Embracing Change: From Pain to Purpose
I come from a broken home, tattered by generational trauma. At one year old, my Dad left my Mom. Six months later, my Mom decided that her eighteen-year-old self wasn’t up to the challenge of raising a newborn, and therefore, she decided to leave the state and start a new life without her child. Me.
Her father, my maternal grandfather, left the family around the time I was born and started a new life with a much younger woman and disowned the family that he had begun 21 years prior, leaving a son, daughter, and partner to face life without his involvement. My Mother modeled her Dad’s behavior, and set off a tidal wave of trauma that would influence the rest of my life.
I will not dwell on my early childhood, but I decided to set the stage for what I aim to express in this piece. However, we all need to understand the fire from which we were all cooked. After sitting in hundreds of medicine circles with thousands of people, most participants come to heal something from their early childhood. In many cases, that early wounding shapes who we become, and untangling that mess requires a great deal of courage and deep work.
I did all the things that were expected of me while growing up—mostly. I ended up with my father’s parents at the age of five and spent the next few decades doing what young men typically do in American culture. I attended college, earned a few degrees, and then went to work for the government. I hated it. I thought that power was the quickest way to forget the deep wound in my heart. For a while, it worked, until it didn’t.
I am a surfer, and before I got the government job, I took a surf trip with a friend to Costa Rica. I felt so free. It was my first time out of the country (besides Mexico), and while traveling around Costa Rica, I found something in myself that I had never really known—pure, unabashed joy. After a few years working a job I hated, I woke up one day and quit. I packed my car and drove from California to Costa Rica. “You are doing what?” my father questioned when I told him what I was up to and where I was going. I’ll have to tell that story in another post.
It sounds courageous to drive to Costa Rica alone through Mexico and Central America, but in reality, I was running from my life. I was confused and directionless. I wanted to escape from the family and culture that had shaped me. I also wanted to get away from the pain of my childhood. I thought that if I drove thousands of miles away to an unknown place, I would be healed. It didn’t work out that way.
This is where I have to check myself. Because this is where my conditioning was challenged, and the seeds of a new me were being planted in the guise of running. Was I running away from my life, or was I running to my new life? I realize now that I had to leave. Change was not possible in the planter of the known. My flower was wilting, and the running was actually the beginning of a shedding—the removal of a skin that was both mine and not mine. The universe was both pushing and pulling me toward a new way of being. A new way of seeing. A new way of feeling.
Before I left for that trip, I also ended a four-year relationship that was born from my wounds. My life was on a trajectory structured by society, a prescriptive path that I had swallowed completely, line by line. A good life was awaiting me if I followed all the cultural cues: education, relationships, and career. So I thought. I played the game well and was rewarded with money and power. But deep inside, I was longing for something I couldn’t articulate or imagine. Therefore, I did the only thing I could do at that moment. I burned it all down and flung myself into the unknown. This was my gift from childhood, the capacity to survive in constantly changing and turbulent waters. Isn’t our entire life a dance with the unknown?
Later in life, when I began my path with plant medicine, this unfettered courage to face the mystery of life also became a superpower. I was ready for whatever ayahuasca wanted to show me. I was prepared to go deep into the underworld and also to soar high into the heavens. Not that it was always easy. I had been given this gift of surrender, and that gift is still unfolding as my life continues on a path of total dissolution and reconstruction. Things need to be destroyed in our lives. Relationships need to be dismantled. Careers need to be left. The natural movement of the Earth is regenerative, and we cannot escape this dance, no matter how much we attempt to control the current that guides our lives.
My Mom died ten years ago. We never had a relationship. She left when I was one, and she never looked back. I found her on the internet in my 30s and tried to reconnect with her. I had a misguided vision that everything could be healed, and I would finally get a mother worthy of my love. After a few failed attempts, it was clear that neither one of us had the capacity to heal. She carried too much shame from leaving me and carried too much anger for her departure. Shame and anger are difficult emotions to overcome, and it wasn’t until her death that I found the tools to work through all the grief that I had carried all those years.
Some indigenous cultures believe we have an energetic umbilical cord attached to our mother throughout our lives. I wasn’t able to face my healing until that cord was severed. I felt that I carried both of our traumas until the day she died. It’s hard to explain, but when she passed, I was set free to concentrate on my own burden and grief. I had carried so much generational trauma that it suffocated my ability to decipher what was mine and what was hers. I started therapy, and eventually the plants found me. A decade later, through healing guidance and patience, I have come to understand that my life couldn’t have been any other way.
The pain of my childhood instilled in me a deep longing in my heart and led me to the sacred. It was through the pain of my childhood and the complicated dance with my mother that brought me to a life worthy of living. I found my heart in the embers of pain that had shrouded my ability to feel deep love. That sprout of possibility started to bloom into an enthusiasm for what is sacred in life. I began to develop a relationship with something beyond my family and society, call it whatever you want—God, great spirit, creator, or the divine.
This newfound relationship was worth the pain and discomfort; it was what I had been drawn to from the very beginning. Life was pulling me toward a return home, guiding my path. I was running toward a higher power and away from a misguided life where my ego thought it was the captain of the ship. We are the captains of our souls, but our primary job is to get out of the way and let the sacred craft of our lives, and to do that, we must create a relationship with something greater, something cosmic, something divine. I leave you with a poem called Invictus that touched me deeply decades ago, a poem that calls us to the helm of our soul by William Ernest Henley:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be,
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
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