meant at the time, but I felt giddy from the attention that was showered upon me by some of the elder women of the circle who kissed my feet, literally showered me with fresh water, and fed me after the ceremony.
Many years later, through a powerful Initiation into the Blood Mysteries and the healing processes that followed, I began to understand the meaning of this honor and responsibility to myself first, and then to others.
My first healing Initiation was through an unplanned pregnancy which I chose to terminate. The grief that resulted from this experience was too large to be my own alone. After years of self-reflection, ritual, grieving, and self-directed art therapy, I realized that it was a collective grief that I was feeling along with my own. This was the grief of what I now call The Collective Womb. (More writing coming soon about the Collective Womb.)
Years later, during my second pregnancy, I touched upon this grief once again through prenatal depression, a long and difficult labor ~ which my pelvis continues to process, and postpartum near-death ~ which is too complex and graphic to share here. I came to the edge of my life, brushed against death herself, and came to know first-hand the power of birth, womanhood, and the female Blood Mysteries. In the darkest moments of my life, in the wee hours of Christmas Eve, 2006 in the Intensive Care Unit, most of my blood left my body through my pelvis. I remember the shift, the Crossroads moment when my soul chose to live. I am in the process of writing more about this moment, but what I’ll share here in short is that it was miraculous. I experienced complete surrender into something greater than myself and in those stripped down bare, but beautiful moments, I was activated, Initiated, and touched by life in a way that was irreversible.
About a year and a half later, I found myself in a weekend workshop with a man who shares my name and whom had very important Medicine, or healing power, for me. During an afternoon-long healing ritual with Malidoma Patrice Some, my calling and vocation came to me very clearly and an ancient memory of my own knowledge of ritual and healing was reawakened. As I danced and danced to the loud and potent drums for more than 3 hours at the altar of the Great Mother, I gave myself over to her again and again, to be Her conduit as a protector of Birthing Women and a voice for what I now know intimately as the timeless space of the Collective Womb.
Since then, I have been on an ongoing journey of healing my own womb, pelvis, and vaginal gateway from the triple trauma of a too-long back labor, a very painful postpartum which culminated with hemorrhaging to near death, prolonged lack of sexual health, and years of pelvic and hip discomfort ranging from dull aches and throbs to non-functional movement. My own Womb Medicine Journey has lead me to the wisdom of internal pelvic massage, mayan healing and abdominal massage, the practice and study of pelvic awareness, pelvic floor strengthening, sexual healing, and of course, the creation and expression of the Voice of the Collective Womb.
Through women’s group rituals, private healing sessions, Doula work, and more, I am passionately developing the contexts within which, the authentic female voices and stories of the Collective Womb are heard and felt in all moods and truths. Although my work in the community begins with women sharing authentically with ourselves and other women, I am now working toward the vision of sharing this Voice, this space that we create and dwell in together as women, with the larger collective. My intention is to spread this voice to the public, enabling men and women who are longing for something with meaning and beauty to have that longing met through this profound work.
Stay tuned for more information about The Womb Collective Medicine Project. If you want to be involved in the evolution of this revolution…