~Over the weekend I pulled into a gas station and there was a man on a motorcycle, helmet on, wearing a jacket like my former partner. My heart began to race. I watched myself speed around him, almost hit another car and pull into position to see his face. It wasn't him.
Even though I could witness myself, I had been taken over by an impulse so strong that it can override all sensibilities of safety and surroundings. The junkie needing a fix, a sniper trained to block out anything but her target. My whole entire body was shaking. I was drunk on adrenaline flooding my brain, scrambling my prefrontal cortex. I could not pump gas, my fingers struggled to get the credit card in the machine, my legs could barely hold me up.
The door is long closed with that particular person, other doors have opened. Yet, here is this very dramatic reaction in my nervous system after all of this time, but this day was different.
~I had just left my Grammy's house. I delivered her a letter about her dying process, her choices and what she leaves behind, because no one else will. She is number one on my speed dial. She is- my Grammy. I am her Peaches. Oh my heart. I took her some things to support her body as her soul navigates how much longer to be here.
We don’t do small talk. We stepped right into stories I have heard before but now there is more texture as is common when death’s door is opening. The portal of death helps purge what has long been buried in the bones of the bodies burdened by untold stories. The past does not die unless given a proper death; ghosts are real. She wound me through The Patience, Martin and Filpatrick estuaries that fed her own unique reservoir of life circumstances.
She married a rapist at 15 to escape being raped by the men in her family and had a daughter. She got married and pregnant at 17 to escape being raped by her father and had a daughter. She never let her daughter around her grandfather for too long. She never told how he exposed himself to the girls. She left her home at 16 because of her father.
I got a closer look at how the patterns of rape, abuse and fear traveled through the generations. Every single woman along those lines lived in extraordinary fear of their father, grandfather and/or husband- often all three. Therefore, almost every single man on that side of my family abused women.
We live in a society where hurting women was/is not only acceptable, it was/is encouraged. When men (people) have no healthy outlet for their own deep pain this is the pattern that imbeds itself into our collective DNA. This is one of the roots that feeds the increasing suicide and addiction rates (leading causes of death) in our youth and increasing suicidal depression and anxiety in adults- mainly women.
~I took a deep breath and sat in my car watching the storm of fear inside of me. It was remarkable to witness. I had so much access to every sensation and how it traveled in my body. I knew that the intensity I was experiencing was not only mine.
Btw- my former partner was/is by no means any of the above mentioned things. Yet, he had a particular signature that also ran through those men. I imagine he's navigating his own healing. This reaction yesterday had nothing to do with him. I connected it to him because of how Love lost its way inside of my family line and shaped certain attachment pathways that influenced why I attract(ed) certain types of people and circumstances. The timing was uncanny. I bow to the intelligence of “circumstance”
There are many layers to why we are dawn to painful people and circumstances and call it love. Why the thing we often fear the most, that hurts us, we are also powerfully, primally, attracted to. From what I have learned, through tediously traveling these threads, is that Love is often behind the wound attraction trying to heal that wound. This is why patterns of abuse travel through family lines. A cycle is trying to complete itself, come into the light of awareness and be reborn into a new pattern. It is why I was attracted to men who carried similar signatures to my father. This isn’t even about my father it’s that systemic.
The layers are vital to understand if there is to be healing personally and collectively. It is necessary to examine the root cause with the eye of the heart in order to re-pattern the systemic pain. Distilled down- it is all a Love problem. This could also translate into a belonging problem.
These patterns don’t just show up in relationships, even though that is the arena where they are most able to wrestle it out. They surreptitiously embed themselves in many little reactions and impulses throughout our days that eventually shape our identity, drain our life force and cause disease. Very few of us are truly sober.
I was prepared this day. I have traveled the pathways of my psyche in tender curiosity around my attachments, addictions, impulses and maladies society likes to label mental illness, mystery disease or depression. This day, primed with ancestral story and the perfect timing of motorcycle man, I could unwind my sensations to the origin, scrape back that first, still oozing scab, and examine what was underneath.
Under the rubble of all the lives lost to pain was the song of compassion for every young woman who lived in horrific fear for her life under rule of severely wounded men. I could feel why and where it lived in me and hold space for it in a new way. That fear never had anywhere to go. There were no safe places for the tears of my people, so I was born with a Well of a Heart.
At the center of the wreckage stood a hearth fire harboring an inviolable flame. Around it stood the ones who have never forgotten how to pray in a good way for the day the one was born who could retrieve the torch of light from the inferno of the long dark night and carry it forth.
Love was corrupted so many times it became the dominant story and the womb passed it along. When we heal the Womb, Love can be restored as our first responder.
I cried. I shook. I felt my heart melt. I could see the faces of the women, and the men who hurt them, softening as they released their secrets. Those silenced mouths are now singing somewhere. I bathed my own inner child in compassion who lived in an entanglement of fear and longing for her own father. I know for a fact that this trigger no longer lives in me. I saw it leave. It is leaving. This is not a small unwinding, it’s interwoven with patriarchal wound. I have already had practice to test the trigger. I passed.
I can see myself standing in the center of everything that has lived before. I watch it all step back onto the Circle of Life by my ability to dance in the deep waters. I am the Ocean that these estuaries have been seeking to swim free within.
My personal power grows every time I can travel the pathways of pain and fear with curiosity and allow myself to feel the emotions. It is in my ability to engage the intricate intelligence of these patterns that I can re-pattern multiple generations and, more importantly, free myself. I don’t do, I haven’t done, this alone. I have had a team of scared medicines, rituals, ceremonies and mentors along the way. It’s why I guide others along the path of rebirth.
We all have our patterns. No one escapes their homework on Earth school, as I am witnessing in my grandmother. We are gifted moments to create new stories every day. Yet we are unaware of our triggers because they have created habits that hide the core wound, protect us from being hurt and because we live in a society that relies upon our addictions and distractions. We can choose to walk through the door we ignore banging in the winds of change, making a racket in the background of our lives, or we can be pushed through. Either way your soul will arrive on the other side at some point.
Do you know your patterns and impulses and what they rise from? Sobriety is a process that often takes many lifetimes. The soul has to be ready to inherit and bring back alive what lives below the rubble. Meeting God and letting Love back in is daunting. Can you run that much power? You bet. You were made for it. But maybe next year. Reclamation of sacred belonging takes the time it takes.
I am here to highlight the function of the wound and what happens when Love and God are manipulated. I realize I sound like a broken record. I mean who really wants to hear about the horrors of humanity again and again? Can’t we just talk about what’s pretty, be inspired, get on with it? We can when children would rather stay here and play here than disappear, and women are no longer living in fear for their lives worldwide, so it’s a worthy replay.
The balance lies within being a beacon of both the voice that stands up in the places that threaten love - and living life knowing that you are Love. Then you embody a consciousness greater than one that contains blame and victimization or bypass.
Healing to the root is possible when we have the tools to transform our triggers. Even if we still experience the aftermath of the wound in a moment, as we will because we are human, when we operate with awareness we ally our evolution into a new reality. Instead of “we will always be healing” we can reframe into “I am forever gifted the ability to shape shift myself into a bundle of love”.
A question for you to consider is:
WHY THE WOUND?
Imagine what it takes to try to shut down LOVE. What amount of suppression and manipulation does it take, how corrupted does it have to be? Why? A wound this huge must be pointing at something huger (yes that’s a word).
Who wanted to play God so badly?
WHAT REALLY LIVES BELOW THE RUBBLE? Why did it need to be silenced? What gains from all the loss?
~I close my eyes. I see her, the oldest Grandmother. They call her the Mother of all Tribes. She is The Healer. She is cloaked with a knapsack on her back woven of Starlight that she has been carrying through many timelines. It holds the seeds of the First Story that that had to be wrapped up and buried deep inside the Womb for protection. They lay dormant until Her daughter was reborn with the medicine to remember how to grow paradise within her body and soul. She passes the torch so the lost souls fluttering around the fire can let go into The First Flame of Love and rise again in the light.
She is Mary mother of God, the Magdalene, White Buffalo Calf Woman, Baba Yaga, she is Kuan Yin. She hails from an old star lineage that lives at the edge of the Primordial Womb where the Great Mystery first made the Love that made the Love that made you.
The Old Woman laughs at the glint alive in the people’s eyes when they realize {almost} everything has always been God in disguise guiding us back to Her bosom.
She can rest now. It is done.
Blessed Be. Bless my Grammy. Bless the man on the motorcycle- Angel in disguise. Bless my former partner. Thank you for witnessing.
Shira Starfire
PS!!! I am holding an online, 7-week immersion beginning July 10 for women. Tools to help open up the pathways of intuition in the Womb from under the wound. It’s a beautiful ceremony.