photography by bomobob

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It has been a beautiful whirlwind these past few weeks as I launched one of my dreams into the world. I can see now how much of my own work on myself as well as the work I’ve done over the years with women has led up to this.  It’s funny because I always envisioned opening up a physical sanctuary, a big house where women could come on retreat and take steps toward their healing.

I didn’t realize this house, would be online and that I could reach even more women than I imagined.  I didn’t realize art would play such a big part in the process when I was dreaming up my little dream.  I didn’t realize how much writing would be a powerful tool for exploring thoughts, feelings and creating more of what we want in our lives.  I didn’t realize that we could share so much of ourselves in this online space and that perhaps by doing it online, it made it easier to share our deep pain. There have been quite a few happy surprises.

That is the beauty of being open to a dream, of allowing the dream enough space to grow into what it wants to be. It allows the miraculous to flow in.  My job is really to relax into what is here in this moment and to let it guide me into the next moment.  I love letting the community lead me into what is next through their longings and their undeniable wisdom. Although I hold an idea of where I’d like to go, I am happy to let go of the control or attachment to how it should look and leave lots of space for the work to inform our journey. I am happy to trust the process, because I am always, delightfully surprised and healed in unexpected ways myself.

My biggest challenge is to give myself completely over to the process. I have a few very strong parts on board..my inner manager, my controller and my perfectionist all vying for control. Each wanting to make sure it all goes well, that there are no mistakes made, that everything moves along perfectly. I witness them internally, piping in with their voices..”Oh, oh, you said too much.” “or no that’s not the right way to do it.” or “that’s not good enough, you are not doing enough”.  And each time I relax my hold, I breathe, I make space inside for the feelings, for the human fear of messing it all up and I relax some more. I let go of what I think it should look like, or how I want it to be exactly and make room for what it is becoming and the perfection of it. Because the truth is, it is perfectly unfolding.

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Right now in the sanctuary we have a gathering of brave souls practicing courage in action.  We have women from different parts of the world, already digging deep in our very first week and half, exploring their wounds in the safety and love of the sanctuary. I am blessed to hold this space, to facilitate the conversations of women who are in the midst of healing and becoming more of who they are underneath their wounding.  I get to see the miraculous every day in them and I am grateful. I get to be witness to all the shades of healing.  I get to wake every day and see the beauty and rawness of truth and the power of reclaiming what was once lost. And that is a miracle in my life.

If you are in need of healing childhood pain, I encourage you to join us.  Each month we explore healing themes and engaging in healing conversations and projects.  Starting in March we will be exploring Boundaries and Childhood.

Registration is ongoing and each month brings a new healing theme. Membership is 12 months and begins when you sign up.

We welcome you into the fold when you are ready.

I live in rural southern Scotland with my partner and our two dogs. My main occupation these days is studying for my PhD in human geography, for which I’m lucky enough to be fully funded. It involves a fair bit of travel and spending time away from home at my fieldwork site, but it’s good fun!

My other main focus, workwise, is my business, ahamsa: being peace, serving beauty. This is the vehicle for my work as an Interfaith Minister and a Pagan Priestess, helping people to find and follow their spiritual path, to heal any past hurts from religion, and to celebrate Life. I also conduct a fair number of weddings every year – both legally recognised male-female weddings and handfastings, and spiritual ceremonies to accompany civil partnerships for same-sex couples. My passion is teaching, and I currently do that through my blog posts, and through the books and e-courses I’m working on.

The most significant forces in my day to day life are my partner (who is a musician, a composer, a geek, a Brony, and an animal-worshipping Pagan), our two dogs (Leonbergers) and my own spiritual practice and community in the Anderson Faery Tradition. I’m also a lifelong fan, and like to keep a toe in Harry Potter, Stargate: Atlantis, Star Trek, Wraeththu, literary science fiction/fantasy and various other fandoms through the Internet.

Sharing only what you feel comfortable with, tell us what prompted you to find healing in your life (here is where you can tell us some of what happened to you as a child)

The first trauma that happened to me didn’t happen just to me, but to my whole family. My mother had a late and almost fatal miscarriage, and was one of the last few patients in a hospital, in a condemned building, over Christmas. That was in 1978, and I was eight years old. A lot changed in my family because of this event, and increasingly home no longer felt like a safe, comforting, welcoming place for me.

Within a year of that happening, my beloved ballet teacher, Mandy, who had been my mentor and greatest cheerleader since I started dance classes at the age of five, committed suicide. I should explain that I didn’t just have any little girl’s love of the pretty pinkness of ballet. I had a passion for the excellence, artistry and transcendence which I saw in ballet; my heart’s desire was to be that transcendence through dance. Mandy had an eating disorder and was in hospital because of it. She found a bathroom window on her seventh floor ward, and used it to escape from the hospital and from her life. To this day I don’t know whether it was a deliberate suicide attempt, or simply her desperation to escape from the ‘treatment’ she was receiving, but regardless, the effect was the same. I lost Mandy, and I lost my dance.

The effects on me of these events were profound, and still last to this day. What most prompted me to seek healing was the deep, clinical depression that resulted in part from them, and which began to manifest from age ten.

What are some of the paths you have used on your road to healing? (writing, art, therapy, body work, energy work, etc) Tell about your healing journey.

My first attempted route to healing was through religion. I took myself off to the local Methodist church when I was 11 years old. I wasn’t conscious of what I was trying to do, and it wasn’t where my path ultimately lay, but (through what I experienced as the church’s rejection of me as a young lesbian/bisexual woman after my confirmation) a door was opened to deeper spiritual questioning which has been an important part of my healing, and remains so today.

I think my healing path really began when I was sixteen, when I began to write poetry and to journal, both in words and in art. The healing effect of that writing was not something I felt straight away. Yes, there was the immediate relief of getting something out of me and onto paper, but the deeper ripples of what the writing set in motion took longer to take effect. I still write a personal journal, off and on, and still write poetry, although its purpose now is more artistry and less therapy.

In my late teens and at university, I self-medicated to a certain extent with alcohol, which is not something I would recommend for anyone. It led to me being in numerous unsafe situations (although I had no idea at the time, and came through them all unscathed) and has had lasting negative effects on my physical health. Nonetheless, it was part of my healing journey and not something I judge myself for, as it was part of making friends and having a social life for the first time since before the miscarriage, beyond school or church. Having friends who listened to me, who accepted me, and who were there for me, even if only for a short time – as a ‘weirdo’ who found making and keeping friends a difficult proposition – was very, very important to me.

My first experience with alcohol, at a toga party on a school trip to the USSR, was to bring me one of my very best friends in the world, as well as – through her – an entrée into the world of Science Fiction fandom. That might sound trivial, but fandom – both in person at conventions, and through writing in fanzines and APAs – was my safe place during my late teens and early twenties, and to a great extent, through the wonders of the Internet, still is. It was also how I found my partner of 16 years

Reading science fiction and fantasy was also a very important part of my healing journey. As a child, a teen and a young adult, it not only gave me an escape from my day to day troubles, but provided models of relationships and families, and of gender and sexuality, that opened the world up for me, and allowed me the freedom to totally accept myself and my past as I grew into adulthood.

Another community of great support and healing for me was the bisexual women’s movement in the UK in the early 1990s. Just to be around other women who not only accepted me but understood me and a great number of my challenges was immensely empowering. Even though it had no direct bearing on my childhood hurts, it still found it profoundly healing to my relationship with my mother to have positive, open and equal relationships with other women with whom I could identify.

The same friend who introduced me to SF fandom also introduced me to the Tarot. From the age of 17, the Tarot was my therapist, my mystery school and my path into self-knowledge. I cannot overstate how important it was to my healing and the uncovering of my path. I read for myself every day, meditated deeply on and into the cards, and allowed their energies to manifest through me.

It was a deeply transformative and empowering experience. It was also the doorway to my spiritual path, as it led me on to subtle aromatherapy, which led me on to chakra healing, the two of which combined led me on to train as an aromatherapist with a spiritual and yogic bent in 1994. Through my aromatherapy training, I went on a deep-tissue-massage-with-Vivation workshop, which had a profound effect on me, introducing me to the idea that I don’t always need to know the source of my wounds, and I can just be with uncomfortable feelings and allow them to transform. Through that workshop I also discovered A Course In Miracles and began reading it with a group. Through the ACIM group, I discovered Interfaith Ministry and began training as an Interfaith Minister. Through Interfaith Ministry I stumbled upon my spiritual path and tradition, the one I continue to walk to this day.

My spiritual path has enabled me to place my traumas and my healing in a larger context, and to compost the sh*t that has happened in my life into rich soil for the growth of my soul and my connection with others. The tradition I am part of emphasises knowing myself “in all my parts”, and accepting the shadows along with the light, and although the purpose of the path isn’t healing, healing is a constant side-effect.

In amongst all this spiritual stuff, I have had some short-term but very effective counselling, which has been part of uncovering “all my parts”, enabling good communication between them and convincing the parts of me that still live in the past that yes, it really is safe to come out now. A good counsellor is worth her weight in gold. The first counselling I experienced was at university, following a breakdown which became a breakthrough, when it prompted me to phone my mother and have an honest conversation with her about myself and my experiences, which she responded to in kind.

I have also been helped greatly in accessing, accepting and channelling my anger, not only by counselling, but also by work with the National Coalition-Building Institute. It’s an approach to reducing prejudice based in the co-counselling model, and while I find the high intensity of emotional energy it brings up to be difficult, it was through NCBI work that I finally allowed myself to feel anger at what was happened to and around me as a child, and to direct that anger to the right target: the low priority given to the health of women and girls in the 1970s, which allowed my mother and Mandy to receive such poor and ineffective treatment. I can feel rage building up in me as I type this, but I’m no longer afraid of that rage, because it’s an energy I can channel into educating and raising awareness in my day to day life, so that women and girls all over the world can be safe and healthy.

Finally, my relationship with my partner has been a place of profound healing, for both of us. Being committed to staying together, no matter what, has meant that when we unintentionally bring each other up against our past trauma and our wounds, we also provide one another with a safe container to work through the trigger, own our reactions and take another step together towards healing and integration.

What has been the hardest or most challenging part of the healing process for you?

The most challenging part of the healing process for me has been anger. I still can’t allow myself to be angry at those who hurt me, because it’s so clear to me how they were themselves deeply wounded and acting from that place of wounding, and even illness. I identify too strongly with those whose actions hurt me to blame them; I feel their pain as much as my own. But I have been able to and do allow myself to feel and release anger-in-itself, and to treat it with respect and even love as a source of immense energy.

Another hard part, which I’ve seen other interviewees in this series mention, is that I keep finding myself back in the same place, dealing with the same sh*t! I met a wonderful and very wise sixty-something woman on a Joanna Macy workshop once, who said it’s like peeling back layers of an onion: there’s always more underneath.

Also hard for me has been accepting that my depression and fibromyalgia aren’t character flaws; that I’m not a failure, I’m not lazy, I don’t lack willpower, I have chronic health conditions. There is such a tendency in any spiritual healing to see everything as being the fault of thinking, that if only I could think better, with greater clarity, in more alignment, I’d be well; that if I think I need medication, or to spend the morning in bed, I’m just looking for a crutch. To which I can now finally say, “Bullsh*t!” I’ve finally come to see that spiritual healing is of the spirit, and while it heals the core of me, it’s not going to make a neuro-chemical defect just disappear, or instantly correct two decades’ worth of unbalanced sleep patterns. I wouldn’t expect spiritual healing to make a broken leg instantly knit together, and I wouldn’t say there was anything wrong with using a crutch for it, either. Mental, neurological and biochemical disorders are no different.

If you could find a wisdom, a gift in your childhood wounding what would it be?

I find it hard to see wisdom or a gift in the wounding itself, but what I’ve learned from digging deep in inner exploration has been immense, and without the wounding I wouldn’t have had the impetus to go digging. I’m not sure that I’d say the jewels I have found and continue to find are worth the wounding, but they are certainly an ample compensation for the work of healing.

What is your take on how people heal?

Everyone heals in their own way. Some people need therapy. Some people need sport. Some people need to be left alone. Some people need friends and community. Some people need spirituality. Some people need to approach things scientifically. We each have our own, unique healing path. What matters is that we find it, that we keep on it and that we find faith in ourselves.

What would you most like others to remember on the healing path?

There are two things I’d most like others on the healing path with me to remember.

Firstly, healing is never done, and that at the same time, where you are right now is OKAY. I’ve come to regard healing work as like walking a labyrinth: there’s a point on the labyrinth when even though you know you’re getting closer to the centre, it looks and feels like you’re further away than ever. Our healing is daily work, and our healing path is something we take steps on every day – it just doesn’t always feel like it! Some days we walk five miles. Some days we just shuffle a couple of centimetres. But even if we feel like we’re going backwards, we need to have faith that we’re going forwards.

Secondly, in the words of Cheri Huber, “There is nothing wrong with you!” Shitty things have happened to us, traumatic things have happened to us, things that nobody deserves. But as broken as we might feel, we are all, each one of us, inestimably precious jewels – yes, with our wounds, yes, with our broken reactions and perceptions. To state a paradox, there is nothing wrong with us, and that is how and why we are on the healing path.

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I have some pretty amazing women in my life, women I can be myself with…all of me.  Five years ago, I didn’t really understand the power of the feminine and their ability to hold me. I had not experienced a loving feminine in my childhood and my mother often kept us isolated from visitors. I didn’t grow up cooking, dancing, and sharing with other women.  I didn’t grow up with the experience of women as safe, loving and trustworthy. In fact I experienced the very opposite.

As a sixth grader, I remember being annoyed by a particular girl who would come in every morning and kiss her girl/friends on the cheek to say hello. It is of course how I greet my girlfriends now, but back then, I felt like an outcast, like I had been left out of some secret language between girls. I wasn’t one of the girls she kissed hello and I could not understand this way of being with each other. I hated this girl so much, that somehow I ended up in a fight with her in the lunchroom one day. It was a small fight, she slapped me, I punched her in the stomach. That was that. I can’t even remember what started it, but I am sure my hatred of the feminine had something to do with it.

As I grew older, I excluded myself from having any real long term relationships with women. I had one friend from JHS, we talked for hours at a time, for approximately 3-4 times a year. And that was enough for me. It was as close as I could allow myself to be with another woman.

The healing for me came in many ways, perfectly timed.  I really believe I was gifted with exactly what I needed to heal when I was ready to heal.  These gifts came in different forms. First I developed some friendships when I was a teacher that I truly valued. I was able to witness women of integrity and I felt a kinship to them.  I soon found out that most women actually liked me. This was huge for me, because I did not feel loved or liked by the woman who gave birth to me and so I internalized that I was not likeable or loveable. I really didn’t even know I could be liked.

Of course there were women who didn’t like me and who I gave myself the right not to like. I quickly became attuned to women who were out of integrity with themselves. Women who were not consistent. I remember them well. I needed at the time to be able to say no to certain women, despite the fact that I so desperately wanted to be liked by them and by everyone.

Later when I started attending retreats at Shalom Mountain, it would be a woman, who would lead me into my inner child work. She would become like a mother to me. She would hold me, in my sadness, and walk with me in my rage and she taught me that I could trust her. I felt extremely cared for by her. I felt safe. She was a survivor like me and she knew exactly what I needed to feel safe. I can’t imagine this healing journey without her and the work we’ve done together throughout the years.   In her I learned to completely trust the feminine energy and to begin to trust my own.

Over the last few years, I have developed friendships with women I respect and love. I have experienced the power of groups with some of them and been able to show them even my deepest shame. I have also facilitated groups of women, who I hold very close and their courage to show up and trust me with their wounds, has further healed the feminine rift.

And then there are women, who I have felt a kinship to and later found that I could not trust them, that they really did not trust me and thereby kept me at distance, in a box to protect themselves from who they perceived me to be.  I’ve learned that these relationships tend to come together too quickly, never giving either of us enough time to really get to know each other and decide whether in fact we truly do like each other. Inevitably we find out that we are not compatible as friends, that perhaps we don’t really like each other, or resonate with each other. These are the ones that still pain me as they remind me so much of my relationship with mother; that love/hate dance, the not knowing where the other stands, feeling as if they keep shifting, feel so very rejected by them and not knowing why.

It is a dance and the very young wounded part of me is pained by it, and considers it an unfortunate dance, but the truth is, it is also healing the rift. These are the relationships that teach me about loving myself regardless of where the other stands. They teach me about setting boundaries when the actions of the other do not jive with my values of kindness, loyalty, safety and truthfulness. These relationships, just like the ones with my sisters, teach me so much about me and where I stand and what still needs healing. They are perfectly timed too.

Life heals you. Relationships heal you even when they break your heart and especially when they fill your cup.  They teach us what we need to know about ourselves, about what is left to soften and open, about what is okay and not okay for where we are in the moment. They teach us about the many forms of love: the holding, the being carried, the offering, the receiving and the letting go.

I am grateful for each woman who has left their mark on my path.