The path to becoming a ceremonial minister has been a long and winding one. It began in 2020, when on my way to moving indefinitely to Northern California I stopped in the Anza-Borrego desert to participate in a vision quest through Bill Plotkin’s Animas Valley Institute. I had been reading Plotkin’s Nature and the Human Soul for a mindfulness teacher training that I was in, and I completely fell in love with his vision of and for the world. I decided to take the deep dive into the initiation that was beloved to him and to indigenous cultures across the earth: fasting alone in the desert for multiple days. The Sioux term Hanbleceya translates to "crying for a dream," and this is the quest: in our naked vulnerability, stripped of most safety and comfort, we pray for a vision for our lives. As Plotkin explains, this can be the simplest image — it is a symbol that will continue to reveal itself to us throughout our lives.

There is a quiet in me. And a stirring. And I want to keep my words simple.

This year was the worst and best year of my life, rolled into one. I swallowed the deepest darkness I have known and transmuted it into the brightest light. And so I have learned that alchemy is real; I have described myself as an alchemist for a long time in my Instagram bio, and only now have I tasted the arc what that means.

As I have begun to sit with more clients in the intimate space that is hope — hope that we don’t have to sit in the darkness, in the unknown, forever; hope for a life that we truly love; hope for a world of humans that know how to treat each other with kindness — I have realized this: we are all on our own hero and heroine’s journey. We are all dancing with darkness and light, hoping to find the peace that comes when we learn not to attach to either one.

This week, I have felt something deep in my fascia wanting to move; wanting to shed, wanting to release. It is a Scorpio new moon, and so this impulse to shed makes sense to me (I heavily associate scorpio with snake medicine). There are no words or thoughts that accompany my shedding; just a vague pain, a vague nausea that used to express as full-blown migraines but has become less intense over the course of my somatic healing journey.

In somatic therapy world, we talk about the fact that much of trauma is pre-cognitive: in childhood, we don’t yet have any language for our emotions, and so we experience them only in our bodies. Our childhood memory - until about age 12-14 - is held primarily in the body’s memory, not in the logical / talkative part of the mind that we are used to operating from as adults. It is stored in our reptilian brain, in our nervous system, in our connective tissue.

When I was in college, lost as lost could be, a conversation-in-passing changed my life. A friend of a friend mentioned that she spoke to an astrologer, and in a flash — remembering that my grandmother had once mentioned astrology — I just knew I needed to schedule a call with this person.

“Somatic healing” or “somatic therapy” may be terms that you have heard (likely, if you live in California), and they may not be. Somatic healing / therapy is really the frontier of the therapy world at the moment (btw, I consider California to be the geographic epicenter of the Western healing frontier; we are now in a second wave of what began to happen there in the 1960s – an integration of eastern, western, and shamanic healing principles and modalities).

I don't want to answer this too clinically, too dryly, too alienating-ly. What I want to start by sharing is a moment I had about a year and a half ago, in a tiny local gathering-place in the upstate New York town my parents live in. I was there with my parents the winter before last, and one of their not-very-close friends came over to say hello. She began to ask me about what I do, and I shared with her that I was a counselor. She dug a little deeper and the topic of trauma came up. She frowned at me. “But don't you find that there are so many people now who say they have trauma? Like, I have trauma because my mother smoked cigarettes when I was growing up?” She said this sarcastically, almost meanly, and I wore the tight smile I wear, in return, when people I should agree with because they are older than I am and friends with my parents say things that I don't agree with at all.