Medicine

We all have a story.

Each of has a unique set of powerful life experiences that largely effects the people we become. At 33, I have finally begun to piece together my story, understand how all of these experiences are related, and what they are adding up to. I'd like to begin to share a bit, in hopes that it may help shape yours.

I am not writing this to prove anything to you, or to prove anything to myself. It is just to share that other ways of knowing are alive and well, if we are open and able to listen. We don't need PhDs and fancy degrees to be present and experience the magic of this life.

This is a lesson I am working hard to remember, and retelling my own story helps me value my journey, and honor my path.

Thank you for reading.

My strongest memories begin around age 6. I am stripping bark off of birch trees, and pulling the leaves from juicy skunk cabbage. I would mash it all together with creek water and call it a potion. The scent of the cabbage would follow me inside, where I would read for hours, telling my mother that I didn't need friends because I had books. I remember walking quietly through the forest, seeking lady slipper flowers, and feeling that they were the most beautiful and unique flower I have ever seen. I remember catching frogs, and calling them my friends. And the memory of my cousin killing a snake before my eyes.

These memories root my being into the earth, but my story truly begins at age 13.

I am lying on the floor in my bedroom, a thick smoke of incense wafting through air, listening to ambient classic rock on my CD player. I have just discovered meditation and learned how to spend hours exploring the liminal space of my consciousness. Feeling the edges between aliveness and death - wandering through the reaches of the in between.

One year later, at age 14, I took LSD for the first time. I met a girl in the bathroom at school, and she handed me a small square tab in exchange for $5. I took it, and then slipped out the backdoor of my middle school. I walked down to a local cafe and watched the clock drip down the wall for a few hours. To this day, I don't know if the LSD was real or not, but that doesn't really matter. I had made the decision to open my mind.

Shortly thereafter, someone gave me mushrooms. I remember sitting my father's backyard in rural New Hampshire, watching a wave of tadpoles swim from the center of the pond, over and over. I laid in the grass, and watched the clouds shift shape above my head. I felt death, and I freaked out. My father came home to my crying hysterically in the middle of the living room. I told him my boyfriend had broken up with me - thinking to create a quick cover, but really, I had just lost sense of who I was. I relaxed, and went to my room, pulling out Ram Das' "Be Here Now". I will never forget how those images jumped off the page and into my consciousness.

By 15, I was a runaway. I wouldn't go to school, and I wouldn't stay home. I was brought to a psychiatrist and diagnosed with "Oppositional Defiance Disorder". The Doctor took out her pad of paper and wrote me a prescription for some pills that she said would help me to calm down. I looked her in the eyes and said, "F*ck off. I will not take your medicine." I then ran out of the room. My mother tried to catch me and make me sit back down, but I told her that there was no way I was going back in there. I didn't go back and I never took the pills. I dropped out of high school 6 months later.

At 16, I tried to take birth control. I went to planned parenthood and got my prescription, thinking I was doing the right thing. I took the pills for a week and my insides began to feel terrible. I got emotional, moody, and felt erratic. I took them sporadically until the pack was gone, and then never refilled it.

At 18, we went on a family trip to Aruba. I remember meeting some locals, particularly a man that I spent some time with, Lavardo. A few days into the trip, I got sick. Really sick. I laid in the hotel room shaking, vomiting, shitting, and hallucinating for three days. I got on the plane back to the US completely jaundice, and I hadn't eaten in days. When I returned home, I laid in my bed, unable to eat or even more. I finally went to the hospital. The doctor ran some tests and said that my white blood cells were elevated, but he was unable to find anything wrong. It took a month for my appetite to return, but eventually I healed. Soon after this experience, I found yoga and began practicing in my living room to a DVD.

At 19, I got pregnant. At that moment, an abortion felt like the only option. I spoke to it's spirit once in the shower, water and tears steaming down my face. Then, I went to the clinic with my then-boyfriend and still-best friend and got the pills that you insert in your vagina, and a tylenol with codeine. When we got home, I took the codeine, and inserted the pills. I threw up the codeine immediately, and therefore felt every excruciating moment of the home abortion. My body trembled as it finally released the fetus, and then I watched it swirl down the toilet.

At 22, I contracted HSV2, or genital herpes. Many people contract this disease and hardly experience symptoms, but that wasn't me. I was sick for over a month with debilitating outbreaks, nausea, fevers, and nerve pain. Desperate, I went to the Doctor for a prescription of Acyclovir. I took the first few pills, and then developed excruciating shooting pains through my skull every minute or so. I called the Doctor to tell them what I was experiencing, they said it was a side effect. I stopped taking it immediately, and suffered severe and chronic outbreaks for the following four years.

At 26, I had enough and was ready to take my health into my own hands. I was living in Santa Cruz, practicing a lot of yoga and meditation, and was somehow introduced to Ayurveda. I enrolled at the Mount Madonna Institute to become an Ayurvedic Health Counselor and spent a full year in the program. After that, I signed up for a Yoga Teacher Training, and felt that I was getting a handle on my relationship to my body.

At 27, I took Ayahuasca for the first time, and everything shifted rapidly from there. I realized that my life was off track, going in the wrong direction. I immediately quit my job, packed my home, and took off with a backpack into the unknown. Set on finding the truths and healing I had been seeking for over a decade.

The subsequent years were nothing short of a self-imposed vision quest. I sat with Ayahuasca many times and learned how to work with San Pedro Cactus. I walked for days through thick forest with men I barely knew, taking plant medicines deep in the jungles of Hawaii and mountains of Peru. I would journey alone, or in circles, going deep and deeper inside myself.

For three years, I neglected all of my worldly responsibilities and became dedicated to my path of personal healing. I lived in the woods, on beaches, in tents, and trailers. I hardly stepped foot in a house for over a year in the depths of my journey. I slowly began to wake up to the nature of reality.

I found myself on a beach deep in the jungle of Kauai. I took Ayahuasca in a Mango grove with my then-boyfriend. We journeyed all night, then smoked DMT in the morning. I remember watching my ego dissolve, and tasting God. The next morning, I woke up in pain. A friend made a concotion of Noni, that I drank, but it didn't helped. I hiked out 11 miles to civilization, feeling nauseas with pain in my bladder. We set up camp on another beach, closer to town, and I became very ill. I spent two days laying in my tent, shaking uncontrollably. Sometimes, I would venture down to the water and, perched on a rock, relieve myself from both ends into the ocean under the moonlight. I managed to crawl the road, where I hitchhiked to the hospital. They gave me one pill, and all my symptoms disappeared immediately. I had residual effects in my gut from that pill for the following years.

Eventually, I entangled myself in what I now know to be some past-life karma...otherwise known as a toxic, abusive relationship. I put myself through a gauntlet for 2 years, before I finally felt complete. I received many visions of my past lives in this time and spent days following deer trails through the forest, familiarizing myself with the local plants. I learned about mushrooms, oak trees, and how to grow a large garden. On my 30th birthday, I moved into my own bedroom, and shortly thereafter began to dream. I began to journey my dreams and watched as some came to life. This was a dark, but transformative time.

I spent another year exploring the spirit world through medicine, mostly alone.

On one Ayahuasca dieta in Peru, I went very far in a ceremony and felt that I had died. I left the maloka to take care of myself outside, and met a man named Jesus who blew smoke on my body and sang me songs to calm me down. He became my friend and guide for the rest of the time I was in Peru. We went to Machu Pichu together, and I fell asleep on a cliff overlooking the mountains. When I awoke, a hummingbird fell from the sky and landed next to me. I picked it up, and watched it die in my hands, the purest vibration filling its body with its last breath. When I found Jesus later that day, he had two hummingbird feathers that he gathered for me. He rejoiced when I showed him the bird. He told me it meant that I would find love in this lifetime.

On my 31st birthday, my now partner took me on a date. We took San Pedro cactus together and went to the archery range. That evening, he asked me if I had ever thought about taking a break from medicines. I said that it hadn't occurred to me, but I have not sat with a master plant since.

That was over two years ago. My integration was challenging, but I now sit squarely on the other side.

Now, I write this from my cozy bed, in my tiny home in Grass Valley. The rain is soaking the roof outside my window, and my partner sleeps soundly beside me. He is just spending the night, as we both prefer to live alone right now. I have been spending time with Yerba Santa and Rosemary lately, learning to marry the magic of my ancestral homelands with the medicine of the lands I now live on. I haven't had an outbreak in many months, and I have begun to work with clients that are seeking their own healing.

Lately, I have felt nervous that I am moving too fast. I have deep worries that I am not ready to help others yet..that I am pushing my limits energetically and spiritually. I am writing this story to remind myself of where I have been, the path I have walked, the journey I have taken to find the stillness I feel right now. When I write this, I can see clearly how I am still at just the beginning of my journey, but oh how rich it has been.

I intend to share the bits of wisdom I have gathered, with those that feel called to sit with me.

To help you to listen to your own inner-guide and your own intuition. I intend to simply reflect yourself to you.