In large part, I got into the woo woo because I was so beyond uncomfortable in my body that I felt like I was about to crawl out of my skin.
I was making no progress in talk therapy. In fact, I may have even been regressing.
My very well-meaning and kind and gentle shrink (this was a different one) had asked if I had heard of codependency. This was a few years ago, before codependency was as cool as it is now.
When I left her office, I felt the sun shining on my face.
“A codependent,” I wanted to shout. “I’m a codependent!”
Like a movie montage, I might have twirled and looked to the sky. “I’m a codependent! I can keep drinking!”
I should also note that my therapist had been suggesting AA for several months, but I had been ignoring that.
I began to read all things Melody Beattie, which is perhaps the first place I began to become softened to the 12 steps and to stop rolling my eyes at the words “higher power” or “God.” Every morning, I read The Language of Letting Go and focused on how to apply that to my marriage. I thought perhaps this was my problem -- my marriage -- and that if I could just solve my marriage problem, maybe that would fix my drinking problem.
The crumbling of my first marriage occurred over many years and without tremendous fireworks. There were not affairs, there was little violence, nothing dramatic.
We had gotten in the habit of drilling holes in the bottom of the boat while the other was shoveling water out. And we never quite got into a rhythm where we were shoveling water at the same time and the other wasn’t drilling holes. And it continued to crumble, even as I got sober.
Or at least that’s how I recall it. Memory is malleable, and fickle, and perhaps mine has been gentler to me (or to him) than it should be.
In any event, the other thing that happened when I began to get sober was I realized I had no hobbies. I had gone to college, and then grad school, and then I worked and drank and bought a house and planned a wedding and started a business and had babies. That covers more than a full decade of my life.
In between all of that life, though, there were a few times that I had felt deeply. Being near the ocean. My pregnancies. Hot yoga.
For some time I was regularly going to hot yoga at studio in Spokane that I loved very much. Something had happened to my body in those hot yoga sessions, too. I would be moving through the sequence and we would get to a chest-opening pose like camel and I would burst into tears.
These feelings had been paralyzed in my body — and when I finally stopped drinking, I had to learn to live in my body. I would gasp in fear sometimes. I had to sit down. I thought maybe I needed a fainting couch.
I must have a case of nerves, I would say.
I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I thought maybe I was dying.
I don’t remember exactly what it was that brought me to my first energy healing session. I must have seen something on Facebook and figured, what the hell. Why not.
I just wanted to feel comfortable in my body.
In that first session, I lay on the massage table and worked on releasing codependency, alcoholism, letting go of my fear. The healer asked me to dive into the emotion. She worked above me, with a rattle, lighting palo santo, doing this and that. She asked me to feel the emotion in my body. I cried. I felt the emotion lifting off of me, probably sadness or guilt or loneliness or anger. She asked me to try to dive into the emotion once more, and it was like I hit a wall. I couldn’t go into the emotion again. Not as I had.
It was gone. It had been taken from my body.
I was comfortable in my skin.
During that first session, something else had happened. While she was working above me, I had a vision. I was riding a jaguar through a jungle (and this was a few years before Encanto). I could hear the beat of drums in my ears. I was moving towards something larger than myself and I was part of a whole and I was exactly, perfectly, precisely where I was meant to be.
When I mentioned the jaguar to the practitioner, she said, “Oh I have a jaguar, too. What did yours look like?”
Mine was spotted and hers was black.
I later learned the jaguar mulched the heavy energy removed in the session.
“You might have a bit of the medicine wheel in you, too, “ she said.
She also told me that my totem is the vulture.
The vulture. Such a strange animal. Not glamorous, certainly. Underrated. Built practically, its bald head keeping it safe. Keeping other animals safe by clearing the carrion.
The other thing that happened here was this: I just didn’t care if it was real or imagined, it gave me relief in my body. As the yoga had done years earlier, and how the EMDR had helped me process my childbirth trauma, and how boundaries work and doodling and any artistic expression had.
Whatever had transpired had expedited my healing and was allowing me to let go.
And so I began taking classes. First reiki. Then archangelic light. Reiki II. I began the year-long, 4-part medicine wheel (South, West, North, East -- a modified version of which Billy and I intend to offer soon). I did energy healing trades with the other students in the course and I felt the heaviness and trauma being lifted from my body.
I also did my tarot cards. While sorting out my stuff from my ex-husband’s, I had found the cards I had purchased as a teenager at the second-hand bookstore in downtown Tucson. On a daily basis, I was being faced with the fact that I couldn’t quite remember what I did before I drank. What did I do, I wondered. I mean surely I did things. I existed.
I had liked astrology and tarot when I was in high school.
Most mornings in the beginning, though, I woke up in a panic. I wasn’t hungover, and somehow that was scary. I drank 10 cups of coffee.
I did a tarot pull every morning and studied the cards. What did the pictures mean. It gave me something to google. Something to focus on. Something new to learn.
Temperance was a frequent pull.
And then I asked my guides, what are you trying to tell me. Sometimes I was more frustrated, like, what the fuck are you trying to tell me? For fuck’s sake, just come out and say it!
And other times: please. Just please. Help me, god. God dammit. Help. Me.
It was something like prayer, but it was just talking to the universe. It also gave me a center, and something to do with my hands. What did the cards want me to know, and what did the cards mean? I took notes.
I just needed something to focus on to pass the time. A moving meditation.
There was another change I wanted to make to my body. I had a rose tattooed on my back from when I was 22 and walked into a tattoo shop, hungover as hell (in fact, maybe we were drunk), ebullient: “One tattoo, please!” I had just moved 1500 miles away from a violent man and my friend with me had just kicked a meth habit.
But I probably wouldn’t have gotten that tattoo if I hadn’t been hungover, or drunk, or whatever I was and I certainly wouldn’t have thought it was funny to get a semi-ironic tacky-ish tattoo, and for many years I felt shame when I looked at the tattoo.
Another friend said it looked like the kind of tattoo someone wearing an oversized Tweety-Bird shirt and smoking a cigarette outside a gas station might have. And he wasn’t wrong.
So I wanted the vulture with me all the time.
My new husband, who was not yet my husband, let me grip his hand tightly, while I was bent over a chair in the tattoo shop, and had the rose turned into a vulture.
I wept when I saw the vulture on my shoulder in the mirror for the first time. Even I didn’t know how deep the shame had run until I looked at the vulture’s sweet face on my shoulder, perched on a dead limb.
Later, my husband rubbed lotion onto the vulture on my back, rubbing the tiny ball of dead skin between his fingers. I was embarrassed, but the body was doing what the body does -- sloughing off, healing, regenerating.
“She’s already doing her work,” the tattoo artist said when I explained the meaning of the vulture Recycling, repurposing. Salvaging all that appears unsalvageable.
She sits on my shoulder and reminds me: Nothing is wasted. Everything you have been through has been to purpose.
I pull the Temperance card when I start to think 'maybe I can moderate', do you interpret it as an abstinence card? I do and I also pull the Eight of Cups which serves as a reminder to let it go! Great article btw love your new tattoo.