(Strong themes warning)

The last few years have been absolutely brutal. I have never experienced anything quite like it, and I didnt think I would survive it. There were a few people who kept me tethered to life, while I drifted in darkness. Just now I can feel myself returning, I can think again, I can feel again, my life force is returning.

The thing about living in two worlds at once is, I can look calm and serene and totally put together while at the same time in another place in another way I am in the depths of hell. So if you know me and you didnt know, thats because no one did.

Close proximity to death does something to you. It takes you from your body as the other person leaves you. It can take a while to come back from that, especially if you were close with that person. Especially if that person was part of you. It leaves you sort of fractured. On one hand you are alive still, living, breathing and moving around the world as though you belong here. On the other hand there was so much blood… Are you sure you survived that? Are you sure you are here still? In the land of the living? Or did you die with them?

And if you have been close to death more than once, multiple times. Each time you hold death, it holds onto you and each time you try to return, death grips you a little tighter than before. You spend a little more time inbetween worlds before you return.

Tending wounds like this can be difficult, the psyche wont allow you to enter those spaces unguarded. Even with support I have found it difficut to navigate these spaces. And the fragments you return with can take years to integrate or even make sense to you.

We sat in a circle for 10 days. We were all healers there to heal. We ate together we sang, danced, drummed, drank cacao and we used breath as medicine. We stood on the earth and we faced our darkness. It took me 10 days with the support of 40 healers who ate, slept and breathed together for me to feel safe enough to go back to that place where there was so much blood. The two men who gaurded me for two hours, while I went back, they had been to hell, they knew the way. I wasnt afraid Id get lost again.

The breath ,the cacao, the vision it was gentle but the messsage and the meaning was ground breaking. I found it written on a piece of paper today, I wrote it down straight away on the day I heard the words. It is difficult to remember words from that dream state. The words said, written in black pencil. “You can’t wash your healing, darkness has its teaching.”

There are so many things I wish I could wash from my memory. The blood for one. The way a body changes after death, certaining, I dont need to hold that image in my mind. The terror, I dont think they make a solvol for that. The way my body responds to a threat now. A raised voice sends all systems into red alert. That would be nice to wash off.

But the darkness has its teaching and these things cant be washed away, they remain. Like a dark stain that can either tarnish you or make you uniquely beautiful. No body is marked or scared the way mine is and that is something I know to be true.

In a world full of things I am uncertain of. I know I am uniquely beautiful because of these experiences and what the darkness taught me.