I have four younger sisters, so I know I was at least very close-by for four other births as a child. The only vague memory my body can stir up from those is the sound of my mother, Jeanette, moaning. It’s not a singular memory, but something I remember the way you learn the sound of a person’s voice and you can summon it back to life in your mind anytime you wish to hear them.

Faintly, I can recall the sound of my mother’s pain, which was very brave, though I did not understand that yet.

Through the veils of whatever separation may or may not have been created between me and her as she pushed all five of her daughters into the world unmedicated, with my dad and her midwifery team surrounding her wild long dark hair, big breasts and natural shape that always seemed to be swelling with new life, I learned that sound. I imagine at times I might have been taken out of the room of my sisters’ births to soften the intensity, but somewhere deep down I know it.

I was born to it, after all. I heard it first from the inside, her pain.

Is it any wonder that I have always carried it with me?

In hindsight, it was also sound that struck me most when my first sister Rebecca delivered her daughter in 2015. I held her right leg, nervously and with wholehearted encouragement. What an honor. I remember the small river of bright red blood that followed the final push, and the way the lightning-crack of her wail moved through my body. It was a death sound, but as if by a great divine feat, she did not die. As her sister, I was simultaneously disturbed and stunned, while suddenly smiling and weeping in the breath of God as her baby was placed on her chest.

My memory was marked again in this way when I had the privilege of holding my third sister Meredith through her process as she labored her daughter to life. Her birth sound was a true roar. A lioness of teeth and terror and conviction and absolute power became my sister for a moment to finally push her baby out, and then retreated, allowing the soft, tender-hearted personality I knew well to come back into her flesh and receive her.

The miracle of life is violent. No word is enough to describe the ferocity of a woman’s love.

I was on picture duty for Meredith’s birth, so I held my breath to stay invisible and cried silent streams of tears in awe and admiration as I snapped away above the scene of her triumph. I remember her eyes appeared dazzled, almost disoriented, as if she could hardly believe what had taken place and landed in her own arms as a result.

Those wild eyes. That - the gaze of a woman in labor - is the second memory mark I have taken away from presiding over birth.

I realize now, of all of my sisters’ collective six children, I was only in the room for the birth of the two girls. The others, the boys, I only got to meet after they arrived.

My third live birth experience, on May 12th, would also welcome a new daughter into the world. This time, outside of my blood family, but still very much a new family member to me.

It was a golden day and the grass was high on the farm in Lockhart. I had barely slept because I woke multiple times to that sound again: familiar, but of course unique, as all voices are. One of my closest friends, Vylana, was in labor.

The sound waves came in the middle of the night and stirred me in my sleep. I heard muffled whispers and soft footsteps flowing in and out of the master bedroom. I blinked away excited tears in the dark and checked my phone, waiting to learn how she was progressing, until the sun rose and we all were welcomed by her midwife to gather in support of the active labor prayer.

Now, I have a lot of friends, and a broad community of many people that I love and care for. Many of the women in my community have children. And some of those magnificent mothers, I am close with. But when it comes to my inmost circle of besties, with whom I speak frequently and have shared many seasons, chapters and changes of my life, Vylana would be the first to give birth. I had the blessing of being one of the women she called in to hold the space when her water broke.

Her birth story is hers to tell. But it taught me something important that would become my own story of her birth… A small part of a grander picture, that I want to honor by the integrative practice of writing.

The day had a mystical atmosphere about it, almost shimmering.

I had just turned 43 and actively trying for almost a year to conceive my own child, which continues now to be an ongoing process. I always thought, being the sort of “big sister” in age of all of my friends, that I would be the first to become a mother. I suppose I could have looked at the pattern that happened in my own family to know that would not be the case.

Again, I am the oldest of five girls. All of my younger sisters would have children before I finally was able to emotionally transition from the feeling of “not yet” to the brave territory of “yes now.”

Perhaps in some ways, being the first and the oldest of both my sisters and my close friends, I was missing my own “big sister” energy: a wayshower to walk the path and prove that it’s safe to change. Or really, to die.

Because this level of transformation, birthing our way into motherhood, requires some forms of dying, in identity and lifestyle and priorities.

And it requires the courage to actually risk death.

So Vylana would turn out to be that wayshower from my circle of friends, as my little sisters had been. It was as though she granted me some social permission I did not know I needed to let go of who I thought I still had to be to stay connected with my community. Her journey was showing me that it was safe now, finally, to grow up, settle down, and become a mother.

That day was surreal. And not only because my friend was leading me in labor, and I was holding my own tender self-reflections around my fertility and conception journey, my expectations for my life sizing up with its reality, but also because her husband Aubrey was becoming a father. And he is my longest, closest, best friend of all.

Aub and I have a lot in common as free spirits. And we, of all of my friends, have been through the most together. To start, we were engaged to be married 15 years ago. We have worked together, created together, adventured together, and even published our first poetry books together.

I knew the young man he was, and his dreams of a big bright future. I knew all of his lovers and great loves that preceded and followed me. And I had witnessed his dream of children as it flowed through him like light through clouds, sometimes bright and sometimes overcast. I could feel it coming for him too… a moment when everything changes in ways that we cannot yet conceive of.

The field outside the barn thrummed with this sacred gravity as we gathered around the morning fire on the precipice of an unfathomable transformation. My body remembered what my mind couldn’t consciously recollect from the births of my sisters’ children, and from the births of my sisters themselves, and from my own birth, through my mother Jeanette as she brought me into the world and initiated herself by pain and power.

The space was a true temple of nature, love, care and collaboration. Respectfully, most of us waited outside of the birthing room except for select periods of time when we were welcomed in by the midwife to support the mama.

Now, due to my experience with the absolutely primal nature of labor, it was my instinct to generally hang back. I had been beside the lioness before, and learned well that she is fickle in her approval. And rightfully so. What is pleasant one moment is appalling the next. Birth, from what I have observed, is a very “hot and cold” process. And it affects the witness very deeply, especially when you love and care for the mother in process.

I was in the company of the most powerful medicine women I know and am blessed to call my friends. Ceremonial drums and feathers were out to sing this baby girl into the world. The wise women who had already given birth themselves, like my dear friends Natasha and Huaira, were directing the flow of the room, refilling water, adjusting temperature and delegating small tasks, while the doula, midwife and doctor on site closely nurtured Vy in her process.

I didn’t want to overwhelm Vy. I wanted to let her birth process breathe. I visited her periodically with gentle touch and words of encouragement, and tended the space the best I could.

Those primal mother sounds I heard first in the night continued, and I watched her eyes begin to flicker into the veil, in between dimensions of life and… well, wherever life comes from.

I saw the tender, tired girl, trembling with tears and fatigue, time and again trade places in her body with the fierce warrior queen; roaring, singing and breathing like dragonfire to assist her daughter’s passage.

Hours passed with no delivery, in spite of full, valiant effort between mother and father. We, the spiritual sisterhood, oscillated as a collective from direct presence to giving space and privacy, and supported them indirectly through reverent presence and prayer at the fire that had been burning all day.

As time went on, when I visited her, I saw Vy’s eyes shift farther into the other dimension, seemingly in unimaginable exhaustion. She was a goddess possessed by the process.

I never once felt fear for her. I had absolute faith in her soul and her body. But the immense respect that began to well in my heart as the laboring continued on with no baby arrival did something to me over time. It began to crack a shell of fear I felt for myself that had been caging me for a long time.

Vylana and I have a complex history: a glorious and passionate 10-year friendship that has collected some beautiful scars.

From a distance, some people who see our friendship from the outside might feel confused by it, or even question it. She is, after all, married to my former fiance (and in a stroke of karmic bewilderment, they even got married on the same day that my father died in 2020). But their relationship was hardly the source of our old sisterhood wounds.

We had shared a complicated relationship with a different man before their union: an agonizing, trying-but-always-failing effort at an open relationship. In the process she and I had become, at times, both lovers and enemies, and our friendship took on strong dynamics of archetypal sister wounding.

We subconsciously competed with one another. We secretly compared ourselves to each other, and simmered privately in judgement and jealousy. We also burned through those barriers into moments of the most relieving reconnection, safety, and joy. The whole saga exploded at my hands, in a violent fit at Burning Man where I ripped apart the RV we shared while I was blasted on drugs at sunrise.

The next time I saw Vylana, she would soon be engaged to Aubrey and I was in the early moments of falling in love with my friend and co-worker, Erick, who I now share a beautiful life with.

Vy and I have walked the winding and magnificent road of repair ever since. From the Peruvian jungle to music festivals, and from deception to redemption, we danced through the years in a legendary evolution from friendship to rivalry to unbreakable allyship. And across ceremonies, birthdays, adventures, grief and breakthroughs of all kinds, we arrived in a new place of true sisterly love. The “post-tragic”, well-earned kind that cannot exist before fallout and adversity.

In that sacred moment during her birth, I noticed something unsettled still stirring in my subconscious. I was holding back.

I did not want to crowd her, or take up too much space, or take a risk of making her moment of labor about me helping her. Where the other women flowed in ease with their offerings, applying a warm washcloth or rubbing her back, I waited to be invited.

Most of this instinct was pure, and I still stand by it. But, if I am honest, I began to realize that a sliver of it was the response to my own guilt and intimidation from our past. I had, at times, shrank in atonement and submission for the ways I had hurt her in the past. I didn’t want to risk separation by imposing any threat.

As I noticed these little shadows, dormant insecurities arose for me in the thick of the ceremonial air. What if she didn’t want me close right now?

I began to register gusts of jealousy when my other friends got to be with her for longer, simply because they chose to step in and support her. Somehow, the intensity of the experience was activating a subtly frightened, tense, and overly cautious aspect of myself that had been inhibiting my expression for as long as I can remember. It was the part of me that plays it safe, fears to take up space, or to risk feeling unwanted – so she does not extend herself with confidence. She waits for permission.

I had done it at my sister’s birth too. While I had the instinct to speak words of encouragement, or offer some loving touch, I was afraid of the rejection. I was afraid to overstep. I opted to sit back and become as unimposing as possible.

My friend Sigrid even waved me in and invited me to participate because I was frozen on the outskirts for some time, becoming aware of my own nervousness in little echoes of my sister wound. I was trying to cleanse it from my body by sheer intent, but it would take one final insight that I could not force, to really let it go.

Of course, none of this is a bad strategy in another woman’s labor! It is considerate, conscientious, and centers the laboring mother, which is appropriate and necessary.

But witnessing a birth is as much a ceremony as witnessing a death. It will affect you. It will wake you up. It will change something.

As I tracked this tension in my body with Vylana’s birth, pulled between the urge to support her and the hesitations to sit back and give her space, and examined the undercurrents of emotion at play, I started to realize this as a much greater pattern in my life. Anywhere where there was risk of rejection that mattered to me, I would tend to hold back and wait for more permission and approval.

Suddenly, I could see the way that wounded pattern showed up in my friendships, inhibiting my authentic expression. I could see it in my partnership with Erick. I recognized it in my work, under certain conditions, with new audiences and prospective clients. I could feel the way it holds me back from expressing my art more often in public forums.

And finally, I saw how that protective pattern of holding back had kept me from saying yes to motherhood until now.

There is, after all, so much risk.

And that is what I saw Vylana standing in, along with the warm waters of her birthing pool: the ineffable risk of childbirth. The countless ways things could go wrong, or mistakes she could make in a given moment, with her child for the rest of her life. It was truly a matter of life and death. Her own and her daughter’s.

She chose to risk death for that life.

As we kept the fire outside and I sat in this slow self-realization process, Vy eventually made the call to move from her home birthing space to the nearby hospital to receive more medical assistance.

When she emerged from that holy room to get in the car, she appeared to be floating, completely wrung of embodied strength and moving purely, it seemed to me, by spirit. Bare feet, traces of blood on her inner ankles, a long soft cotton dress billowing in the strange sunlight.

And there was that faraway gaze, more distant than ever… She was in the otherworld still, truly touching the life-giving edges of what we call death. I could feel the intense significance of this moment, and it awakened my deeply protected, great love for her.

This is what the possibility of death will do. You never really know how much you love someone until you face a real “what if” of losing them… As Vy began to transfer to the hospital to finish her birth, and all of us had to let go of our ability to assist her, we surrendered our friend to the wildest unknown.

Suddenly I realized how absurd it was that I had ever, for a second, nervously held back even the tiniest gesture I could have offered her in love. Even if she didn’t want it, or would have declined it. I not only risked her never knowing how much I loved her, but I also risked ME never feeling the full capacity of my own love!

Meanwhile, Aubrey had never moved faster or with more precision. Everyone had assignments and those who were on duty for the transfer were swift to work, gathering the necessary supplies and packing up. Aubrey emerged strong and focused from the house with his monogrammed bag, his eyes were already gone and on the road ahead. His sacred necklaces hung with intention from his neck. He became a father in that moment, in my eyes. I was watching him step into the future he once dreamed about, and he did it impeccably.

He ripped the car around to the curb to pick up Vy, as I and the other women delicately followed her with energetic support, admonishing her with whispered prayers of faith and encouragement.

Then, as if telepathic to my care for her, she turned suddenly and called out, looking for me. “Caitsy?!”

She turned her drowsy head up to locate me, not wanting to leave without a goodbye.

She wanted me! She needed me! She loved me, too.

I rushed to her with my arms open and this time, I did not hold back. I hugged her and told her I loved her and that everything was going to be great. And it was true. It did proceed to go great.

My old, invisible wounds of playing small and holding back seemed to instantly healed as they drove away to the hospital. I was stunned into a sort of emotional sobriety, where the drama of the past was somatically annihilated by the truth of the present moment, which was, of course, the truth of all of our goodness and innocence. Everyone we had ever been, known and loved. All of it collapsed into the blessed here and now. None of the old scars mattered anymore. They ceased to exist.

I returned to the fire with my friends. Together, we all sang and prayed through sunset as Huxley Lokahi Marcus was born into the intimate arms of just Vylana and Aubrey, by the support of western medicine.

And I released my tears at the foot of the flames in a sudden resolve to never again hold back a gesture of my love. There in the sticky glow of dusk with the singing insects and ash thickening the iridescent sky, I reflected on all of the places in my life that I have fearfully hesitated to share my heart, in so many forms, such as art, action, and forgiveness.

I grieved the unspoken feelings I had bottled up, withholding truth from friends that I am no longer close to. I began to honestly reconcile my judgments with the vulnerable reality of my unprocessed pain. I finally took responsibility for opting out of the game in a long silence on my social platforms, as online territories remain polarized and hostile. They have begun to scare me away. I had been holding back from being seen, from sharing my truth and my wisdom and my stories, for this same fundamental fear of rejection that inhibited all of my expressions of love.

And with perhaps the greatest sorrow, I let myself face the most sobering costs of my holding back…

The years I had put off finishing my first book. The numerous opportunities I had let pass me by because they stretched me out of my comfort zone. The many ways I told myself I was not ready “yet”… All of those hesitations mattered to me, and needed to be grieved.

But none of them were more heavy to face than taking responsibility for my hesitation to brave the pain of childbirth and become a mother myself, until the improbable age of 43.

It became clear that the cost of holding back in my life has been great. So I let all of the emotions move freely, no longer suppressed by my well-developed restraint. My dear friend Frida held me as I loosened my grip of protective control, while processing her own unique inner experience. It was a day of ceremony for everyone.

There, by the fire, inspired by my own private ceremony of self-healing through my friend’s birth, I made a new commitment for the rest of my life:

No More Holding Back.

I can still see the tail lights of their car driving to the hospital, reminding me that you never know when you will have another chance to hold your best friend. You never know how many more opportunities you will get to express your heart.

I can still recall the sacred silence of the altar they left us to hold, as I prayed for the safe and joyous passage of her daughter into the world, and how it confirmed my courage to become a mother myself.

I am still waiting for my child to begin their journey to life in my body. And in the meantime, I am keeping my word. Starting now, with the first of many untold stories that I have been holding back that, if I am brave enough to risk rejection and share them, just might be medicine.

So here I am, extending myself again to the audience I have been holding back from, whoever is still listening.

We are weaving a new lineage as a sisterhood of mothers bravely birthing a dawn of new daughters and sons.

As they arrive to become our little teachers, these healing moments of self-awareness, internal repair and change do not only free us. Our liberation in turn also frees them from the patterns that once kept us separate from each other, and from our own power and potential.

That insightful instruction, “No Holding Back”, was my first gift from our new teacher, Huxley Lokahi, who was born by the courage of her mother and the love of her father, as a blessing to the heart of her spiritual auntie Caitlyn on that bright day of May 12, 2026.

And I understand the assignment. So it begins.

*Note: The Red Thread is a creative tribute to the soul, which honors writing as a vulnerable and sincere act of true expression that nourishes our life blood. As such, all posts here are and always will be original, human-crafted articles, blogs and poetry that make no contact of any kind with AI.

Thank you so much for slowing down to read and thereby supporting this space. May your soul be nourished in kind.

With Great Heart,
Caitlyn

I wrote this poem for my very niche mini-collection, The Slayer Box: Ritual Poetry Set. Until now it has only been available through the QR code in my main book, Ridiculous Masterpiece.

It is a collection of only 13 poems, each with a corresponding ritual. All written and designed to help slay the life-sucking vampiric forces that have infiltrated our hearts and strangled our voices for far too long.

I thought of it a cute little extra project, but the collection has opened a long process of healing for me, and has also become a wellspring of creative power. Things just keep coming from it.

This collection has become the foundation for my new creative and ritual arts self-transformation program, The Slayers Club (which is currently open for emrollement for the summer session). And, it is also the spark of inspiration for a free creative workshop and poetry reading I am hosting online on Thursday, May 21st at 4pm CST, called “Sacred Weapons.”

This particular piece is less a poem and more a raw stream of conscious from my core vampire; a voice that has been with me since the very early dawn of my adulthood when I started coming of age. It’s a life story. Unfiltered in every way and made by hand.

If it touches you, please share it - especially with another woman who it might serve as a cathartic mirror for.

And if you are interested in overcoming the stranglehold that your own inner critic has on you, consider tuning into the workshop, or catching the replay by signing up here: https://luma.com/sacredweapon

And, sincerely thank you so much for taking the time to watch this.

With tenderness and courage-
Caitlyn

Thanks to the deeply ingrained programming around original sin and karma as punishment that I (like so many of us) have carried around for so long it feels like I was actually born with it, I used to perceive this pattern as something I must have earned by being bad and doing things wrong.

But now I hold it lightly. Learning doesn’t always come easy. And for some of us, we can’t learn by being told; we have to learn for ourselves.

Shoot, maybe “learning the hard way” is actually my soul’s existential kink?

Maybe somewhere beyond my small, disempowered ego self is a valiant and mighty golden shadow self who has been LOL-ing at my self-pity all along, knowing I was born precisely with the mission to go through some hard shit. And she likes it.

Then again, maybe I am just one of the stubborn and fearful people who has to wait until the whisper of my soul becomes a scream, the stakes are high, and I am experiencing unnecessary suffering before I really integrate my lessons and make the changes I know I have to make…

Both are probably true.

Whatever the case may be, I now find myself here, recently on the other side of another birthday, in my early forties and preparing for motherhood soon (I hope), with a wealth of well-earned life experience that I want to start sharing the lessons I have lived hard enough to learn in a more consistent way.

While there might be a lot of people out there who, like me, will still need to learn the hard way (themselves), I can say that awareness often saves a lot of time spent in that purgatory of “unnecessary suffering”.

Maybe, if I share what I have gleaned from hell, I can help you get out of it a little faster or sooner in your life than I have when I’ve been there.

And God knows that if there has ever been a good time to start doing everything we can to save each other from the threat of apocalyptic hellfire that we are facing here in the 2020s, now is the time.

I watched one of my best friends labor through the birth of her first child this past week. As the hours passed at her side, I felt the surreal, reality-warping power of that veil between worlds breathe all of us in and out of a sudden lucidity with life and death. When she was eventually transported to the hospital for c-section, my entire being was left ringing with one clear message: No more holding back.

Is there anything in the cosmos more simultaneously powerful and vulnerable than a human life?

We are so mortal. So soft and ephemeral… And yet, we are also so unfathomably strong in spirit, intent, creativity, and resilience. Watching a live birth is proof of that. (And a potent reminder that AI really cannot replace us for everything… especially what matters most)

This was not the first birthing threshold I have witnessed, but being the most fresh in my memory, I came home with a fierce determination to give birth to everything that I have been holding back over the years: my own child, my true story, my first real novel, and - perhaps first and foremost because it is all so ripe it might rot if I wait any longer - every tool and lesson I have collected over my lifetime that might help another person survive these times.

There really has never been less certainty about the future, and time is warping with palpable acceleration in the advent of AI. So, no more holding back.

The best way of following that instruction that I know of is to write. And to share what I write.

So where to begin?

Well, I think I am going to get a little weird. I want to start talking more about what I am finding to be particularly relevant and useful lore: namely that of demons, vampires, psychic attack, and spiritual battle.

Because the most recent lessons I have been able to add to my strand of hard-earned pearls of wisdom have come from the slow and subtle teachings of the school of shadow interference.

What exactly is spiritual interference? It would be a little crazy for me to pretend I can answer that question, because it is part of the great mystery which includes all unseen and immeasurable forces.

But I can talk about what it has meant to me in a more grounded and practical sense. So I will be unpacking what I have experienced with “interference” in my next few posts, which will be titled as “Vampire Diaries” because, at the secret center of my spiritual journey over the past 18 months, I have spent a lot of time working with mythic maps of demon hunting and vampire slaying to get myself out of my own personal hell.

It is difficult to pinpoint precisely when it began for me, because I honestly always was a hot mess of a young woman. As a neurodivergent, super type B wild child, chaos was a cloak that I wore for most of my life. And I was no stranger to common proverbial demons of temptation and misfortune.

But it has been many years now since I transcended that old familiar pattern when I found a path of higher alignment with my soul. Prosperity and blessings beyond my wildest expectations followed. I was walking in purpose and service, fulfilled and confident that I was on track to make all of my dreams come true. I finally experienced the beauty of order, and I matured into a woman there. As the saying goes, the wind was at my back for quite some time.

But, as any true path of soul is bound to take a person, I eventually found myself at a challenging crossroads where it would be time to level up, just as soon as I was getting a little too comfortable. Translation: things suddenly got hard again.

The wind started to push against me at first, and then over time, pummel me in the face. Much to my dismay and resistance, the world I knew slowly started to crumble. It was time for a new iteration of myself.

This fallout period started subtly in mid-2023. Over the following 18 months, my money drained, my health started to decline, and trouble started brewing in virtually every area of my life. I reached the most intense peak of misery and confusion last year, in 2025.

At my best moments, I understood that life was simply keeping its promise of impermanence and I was at the mercy of its imperative for growth and evolution.

At my worst moments, I fell into the terrible dread that I was indeed cursed, likely being stalked by demonic entities, and might be doomed to perish at age 42.

I still can’t say for sure that both stories weren’t true. But either way, I was not doomed. I was destined to become a slayer and save myself from my own worst fears.

Looking back I can see a remarkable “coincidence” that around the time when the wind started to shift directions in 2023 I was given an antique vampire hunting kit as a belated birthday present. I had a lifelong passion for vampire lore that started in childhood with the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie so the gift was a total thrill. It’s hard to tell if the slayer box came to support me just in time as the energy vampires started to come for me, or if my interest in the slayer box opened my psychic field up to a new layer of the unseen dimension and catalyzed a sort of initiation to awaken the spiritual warrior within me.

Either way, the box has been a symbolic portal and powerful talisman that has really helped save me from being overcome by any of a number of forms of destructive darkness.

Before that initiatory shift in late 2023, I was thriving. I had hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank. I was co-hosting a flourishing community and a full-on music festival which was named after my own inner vision (and was also my dreamlife baby). I was working in a well-paid job that I adored, doing the most rewarding work of my life. I was in the best physical shape I had ever been in. I finally had a healthy, loving partnership with my fiance Erick.

And over the next couple of years, I managed to swiftly ruin almost all of it.

Of course, I didn’t set out to consciously destroy my own happiness. I hardly noticed the erosion happening until everything began to really crumble. So I can’t - and don’t - fault myself. At the time, I simply did not have the knowledge and the capacity to hold and protect the life I had. I had to learn through experience.

But in hindsight, I do take responsibility for my own demise, because I can see now where I made myself vulnerable to the vampiric energy (mindset, thoughts, patterns, relationships and behaviors) that ultimately sucked the life out of that dream I was living.

Taking responsibility for my own errors gave me the power to fight my way up from the rock bottom I hit financially, physically and emotionally. And you can bet I am going to continue to fight to rebuild a bigger and better (and refreshingly different) life than I had before with everything I have learned in the process.

It was actually that very process of fighting for my life that gradually revealed the “Slayer” archetype for me; a full circle gift from the vampire slaying kit I received for my birthday 3 years ago.

So for this first “vampire diary,” I am going to share where I went wrong and how I invited in the energy vamps so (hopefully) you can prevent the same kind of tragic self-destruction I have spent the past year repairing.

Now, to explain it all in detail would require me to write a small memoir. Instead, I’ve taken the time to retrace the missteps and sift them out of my own stories into a clear list for you.

Let’s have a look.

From personal experience, here are my own hard-learned…

20 Ways to Become Vulnerable to Interference & Unwittingly Invite in Energy Vampires

1. Break your Word to Yourself

Tell yourself you are going to make the move, quit the drug, or start the new habit (even in the privacy of your own mind) and then change your mind or make an excuse why not yet.

2. Obey Creative Resistance

When Resistance rears its head, and writers block or creative constipation kicks it, and you let it stop you or hold you back.

3. Silence and Hiding

Whenever shame, doubt, or the fear of judgment from others succeed in keeping you from being seen and heard, vampires have a feeding frenzy!

4. LIES (of All Shapes and Sizes)

Omissions, denial, secrets kept for fear or deception… Where truth is concealed, or falsification is spun, the fabric of the spirit is thinned. The bigger the lie, the longer it is lived, the stronger the vampire.

5. Unspoken Truth of Feeling

A well-meaning cousin of Lies, the tender places where we hold back the truth of our hearts out of fear of separation or loss, or worrying about other people’s feelings, make opportunities for interference to enter.

6. Rumination

The spin cycle of low vibration, unexpressed feelings that turn into gremlin-y thoughts of resentment, envy, or judgment (even with the self). This also includes fixating on what you want for too long in the mind - especially from a place of longing and lack - without active pursuit.

7. Misplacement of Attention

Or Paranoia, versus Pronoia: the expectation of something good to happen. Spend more time focusing on worry, scarcity, and dread of the worst that could happen than on possibility and positive expectations of “what’s the best that could happen?”

8. Inaction

Stagnation for too long will turn us into prey. Indecision can become paralysis. The negative effect of this one is intensified by knowing what you need to do and STILL saying “not yet” for longer than necessary. No choice is still a choice, and it chooses vulnerability to energy vampires!

9. Suppression

Bottle up what wants to be physically expressed (positive or negative). When the tears come, swallow them down. When the urge to dance takes over, play it cool. When you want to scream, distract yourself with the anesthesia of mindless scrolling. Vampires, vampires, vampires!

10. Disconnect from Nature.

We have all felt the sickly pale creature of the night effect of staying inside under fluorescent lighting or plugged into a screen for too long. The sterilized and suffocating luxuries of modern human shelter can become a casket without proper balance, and the support of the elemental angels like sunlight, fresh air, and earth under our bare feet.

11. Disconnect from the Body & Self

Akin to separation from the Ma is the separation from our physical bodies and the depths of our inner worlds. Spend too much time working towards the future, plugged into the next stimulating simulacrum, and the mind can grow disconnected from the subconscious, leaving forgotten parts and neglected feelings to turn into monsters. The same goes for abandoning our “original” self; meaning, the self we were as children, connected to our roots and true passions. We can run but we cannot hide from who we really are. And the memory of our past will come back to haunt us if we leave it in the shadows for too long.

12. Disconnect from a higher power

…Or a greater field of relationship & meaning. Whatever our personal sense of God may be, when we stop praying to that divine power, forget the bigger picture, or cease to serve something greater than our own needs, interference is bound to gain the upper hand.

13. Overseriousness

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” There is wisdom and freedom in the great cosmic joke. The mystics, masters and shamans all know when to tap into the medicine of laughter, and how to hold it lightly. Play is protection. Take everything seriously, personally, and literally and you will give your power away along with your joy.

14. Insomnia

Anyone who doubts the vulnerability of “too much night” or the existence of vampires hasn’t spent enough time in an after hours club! The lore has tried to help us with this code: sunlight kills vampires. Occasional midnight adventures are good for the soul, but circadian rhythm alignment is essential for aliveness.

15. Unconsciousness

Anthony DeMello said it best: “Awareness, awareness, awareness.” The autopilot routine of going through the motions is unconsciousness. Too much time in that mode and we relinquish our power to be creative agents of true free will. Wherever we are not conscious of ourselves, shadow energy will run amok.

16. Desperation

Vampire energy is thirsty. It wants and craves and pursues. If you want to magnetize interference, become an energy match for vampires through desperation. Chase what doesn’t want you. Pine to be noticed. Go out of your way to be seen. Especially by the ones that don’t pay attention or respect! Want to crank it up a notch? Get obsessed. Check their social media page over and over again. Feel the vampires come flooding in. (I have unconsciously been really good at this one)

17. Settling

Compromise for less than your worth and true desire. Tell yourself you should just be happy with what you have. You wouldn’t want to risk losing it would you? Whenever you feel the urge to ask for a raise, or raise the standards in your relationship, better stay safe than sorry. Now, enter stage left… Vampires!

18. Repeated Self-Destructive Behaviors

Overconsumption, addiction, continuing to choose abuse, risking your own life… We are human beings having an experimental experience in existence. We are going to partake of risky, self-destructive behaviors from time to time. Where they get dicey and open the floodgates for energetic interference is when we know that they are harming us. Our agreement to harm ourselves can become a magnet for harm from the world around us. The more we repeat, the bigger the energy leak.

19. Lack of Boundaries

Not saying NO, when the body says so. This includes tolerance, the subtler form of No. Whether it is an internal scream or a soft resistance, a Yes expressed when a No is true may as well be a direct invitation to a vampire.

20. Avoiding Discomfort

…for too long. This is a big one, and we’ve all been there. Periods of respite in comfort, security and stability are essential for a healthy and happy life. But we all need hormetic stressors, too. And where it gets sketchy (more vulnerable to interference), is when we start to avoid the discomfort that would come by stepping bravely into our potential, rising to the occasion of the big life that our soul deeply desires for this incarnation. If we try to hide in the comfort we have found for too long, the vampires will come to drag us out and onward. By any means, our power will be requested, and tested, so we can claim it fully.

These were the moves (or traps) that made me weak– spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and eventually even physically. Ultimately, they amount to integrity work, which always includes shadow work. Wherever there are discrepancies between the truth of our hearts and our actions, and the identity that we either want to believe we are, or the one we project outwards for others, that gap is a leak. That leak is an unmanned shadow path that lets our energy out, or lets other energies in.

And trust me, listing these (my own list of repeat offenses to my soul) is still a tough mirror to face. But facing it helps me track myself honestly so I can recognize where I might still be creating holes in the integrity of my energetic body. When I see them I can continue the vital patchwork of strengthening my energetic forcefield, and protecting myself from that which might otherwise suck the life out of me.

It’s kind of fun to catch, too.

It’s an interesting game. It was through inverting these lessons of “what not to do” into “what to do” that I was able to chart the structure of what I now call the “slayer” archetype. Because if this is the path to vampiric interference, then the opposite is preventative.

So the path of the Slayer is basically this: Keep your word, devour resistance, be visible, tell the truth, express your feelings, protect yourself & value your own life, exercise discernment and say no, lean into discomfort with confidence, take action (don’t think about it, be about it!), spend time in your body and in nature, be brave, speak honestly, keep a good work-life balance (make time to laugh, play and make love), stay connected to the natural circadian rhythm: rest at night and live in the natural day, be spontaneous and creative, choose novel pathways, and expect good things from a good reality. Envision possibility.

We are up against some strong counterforces (more on that in the next diary), so slaying ain’t easy. But doesn’t it sound like a life worth fighting for?

Personally, I sure think so. After all, I have never been one to earn things the easy way ;)

This summer, to me, feels like a prime time to slay.

Thank you for reading. I hope this heads up will help you a bit, the way it has helped me in hindsight. Stay strong in your integrity out there!

With Great Heart,

Caitlyn

If you appreciated this article, keep an eye out for the 2nd Vampire Diary, dropping in a couple of days.

I am also hosting a FREE online workshop connected to this material, on Thursday May 21st at 4pm CST. Register to join live or to receive the recording at www.luma.com/sacredweapon

If you want to keep the conversation going or ask a question, drop a comment on this post - or share it!

And if you found value here and want to learn more about overcoming spiritual interference, “vampire” hunting, or techniques to empower the Slayer archetype in you, come learn and train with me in my online creative ritual program, The Slayers Club. The summer session begins soon, on May 25th.

I personally love that feeling, so I call those moments synchronicities. The risk of granting meaning to them is that sometimes, they carry an ominous energy and leave an unsettling aftertaste. Synchronicities can offer hope, and they can haunt, too.

If you want to take the good kind for its encouragement, then it has to come with the troublesome kind and its residue of fear; those little moments that leave a shudder and the mind, disturbed, echoing, “What does that mean?”

It is in times like those where some familiarity with symbol, metaphor and dreamwork can help to soften the dread that comes with taking magic too literally. In this way, poetry - by nature - helps me to remember never to take words at face value.

Thankfully, I do have a healthy inner skeptic to balance my magical thinking (and serve as a buzzkill to my inner meaning-maker). Still, I tend to generally be somewhat superstitious. I can’t help but make meaning from the patterns I encounter, and sometimes they haunt me.

I had one of those haunting synchronicities in the middle of 2024. As I type now, in January of 2026, the fact that that this happened about 1.5 years ago now is absolutely mind-boggling to me. Time seems warped in this decade, and it truly feels like just months ago.

I was still healing (slowly, to my great frustration) from breast explant surgery.

I had my implants (large profile, saline) drained and then removed after 17.5 years of living as a person who wore size small clothing with a DD bra size. It was bound to be a shock to go back to the breasts I could barely remember since I had them enhanced at age 23.

But I had also been excited for it, hoping I would reclaim a lot of life force and vitality that my body seemed to be starved of lately. What I did not expect was the depth of ongoing multi-dimensional inner work and external support that my healing journey would demand of me from that point on. It would be years-worth, in fact, although I did not know it at the time.

At that point, mid-2024, I was focused mostly on the physical: rehabilitating my tense chest, neck and shoulder muscles that had gotten stiff from immobility, stress and nerve interference.

I had a strange mixture of more pain and more numbness; a louder body preoccupying my attention that I felt more disconnected from than ever before.

My chest was jarring to see when I was undressed.

The expanded skin, which now appeared empty after so many years in the inflated shape, did not bounce back to fit my memory of those natural breasts I had altered. I had a ‘capsulectomy’ as well (removal of the capsule the body forms around the foreign object), and that cost me a bit more tissue, but was supposed to be the most effective for removing potential pathogens and bacteria, if my implants had developed any. Neither I or the doctor could know until they got in and removed them for testing.

I would learn after surgery that mine were clear: no bacterial infection, no clear signs of direct problems. But, in the mysterious world of breast implant illness, there is a proposed theory that in the right conditions of systemic overload, the body can start to reject an otherwise healthy implant that has been there peacefully for a long time. This autoimmune-like behavior usually comes with chronic inflammation. It just begins to go to battle with what was previously benign.

So, I was relieved that in this way it seemed I was one of the luckier ones whose implant capsules were not an obvious breeding ground for toxicity or acute infection. But it left my the root source of my chronic health issues, insomnia, fatigue and joint pain an unsolved mystery.

I maintained hope that offloading my body of the presence of my implants would ultimately support my immune system and be a little less internal battle to hold. (Never mind the absolute assault I had just introduced with major surgery, anesthesia, and the pandora’s box of sleeping dragons that the intrusion opened in my nervous system).

As I was healing, my bloated belly was draining fluid from surgery and it protruded farther than my breasts did for the first time in my life. It was a shocking reunion with the lower half of my body, which was now so visible across the flatlands of my chest wall.

I prayed every day that a morning would come where the way they looked would begin to visibly improve; where my breasts, now all but gone, would start to grow back. “Fluffing” out, it was called, according to my internet research. In the meantime, I focused on other elements of my healing journey.

At that time, I was still focused on finding the right healing team (outside of me) that could help. I had a chiropractor who helped with scar massage. I got lymphatic work. I spoke to a few different counselors. I went to PT occasionally.

A part of that process included occasional bodywork sessions from a gifted hands-on healer a friend had referred me to, who would - with permission - often share what she saw in her inner vision after she worked on a client’s body.

So here we are, back in that moment of synchronicity—

I had just emerged from a bodywork session with her in my home. She shared at the end, that she saw a vision of me having my breasts cut off in a past lifetime (those were her exact words), among numerous other violent deaths in other lives. Evidently, violent suffering was kind of my karmic thing, according to her inner dreamscape.

Now, I am not whole-heartedly convinced in the past-life cosmovision. Nor was I particularly convinced of this transmission. The suggestion that my breasts had been chopped off in another lifetime and I was somehow reliving this experience seemed too on-the-nose to be true. So my inner skeptic was right there at the front lines of my mind, politely filtering her reflection through discerning dismissiveness. But I did feel a surprising chill of resonance, because of my own dreams and visions. I held it all very lightly. “Wow, Interesting!” I said, before thanking her and bidding her farewell with a hug.

The very next thing that I did was go to the bathroom.

I remember it rather vividly for how long ago and ordinary the experience was. I did not turn on the light. I left the door open, so the natural sunlight spilled in. I was working on my own poetry book that year, and had been swimming in other poets’ books to get a feel for them as tangible artifacts (the layout, the paper, the weight, etc), while I channeled the design and feel of my own.

So there, on a shelf in front of the toilet, I had left Adrienne Rich’s The Dream of a Common Language, which I had only recently found after a cover illustrator said my work somewhat reminded me of hers (massive flattery, it turned out). I was finally getting to know Adrienne Rich as a poet then, and I was smitten.

On an impulse, I did what I often do with poetry books and I superstitiously flipped the book like a deck of oracle cards to a random page, asking my soul for a guiding message as I always seem to be.

The pages fanned out until my intuition caught the right page and I cracked the book open to see this line first, just minutes after the departure of my masseuse:

(Ps. If you skimmed past that image without reading the entire passage, which is section 1 of 8 from the full piece, I encourage you to scroll back up and read it— It’s worth it.)

I stayed on the first line for what felt like whole minutes, mouth agape, before I even noticed the title of the piece. And that’s when some dread set in.

A WOMAN DEAD IN HER FORTIES

Being 41 at the time (I am now 42), I was wholly disturbed. But I continued on to read the entire poem, which only gets greater and greater, and I wept there on the porcelain throne like God had touched my head. I stood up and shakily walked back into the light, still clutching that sacred paperback and deeply moved —into the realm of wonder, awe, and even fear— by the Mystery.

I was so shocked by the synchronicity of that first line, the world froze. I could not dismiss the astonishing precision of those words, and the timing of my encounter with them… Then and there my inner skeptic sat the fuck down.

Maybe past lives were real, and maybe mine were violent, and my breasts had been sliced off once upon a time… And maybe that is why I was having such a hard time with my surgery experience.

Other women did not seem to have such a hard time. Other women posted on their Instagram stories how all of their energy came back days after the operation. How their immune systems responded with gratitude and their glow returned right away. They raved about how it felt to come home to their natural forms and how they loved their small breasts.

They came back to life so quickly.

My body, on the other hand, only felt more dead.

I felt my age suddenly and heavily, as though a dimmer switch had been gradually turning down on my life force ever since the end of 2023, the year of my 40th birthday. (WOMAN DEAD IN HER FORTIES. I shuddered.)

My body was undeniably upset with me. She hid from my scrutinizing gaze like a scared animal in my new uniform layers of athleisure. Much of what had seemed ‘off’ with my health before - my greatest impetus for going under the knife to begin with - in the end simply felt aggravated by the entire experience. The chronic respiratory infections did seem to improve (praise be!) But my fatigue remained. My anxiety intensified. And the chronic pain in my joints was worse that ever.

Instead of positive changes, what was notably different were the extra pounds I had gained after months of sheltering in my mind, and new numb patches where sensation once been, which constantly signaled “alert: disconnection!” to my subconscious.

But the new addition that bothered me most of all was the new appearance of my breasts; particularly the fresh visible red scars that seemed slightly misplaced at the center of my breasts.

Instead of being seamless, blending into the underside folds like other women’s, my incisions appeared as jarring straight lines, faintly lopsided and clashing with the natural curvature of my breast tissue.

Also, and more disappointingly, one had lifted with the surgery, and one did not, leaving an asymmetry that had never existed before. They now sat on my rib cage like two broken eggs: flat and deflated, nipples like crooked cartoon eyes.

I was no stranger to scars, and these new ones conjured distressing memories for me.

One year prior to getting my breast implants in 2006, I was hit by a car as a pedestrian. I was 21 years old.

I had been at a bar that night with my friends and one of them got in a fender bender as we left. Following behind her in my friend’s Tahoe, we saw the accident and got out to check on her. I was standing on the side of the road when another drive peeled around the corner and slammed into the whole scene where I stood at the center with only seconds to register what was happening.

I remember the realization that flashed in my mind before the collision:

Oh my God. This is how I die.

I felt so cheated. My next flickering thought was how devastated my parents were going to be. Then the car hit my body, smashing me between the two vehicles from the waist down. The pain was incomprehensible. But I was grateful for the lucidity I had to experience it. It meant my brain was safe, and for as long as I could feel the pain, I knew I was alive.

Maybe this moment is where I bonded with pain: when it helped me feel sure I was alive.

It turned out, that was not how I would die. The body is extraordinarily resilient (especially at that age, 21). The recovery was long and hard, though.

To this day, I can hardly believe what I went through… Using my arms to pull my body up and use the bedpan. Living in rehab facility for one month before I went to live in my parents’ living room so I could be taken care of. And the way my mother would walk me to the neighbor’s house to shower because I could not go up and down the stairs.

I recall the story I heard in the hospital about a man who had been hit by a car on the side of the road like me, and lost both of his legs.

I remember the woman I met sitting across from me in the community area of the rehab center, who was paralyzed from the neck down after being shot by her boyfriend.

It could have been worse. I was grateful every day to have the opportunity to heal.

But then (as it does) the gratitude began to fade as I tried to reintegrate into my ordinary life. I was frustrated and embarrassed at age 22 to go back to college classes with a cane. I had a metal rod in my leg then (which I have lived with to this day), and I limped as I was learning to move around on my own again. One knee swelled every day. That pattern of asymmetry remained bothersome.

And the scars were frightful to my eyes. I felt like Frankenstein. It was summer by then so I wrapped and covered them everywhere I went. Even at the beach with my family.

That might sound like some crazy body dysmorphia, which is common for young adults and their egocentric worldviews; imagining that everyone is staring and judging when, in reality, hardly anyone is noticing you at all.

But, in hindsight, I am finding a deep current of grace and compassion for the shock and grief that comes with an irreversible change to the body— in feeling, shape or image.

John O’Donahue calls the face the “icon of intimacy,” alluding to it as a unique and exquisite gateway to the soul, and I have come to recognize the body as an extension of this… A temple of intimacy, perhaps.

Image is meaningful to us. It is the primary gateway to our conscious mind’s intimacy with the soul of this entire unique self, in this unique lifetime. It represents us. And form is how we locate ourselves in the world. All of it is sacred. It matters. It is okay that it matters. And so I have to forgive myself over and over again for my obsession with it, as hard as that may be at times in retrospect.

I had to endure another surgery that year when an error by my surgeon resulted in a crack in the hardware in my femur. In my recovery journey, I had 5 blood transfusions, a fascia transplant, and multiple scar revisions. I lost a lot of weight. My breasts deflated with the fluctuating pounds. I would look at them in the mirror, disturbed by tso many changes in my breasts and body alongside and what appeared me as monstrous leg scars on my shin, knee, and hip.

About one year later, I received a liability payout from the car insurance company for my injuries. I had chosen the path of least confrontation, deciding to take personal injury damages from the drivers’ policy rather than pursuing a complex and uncertain lawsuit for who knows how long and what cost.

I worked at a country & western dancehall at that time, as a beer tub girl, while attending classes at the local university, UTSA. I made great money rolling cold beer bottles in beverage napkins and shivering in the cranked up AC until the club filled with sweaty dancing bodies.

My $500 concert nights at the club were peak wealth for me until that moment. It was hardly an exchange for the suffering (short and long term, it would turn out). I got about $60,000 from the car insurance payout in 2006. I had never had so much money before. I had been through a lot, lost a lot, and finally there I was in the light at the end of tunnel.

Determined to salvage my sex appeal and lost dignity from my scars, I decided to use some of that money to get breast implants. I had never been able to afford it, and the trend was sweeping through my peer group at the time.

I remember coming out of surgery and feeling like my chest was pregnant. There was a soft, quiet, strange hint of seasick guilt, like I had tampered with something that I should not have.

In hindsight, I see that this was the sense of violating the sacred of my body, but I did not have language for it yet. “Intuition” was hardly even a word in my lexicon.

As I adapted to the sensation of having these large water balloons under my pectoral muscles, massaging them to help them “drop”, I also had to adjust to the new life experience of garnering far more attention in public than I had before. It was kind of exciting. And it was simultaneously uncomfortable… Sort of like the feeling of a dream where you find yourself naked in public.

I recall specifically my first time walking through a restaurant in a tank top with no bra on. It was slinky grey and silver, spaghetti strapped. I remember an older woman sitting at a table in the center of the room, casting a side eye of scorn. It wasn’t even pointed judgment… I was struck that it was her natural reaction.

I made a mental note that the days of frolicking around wherever I please without a bra on were numbered. I would be more thoughtful with respect to the crowd.

But I also decided firmly in that moment that I was going to relate to my implants like they were a part of my body. I was going to embrace them, and not allow them (or anyone’s perception of them) to mark me with any sort of shame.

From that point on, I stepped all the way into my new life as the subject of more attention, knowing much of it would be unwanted, whether that was judgement or objectification. It was too late to change my path. There was nothing that could be done to go back. This was my body now. The implants were my breasts now. They were me.

I never looked back…

That is, until 2023 when - upon learning more about what is now called breast implant illness, and I suddenly felt myself beginning to outgrow my old familiar hyper-sexual shape. I decided that the time had come to let them go. So I booked my surgery for January 2024. I was optimistic and ready to rediscover who I might be without them.

But there I was again, about 6 months post-op, facing off with that 18 year-old nagging question: “Why me?”

Every single day since my surgery, I would stop and stare at my scars in the mirror before my shower, covering them with my fingers to imagine what it would be like not to have them, or manipulating my deflated breast tissue around with my hands trying to make my breasts look even again. All the while, I would lament and ruminate… Why didn’t I feel better like the other women? Why didn’t my breasts look pretty like the images I saw at the surgeon’s catalogue of results? Why did mine have to come out uneven? What did I do to deserve for it to be extra hard? Had I made the wrong choice? Whose fault was this?

Most days I felt blame towards my doctor for error in the placement of my incisions. This was my pain story: that he disfigured me. I liked him a lot, but he was supposed to be the best of the best. I felt convinced that he could have - and should have - prevented the asymmetry with more precision.

Then, uncomfortable with my bitterness, I would blame myself for not being more direct and assertive, for not following my gut, and for not asking enough questions when I felt unsure, or being brave enough to speak up when I felt unhappy.

It brought up painful memories of regret, not having stood up for myself more in 2005 after the accident when my doctors made an error in my leg surgery, and just taking the insurance payout instead of standing for myself. I had always wanted peace. I wanted to trust the medical system that saved my life.

And I wanted people to like me so I would be safe. This pattern, as problematic as it has always been, I could grant myself compassion for. Especially if by some wild change, I had been violently harmed in past lives.

I would then seal my daily ritual of discontent by gaslighting myself as overcritical, revoking blame, and wondering if all of my concern was just an echo of that younger dysmorphia…

I would tell myself, “it could be worse,” like so many bad things that had happened in my life, and step into the running water feeling the strange two-sided coin that fate seemed to hand me for this lifetime: cursed and so very blessed all at once.

I deliberated often whether to try to get my breasts “fixed”. But my poor body had been through so much. Sure, it did not feel fair that I had an unfavorable outcome, with one little breast up high and the other low, when they had always been even before. But chasing the illusion of aesthetic perfection by messing with my body was what had brought me to this point of feeling like a patchwork doll in the first place.

Maybe the opportunity in the arising challenge was to see if I could really, truly love myself as I now am.

I would soothe myself by asking, “What would would Joan of Arc do?” Because I knew Joan would not keep fucking around, tinkering with her breast shape. She would get back to her mission.

I sensed the same would have been true for Adrienne, and her mission was poetry. Though she wrote in a different stratosphere of talent, we had that in common.

My mission was poetry too. So every day, I focused on finishing my book, and tried to not to obsess about the loss I felt in my form. I created distance from the fixation that was triggered by the mirror. I left my broken body behind. I would get the book done, and come back to her later to figure out how to “fix” it all.

But there was a monster of grief in the corner behind me every time I passed the mirror, missing the beauty I had not appreciated until it was gone. I dismissed the grief as silly. I was still pretty and still loved, somehow with all of these Bride of Frankenstein secrets under my clothes. And I was alive. The wisdom of waking up in the hospital after the car crash echoed: pain, scars, humiliation, frustration, and setbacks aside, I was alive.

The woman Adrienne Rich wrote about in that poem had actually died of breast cancer, after all. It could have been much worse.

But on that afternoon, the little red book in my hand penetrated my distraction strategy with that common language shared between my masseuse and her words.

The question of “Why is this so hard for me?” had followed me around, just like my grief monster and the synchronicity offered an answer that was broader than “bad luck” or “bad girl” (some sort of great cosmic scolding had certainly crossed my mind when I lamented my star-crossed experiences of fate).

Maybe it was indeed my karma: not punishment for being bad, the way I used to imagine it, but an old soul wound trying to fully heal by coming back to the surface to be seen by me again. A pattern’s invitation for reconciliation.

The synchronicity gave me strange hope for a bigger, more meaningful picture than the frame I had most of the time. The title of the poem bothered me, though. The explant surgery had not exactly worked in terms of the being the “silver bullet” that restored my health and energy.

So then, what would it take to not become a ‘woman dead in her forties’?
What was the message? What might that mean?

That’s what I have been figuring out ever since. I have learned some of the answer to these questions by now, and some of the answers I am still living my way into, as Rilke put it*.

The jury is still out on whether or not my breasts were really chopped off in a past life. But one thing I know for sure us that in order to prevent deadness in my forties, I have to express my feelings. I have to share my stories. I have to honor the grief, the anger, and the Grace that has been bottled up by silence, so it can flow freely through my veins and bring me back to life through connection.

I have been hesitant to share my experience publicly, because it is true, as Adrienne Rich says in that final line of that page, “There are things I will not share with everyone.”

Part of my healing journey is me walking this tight rope: holding and protecting my sacred secrets, while returning to the collective conversation with stories that are vulnerable enough to penetrate and touch other hearts.

Just like my implants, I can’t control what people will think of my stories, but they are mine. They are a vital part of me. And sharing them is a way of reclaiming myself.

I think that this kind of reclaiming might be the most healing thing we can do for ourselves: the surest way to begin to come home.

A Note from Caitlyn:

This post is the first entry in what will be a series, recounting my healing journey after removing my breast implants. I hope my lessons and insights can help all readers find more compassion for the challenges that often come with body modifications, and can support you all in making clear choices for you while potentially forgoing some of the harder lessons.

I am not sure how many parts will come through this red thread. At least one more. I hope if you enjoyed this post, that you will follow along with me for the next, where I will share more of what I have learned in the interim.

And if you are reading this as someone who is curious about breast explant surgery and want to ask a question, please drop it in the comments. I will do my best to weave my responses into the next post “coming home to the body I left behind, part 2.”

Thank you so much for reading with me today. It means more than you know.

*Footnote— Rainer Maria Rilke, on unresolved questions:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

If you enjoyed this, please share where it feels right for you. And if you want to stay connected, check out www.poetqueen.com to learn more about me and what I am offering in my work with ritual arts, creative expression, and emotional alchemy.

“The burden of communicating the unspeakable is on the psychonaut. If the psychonaut wishes to be understood, she needs to find the means to communicate those experiences, and the means to overcome whatever obstacles are encountered, in relation to these dimensions of unspeakability.”

Diana Reed Slattery, Xenolinguistics: Psychedelics, Language, and the Evolution of Consciousness.

How do I even begin to speak to a topic that is so profoundly sacred in its indigenous belonging, so ineffably powerful in its mysteries, and also simultaneously now seems to sound so New Agey cliché as ayahuasca?

The more I observe public discourse around the subject - especially in the comment sections of social media posts - I often want to take the word ‘ayahuasca’ out of the mouths of people who don’t understand it through a sincere gnosis, without which it feels like a desecration.

Even with direct personal experience, we must tread lightly with the ego’s tendency to perceive itself as a master. It took me 15 ceremonies or so before the medicine of ayahuasca truly opened to reveal its greater power to me, shattering all of my previous stories of understanding. Since then, I have known better than to claim that I know it fully. I respect ayahuasca so much, I don’t often speak publicly about my intimate relationship with it. In fact, the more experience I have gained, the less I talk. The truth behind the name certainly feels too magnificent, and too holy, for words.

But I have to speak about it now because I do know its exquisite and unique power to clear the body and psyche of problematic ancestral patterns, to heal and rewrite core wounds in the emotional body, and to awaken divine creative light in consciousness and bring it into the vessel of the self by a more expanded capacity (to name only a few major benefits). I believe we need this sort of catalyst at this time, more than ever before, not less.

And I have to speak about it now because I am going back to Costa Rica next month and bringing a small group of brave travelers to the altar of the medicine to pray with me for humanity and for the salvation and regeneration of this magnificent world.

If I don’t speak about it, the people who are meant to accept the invitation might not even get to receive the chance. So I am going to attempt to talk about it today. At this point in my life, I must trust that I have enough experience to do the great spirit of this sacrament and its surrounding rituals at least some justice.

As it is, I see too many people lately that seem to have no personal direct experience with ayahuasca diminishing these ceremonies with judgements and assumptions.

If I had a strong enough conspiracy theorist in my psyche, I might believe by now that the trends I have seen recently to be some kind of spiritual psyop by dark forces attacking this pathway of direct access to the divine and interfering with a great opportunity for us to make the leap into our potential as a human collective before perishing altogether. That might even be true, as kooky as it sounds. I won’t pretend to know what forces influence our higher collective mind and all of its slipstreams of groupthink.

But don’t worry. I do not have a strong conspiracy-weaver in my psyche. The way I see it, we are human, after all. We are currently extremely divided. We are afraid of the unknown. And our paranoia and skepticism are heightened in these times of collective upheaval in an atmosphere of existential risk. We are clinging to the known to feel stable ground while everything is shaking.

Nevertheless, I will extend my hand and bring you into my journey with ayahuasca, if you are curious to hear about it from someone who has walked with the medicine for a long time, not always by seeking it out, and rarely by my own personal desire— But always by a calling from my own soul, in some form or another.

And always, ultimately, for my highest good.

After 13 years of stumbling exploration on what we would now call my spiritual journey, in more healing modalities than I will take the time right now to count, I know with full conviction that human beings do not “need” psychedelics or plant medicines for healing or self discovery.

But wow, do they help.

And when it comes to personal growth and liberation, or the quest for inner knowledge, we do need help, in some form. Whether it is the mirror of a relationship, the resources that come from a great book or course, a spiritual practice or teacher, a wisdom lineage, conventional psychotherapy, a supportive community, or the remembrance that comes with reconnecting to nature, we ultimately cannot do it all alone.

Even the powerful gifts that come from practices of isolation and introspection such as vipassana and darkness retreats, or periods of solitude, will eventually need to be integrated into the truth of our interrelatedness with all things.

Separation fosters suffering. Connection is the antidote to addiction, self-destruction, and all shame-bound behaviors and their distorted fields of perception.

I have been communing with my soul, with God in many forms, and with the spirits of plants through medicine ceremonies for long enough now to realize that one of the primary gifts of these sacred tools of plant medicine and psychedelic therapy is this medicine of connection.

Whether that is reconnecting with the self, others, life, the body, or otherworldly spiritual energies, reconnection is the ultimate panacea.

We can experience the healing of connection by bringing that pure intention into our mundane everyday lives, or in a slow drip from subtler tools like prayer and somatic embodiment practices, or in a higher-octane dose through modalities like ceremonial breathwork.

But there is nothing I have found quite as effective, immediate, and lasting as a psychedelic healing ceremony; especially with the earthly intelligence of a plant medicine.

I use the word “medicine” with a broad range of application beyond mainstream allopathic prescriptive medicines, and beyond less conventional psychedelic or plant medicines that are used in ceremonial therapeutic settings.

The way I see it, every substance, element, action, emotion, and life form has a distinctive energetic essence: a unique compound of qualities that are encoded with a signature frequency.

The word ‘heal’ etymologically means to become whole again. Medicine can be anything that contributes something that was lacking which is needed for this balanced sense of wholeness. So, in various doses, any essence can be medicine, when it is that which is needed.

Some medicine essences have very clear fundamental healing properties, depending on what a person or being’s given imbalance might be, such as alkalizing, anti-bacterial, anti-viral, probiotic properties, etc.

Some medicines induce healing affects, like purgatives, which help the body to expel waste and energy that is stagnant or blocking the holistic harmonious flow of life force energy and nutritive resources through its cells and systems.

Some “medicines” evoke an emotional or psychological experience that infuses the self or effuses the other with a state of experience that brings balance wherever in the system there is a lack of a necessary energy for a felt sense of wholeness.

A hug can be medicine. Gazing at an open flower can be medicine. Honey is a great example of a multidimensional medicine, evoking the sweetness of pleasure and joy while offering its antimicrobial benefits with ingestion.

Medicine can also be quite bitter or even painful, and still be beneficial. Take the old retributive saying, to give someone “a taste of their own medicine”, meaning for example, that if someone serves you anger, it might serve them well to receive anger in return. It might be uncomfortable in the moment, but experiencing a harsher emotional frequency could be what is needed to bring perspective and open the heart.

That saying has been poorly used to justify acts of petty revenge, but there is wisdom in it. It points to a truth that we as human beings, carry our own medicine, and we transfer that medicine (or its “poison” form) between one another through our frequency and essence.

Ayahuasca is a medicine in every sense of the word.

It is medicinal by nature, and good for the body. It is purgative, wringing us out from all directions. It facilitates the flow of our suppressed grief, and unshed tears of sorrow. It takes us into the territory of sweetness and wonder when we need it, and it brings us to the bitter altar of ownership and self-awareness when that is what we need.

It can be a bitch-slap, a luminous and sobering wake-up call, a permission slip for freedom from the chains of trauma and emotional fear, and a long warm hug in the arms of The Mother when we can no longer curl up in the lap of the woman who gave birth to us… all in one night.

And it is more than medicine. It is a sacrament.

A sacrament sits at the heart of a divine rite. It is temple medicine, imbued by animistic reverence with the spirit of Higher Power made manifest in a tangible, ingestible form.

To receive a sacrament is to commune with the Divine. Communion is the intimate experience of coming together between the self and an other. A sacrament of communion is a reunion of the self with the Divine. For that moment of remembrance in which we partake of the sacrament, we are made whole as an embodiment of divinity. We are healed in this way, through communion.

I recall taking Communion in the Catholic church as a young girl. It would take me years to understand that the Eucharist was Christ, through the consecration of the ceremony. Once the plain papery wafer was blessed in the ritual, there was no longer a distinction between it and Christ himself. Through ingestion, we took his sacred body into ours and became one in remembrance. I didn’t grok this well enough at that age to fully receive the invitation, but a seed was planted that would flower later in my life.

When I drink the medicine of Ayahuasca now, I enter a full-sensory communion experience with Divine Nature. There is a simultaneous sense of my ego and mortal body being so minuscule and insignificant in comparison to the vastness that encompasses it, and there is also an astounding realization that I AM that which I am suddenly perceiving, so much greater and more brilliant than I can ordinarily comprehend.

Every time, after the dizzying initial launch into that higher plane of consciousness, I eventually realize this medicine is not an “other” that I am making contact with. It is (to me) a benevolent powerful spirit that presents herself to me and then also guides me into communion with my own true nature…

Communion with my soul.

It is radical realization and healing remembrance.

And then, every time, I come back home and I forget.

It is the nature of the human experience to forget.
And it is the gift of Divine Nature to remember.

This is why it disheartens me to see people with little or no direct personal experience shaming others for having an ongoing relationship with these medicinal allies. It is of course very important to be discerning about who you will sit with in ceremony, and when. A big immersion in plant medicine or psychedelic therapy is certainly not for everyone, and not always needed.

I personally have never participated in an ayahuasca ceremony more than once in a calendar year. The medicine continues to unfold in subtle and nonlinear ways for months and sometimes even years after a full ceremonial experience (3-4 sessions).

But ayahuasca is not a one-and-done cure-all, that simply hits or misses. It has many facets and benefits, and layers of support that unfurl in unique ways… every. single. time. For this reason, I encourage anyone who does not have contraindicating medical conditions to stay open to continue to explore these medicines in reputable spaces with experienced facilitators and legitimate lineage carriers, when the timing is right. Bonus benefit if you can make the time to immerse yourself in the healing setting of wild nature.

One night of ceremony in a friend’s house, even with an expert shaman, done in a good way, barely scratches the surface of what is possible through an ongoing relationship.

If I had stopped after my first journey with ayahuasca in the Amazon in 2014, I never would have been able to experience the relationship I now have with this master medicine. At that time, I had no intention of coming back anytime soon, if ever.

That’s why I have scoffed at some of the recent narratives that paint ayahuasca ingestion as an addiction. I would argue this is rare. A ceremony of this magnitude is honestly not what I would call “fun”, particularly with the medicines that require great surrender. In all of my years in the “spiritual community” I have never personally observed someone develop an addiction to ayahuasca itself.

Altered states of consciousness for dissociation? Yes, I have seen addiction to that. Expanded states that re-associate you with your emotional body, inner child and hidden core wounds? Nope. I have not personally witnessed that, although any medicine has the potential to be abused into poison.

I have some highly experienced psychonauts for friends and not a single one of them is chomping at the bit to get back to that gritty cup of magical mud, no matter how long it has been since the last cup. There is ALWAYS a hint of respectful dread in the air as the group approaches the maloca in silence.

Oftentimes the more you drink it, actually, the more the body develops a physiological aversion to it. I cannot tell you how much strength it has taken for me to choose to go back to the altar of ayahuasca with each successive night.

With that said, I do greatly appreciate the general messaging from culture to steer away from the idea that we are broken things that need perpetual fixing.

I think this is the virtuous heart of the skepticism: we are tired of behaving like we are broken.

We are collectively remembering that this is a perspective of our emotional wounds. There is a parallel dimension where we sense that we have a diamond-like nature: indestructible, untarnishable, and perfectly imperfect. The time of obsessive self-healing is beginning to tire and expire. And it’s important to pause before working with anyone who sells you the story of your sickness without their cure.

But I do fiercely trust that these medicines want to be our allies, and offer powerful gates to accelerating the evolution of our awareness and helping us remember the bigger picture. Because we will forget again and again in this noisy world with its onslaught of dissociative distractions.

We owe it to our brothers and sisters in humanity not to fire cheap shots at the “spiritual community” in order to capitalize on algorithmic trends through clickbait headlines that mock the exploration of these profoundly healing medicines.

When we speak of ayahuasca, we are entering holy ground. We must tread humbly with respect to others’ subjective experiences with these sacred teachers. And it behooves us to nurture the spark of curiosity and connectivity (including discernment) for those in our audiences who might benefit from exploring them, or going deeper for greater benefit.

Here are a few of the other pathways of beneficial experience I have had in ayahuasca ceremony, aside from healing trauma and emotional wounds (which is, lets face it, a primary benefit- and an invaluable one at that):

Ayahuasca as integration.

This one might surprise you to read. It has been the newest revelation for me over the past couple of years. It used to be that life was the spacious playground for me to integrate the vast intensity of my ayahuasca ceremonies. Something has shifted in my consciousness with the advent of integrated AI in all arenas of our lives, and the immersive virtual reality that many of us spend most of our days living in now. Life feels noisy and overwhelming. The wheel of time spins furiously onward with exponential new developments and offerings and books and podcasts and access to so many lines of communications. It is a cognitively destabilizing assault on our attention, leaving less and less awareness for us to drop into our bodies and process the depth of emotion that is being shaken up in our day to day experiences.

The past few big medicine ceremonies I have sat in, have felt like, “Ahh.. Finally, space to integrate life.”

Ayahuasca can be an exceptional medicine at pulling us deeply into the emotional body and the soma to integrate what is hiding beneath the overstimulated mental body. Rather than approaching these ceremonies as yet another thing that must be integrated somehow during our busy lives when we get home, there is a new modern benefit. We can bring our busy lives into ceremony to integrate the deeper significance of our mundane experiences, with all of their tender roots and toxic residue, so we can return to life cleaner, more aware and reset in a natural rhythm.

In the ceremony, we finally have no distractions to keep us from facing what we have been avoiding. We finally experience that long lost essential human experience of reflection and contemplation. We get to explore our bodies and investigate the roots of pain and illness that we struggle to solve mentally, day after day. We get to make peace with the events we have been too overwhelmed to process.

When I first met the medicine, I never imagined that I would see it one day as a sort of vacation retreat for integration, but we are in a different world now, and I honestly do.

Ayahuasca as exploration.

I remember the exact moment when my relationship with psychedelics and plant medicine stopped being about fixing my seemingly endless wounds of brokenness, and expanded into something bigger.

I was in a psilocybin ceremony (with a shared intention, in a sacred container with on-hand support) in Sedona somewhere in the blur of 2020. I braced myself to face my demons and descend into my shadows and cry in front of my friends, as seemed to always be my role in the medicine space up to that point.

But that time, fascinating things began to happen. My hands began to move in language, and then my voice spoke fluently in a tongue I was never taught. I saw beings in my vision space that I had never conceived of, and archetypal deities danced through my waking dreamscape. I had heard others speak of such fantastical encounters but had been disappointed for years to pass through that hallmark veil of sacred geometry only to constantly re-encounter myself, in all the ways I yearned to transcend. I had all but given up on gaining access to those magical levels of experience I had heard about in other people’s trip reports. Until one day, the focus of my psyche just shifted, as if to bless me with the assurance that I had healed enough.

It was the start of a new chapter, where my body started to become an instrument for energy that I would gain incremental mastery in playing over the years to come. I was finally learning new things, instead of processing all of my old shit.

There is a place beyond the healing journey; it is the dimension of discovery. Some people gain fast access, and for some of us (like me), there are thick mental blocks and emotional or perceptual walls to dismantle before we can get there. I believe that all of the seemingly supernatural magic and higher states of consciousness that have ever been accessible to any single person in medicine experiences are available to any of us, in time. There is no guarantee where we will go and no concrete way to measure or compare experiences.

But once enough layers have been peeled back, and knots have been loosened in the body and mind, there truly is an infinite playground to explore. You will know when you arrive. And I promise, it is worth the work it might take to get there.

Ayahuasca for collective healing.

It’s not all about me!? Ah, the humbling wisdom that comes with a purge for the collective… I recall on my last trip to Peru, the remembrance I experienced as the medicine worked in me for hours with a massive haunting wound that was certainly beyond anything I had experienced in my personal lifetime. When the somatic expression of the tangled emotional web I had been trapped in for hours finally surfaced to move through me, it started as a low groan. The groan turned into a roar, and the roar expanded into a guttural scream. Words fall short again to describe what I felt and heard move through my body in that catharsis. I could audibly hear and viscerally sense the texture of multitudes of voices, wailing their sorrow and outrage through my body, as though I became an open node in the interconnected web of all lives ever lived, allowing for the unexpressed emotion to finally be discharged; heard and transmuted by the universe.

Without a word, every woman in the space - my spiritual sisters Vylana, Sigrid, Alana, and Huaira, surrounded me like guardians and wept quietly with me as the waves of sound flowed through my vocal cords. It was a catharsis that undoubtedly purified my body and healed my own personal wounds, but it was not mine. I had the gnosis that that scream was for generations of women. I was simultaneously amazed as I observed the many voices within the sound of my voice.

I actually wrote a short poem about it which you can read here: The Cry

The medicine did not let up all night. Grief for war, furies immeasurable, and impossible compassion shuddered through hot tears and unrelenting trips to the bathroom. It felt at times like more than I could bear. I even begged my Holy Guardian Angel, or my soul, or whatever guiding principle had agreed to the experience to please make it stop. I didn’t want to do that collective healing anymore. It felt like too much. The response was instantaneous: “But you will. Because you can.”

This is just one example of many instances now of mysterious healing processes I have experienced that felt beyond my own.

Even if we could ultimately “graduate” from our own personal healing journeys, we are still inextricably connected to, and never separate from, the collective transtemporal body of humankind. There are SO many human beings who do not have access to such levels of healing support, nor have the resources and guidance to be liberated through the catharsis that comes from this sort of emotional self-expression.

We can only hope that there will be a point when we are invited by the soul to use whatever means we have to help all beings heal and be free. One of my primary means is my feeling body. Whether it is in a circle in a ceremony for a person across the room that I just met, or in a movie theater feeling suddenly moved by a film about another culture, we are naturally empathic, and the web of collective experience flows through us to find harmony and release wherever it can.

Ayahuasca opens us through surrender to become conduits of this greater collective healing, that is bigger than our own story. We inevitably realize that it’s not all about ‘little ole me’, and that we are actually big enough to hold more than ourselves. It becomes an honor to contribute our ceremonial work to the well being of the greater body we are a small part of.

Ayahuasca for personal healing. (Yes, still!)

There is always more. And the path is a spiral where we may come back to familiar territory over and over again to re-experience similar feelings and circumstances in new ways. It can feel frustrating, because we live in a cultural game of graduation and achievement. The ego loves to feel like it has graduated, especially if we perceive personal healing as an indication of personal brokenness.

But what if it was exciting to continue healing, always?

What if healing meant a continual journey of reclaiming more and more of the truth of who and what we are, expanding infinitely into ever greater wholeness?

We are infinite beings when it comes to the psyche. The body is temporal and finite. The soul is a vast immeasurable mystery. It has been a long road to get here, but I now feel excited when I encounter a part of myself that was unwittingly fractured from my awareness, even if that reunion comes with pain and tears.

Healing is a brave exploration in itself and as long as we are blessed to live, there will always be more that we get to do.

If you have read this far, you might be wondering at this point, am I trying to become a spokesperson for ayahuasca, or what?

Well, maybe yeah. Right now, kind of :)

In part because I want to open an invitation to the right people to join me in Costa Rica on Dec 12-19 with Anam Cara Retreats to receive the sacrament and participate in the collective healing and cosmic explorations, and that invitation deserves context.

If you feel that whisper, click HERE for more details on Communion With The Soul.

I also have recently recognized that as both a writer and a generally secretive psychonaut, I have a creative duty to come out of hiding and tell my stories from my medicine work. I want to set an honest foundation that states clearly where I stand for the trip reports I will be sharing in future entries here. And I am hoping to soften the taboo and find the others, like me, who struggle to find many spaces of open, resonant dialogue online around these fascinating mysteries.

And finally (but most importantly), I am doing my best to give back to a medicine that has given me maps of creation, poems I am proud to have written, and profound healing experiences that have helped me overcome addictive self-destruction patterns and build healthy relationships on a path of purpose and meaning. I know the magic that is possible for us with this plant, and I hope more people will lean into an interest to explore it, rather than feel shamed or scared off by the rhetoric of critics out there.

If nothing more, I hope this post has opened your mind and heart in a small way that might support your journey in ways that surprise and benefit you. Perhaps you will be able to open your heart to receive the “medicine” of your friend’s hug, or of a blossoming flower, or a spoonful of honey, just a little bit more in the future for having read it. And maybe one day it will help you navigate the invitation to explore a ceremonial space, with or without psychedelic medicines, that might bring you profound integration, exploration or healing.

I owe so much to the medicine carriers of these lineages and sacraments who have blessed me with the direct experiences I have had. I want to honor them by telling true stories of possibility in times of widespread discouragement.

As my first maestro Don Howard Lawler of Spirit Quest Sanctuary in Peru would say, “Para El Bien de Todos”, which means “For the Good of All.”

With Great Heart,
Caitlyn

PS. I would love your feedback! Share your perspectives and questions in the comments below, and if you have questions about working with me in these ways through the upcoming retreat or other offerings, reach out through my website, Instagram or email. My heart is always open.

There is a scream inside of me.
When I close my eyes I can still see
the shape of it, echoing 
in hypercolor pipe organ geometry
reverberating into infinity. 
And the voices don’t (all) belong
to me, but they are all mine.

Yes, I claim this world
so full of suffering. I sit
on the toilet, screaming
from both ends. The porcelain 
is my oldest friend
I never wanted to have. 

But here we are, collaborating 
as the bowels of this great big 
all-consuming heart; 
empathizing, agonizing 
in desperation. 
In digestion, and assimilation 
of everything that we love 
and all of its desecration.

I attempt to refuse the throne
of pain and stench. 
I clench my fists against 
the wretched monument
of barbarism and violation.
I ask for mercy from my station.
I don't want to be a warrior anymore
tonight. I don't want to fight 
alone in this symphony 
of sensation. 

‘But this is what you came here for.
It’s what you’re made to do. 
BECAUSE YOU CAN.’

The voice lands in my pineal gland
and resounds with a wave 
as it falls farther down 
and pounds like a tear 
in the pool of my dark, 
sheltered heart.

‘This, my love, is the part 
you chose to play.
If you are feeling it,
If you are already doing it, 
Then you must.
Because you can.’

That’s the answer I receive 
for my broken pleas of 
Why? WHY? WHY?!
And so, 
I let go of the battle 
against my own life,
surrender composure,
and let 
myself 
CRY

Listen as Spoken Word:

Today, I woke up in the blue light of the early morning with my feet completely relaxed and folded, right on top of left, and so soft, upon each other.. Like the feet of Christ on the crucifix centerpiece of the church when I was little. 

There in the covers, I thought about Christ’s feet with that nail driven through the center and how I would stare at it in church and try to make sense of the mechanics of a crucifixion; that the way it’s set up (3 large nails; with the foot nail being at the center, as the base, and supporting two appendages above) must mean that this nail in the feet is really what keeps the body up. I would wonder -and I still do- whether Christ and other crucified people would die of starvation, blood loss.. What else could it be? What hurts the most about it? 

I thought about this with my soft feet folded over together this morning; safe, alive and well, for the first time in many many years, maybe decades. It’s been a consistent focal point throughout my life. My eyes seem to go to his feet in the church. And I marveled at my realization of this in bed with a bit of shock and horror; that I used to marvel at Christ’s feet this way in church with very little shock and horror. 

From a very early age, I had already accepted this as a normal image to focus upon during times of prayer. It was so familiar, it didn’t register to me as gruesome. I was practically born gazing at this image of torture and human sacrifice. So many of us have been… I’d venture to guess that the majority of human life on this planet has this image as a formative, central image in our psyches. Bless our hearts. 

I wondered this morning again, and not for the first time, how we subconsciously relate to this symbol until we take the time to construct and update it with an adult interpretation, to put it to good use if we can. I thought about Jordan Peterson in the pulpit of the theater last week at his sold out show, “We Who Wrestle with God”, advocating for sacrifice as the act of putting our best on the altar.

I laid there this morning and continued thinking, moving deeper into the concept of sacrifice, and found my way back to a more beautiful contemplation about the symbol of Christ on the cross. One of born of my own heart in a moment of emotional lucidity:  

I’m in Sweden in early December, snow all around; sitting by a small stove fireplace at the end of a mushroom ceremony with a beautiful friend of mine. I'm holding my rosary, tumbling the coral beads around in my palm and tracing them with my fingers, and I am examining the space between the crucifix and Mary’s visage. I recognize, finally, the message of her sacrifice from the point of her conception, that was promised with his death. I recognize that we all are asked to agree to this level of sacrifice by loving; especially loving at the capacity of a mother (which is alive in each of our potentials) and giving birth to any form of love.

I spend a long time looking at the five beads that link Mary to her son, and the necklace-garland of silver and coral beyond their bond that depicts the hoop of life; with no clear beginning or end. 

“Everything I love,” I whispered aloud, as the tears dropped down my cheeks like hot wax. Everything that I love, ultimately including my self as name and body, is now and forever will be my sacrifice to this one precious life.

Inspired by my preemptive grief and unavoidable courage, I moved to the crackling fire with a small, burlap bag full of loose tobacco and lavender calyx, and begin to practice my death offering with my hands. Pinch by pinch, a prayer of surrender -and a promise to create anyway as my endless offering- went into the whipping flames. 

I remembered that moment as I laid there, deliberating whether to steal more sleep or try to overcome my resistance to the idea of a morning writing practice after such a long time away. 

Everything that I love. 

I thought about the beauty of my father’s legs, like Christ in the center of the church, folded into each other on his deathbed.

With that memory, I got up. I stopped in the restroom to relieve my overnight bladder and paused in the mirror. I wouldn’t risk the momentum with tooth-brushing or anything like it yet. I looked at my aging face and the darker roots of my hair that had grown since my last visit to the hair salon, months ago. I parted it with my hands, and took note of how the gray hair has multiplied. I parted it over and over until I found one delightfully well-populated patch. It glistened like those tinsel hair extensions I enjoyed in my twenties.

Time is narrowing. I have been procrastinating the creative birth of so many projects, and the literal birth of whatever children might be my own. I think about the 9 years I spent avoiding monogamy, and the way I flinched at a second invitation to marriage when it finally hunted me down in my current, most loving relationship. So much armoring against the absolute trust-fall of surrender that is creative love. 

Is my own childlike meditation on the horror of Christ’s death behind all of this? Is Mary’s iconic tragedy my great subconscious fear? 

My resistance to create staves off the surrender point, where I release my greatest loves to meet their mysterious fate beyond my control. 

I chose in the mirror to embrace Time, my lifelong nemesis. To seize it by the throat, and passionately kiss it. To be with it all the way, like the lover who wants to love me back, and the child who wants to enter the world through my womb, meet my face, and call me Mother.

More simply put, I marched over to my writing desk in the morning twilight and lit my still-tall red candle, entering the devotion of writing (my creative birth process) first, before any of the other things I routinely prioritize for the sense of survival. Morning breath and tangled hair, with those silver glitter streaks of wisdom. And I wrote this; before turning on my phone, before making another move, for the first time in well over a year. 

I also took a moment, after the first timer went off, to do some research via Google, at last, on the mechanics of death by crucifixion. I learned, amongst many other things, that it can (and likely would have been) more than 1 nail through the feet.

As much as I believe we need to face, and even stare deeply into the harm we have done (and are doing) as human beings, I cannot say that I recommend you do the same research of this historic atrocity. Crucifixion, it turns out, is much more terrible and heartbreaking than my sweet young mind could imagine. I wish for our psyches to be scrubbed of the stains of our collective memory of such cruelty. Maybe, if we could forget, we could forgive, and cease the vicious cycle of reimagining and repeating what we have done to each other.. 

After this nausea-inducing mental excursion, I came back to the keyboard and completed this entry. My first, long-procrastinated, post here in this space.

As I finish typing now, I watch my cats compulsively bathe each other with their tongues across the room..

I am marveling at this now, rather than the mechanics of torture: 

The way our animal selves, without their divine humanity and its distinctive attitudes (which encompass the spectrum of primitive disgust paired with judgment and superior otherness that crystallizes our separation, all the way to our evolutionary qualities of holy compassion and lasting appreciation), might be compelled to care for one other by nature. 

I am thinking about the way cats wrestle, bite, tumble, and even hiss, only to instantly forget the exercise; lick the inside of each other’s waxy ear as a greeting, then curl up in a nest of one another, perpetually moving within a field of natural love. Every day for them is a new slate of presence. Forgiveness is obsolete. And how even cats, some of the creatures most prone to torture, would never conceive of such a punishment as crucifixion.

And yet, from everything we can measure, they also cannot conceive of the gravity of their own impending self-sacrifice, and that of everything that they love, through the act of choosing to continue living, reproducing, and creating...

All of us here together, coexisting and striving to last for as long as we can, and by whatever means (creative or destructive, collaborative or competitive) in this generous and noble quest of continuing living.. Compelled to create, to bond, and to find our divine willingness to make the implicit sacrifice, in this field of natural love.