Shortly before I turned 16 during the summer of 2005, my mom and I were walking in San Francisco past the piers along the water. It was a beautiful clear sunny day, and my mind was preoccupied with school and the future in general. A small crowd was gathering in front of a three-masted Japanese schooner called the Nippon Maru. I approached a man with a ponytail who was setting up a keyboard and he described the background of the ceremony that was about to begin. The ship had carried the atomic flame across the Pacific Ocean, a flame that was cultivated and kept burning after the nuclear bombings of the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
The group, led by Buddhist monks, was about to begin walking from California to New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was detonated as part of the Manhattan Project. There, they would extinguish the flame in a peace ceremony. I learned that a period of 60 years represents a significant cycle in Buddhist tradition. This ceremony in 2005 was held three weeks before the 60-year anniversary of the U.S. bombings of Japan, which killed hundreds of thousands and caused brutal environmental repercussions.
This intimate-sized outdoor ceremony was designed to set the intention for a cycle of global harmonization. Among the speakers were a man who survived the bombing as child and actor Steven Seagal. A middle-aged man wearing a quartz necklace played an instrument that had three strings, a long thin neck, and a snakeskin body. The monks stood strong, wearing long lightweight robes. The sashes of yellow draped over their shoulders were striking in front of the crisp blue sky. Some wore modern sneakers while others wore rope sandals.
My mom and I joined the group for the initial leg of the walk and I thought about how violence reverberates through the ages. At that time in my life, I regularly ruminated on the world’s most depressing subjects and maintained a cynical internal dialogue. When I looked at the monks, I noticed that they seemed to have an inner smile like they were in on some cosmic joke that I couldn’t decipher. I wore tie-dye and hemp accessories, producing an I’m-into-peace image. The traumatized parts of myself, however, blocked off connection to the state of being that truly exists beyond violence. I looked at the monks and wondered, “Could I ever be at peace like them?” I thought that maybe if I looked the part, that peace might show up. But by so heavily denying the anguish I was in, I couldn’t break out of the low-vibration cycles I was experiencing.
Back then I had no idea how emblematic this event would become as I looked back over my life as an adult. I didn’t realize then that my life would follow a similar path. I had no idea I would spend years walking from the devastation and destruction of my internal guidance systems, across distances of drug dependency, disconnection and pain to finally uncover a greater sense of peace and connection 15 years later. As an adult, I would also discover that what contributed to destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and what contributed to my own internal annihilation were more closely linked than I could have previously imagined.
The first bomb that fell on my body was dropped on me the previous summer, the summer I turned 15, when my dad arranged for me to meet with a bodyworker he had met at the local YMCA in Sarasota, Florida. He was attending sessions with this man, who was a Hindu priest. I never knew his name - I only heard him referred to as “the swami” and he didn’t introduce himself to me by name.
On a blistering sunny afternoon, my dad drove me in his silver Acura SUV and dropped me off at the swami’s modern stucco duplex apartment. The swami was slightly shorter than me, he wore white linens, and his long hair was pulled back. At first, we sat on adjacent couches and began engaging in philosophical conversation. I was excited to delve into the esoteric topics that I was most deeply curious about and time flew by. Repeatedly, he asked me if I was a virgin and I hesitantly let him know that I was. He was especially interested in this disclosure.
Then, after a couple hours of conversation he instructed me to lie down on a massage table. The apartment featured a lot of peach colors and dark greens. There was a potted plant in the corner of the room. As I undressed and got onto the table, I could see the palm trees outside the window. He poured oil on his hands and began the massage. I was not familiar with receiving massages and didn’t know what to expect. Without any notice, he proceeded to grope my chest and penetrate me with a metal tool that clicked inside me when he triggered it to do so. He told me that what he was doing would make me irresistible to men. He told me that an orgasm was a window to God.
As he violated my body and I became numb, my concept of time slowed significantly. I fixed my eyes on the green digital numbers of the microwave clock and each minute felt like an excruciating hour. The room began to pulsate and swirl. It took an incredible amount of effort and concentration for me to put on my clothes and shoes after disembarking from the table. I had been in his apartment for four hours when my dad came to pick me up as the sky filled with the oranges and purples that accompany sunsets. I could tell by how my dad looked at me that he knew something had gone wrong. He asked me how the session went, and I told him it had been good. While in the car, the tension of our body language was having a very different conversation than the one produced by the words we spoke.
We didn’t speak of the session again. Later, I found out that my younger sister was going to have a session with this man and that my stepmom would be accompanying her. I felt internal terror for my sister, but I did not speak up. I felt conflicting emotions. I thought she would be okay because my stepmom would be there and I wondered why no one went with me. What had happened to me did not register as rape in my mind at the time. I told myself that I must be too ignorant to understand the cultural significance of what he had done. I carried considerable guilt and self-blame. Understanding this encounter to be “rape” was a process that unfolded for me slowly over several years. A small internal voice kept whispering, “I was raped” and I continuously buried that voice until I decided many years later to face my pain.
Later that summer, I left for my first year of boarding school at St. George’s in Rhode Island. The first year away at school I buried myself in books to distract myself from the hellish torment that would periodically creep up and overwhelm all my senses. The sensations would start small, like an internal tingling, and quickly explode into thick cords that wrapped all around my body yanking me downward. I would desperately wonder to myself, “How will I be able to continue to live like this?” During this period, I worked hard to keep my dread hidden and myself distracted from the discomfort. I had an iPod full of music from the 1960s and 70s, which I listened to as I did homework and intermittently looked out my dorm room window at the ornate St. George’s chapel. I often felt disoriented and disconnected from everyone and everything. I wanted to leave school, but I didn’t want to go back to Florida. I had considered moving back to Iowa, my original home state. I wanted to run away to a place I felt safe and comfortable, but that place didn’t seem to exist.
The new environment I was in, a beautiful oceanfront campus, felt haunting. I wanted to fit in with the other students and I also wanted to stay true to myself, though I really struggled to envision what that meant. I often avoided social activities and stayed in my dorm room, curled up in my bed with a red comforter next to a poster of a beach. Most days, I was out-of-body just observing myself through tunnel-vision going through the motions that were expected of me.
A year and a half after the assault, I arrived at my dad’s house for Thanksgiving when unexpectedly he told me he had invited the swami, who would be arriving shortly. I felt frozen and braced myself for the remembrance of the bodily violations to come flooding back. I immediately stifled the sensations. My dad and I stood by ourselves next to the table as I felt the familiar nervousness around attempting to communicate with him. I asked, “Where will I be sitting?” My dad explained where each person would be sitting and watched me closely as he told me, “And you will be here, next to the swami.” I tried to remain expressionless as terror coursed through my veins. I felt betrayed by my dad. I told him that it had been so long since I’d seen my stepsiblings and I’d rather be seated next to them. I was then moved to the other side of the table. It was a meal permeated by thick multidimensional ropes of interlacing trauma. I tried to remain invisible as I hyper-focused on the plate in front of me. My breathing was extremely shallow, and I just wanted dinner to end so I could leave the table.
During the peace walk in San Francisco, months before this Thanksgiving dinner, I was not thinking about the previous summer, as I had deeply repressed the memory of being raped and told no one. In order to avoid addressing my agony I often used the excuse, “I have no right to speak about my pain because my pain is nothing compared to the pain of others.” Some people lost their entire families in the nuclear bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How did they find the will to live after that? Did they have flashbacks? Did they block them in order to continue their lives? I figured that’s what they did and that’s what I had to do too. I didn’t know of any other way.
Shortly before I graduated from St. George’s, another bomb hit my life from a different angle. The aortic valve of my dad’s heart suddenly split while I was on spring break. Our relationship was particularly strained at this point and so much seemed unresolved. My family camped out at Sarasota Memorial Hospital for weeks. He made a full recovery but died of a heart attack a year later in 2008. We shared nice moments during his last year, but there was still substantial discord under the surface. Several months after his death I was diagnosed with “bipolar disorder” and prescribed copious amounts of drugs after being confined in a sterile psychiatric unit. The medical establishment quickly doled out surface-level business-as-usual approaches to get me back to “normal” by obstructing the trauma and grief pent up in my system.
I was viewed by doctors as a problem in need of immediate fixing and was prescribed over a dozen pharmaceuticals as a teenager. This type of standard medical practice suppresses symptoms but ignores root causes. This made me a susceptible player in the rape culture that is the prevailing cannibalistic force that seeps through the unconscious brokenness of people. As an adult, I was raped several more times. The rapes were committed at different points by various men who were strangers to me. They came into my life suddenly, briefly, and were not part of my life after the assault. The prescription drugs deadened my willingness to protect myself and interfered with my ability to see myself as someone worthy of love.
I had enjoyable and respectful dating relationships, but my unhealed layers of pain prevented me from experiencing deep connection and I wasn’t settled in my body. This discordance, combined with the way the early abuse led to extreme feelings of worthlessness, made me rashly subservient in general. I believed I deserved to be taken advantage of and manipulated by others. In the same way humanity has largely become so disconnected from inborn wisdom and the innate intelligence behind the Earth’s natural dynamics, I also became stuck in a state of fragmentation because of the drugs I was prescribed for my “mental illness.”
Just as the U.S. government believed that thoroughly brutalizing the opposite side of the world with bombs would lead to more security for the U.S., doctors believed that they were helping me by blocking off my ability to process the grief I carried in my body. What they didn’t see, in the same way that the authoritative U.S. government didn’t understand, was that these problems of war - both in the external political sense and the internal personal sense - have much deeper causes that need to be addressed. We will only resolve each by attending to the subtle root-level realms rather than strictly through the dense and harsh suppression of symptoms. The attitude of aggressively “fighting,” whether it is “against” illnesses or other countries, is toxic. It leads to narrow-minded thinking that fails to recognize a fuller picture that integrates healing energetic flow and interconnection.
My ties to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki go even deeper than the symbolic internal decimation of my psychological landscape. My great-grandfather was a venture capitalist who was instrumental in founding the genetic engineering corporation Biogen in 1978. His name was Raymond Schaefer and he worked on the Manhattan Project early in his life. He never spoke with his family about his contributions to the nuclear bombs that were used to demolish Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During my childhood I was horrified when I discovered he worked on this project, even given that it was most likely he had not been informed that he was contributing to a weapon of mass destruction. I remember hearing stories about his briefcase, which was never to be touched. My great-grandfather had very much wanted a great-grandchild and I was his first. In 1989, he traveled with my grandma from California and visited Iowa Methodist Hospital shortly after my birth, where he held me in his arms. He died in 1995 and I have no memory of ever seeing him in-person. A few weeks ago, I watched a recording of the 1981 BBC television special The Risk Business, in which he said in an interview, “What I had in mind was commercializing microbiology and putting together a group of giants in the field who were interested in commercialization. If they weren’t interested in commercialization and they weren’t interested in financial rewards for themselves, I wasn’t interested in them.” This line of thinking exemplifies the hijacking and manipulation of nature’s patterns, as has been the case with GMOs and women and girls’ mind-body-spirit connection.
Throughout this past year, I have continued to observe the role of the underlying profit-driven mindset in the compartmentalized worldview that is still propelling the dominant Western approach to science and medicine. As an adult, I have become well aware that the prescribed pharmaceutical drugs caused me to lose touch with my innate wisdom and interfered with processes in need of completion. Instead of listening to my intuition, I perpetually and impulsively did whatever I guessed others wanted from me. The erroneous label of “permanently ill” results in ongoing profits for a range of industries and a lifelong dependence on pharmaceuticals paired with a struggle with depression for countless people. For almost a decade I resigned to the falsehood I was told by medical professionals - that I would always be sick and that I needed to follow their orders to be able to function. To do so, I put on a convincing mask and lived a stuck, numbed-out and performative life in which I sought exhilarating highs through drinking, recreational drug use and temporary escape through inflicting pain on my physical body to remove myself from the emotional pain.
I was under the impression that suicide might provide a permanent escape, so I attempted that too through an overdose when I was 20. Both before and after that attempt, I fantasized about suicide regularly. During the times I felt such utter despair, I was perplexed thinking back on the monks carrying the atomic flame on that summer day, walking in their sandals and sneakers, and I wondered how they became capable of flowing through life in such beauty.
When I was 24 and had been living in Maine for a couple of years, a friend showed me her copy of Christiane Northrup’s book Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom. We sat outside in lawn chairs in the early evening, chain-smoking and drinking beer as I flipped through the chapters while her gray cat curled up by my feet. I knew I was looking at a radical departure from the mainstream perspective on health care. In the book, she describes how stifled grief leads to health issues and this message resonated with me deeply. The idea that thoughts affect physical matter was intriguing and Northrup highlighted the connection between the emotional tension women tend to hold inside and the development of cysts. It was a lightbulb moment for me, but it took several more years for me to further connect the dots in my own life.
Shortly after turning 25 I was scrolling through Facebook and clicked on an article titled “What a Shaman Sees in a Mental Hospital.” It was an excerpt from the book The Natural Medicine Guide to Bipolar Disorder by Stephanie Marohn, in which she interviews author and spiritual teacher Malidoma Somé. In the interview he describes those who experience “mental illness” as spiritual mediums in need of training, not sick people in need of institutionalization and medication. The excerpt began to spread widely online in 2014 and I started to question the psychiatric labels I had been conditioned to apply to myself. Somé’s message resonated with me and his descriptions mirrored my experiences of the spirit realms. This form of perception is not accepted by predominant Western schools of thought. Eventually through somatic practices and homeopathy, I was able to gradually discontinue the use of both pharmaceutical and recreational drugs and alcohol and began to rekindle connection to the natural synchronicity that had been common in my life when I was a young child.
Looking back now I know that I was not mentally ill. I was suppressing trauma while living in a severely dysfunctional society and coping the only way I knew how, by staying silent and trying to remain unnoticed - trying to make myself small and invisible, an attempt to erase my trauma in the erasure of myself. The medication and label of “bipolar” gave me the impression that I was permanently defective and made it extremely difficult to reach and tend to the grieving girl inside me, crying out for my attention.
In the healing paths I traveled over the years, I had to learn to give myself space to move through the tremendous weight of karmic layers interwoven with personal traumas. I am continuing to learn as I move through these layers. By seeing the example of the monks embodying forgiveness and walking in peace, a seed of hope was planted in me that day in San Francisco. The hard work of transmuting grief has allowed me to touch into joy and has opened emboldening pathways that I didn’t think I would ever be able to walk. Through internal frequency shifts, a new layer of my life has opened up in which the previously dormant desires of my heart have begun to manifest.
Just as a new Earth is now emerging, so are the contents of each one of our souls. My younger self wouldn’t have believed that at the depths of my soul wounds I am finding blessings by going further inward. With the world in transition, I believe it is possible on a global scale to orient to a new way of being that nurtures a deeper interconnected healing for all of us.
January 6, 2021