When I Came Home

Part 5 – Read Part 4 here

We had been in silence since lunch time on the day of the 2nd ceremony.  It had helped quieten the inner voice and the chit-chat within the group.  Both of which are a great way to avoid and distract us from doing the inner work and integration that is so important for personal growth.  The quiet time had helped me focus and regain my poise.  I had come here for answers, for truth and to see how I could serve the world.  So far I didn’t have that, I had gotten knocked in the dirt by past revelations.  But I wasn’t done yet, I wasn’t quitting, I still had questions and I still wanted answers.  I used the quiet time to stengthen my resolve.

So with empty stomachs and open hearts we made our way into the Temple for the next step on our journey of truth.  We entered all dressed in white, as the pristine, angelic presence that we were returning to.  So much of our culture seems to pull us away from our essence and our true self.  We are all loving, beautiful and pure in our hearts and the sacred plant medicine ceremonies were helping us to remember that.

The four shaman entered the temple at 8pm, “buenas noches” they all said in unison.  They were a gentle and powerful presence and worked as one to prepare the space.  There was a peace and calm like never before, we had called in our guides, our invocations had been spoken and our intentions held within our hearts.  It was time.

I was resolved to flow with the ceremony and work with the medicine this time.  A courage and strength had replaced the timidness and fear from before.  Intentions are everything when working with spirit and energy, as I was slowly discovering.  “Show me my life purpose”.

As spirit gathered among us and the tempo increased I became awash with beautiful images and visions of our incredible, vibrant world.  They danced before my eyes, happy to be seen and enjoyed, a flurry of colours and patterns.  I saw relatives that had passed years before, happy and content and at one with all of life.  I was easing gently into my journey.  My intentions were working, this was a journey of light, the darkness stayed away.

Sometimes spirit gives you information and answers that don’t make sense straight away.  This is the guidance that needs time to integrate and reflect upon before it will reveal its gifts to you.  There is depth to this work, these are not the answers to a test that you take in school, with a simple right or wrong.  The answers are seeds sown deep with us and sometimes they take many months or years before they start to flourish.

This was the case in the guidance that the spirits gave me this night.  The answer to my question “how do I serve the world”.  I had asked several times when I finally got the answer “Remember, you asked for this” came spirits reply.

I was taken on a journey back in time and into the lives of the three people that abused me.  I was taken into their deepest pain, their greatest trauma.  The moment when they were turned from a pure, innocent and angelic presence.  The moment that the darkness took them and they descended.  It was painful, but my resolve to stay in the light held me in place.  Spirit gave me the opportunity to help these people.  Those that took so much from me and who I had learned the truth about only 3 days earlier.

I was being tested to my core.  How could I help the three adults that took everything from me?  The monsters that had betrayed me and scarred me so deeply.  The thieves that came out at night and then stole away back into the shadows of a ‘normal life’ during the day.  Never to breathe a word of truth about their deeds.  Hidden in a broken world of deceit, alcohol and nicotene.

I saw then what so many of us choose not to see.  I saw the repeating cycle of abuse and trauma that plays out in our world.  I saw the hamster wheel, the same wheel that generation after generation are programmed and manipulated into joining.  Society would rather deal with the victim and the villain.  Blame the villain and hope that the whole world-wide issue goes away.   Then give pity to the victim.  By brushing these issues under the carpet and giving the ‘villains’ a slap on the wrist or putting them in jail we only create more trauma, while the core issue is left to fester and surface again and again.

But spirit was not asking me whether I would help the monster, the thief or the darkness inside my abusers.  It was presenting me an opportunity to help the innocent, pure and angelic child inside each of them.  It was showing me the beginning of their fall into darkness and asking whether I would help then, when it was needed the most.  When it could save them.

I needed no time to think.  My response was instinctual.  It was the response that love herself would choose.  I chose to help.  I dived into the vision that spirit had presented and I did what I was guided to do, what felt right in my heart.  I shined my light.  I chased the darkness away, I consoled, I listened, I comforted.  And in that moment, presented with a simple choice of fear or love, I chose to transend my own pain and suffering. I chose love.  And in doing so I allowed myself to become the Shaman.

My children would not suffer the same fate that I did.  The repeating generational cycle of sexual abuse would end with me.  The darkness that had lived inside me for forty years was free.  In the end the light that burned within me was enough to contain the darkness and eventually prevail.

There was much more self-healing to do when I returned from the Jungle and started the real-work of integration.  I remember a conversation with the shaman after one of the ceremonies, he had told two of my close friends that they were to become shaman.  He had not told that to me.  “Thank Christ” I thought.  I would not choose this life.

How beautifully ironic life is.  Six months later back in Ireland with my shamanic initiation still working through me in full force, I would start a shamanic self-healing course, the pre-requisite to becoming a shamanic practitioner and someday being known as a Shaman.  Little did I know when I chose to heal my abusers pain on that fateful night in the jungle that I had accepted the path that was offered to me by Mother Ayahausca and the spirits.  A path that I was always destined to walk.

A path that would lead me home.