My body has always been an odd thing for me. To be honest, for the first 30 plus years of my life I thought it was this thing that I constantly had to judge and pick apart. I was rarely ever in it, but when I was it was a cacophony of criticism. I was constantly telling myself how I wasn’t pretty enough, my thighs were too big, I had too many stretch marks. I believed I would never be beautiful in my own eyes because I wasn’t some ideal of perfection that I had been conditioned to compare myself to. I had no idea that after a hip replacement in 2008, Bikram yoga would kick off the first phase of my spiritual journey in 2009. For those of you who don’t know, Bikram yoga is a specific series of postures done in a room heated to 105 degrees with giant mirrors that really force you to be present with yourself. In this space, I was no longer allowed to run from myself. I found myself for the better part of 7 years, going at least 4-5 times a week. At the time, I thought I was just a way to safely exercise after my surgery. I had no idea it would be such a huge part of my transformational process. I thought it was really great exercise and that was about it. Of course, the heat, smell, people, postures, etc. were hard but the thing that was like kryptonite to me was the mirrors. I had never looked at my reflection for that long. When I started to do my healing journey, I began to have some small comprehension about the power of mirror work and why doing Bikram was so powerful for me. Although I still had some body image issues during and after these years, it was a big step forward towards acknowledging my earthly vehicle.
As I progressed on my spiritual journey, so much of it was about coming back to my body. And I had no fucking idea for a long time what this even meant. I just intuitively knew that I was meant to be doing it. So, I would ask for it, I would have healers help me with it, I would dance, I would do yoga and lots of other things that helped me. In time, I began to have a small understanding of what it might mean to come back to my body. The way I explain it to clients, is that through trauma we leave our body. So, what leaves our body? Our soul, our essence. To reintroduce the soul back to the body you need to heal past traumas and create safety in your body. The safety is the key. If we left the body because of the trauma and pain, the only thing that will get our essence to come home is a calm and grounded nervous system that knows it can handle a new paradigm or way of being. Being in your body means that you get to truly experience this world and this human experience. The beauty, the pain, the joy, the struggle. We signed up for all of it when we came to this planet. The trouble is that when I first started my journey, I loved being out of my body. It seemed that even in yoga, or meditation, I was constantly in other realms. It was easy for me to go there. and it was really beneficial but I wasn’t grounding my energy into my body and connecting with mother earth. This left me feeling really anxious, scattered and fearful because I had so much energy coming in and it was short circuiting my system. That much energy is just overload on our human bodies if we are not grounding with mother earth. For a long time, I did what so many of us do – I blamed this ungroundedness on a character flaw I must have or something I was doing “wrong”. I had just never been taught the connection between our bodies and the earth.
If you start to look at the earth as our physical home for our reincarnated souls, you can start to see our physical body and vessel as something very similar. Since we are all things, we are also earth, stars, animals, spirits, birds, trees and such. The reason we have so many issues as a collective is because many of us have lost our connection with the earth. I mean, think about it, 500 years ago, we were living much closer to the earth. We were riding horses, hunting for food, foraging for twigs and berries and shit. (BTW – I suck as history, so my 500 years could be off 😊). But anyway, you get the point. We have def come a long way in our evolution that has taken us away from mother earth.
The next phase of my spiritual evolution started in 2017 and lasted for about 6 years or so. This part of my phase was marked by lots of trauma being brought up through various struggles. But during this period, I discovered my first spiritual mentor. Telling you how I met him is a story for another time but I’ll just share with you what those 6 years covered by way of my spiritual growth. I found Arthur L. through a friend of mine and had no idea I was seeking shit; I was honestly just tired of struggling emotionally even though I was doing all of the things. I was in therapy, I was doing yoga, and I was trying to get through some pretty heavy grief. But it just wasn’t getting deep enough. During these years, I learned to meditate, to connect energetically with my mind, body and spirit and to also begin learning healing modalities that I still heavily draw on today.
This period was magical and amazing. I enjoyed connecting with the stars, my soul, and being “out there” in the ethers during meditation. Bu t I was also struggling a bit and didn’t fully understand why. I would feel super lost and ungrounded when I was on this earthly plane trying to do the human things. I was so anxious and unsure so much of the time. It was hard to connect with many people and tbh, I would have rather been meditating and checking out more than anything else. I also started to notice that I had this desire to stay in those other realms because of the connection with our creator and my connection with people. In those realms, you just feel the love, the clarity of the human experience and the beauty of the soul. You don’t feel the pain of humanness as much. You understand why you’re here and everything is much simpler. But when I came back to earth, I was again facing my old familiar challenges – feeling unsure, lost, annoyed with people and the list goes on. I didn’t understand energetic boundaries and I was feeling energetically fragile and on edge. Being in my body and living this human experience was getting easier in some ways, but not so much in others.
In 2021, I was called to psychedelic mushrooms and had my first introduction to plant medicine. When it was first coming up for me, I fought it. I was nervous about using an illegal substance and my first mentor was not a big plant medicine guy, so I probably had some judgment towards it. I also had NO idea where I would even get mushrooms from, so I was all up in my head about it for a while. But after I acknowledged the fear, I finally surrendered and told the universe, “If you want me to do this, you’re going to have to make it very obvious”. And boy, did it ever. I found myself serendipitously at an acquaintance’s house and what did he offer me? You guessed it, good ole magical mushrooms. During college I had plenty of experience with schrooms but I had never used a substance of that nature intentionally for healing. So, the universe hooked me up and started a two-year journey of diving into the beauty of psychedelics.
For a little over a year, I micro dosed and set my intention as helping to heal my anxiety. I had read things that spoke of the rewiring of the brain that occurs with these little guys. I def could feel it. I could feel my connection with this earth and with mother nature much more completely. I even ended up doing three large healing journeys that were profoundly transformative. Little by little I was coming back into myself. I was healing old wounds that had been holding me back, and I was feeling more daily joy and pleasure than I ever had before.
As the universe does, it started preparing my next phase (of course unbeknownst to me). The next phase that I currently happen to be in is heavily centered around Ayahuasca. I was introduced to this beautiful plant medicine last year and my mind has continued to be blown. Talk about healing at a whole new level. This little beauty takes you out to the ethers but also has this really amazing ability to heal the deepest layers of trauma and get you back in your heart and body in a way I never knew was possible. When the universe connected me with Shamana Amy, during one of our first conversations we had, she called our body a spiritual technology, It blew my mind y’all. Here I’ve been for all of these years thinking of my body as this fucking nuisance I’ve been dragging around, judging and nitpicking. For years, I’ve heard so many spiritual people call it a “meat suit”. It just sounded so disempowering but I had no idea it was something so damn advanced. Although I may not have completely understood what she meant by this term, I am slowly beginning to experience it in my body. Our bodies WANT to heal. We have all the things inside of us we need but we have been so damn conditioned to think that everything is outside of us, that we miss this beautiful vessel we have been given. I mean, think about it! Our bodies give us the ability to hug our loved ones. We can walk, run, play, dance, and eat yummy foods. We can feel the warmth of the summer air on our skin, feel the silkiness of water, make love, DANCE! (yes, I know I already said it, but it deserves to be listed twice). We get to experience crying and laughing and pooping and snuggling babies and dogs…..I mean, we could be here all day for me to list out all the things.
And like I said, I am by no means an expert on this concept of our bodies being a technology, but y’all I can feel the truth of it in my body, especially now that I’ve sat with Mother Aya 4 times. Anyway, if you are one of those people that still refers to your magical vessel as a meat suit, I invite you to question this outlook a bit. I mean, you are selling yourself short! Your body is the home that you are living in. it will be with you until the day you die. It is the only constant thing you have on this human journey. People, money, cars, houses, jobs, they will all come and go – but your body remains this constant, steadfast gift that we have been blessed with. Don’t get to the end of your life and look back and wish you had appreciated the moments you could walk, run, play, jump and DANCE! Don’t miss out on hugs, and kisses and hot passionate sex. Take a moment and give your body some gratitude. Appreciate the way it holds you. Appreciate how you feel after a good workout or a warm hug. Start to notice all it does for you, instead of fixating on what’s wrong or not working. Our lives pass by in a blink, make sure you make the most of it. Because, who knows, you could come back in your next life as Big Foot and have no body believe in you, how sad. LOL>
Much love! Robin the Spiritual CFO