I have been mostly silent over the last six months, but I cannot let today pass without finally returning to my keyboard. My heart demands that I do so.
Today (May 13, 2016) is my re-birthday … a day in which I complete nineteen years as my authentic self. (If you don’t know my story, you can message me and I will gladly fill you in.)
These nineteen years have been a wild roller coaster ride of ups and downs. The healing journey has been far more intense than I could ever have imagined … a journey taking me to the very depths of my soul … but WOW, it has been so worth it.
This morning, as I hiked toward Soldier Pass on one of the countless beautiful trails in Sedona, Arizona, I found my eyes tearing up with raw vulnerable emotion. At the time, I was pondering the kinds of things I would like to say in this post while simultaneously experiencing a river of pure gratitude overflowing from within. Soon, I found myself sobbing in the shade of a beautiful red-rock arch, high above the valley below.
I found it quite significant when I realized that, as Brenda, I was only twelve years old when I boarded that one-way flight to Mexico in June, 2009. As I began that magical “Journey of Self-Discovery”, I could never have predicted that I would spend most of seven calendar years outside of the United States. My mind could never have fathomed the constant stream of magical synchronicities that would repeatedly guide me through powerful, magical, emotionally excruciating, and life-changing growth, one courageous experience at a time.
When I returned to the U.S. last November, I had every intention to quickly find a place where I could settle in and begin to write … and write … and write. After three weeks or regrouping, visiting family and friends etc…, I loaded up my car and set out with blind faith, having no idea what the future would bring, simply knowing that I had an undeniable intuitive nudge to begin my adventures by heading south into Arizona.
These last six months have not been at all what my mind had expected. The mental expectations can be quite overbearing. I have to frequently pause, take some deep breaths, and thank my chattering head for its input. Then I continue to flow with my heart.
On that first day of travel, as I pulled into Sedona, Arizona, after dark, I began to realize just how much I did NOT want to be in this country. In Peru, I had been living on much less than $500 per month (rent, food and transportation). As I searched for lodging in Sedona, the cheapest, dumpiest room I could find was just shy of $100 for one night. The culture shock was beginning to feel like quicksand … and hints of rebellious depression tried to convince me that there was no way I could survive in the U.S. without losing myself back into the hypnotic clutches of the economic rat race.
After three delightful days visiting and hiking with a friend in Sedona, I spent a magical week with a friend in Phoenix. Finally, just before Christmas, I settled in for a longer stay at a mountain home owned by a friend — a cabin in the mountains just two hours from Phoenix. I was so grateful for the solitude there … for the place that I could temporarily call my own … and for the chance to begin exploring this new phase of my life. Who would have thought that instead, I would spend the next six weeks cycling through intense waves of suicidal emotions. I myself was not suicidal. I clearly knew that what was really happening was that I was healing another deep layer of emotions from my youth … emotions that had been repressed and forgotten, and which were now boiling to the surface so that I could finally heal them. For those who have followed my journey, you may recall that I spent nearly six months drowning in similar emotions while in Guatemala back in 2012. In Arizona, these emotions were even stronger, but thanks to so many years of acquiring wisdom related to healing, I knew that the best way to heal this new layer was to lovingly give myself permission to swim right through the middle of it … which is exactly what I did.
It surprised me when I was finally shown (intuitively) that the primary roots of that depression were mired in my shut-down throat chakra … in the overwhelming unhealed grief of having bottled up the expression of my true authentic self as a tiny child … in the terror of expressing what was really going on inside, and of instead pretending to be what everyone else wanted me to be.
I stayed up late one night in mid January, sobbing through intense layers of that emotion, releasing each layer with physical gut-wrenching tears and then bringing in Higher Love to transmute them.
The very next morning, I suddenly felt motivation to begin researching my next move. My friend needed her mountain home back (she was moving in a week later), and I finally felt ready to step forward out of that hypnotic cesspool of old emotion. I explored internet sites to investigate the possibilities of rooms for rent, somewhere in a warmer climate. I checked possibilities in Texas, Colorado, California, Oregon, and elsewhere … and then as a last thought, I felt an inner nudge to check out southern Utah.
Suddenly, I found myself staring at photos of a room rental that resonated deeply in my heart. To my shock, it was a room in the Sedona area (I was NOT even searching there), near the famous Bell Rock in the unincorporated village of Oak Creek. Sedona had not even been on my radar of possibilities. I giggled when I noticed that my new landlady had just posted the add less than twelve hours earlier — precisely when I was releasing all of that emotion and finding deep healing.
To make a long story short, I moved in to my little ten-foot-square room on January 26, 2016. It is a separate little exterior room just ten feet from the door to the shared kitchen. I have a view of the energizing red-rock (including Bell Rock) just outside my bedroom window … and I share the kitchen and bathroom with a sixty-year-old woman and her eighty-year-old mother. It has been an ideal situation from the start, and I have the freedom of a month-to-month rent with only two-weeks notice needed if I decide to follow my heart elsewhere.
These last three-and-a-half months have been both beautiful and intense. On average, I hike anywhere from three to five days per week, averaging around fifteen miles per week. There are so many trails in the area that almost every hike I do is on a different trail. Usually, I carry a Native-American Buffalo Drum and a Native-American Flute with me, and I find a quiet place somewhere off the trails to sit, meditate, and play with my musical toys. I love those times.
While I continue to do ever-deeper emotional work, I have for the most part just focused these last three months on trying to reconnect with my Higher Self and to further integrate my last seven years of experience back into a balanced and healthy “Me” here in this western culture. I had no idea that it would be such an intense journey to re-integrate my new self with the world I left behind.
The idea of writing book(s) has constantly been at the top of my “mental should list”, but until now, my heart has simply been elsewhere. I couldn’t even get myself to post a short Facebook status until today.
Today, I find myself open and vulnerable. My heart guidance tells me to be here in this country, at least for now. But I am also totally aware that I no longer fit in to this culture in the old way … and I have little motivation to even try.
My heart frequently reminds me that I have so much to offer — so much wisdom and healing experience from healing my own life, from working with countless therapists, healers, shamans, and plant medicines — so much passion to write and to help inspire others — so much love and desire to make a difference in this world. And yet, my mind has no idea how to pull all of this together … at least not in the present moment.
But today, I simply revel in the magical flow of trust and not-knowing … of communing with the red rocks in Sedona … of continuing to heal and find new expressions of unconditional love inside of my own heart … of trusting the yet-unexperienced synchronicities that I know will reveal themselves precisely when they are ready and not a moment before.
So today, I celebrate my re-birthday by overcoming a six-month writer’s block, six months of refusing to even try to write … and most of all, I celebrate nineteen magical years of exploring the authentic side of Brenda, the real me.
In all my openness and vulnerabilities, I get the sense that the cocoon is softening, that the metamorphosis is nearly complete, and that another version of me is yearning to spread her wings for the next phase of a yet-unknown adventure.
Copyright © 2016 by Brenda Larsen, All Rights Reserved