It's been approximately 1 week since I got back from a week long medicine ceremony immersion in Mexico. I sat with a group of 9 other women who were also therapists or healers of some variety. We journeyed outside under the stars long into the night for 3 nights of ceremony. At times devoured by bugs and even rained on as two beautiful medicine women sang to our traumas and scrubbed away the residue of energetic blockages from painful experiences and harmful addictions of our past.
Unlike many of my ceremonies where I feel surrendered to the medicine and am taken on a healing journey, this time I was in sacred partnership with this master plant teacher, using all of the tools I have learned along the way to have agency over my own healing. I worked my ass off those three nights, sometimes stuck in a trauma loop that seemed impossible to get out of and sometimes lost in a void of dissociation and boredom as I contacted the freeze in my nervous system.
Energy moved, I unwed myself from years of marijuana abuse that was still impacting me today even after having years of abstinence. I drudged up memories from my childhood that were keeping me stuck in patterns that created double binds in my relationships. I felt more free leaving the retreat center and less frozen.
Then upon returning home, the emotions started to hit me. After being in a freeze response for several months, my nervous system's final attempt to lock down any level of activation that comes from emotions that hit the sensitivity of my nervous system like a lightening bolt hitting a rod, I finally started to feel everything from the last several months that had been contained deep in my body.
To be perfectly fair, this was my intention, it was my prayer. To unlock my nervous system, to de-thaw my freeze. When I got home I spent days crying as waves of emotion moved through me. Everything from grief to heartbreak to shame. I felt like I was being annihilated. As I walked down an icy trail this morning with my dogs I had thoughts of wanting to die.
Throughout the week I kept coming back to my practices. I journaled, I drew, I prayed. And finally, I created sacred space for ceremony, lit some candles, burned my limiting beliefs, and sat with the tension of the bind in my system. The parts of me that wanted to close down, to escape, to die...and the parts of me that wanted to experience my own aliveness again. My eros. My life-force energy. It was a battle that felt like it might destroy me and in the end, I felt more freedom than I have ever experienced to date.
Sometimes integration feels like applying new wisdom to your everyday life and sometimes integration feels like the total destruction of the parts of you that keep you safe at the cost of your own emotional, spiritual, and even physical freedom.
Integrating these things on your own is not easy work. If you or someone you love is walking the way of the medicine path, I am inviting you to join me and a community of other beautiful souls doing deep work.
With Love,
Genesa
Boulder Community Psychedelic Integration Circle with Raj Seymour and Genesa Falcao
FREE INTRO NIGHT: Tuesday February 20 from 7-9pm
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Round 2: Weaving the Sacred Integration group for Women on the Medicine Path with Genesa
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Meet Genesa
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Genesa Tara Falcao
Founder of Well One Within. A coaching and psychotherapy practice with the mission of helping people to align with their deepest truth by slowing down and connecting with the wisdom of their body and the messages from their soul.
My journey began with my own deep healing through challenging and persistent states of anxiety and depression. From my own experiences and education I was able to discover the Well One Within me and you can too!
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