Total Eclipse of the Uterus
About 7 years ago, a palm reader in Bali told me that I was “very sick.”
Immediately, I recoiled. His words really took me aback and I flat out said, “I’m not sick.” And then he just plainly told me, “well the lines on your hand are telling me otherwise.” He also told me that I will be sick until I was about 27/28 years old and that I will heal, be very successful, and teach others how to heal, too. The second part wasn’t too surprising considering I was training to be a Yoga Teacher when I met him, but I didn’t understand how I needed to heal first. I didn’t think I was sick. Like, at all. I seriously had no idea what the fuck he was talking about. I even told some friends about, we deemed it “crazy-weird", and none of us really put two and two together…
The truth is: beneath the surface, I had a chronic disease called Endometriosis…
Which society had deemed as a non-issue and therefore in my mind, at that time, it was exactly that — a “non-issue.” It was “just something” that “just happens“ to “some women,” painfully, month after month. While on the outside (other than my palm of course) I seemed totally fine, on the inside all of the organs in my abdomen we’re being cemented together by a net of foreign scar tissue and endometrial-like tissue gone rogue (similar to the lining of most organs). Literally, it was growing lesions, nodules, polyps, cysts, adomyonomas, all sorts of names for uninvited guests inside of my body that were causing my organs to be shoved together into the bottom left portion of my pelvic floor. After my surgery, my doctor told me that I had a “pretty big” rectal nodule and that all of my organs were being pulled in one direction and completely stuck together into one solid mesh. To fix this, they had to take them all apart, clean the endometriosis growth off of each organ and put them where they were supposed to be because “nothing was in the right place.” Their words, not mine.
So yeah, I was sick.
And while I still have the disease, I no longer have this giant mass of inflammation sitting like a mutating weight at the bottom of my pelvis. I will continue to have to maintain my hormone levels with medicine for a while. At least until I’m ready to start having children in order to maintain my fertility (more on that later). And forever — I’ll be sticking to a strict diet of minimal to no drinking, meat, caffeine, soy products, dairy products, and god knows what else (I’ll learn as I go). While this all might seem like horrifying information to learn, I cannot tell you how validating it is to know this about my own body. I now understand, with 100% clear, picture perfect certainty that my long-fought search to find a doctor that really listened to me was necessary.
Yes, I have pictures of all my glorious and not-so-little endometriosis blood and scar tissue excisions, which will debut as their own watercolor artwork renditions in good time.
Basically, I now see all my years of suffering was necessary. It sucked, but it needed to happen exactly as it did because it strengthened me enough to have the courage to write about it and stop whining about it. It gave me the self worth and creative energy to hopefully turn this hellish experience into the next girl’s blessing. I know this because if more of us who have experienced this BULLSHIT start TALKING about it, more girls and women will seek help until they find real help. Rather than continuing to believe the lie that it’s normal and to just control the pain with birth control — which is not a bad thing to do, but also doesn’t address the root issue or pools of inflammation that have built up in the body, at all.
Anyway, back to the Palm Reader in Bali…
This memory came to me like a revelation shortly after my surgery. I remembered him telling me what those little lines meant as if it was yesterday. Since then I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. It has seriously been on my mind constantly, along with the fact that my “rebirth” (as I’m kindly referring to my recovery) is perfectly aligned with a major cosmic shift…
A Total Solar Eclipse in Cancer — the sign that is all about safety and security, which is the energy that rules the Root Chakra. Cancer is also a water sign, which is the element that rules the Sacral Chakra.
AND! 7 years ago, just a couple months before I met said Palm Reader, there was another Total Solar Eclipse in Taurus — my sun sign, propelling me on this journey of massive transformation. Today, Saturn is in Capricorn, his ruling planet and exactly where he was when I was born, a little over 28 years ago. This means I am in my Saturn Return. I am unlocking a whole new chapter of my life and shedding the old me, wounds an all. Reading about the energy afoot about 7 years ago and when I was born really makes it crystal clear that sharing this story, in all of its detail from my physical struggle to the emotions, feelings, and revelations that surround it — is my dharma. It’s part of my healing.
I now believe without a shadow of a doubt this moment in time has aligned just perfectly to reawaken a sense of stability in the themes that surround these two Chakras — fear versus trust and doubt versus self worth, not only for me, but for everyone. This battle through pelvic pain is just how its manifested in my life. Fear or doubt can show up in a multitude of physical ways before we ever really catch up to it mentally or emotionally. So much so that on a primal and survival level, fear and doubt cause the psoas (the oldest muscle in the human body) to immediately tense up and prepare you to run for your life. This is because it’s the muscle that connects your lower half to your upper half and runs from your inner knee, up the pelvis, and into the ribs, creating the very stability and structure we need to get up, sit down, walk, run, kick, leap, etc. — all the actions we would need to take in order to survive a threat.
Basically, what I’m trying to say is, It’s totally OK to fully feel that feeling of ‘WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING.’
When that feeling happens — move, scream, yell, write, paint, draw, dance, run, do whatever it is that comes most naturally and in flow for you to move through whatever is stuck because I promise you it leads to somewhere really magical if you just release it rather than resist it. Breathe through it rather than muscle through it.
Everything works so much better with grace versus force.
Alternatively, when we turn away from our fears and just settle on the idea that there is no way that we can accomplish whatever it is that we are afraid of, we literally get in our own way with that one simple thought. And that’s what I was getting so used to doing. I’d start something and be afraid to finish it because I wasn’t sure what people would think. I know this is true for me because I’ve seen the difference when I don’t sell myself short. There have been moments in my life where I have walked bravely towards my fears and done what I felt was right regardless of how hard it was and I’ve been so grateful when I have. But the trick is to keep doing it instead of giving up when we get scared. This is the habit that I am learning to break.
I’ve always been afraid of pretty much of everything ever since I was a little girl.
I had nightmares about showing up to school naked on a regular basis and some of my earliest memories are sobbing so intensely that I couldn’t even catch my breath. I have no idea why, but I’m willing to bet I was probably scared, didn’t want both or either one of my parents to leave (because that happened often), or was just throwing a tantrum so someone would pay attention to me. I would sleep with the lights on every night and eventually started sleeping in my Aunt’s room because she had an extra bed until I left for boarding school — which I sent myself to, just FYI. Even at that young of an age, my intuition knew I needed legit parenting, boundaries, community, and structure.
By 12, I was having full on night terrors most nights, waking up crying or screaming often. My two biggest fears were drive by shootings and not being able to have my own child. The first was a normal fear, not because I would ever be in a drive by shooting setting where I grew up, but because I saw gun violence all over the TV, was constantly surrounded by guns at home, and my own father was murdered with a gun. And the second fear was purely intuitive — endometriosis can often lead to infertility if left untreated. I hadn’t even gotten my period yet but I knew that something in my body wasn’t right. Something was restricting me from fully living without fear or doubt. I was also always deeply emotional. I would cry incredibly easily over something as simple as telling my mom I got a bad grade, forgot my jacket or lunchbox at school, or over even just being looked at the wrong way by a parental figure (which I had many of because my real parents were usually AWOL).
I cried when I told my mom I got my first period, even though she kept saying there was nothing cry about, as she tried to comfort me.
Even then, I had this deep fear that although I was now technically a “fertile woman”, I wouldn’t be able to have a child. This stemmed from the fears that had already been implanted in me. From as early as I can remember, I’ve wanted to start my own family. I would lay in bed in dream about all the things I would give my kids one day that my parents didn’t — like attention, presence, validation, and guidance. Don’t get me wrong, I grew up with tons of love all around me, but I also grew up knowing very well that my mother didn’t plan to have me and she wasn’t afraid to remind me. She didn’t mean to hurt me when she told me that. In her mind, it was simply fact. She was focused on her career, didn’t want to get married, had avoided having children, and then couldn’t avoid it any longer when I “happened” and her life completely changed. Arguably for the better, but when I was a child I didn’t understand that.
All I heard was that I was unwanted.
I never felt “unloved.” I just felt alone. My dad was around maybe twice a year because he was working most of the time overseas and I was lucky if one of his visits landed on my birthday. We would spend the summers “with him” and MAYBE see him for an hour or so out of the day (usually while he was in a meeting or at a business dinner) because he was ALWAYS working. I’m not looking for pitty when I share all of these things, by the way. I’m just telling it how it is.
I’ll spare you the rest of tragic details but all in all, I was exposed to way too much darkness, way too young, and none of it is my fault. It’s taken me years to figure that out. I am still figuring it out… clearly. I fully understand why my parents did what they did and I hold nothing against them. They truly loved me the best way they knew how. But at the time, it was a lot for a child to try to comprehend without any tools to do so.
As an adult, these childhood fears turned into a fear of abandonment, rejection, endings of any kind, or simply not being heard or misunderstood. Endings were the worst. The end of the school year, the end of the summer, the end of a movie, a book, whatever — I had to be 100% prepared and I had to know how it would happen, before it would happen or I was an emotional wreck. And then when I got to boarding school everything was so regimented that I didn’t have the space to process all of those fears and instead, I learned to hide them behind my eating disorder and sightly OCD behaviors. Since then, I’ve recovered from my eating disorder, maybe still have some weird OCD traits but I’m OK with that, and definitely still find myself succumbing to fear at times — but the difference is, I am now aware of it.
I never really show it on the outside, but on the inside, I tend to be crumbling when I feel myself venturing into the unknown, out of control in some way, talking to someone I really admire, starting something new, or am vulnerable in any way. People see me as confident, outspoken, daring, and driven, but really I’m scared shitless, like nearly 90% of the time. I’ve learned to build confidence with some things over time and no longer second guess myself in places like teacher’s seat in the yoga room but when it comes to sharing even this, like right now… being completely completely exposed physically and emotionally to anyone who feels like reading it — my hands start to quiver and my breath automatically tightens.
And then, I take a breath and remember. Like literally — I just took a huge breath in and OUT (because you can’t have one without the other) and I remembered why I’m writing this. It’s not because I’m scared…
It’s because I’m not afraid to be scared anymore.
Maybe it’s because the literal blockage has been removed from my body, maybe it’s because I’m finally seeing what it was trying to teach me, maybe all of this is just how I make myself feel better, but fuck it — it works. Bottom line: if I want to grow, I have to stop playing my life so damn small due to fear that isn’t mine. It was placed on me. I didn’t choose any of those circumstances that created deep seeded “Samskaras.”
“Samskara” is the sanskrit word for our scars and wounds that show up as habits, patterns, and cycles in our lives that control our destiny until we deal with them.
I now see that the times I have shut down with fear in the past is just another mirror image of the havoc that was going on inside of my body, probably due to early childhood fears and traumas that stopped my Root & Sacral Chakras from fully thriving until I worked through my Samskaras. Endometriosis was the protective barrier I built up to numb myself from all my fears and doubts. It calcified me so much that it taught me to pretend I was fine when I definitely was not. I was feeling all of the disappointment of my mother’s lost dreams, all of the stress of my father, and all of the energy all around me from such a young age that I had become keen on being Switzerland — neutral, unphased, perfectly in control of my body, and completely out of touch with my emotions for most of my teenage years and even into my early 20s because it was too much to bare. I was in sensory overload. This happens to a lot of young empaths (deeply intuitive people) and Bali was my first real glimpse out of that fear-based way of living.
I read somewhere recently that empaths are not born, they are made.
I can’t remember where, but whoever said it went on to say, they are usually made in one of two ways:
They are taught and encouraged to be conscious, empathetic, and aware of their gut (aka intuition) feelings from a very young age, or…
They are forced into becoming that way because they experience so much trauma from a young age that they develop the skills needed to be keenly observant of the energy around them so to avoid the next crisis.
This really hit home with me. It made perfect sense. It’s not that I’m different than any other human by being deeply empathetic, emotional, and aware of the energy around me, it’s that I was trained to be that way. In my case, not on purpose. My point in sharing this is that if you look deeply enough at where you are physically feeling blocked in some way, peel back the layers, and ask yourself the tough questions, you’ll find the root of the problem — even if you’re not ready to deal with it yet.
Every chakra has a dark and a light side to it.
Neither can exist without the other. And as shitty as it is, we have to understand what it if feels like to be afraid, doubtful, powerless, heartbroken, voiceless, or unheard, blinded, and hopeless in order to know the opposite. Such as; grounded, empowered, loving and loved, heard and hearing, full of dreams, visions, hopes, and fatih. When we become intune with our feelings, truly, even if they are not so great on the surface, we can begin to let go of all the trauma our chakra systems (or in english: our nervous systems) have been carrying around around.
We can accept that most likely, none of it is our fault but it is our dharma, our mission, our purpose, and most of all our responsibility to future generations to work through it rather than fight it. This is how we heal not only ourselves but also the lineage from which our traumas came, because like I mentioned earlier, the Yoga Sutras teach us that trauma (or Samskaras) is served in ancestral cycles until someone chooses to be brave enough to break the chain. Acceptance and awareness is the first step to moving through whatever it is that’s holding you back or creating “dis-ease” somehow in your body, mind, and Spirit. Whatever it is…
The only way out is through.
Which brings me to my final point. There is more than just my nuclear family trauma going on here. 1 in 10 women have the disease and many, many more than that have other cystic syndrome that are causing fertility rates to plummet.
What if the all the female reproductive cycle in the world are trying to send all of us a message that we’re really fucking this planet up — energetically and literally?
My generation has seen more war, terror, and political unrest over the course of our short lifetimes than our world is willing to admit. Our country has literally been engaged in war in some way since the day many of us were born. We’ve been exposed to fear throughout our medias in unrivaled amounts and that has most certainly taken its toll on the overall wellbeing, critical thought, decision making, and general social atmosphere in our country.
Let’s be real, things are tense.
We were lied to over and over and over again. America has committed grave crimes against humanity and our bodies are feeling it, even if our minds consider it too much to handle. The latest of these crimes is beyond heart wrenching to imagine — like babies and children being ripped out of their mother’s arms as they seek asylum at our borders while their parents are being held for weeks on end in standing room only detention centers, INDEFINITELY (which the supreme court deemed as legal even for permanent immigent residents with a 1 vote difference — I’ll give you one guess who cast that one vote…). They are also without access to proper water, food, lavatories, or sanitary products. This is nothing short of kidnapping, neglect, and in the case of the kids — child abuse. I’d even go as far as to call it torture. And all the children and adults that have lost their lives due to these conditions, that is called murder. It’s obviously traumatic to them and it’s traumatic to us as a society who DOES NOT CONDONE THIS. The truth is, we are constantly being numbed out by the depressing 24 hour news cycle that we are made to feel powerless to do anything about anything. They want us to feel hopeless and scared so we keep our TVs on and vote with fear which ultimately only supports oppressive powers that continue to make money off keeping us sick and afraid.
So you see, my trauma is your trauma, too.
And of course, this isn’t the only injustice going on in the world. Nor are we the only country commiting injustices. I’m just speaking from my experience to say, we all have to be brave and speak up when something isn’t right — in our bodies, in our society, and in our collective consciousness. Even if it’s just writing about it when I’d rather be doing a million other mindless, fun-filled, or numbing activities. It’s so much easier. I know that somewhere someone will read this and rethink how much time they devote to working through all of the shit that inevitably builds up in our systems due to this modern, fast paced, always running out of time, too busy to stop for anything, wild, wild world. And if that’s you, ask yourself — if you’re so busy, how come you have time to feel like shit? Just 5 minutes of mindful meditation everyday on your true feelings, bodily sensations, and breath can empower you to move through darkness and into light.
From that space of personal energetic awareness we can begin to imprint our frequency of healing on the world, rather than having the loudest voices in the room decide for us.
Because at the end of the day, we have so much more power than our fears want to let us believe.
Never forget that.
With Love,
P
