My Gift to the World

Part 6 – Read Part 5 Here

The healing work that happened in those two intense weeks lost in the jungle was tough.  I faced the toughest challenges of my life so far.  I was presented with the painful truth of my past but worked resolutely within a safe and nurturing space of acceptance and love to understand and liberate myself from it.  I needed all the support that was on offer, from my fellow light-family of brave brothers and sisters from around the world, to the facilitators, the villagers and of course the gentle and powerful shaman.  Those that had kept the sacredness and wisdom of this deep and powerful healing modality safe and pure from generation to generation.

My heart is grateful for you.

The five ceremonies that we enjoyed as a family brought profound changes to our lives in unique and powerful ways.  From the lady that struggled to walk into the first ceremony, afflicted with rheumatoid arthritis, who then stood unaided the morning after.  To the lady that made peace with losing her son at a young age, to the lady returned to love after battling alcoholism for years and the lady that had spent over 20 years in physical pain, returned to wholeness.

The key message that the sacred plant medicines and the spirit world had taught me over these two weeks was simple.  Release trauma.  Expect miracles.

The night before our early morning departure from the jungle was a noisy one.  The village had been quiet and serene for two weeks and I realise the locals were on best behaviour to allow us our healing process.  As we headed to bed for an early night, the generator was started and the music pumped out loud.  Clearly a time to celebrate for some…

The boat rides back to Iquitos lasted the entire Saturday, most of us sat in quiet reflection.  A tiredness hung over the group.  By the evening time, everyone had found their party form as we headed out for a farewell dinner in the restaurant by the Amazon.  Quite a contrast to the calm and tranquillity of the deep jungle.  It was all a bit too much for me, I finished a lovely meal and then slipped quietly away, I said farewell to them in my heart.

I phoned home and spoke with my wife and two boys.  I chose not to tell my wife of the revelations that were gifted me.  These would wait until I returned to Ireland in a few days.  I found out my sister was eight weeks pregnant.  I cried with joy, I was delighted.  It had not been an easy few years for her.  Of all the gifts that spirit had given me, one of them had been to show me her unborn daughter in the spirit world.  It was the most beautiful experience of my life.  Pristine, pure and loving.  Spirit had shown me that all was well, before I even knew she was pregnant.

I landed into Cork almost a week later and was reunited with my wife.  We shared tears of joy.  She knew that I had to go just as much as I did.  I think she was more upset with how bad I smelt as we hugged in the airport.  I had washed relentlessly but just couldn’t seem to shift the eau-de-jungle.  We stayed up until the early hours.  I would like to say that I kept the revelations until the morning, but it all poured out.  It had been hard enough to keep it from her since coming out of the jungle.

I had spent two weeks in an incubator of love and healing, surrounded by healing experts.  I had so much more soul work to do to accept the painful past that I had endured for over a decade of my childhood.  I had reached a place of acceptance and love.  My wife’s response was natural outrage.  She was livid and of course she had every right to be.  She had seen the demons that I had lived with since we met in 2001, she knew as well as I did who they came from.  We just didn’t know the extent to why they had lived within me for so long.  We did now.

I spent several months on a spiritual high following my return to ‘normal life’.  Occasionally I would wake at night and find myself disorientated, as though I was in the middle of a healing experience.  This was the shamanic initiation I learned.  That sometimes lasts several years.  So much of my ceremony I had spent performing healing work in the energetic or spiritual realm.  It just seemed second nature to me, the fact that I was still doing this healing work in a dream-state at home didn’t strike me as unusual.  It was a sign of the shaman I was becoming.

After telling my extended family the truth of my past over the next several months and witnessing their shock, disbelief and outrage.  I seemed to come to a place where I was ready for the next step.  I had experienced a number of flashbacks of my childhood, which only confirmed what spirit had shown me in the jungle.  I was ready willing and able to deal with this trauma now and so spirit seemed to be working with me to heal on a deeper level.

And so in January of 2018 I reached out to a shamanic school and told them everything in a long email.  I expected one of two things, either to not get a response or for them to tell me they couldn’t help me as I was clearly insane.  The unexpected response I got the next day brought me more tears and warmed my heart.  Everything I was experiencing was normal.  Not only that but the lady’s response seemed to ground my jungle experiences even further.  I signed up for the course.

Ironically as I had been writing the email to the shamanic school I got a facebook message out of the blue from one of the more ‘modern’ shamans, back in Peru.  I had to translate it from Spanish to English.  “Neil, when do you come?”.  Over a few messages it became clear that he was inviting me to a month long introductory training to become an Ayahausca Shaman.  Tempting though it was, I chose to take a different course, as I needed one in my own language, one that could ground me in the fundamentals of shamanism.  Looking back I see that with the message, spirit was lighting my path.

I would like to tell you that the course was easy and that I had done all the healing of my forgotten past in the jungle.  It’s not true.  Not even close.  Pandora’s box was deep and my path to healing long.  But I endured, I was supported, I put one foot in front of the other, I battled, I kept going.  I cried, I shouted, I screamed.  I swore a lot, I cursed life, my family, spirit.  I blamed everyone.  I was angry, bitter, resentful.  I was hurt.  But in the end after much grappling I let that shit go.

Nine months later I completed the shamanic self-healing course.  Now I was healed I could start another course.  Shamanic Practitioner training.  At least the painful part was over, now I could start learning the healing techniques I naively thought to myself.  Spirit knew otherwise, but never let on.  Like a wise sage, she let me advance, fumble and then fall and then helped me up when I reached out.  Like a parent watching a toddler learn to walk.  I was learning to walk in the spiritual realm.  I was remembering who I am and who we all are at our very essence.

Three years on from the jungle, having sold our dream home and moved house twice, I descended into the darkest part of my abusive past.  As the light faded from the Summer of 2019 and we headed into Winter, I unknowingly stumbled into the memories that would either destroy me or set me free for all eternity.

Spirit started to work with me to heal the core of the wound which she still saw as festering and unhealed.  And for days I fought against it, not daring to go anywhere near my shamanic sacred space.  I knew something big was brewing and I was not ready.  I hid in bed, broken, nursing my scars and trying to make sense of the nightmares that were unrelenting every night.

It was something from my teenage years.  Spirit was taking me there slowly, gently, lovingly.  There was something I needed to see.  “No spirit, I’m not going”.  I pleaded, I begged, I negotiated, I tried to reason with the all-knowing light of the world.  It was all futile.  I could have quit at any stage and the spirits would have understood, they would not have pushed it.  We are never forced to face anything we choose not to.

I wasn’t quitting.  I wasn’t done.  I was broken, my face was in the dirt but I wasn’t dead yet.  I hadn’t come all this way to just give up and go home.  In the end it was my loving wife that provided the space for the memory to surface.

The explosion happened on a Friday in November.  We were in the lounge and the boys were at school and she asked me how I was doing.  In the end, when I was ready, all it took was the right question.   Having tried to outwit and avoid the devil for 42 years, the time had come to face him down.

I was overcome with anger, bitterness and rage, like a torrent it cascaded out of me.  I allowed it.  It was time, all the training, all the experience, all of the spirits with me now.  I shouted, I screamed, I cried, unrelentless sobbing.  It poured out of me, forty years of hurt.  “why, why, why”.

And then the flashback.  Delivered by spirit.  The door to the memory of my core wound, hidden in the deepest part of my heart, cracked open and flooded every part of me.  “NOOOOOOO”.  “Why”. “Why”. “Why”.

My screaming and sobbing took over, the truth was out, wild, raw and free.  I was beside myself.  I got sick.  I was taken to the edge of sanity.  This is what it must look like when you have a mental breakdown.  In the last few moments when you finally lose your grip on physical reality, before the darkness takes you and never gives you back.  I looked into the abyss with my mind’s eye.  I would like to tell you that in that moment I thought of something better to say to the devil, something witty.  I didn’t.  “Fuck you” I said and I came back to my wife.

It had taken everything I had, all my training, all my resolve and the eternal love that my wife has had for me through all these years of healing.  But I had made it.  The whole process lasted about 20 minutes.  Then just as naturally as the night gives way to the day, we gazed out of the window and watched the birds in the trees.  Beauty was all around, the darkness had gone.  “I’ll go pick up the boys from school” she said.  “ok, see you in a bit”.

I was free.

-o-o-o-

With freedom comes responsibility and in a nightmare that I woke from on Christmas Day morning, I saw the task that was now in front of me.  When recalling the abusive memories of the past, I had gotten sick.  There had been a full and complete release of shame, embarrassment and burden from my entire being.  I felt it, it was massive.  It was very clearly someone else’s burden and it did not belong to me.  I would carry it no more.  And so over Christmas I wrote the letter to one of the Police Chief Inspector’s of England and told him my truth.

I am grateful to say I did so with no intentions of revenge, payback or ill-will.  The response I received was professional, courteous and fast.  And so, my ever loving and deeply brave wife took me by the hand in January and escorted me back to my homeland for me to provide full details to the police about the sexual abuse I experienced in my childhood.

It was one of the most difficult things I’ve chosen to do.  The responsibility sat hard on my shoulders.  I was doing this to liberate myself, to speak my truth and to take the shame, embarrassment and responsibility that I had carried unwittingly for decades and place it at the feet of those it belonged with.

Seemingly they didn’t share my noble outlook.  The investigation was closed a few short weeks after my visit to England.  The wonderful detective I had worked with phoned me to give me the news that she deemed as “bad”.  “I’m sorry, they denied it, we interviewed all the people you mentioned”.

And indeed they had and not only that, they had dealt with the case quickly and professionally.  I was actually relieved and delighted.  I was not relishing going into a court and being quizzed about the most painful and intimate parts of my life.  I was prepared to do it but it petrified me.  I do not believe in victim and villain mentality.  Victim hood is an important place to visit on your healing journey but never a place to stay, it leaves you feeling stuck and powerless.  And punishment just breeds more of the same, it perpetuates the same problems.  More trauma and more suffering.  It’s just plain primitive.

I thanked the detective from the bottom of my heart and told her she had help set me free.  I wished her well in her life.  “Thank you”.  I could close the lid on Pandora’s box now and get on with my life.

If Pandora could talk, she would tell you that the lid never goes back on.  Somewhere the lid got lost or broken.  And so as we reached March 2020 and my 43rd birthday, with the global calamity in full swing.  I sat in my sacred space, connected to spirit and asked how I could serve the world in this time of need.  Seemingly I hadn’t learnt that this was a powerful question and had already unleashed all sorts of pain in my life.  “Speak your truth”  was the simple answer I received.

“No spirit”.  “Anything but that”.

“Speak your truth”.  She held her ground, she was serious.

And so here we are.  This is my truth.  This is the story of a boy that endured.  A child that climbed inside himself, shut the door and closed his eyes for forty years.  Hoping that the demons would leave him alone and that he could just go home.

This is the story of a man who, with love and support ventured back into his painful past, and did what no other could do.  Who collected up his broken heart with courage and dignity and pieced it back together again.

This is the story of a student who learnt the ways of the shaman.  Who trusted in the power of a loving spirit, peered into hell, faced the demons and claimed his soul back.

And as the dust settles upon this dark chapter in my life, almost 7 years to the day that I quit work with PTSD.  I see the beautiful tapestry of my life unfold.

It was a gift, the PTSD in 2013 was a gift.  A message from my soul that it was time.  Delivered by my son and his horrific head injury in France.  It was an accident but I blamed myself and became paralysed with grief.  I concluded that I was a bad dad.  I had failed my son.

And now I see with the gift of irony, that I am a good dad and it was actually my father who failed me in my childhood.  And after a seven year journey I can now say with my hand on my heart.

I forgive you Dad.