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A look into the shadow of a healer and how to get an elephant out of your room...
It's an honor to hold the light for so many, share it, and be in it, but any healer worth their salt will take time to purify that light and ensure it comes from a sacred heart. Healers can't do, for lack of a better term, squat for their communities if their vibration isn't equal or higher than those they are serving. I don't say that out of superiority, but rather from a place of truth. Going to an energy healer is essentially exposure therapy. The higher vibration the healer embodies is what the healee seeks to attune to it. Sometimes it takes multiple exposures to attune to it. That doesn't mean that a healer can't have their baggage, and their own shadow to work through. It does mean, they should be actively addressing it and working through it.
Given this, it brought me no surprise that my anticipated trip to Mexico has been a trip I've taken with my shadow in tow— an unraveling of sorts, of a giant elephant I've existed around that's outstayed it's welcome. An elephant I used to feed and nurture, but sometime throughout my journey, I built a cage around it, threw a blanket over it, then turned away from it and quietly started shuffling around this thing, avoiding it, overwhelmed by it, not sure how to see it out.
Melchizedek (my Guides) calls these things "boulders" in chapter five of their book through Paul Selig, "I Am The Word". They define boulders as, "creations that you have either inherited culturally, or that you have created by yourself, or that you have decided you have to have for some reason in the past that may have made perfect sense when it was created, but is now an obstruction of great magnitude." These are beliefs that we create subconsciously or otherwise, that have resulted from trauma or other factors that facilitate belief creation, that keep us from raising our frequency. They further with, "So we will say a boulder is an obstruction in your consciousness. A false belief that has engendered other energies to attach to it and creations to the extent that it has become very, very large, and now you take it for granted and you assume it will always be there because you misinterpret it and believe that it is you."
A part of my life has been fighting to grow, and validating it. I was raised in an environment that wasn't always welcoming to growth. Like many healers, I took the form of emotional support for several early in life, and when the emotional support person changes form, it often comes with a lot of flack from the people leaning on them. This dynamic was only compounded as these early stories paved the runway for magnetized scenarios in my adult life of people who seemingly mirrored this wound back to me. I'd grow or change my mind and then be chastized at home by my partner, I'd grow or change my mind and then be exiled by an employer.
This elephant and I have been on the run for some time, and it's gotten bigger and bigger. The wound that stems from this pattern: growth into a new form >>> getting torn down for becoming a new form >>> hiding or running or self-sabotaging to grow out of view is the one I'm facing this trip, and it's deep and entangled, and sticky, and sometimes it seems like there are multiple elephants in the room, but it (or they) can no longer exist where I'm going.
Innately, I have felt, at the next level, I can't be afraid to be seen in growth in any capacity, so all resistance to growth must subside. How, might you ask, can a healer— someone who, by default, should welcome growth and keep an open heart to new ideas and possibilities— be paradoxically also resistant to growth? Well, for starters, choosing to keep the elephant is in itself, resistance.
Before this trip, I felt like I was up against a"wall" and reached a limit that I couldn't seem to grow beyond in business and my personal life. I exhausted myself quickly in my attempts to clear it because I had this huge elephant in tow. It was like my light had been able to radiate beyond the radius of the eclipse of the elephant, but I could no longer outshine it.
Consequently, this trip has been about allowing space to turn and face the elephant and renouncing my title as "elephant keeper", which is a process that can be overwhelming to say the least. As the age-old adage goes— how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
HOW DO YOU GET AN ELEPHANT OUT OF YOUR ROOM?
There's no easy way to let go of an elephant because oftentimes, this elephant is a deeply ingrained belief system that sometimes comes from lives beyond this one or even memories before birth.
The first step in letting go of an elephant is acknowledging it's there. You have to look it in the eyes and tell it that it can no longer eclipse your light. If you look closer though, you realize this elephant has served you in some way— As a companion, as a safety blanket, as an excuse to avoid the work, and suddenly the elephant becomes this giant echo chamber of your own downfall.
At risk of sounding expository, the second step in letting go of an elephant is taking responsibility for it being there in the first place. At some level, you've chosen to live with this elephant. You've fed it with the stories you've told yourself to justify your anger or to reinforce habits that don't serve you but withhold an illusion of a protected heart.
Then, and probably the scariest of all the steps, you have to open your heart to it, because this elephant is essentially an older version of you with a lot of weighted vests on it.
REMOVING THE BLANKET
When they say healing comes in layers, they're right, because believe it or not, I've attempted to remove this boulder, or elephant before. Twice in fact, once in 2017, and the other in 2022 with intense and breathtakingly spontaneous kundalini activations, etherically facilitated by my guides, but it was too much for just me alone, I needed help. In hindsight, I see these attempts as foundational blueprints of mapping out the shape and structure of the boulder for its later removal.
There I found myself, in Mexico, not knowing what to expect with this elephant removal. I had studied it, I knew all its sides. I wanted it gone, but my heart had to open to it, and it was hard because my whole relationship with this elephant had been intellectualizing it, but not really feeling it.
In the process of opening my heart to the elephant, the first step was to remove all the collective energy that was covering up the elephant cage. These were burdens I'd been carrying for other people and processing for other people and this extended as far back as childhood. I had to choose that those were not my burdens, nor my responsibility to process and that I needed to focus on my own elephant. I had to admit that these collective energies were distractions for me to ignore the elephant. A guise of productivity they were, and good at keeping me from the true block. This was the blanket I placed over the elephant cage.
For this, I was given a tool during a group exercise by a healer called shapeshifting. Shapeshifting goes beyond the physical act of shifting form as we hear of supernatural galactic, angels, or mystical things doing, or even shapeshifting that occurs in our natural world, like a caterpillar to a butterfly. It can also be in consciousness, and the goal isn't to take the form of whatever we're shapeshifting into literally, it's to access a frequency. Traditionally, this is a shamanic practice, and you see evidence of it in several native and Indigenous ceremonial dresses, where an elaborate headdress will have the pelt of a bear, or a wolf, or a jaguar etc.
But here I was on the ground, in front of thirteen women, completely consumed and in full awareness of this collective energy that was living and taking up space in my body, and can you believe it wasn't paying rent? As soon as the healer called awareness to it, my shoulders got heavier and my hips ached and I knew it was there and time to be evicted and I had sunk to the floor from its weight.
So the healer got with me on the ground and held my heart and said, "Sometimes you have to get out from under these things and they'll go away. Let me show you how. I want you to become something that pops into your consciousness, and literally throw all your consciousness into this thing until you feel like you are it. What's the first thing that pops into your mind? It could be an animal, a plant, a planet, under the sea, anything. What is it?"
"A star." I chose.
"Great!" The healer responded, but as soon as I became the star, I saw a black hole appear and swallow it and felt this rise of energy welt up in my chest and behind my eyes. "Aahhhp!" the healer exclaimed feeling the welt, "There it is! That energy wants to grab hold and keep its host. Let's keep going. What are you going to become now? Don't think, just choose the first thing that comes." She asked.
"A blue bird." I said, and I became the bird in my mind. I was singing and flying around. I landed on a tree to look out over a view and then suddenly a cage appeared over me and that welt came back.
"Aaaahpp! Here it is again! It's really trying..." She exclaimed. "Quick shift! What are you now?"
"A dog." I said. And I threw my consciousness into the energy of a dog and I imagined what it would be like. I saw myself prancing around sniffing things and enjoying the company of other things around me without a care in the world. "What's it like being this unconditionally loving being?"
"Pretty great," I responded, "I'm prancing around sniffing things."
"Yeah, this is a good frequency for you." There was a moment of enjoying this frequency and then as soon as I felt this energy swell up in me again I started barking at it in my mind until I felt it leave, and the healer felt it happening."Here that energy is coming, what are you going to do?"
"Bark at it!" I exclaimed.
"Yes!" She said, "Oooo, and it finally realized you were getting too smart for it and it left. Now you're going to feel your own heart here and there might be a rise of emotion because you may not have felt yourself for a while."
And there was, I didn't realize that the tension in my shoulders and hips was not my own, and felt relief for the first time in decades.
DECONSTRUCTING THE CAGE
This cage around my elephant was a big one for me. I had studied it and knew what it was made of but got discouraged the first time I tried to deconstruct it. It was pretty reinforced.
This was somewhat of a rage cage, and by observing it from outside years before when I attempted to deconstruct it I fully understood where it came from, but only in my mental body. The purpose of the cage was so I didn't have to deal with the elephant. It was convenient because it was much more contained than the organic shape of the elephant, and it stuffed all the sh*t into a nice box that was somewhat tucked away (until it wasn't). I had been living with this anger for a long time, and though I'd forgiven the people who triggered it, I had never really sat with it. I needed help with this, so I turned to Mother Earth.
Flash forward to a ceremony, I was waiting to feel the plant medicine kick in, enjoying a performance of sound healing and sacred song by two amazing humans who held beauty that words cannot describe. They looked like Gods and Goddesses against a backdrop of marble and light-filled windows overlooking the sea. Suddenly, the woman who had just been singing so soulfully started dancing and flipped her hair. The action was so undeniably beautiful, and carefree, and powerful, that it triggered this spiral of rage in me. Suddenly I was twenty-two, losing my hair, mad at the world that I had been "robbed" of my youth, not once but twice, first while I was a child, having to grow up fast and take on responsibilities for two emotionally unavailable parents and now, after I had done the thing I thought was finally going to make me worthy of their love— graduate from college. However, that wasn't the case, when I got back from college, all they did was criticize what I had learned and the new ideologies I had formed. None of it was what they had in mind and it all was a character flaw that I had created. My growth did not fit the bill, and the stress of this burden, along with an alarming amount of student loan debt, was making my body sick and I was out of control. Angry at the world for enforcing the once little sweet angel child to an unjust system after being born into a world, doing everything it tells you to do, playing the part, wearing all the masks, and still being made the outcast. The worst part was, that the people who were supposed to love me unconditionally, sure had a lot of conditions.
I wrapped myself under a blanket, immersed in the magic of natalensis chocolates, completely experiencing the grief and rage that was my adolescence and early adulthood in all-consuming waves. Re-living the memories that formed it in a spiral: jumping to when I was ten feeling responsible the night my parents split and for the death of our family because I dialed three numbers and hung up because it felt wrong, the weight of responsibility I felt when my mom moved at fifteen for Texas and left my brother and I behind, the guilt of existing I felt at seventeen when my dad told me he never wanted children and that I was a hoodwink orchestrated by my mother while he was slightly tipsy around a campfire.
The bars of this cage constructed around this elephant were all memories to justify my resentment toward the responsibility I took on. They were protection put in place by a younger version of me to protect an even younger version of me. Responsibility was surely the culprit in my mind when I built this cage. Caught in the riptide, I went further into this spiral of memories, reliving them all. Realizing my body issues come from the weight of this responsibility I felt. Understanding, that I never felt safe to fully be who I was because comments about my body and appearance were constantly thrown at me. Realizing my family was really my first bully.
Regardless that I had been here before, realizing these same things over again, the difference was that before I had been intellectualizing them, now I was truly feeling them. As the medicine's waves came, I built up the courage to ask if I should finally forgive my family once and for all to let it go."No" I heard the medicine reply, "Now is a time to be with this emotion. Forgiveness is inevitable once you sit with the emotion. Don't dismiss it by making it about forgiveness." an answer I was comforted to hear.
There's a time when grief and rage become inconvenient, and so we cover it up, project it out, tuck it in, and push through our life, because oftentimes it's easier, or because we don't know how to face that emotion. It gets stored in our bodies and takes home there. We weren't given the tools to process the emotion, let alone, a safe environment to. In my opinion, plant medicine, when used in a sacred way, in a safe place, is a strategy worth considering if you've come to a wall in healing. It can help you lift the steel lid of the shadow and release energy that has become stuck. You have to make sure there are people holding space who have energetic hygiene and safety in mind, so a facilitator is always recommended.
As the medicine faded, and the anger quite literally lifted via my neck and a tension headache, the bars of the elephant cage came down, one by one. There was still an elephant...
FREEING THE ELEPHANT
Behind all trauma, all the emotion of trauma, and the distractions from trauma, is a belief we've created to keep us safe. If we don't address this belief and it's problematic enough or rooted in lies, it becomes an elephant. Elephants feel like resistance. When we think of something and feel resistant but don't know why, you probably have an elephant in your room.
In my case, my resistance was all about this next phase of consciousness I'm entering and becoming embodied. My journey through ascension hasn't been the easiest. I've had to outgrow a lot of things in my journey and walk away from choices I had made at an earlier version of myself. Things I had worked really hard on and invested time in. Such is the process of ascension... However, for some reason, this next level didn't feel liberating, it felt exhausting. Why?
I couldn't get to the bottom of it. By this time, all thirteen women had left and it was just me and my mentor, who owns little casitas in Baja that I finished out the rest of my stay in. We work with the same primary guide, Melchizedek, and she called a meeting to work on this resistance. She's already embodied with them and channels them for her YouTube channel.
We called them in and they started out with the scenario this elephant is all built around, me going to college. They started their channel and spoke briefly about the background of the issue, but then kept showing me having tea with my elephant.
"But I need this elephant to go. I don't want it here anymore."
"You have to open your heart to this elephant." They said through my mentor. "It has taken a life of its own."
So I had to sit there with my elephant, trying to think of what to say to it, or what it would say to me. When finally I heard, "Everything that happened was supposed to happen, and you can't hide behind me anymore or hold me over people's heads". It was the elephant. It broke the silence.
My mentor asked me how old I was when this elephant started forming. Suddenly, I was reminded of a memory I had when I was six of me feeling very overwhelmed by my existence because I knew my parents were overwhelmed by it, and feeling responsible for being the good girl and deciding to not cry out too much to validate it. That flashed forward to me sitting around the fire with my father again hearing that I was a hoodwink. Then it flashed back to me in the womb feeling my mother feel shame for having me growing in her body, which then flashed to me convincing my dad to go to college and then it becoming this reason for my family to invalidate me.
And suddenly it clicked— the elephant in the room wasn't the student loans, or the daddy + mommy issues, or the resentment toward responsibility, the elephant was the belief that if I'm seen growing, I'll be chastised and outcasted.
This translates in my waking life when I'm selling myself as a healer and procrastinating on marketing or not getting closer to my guides to become an embodied channel because a part of me feels like that eighteen-year-old convincing her dad to go to art college or the twenty-two-year-old on the other side of that, or that six-year-old prooving her parents she's worthy of love or the ten-year-old dialing the three numbers of doom that in her mind killed her family. The next level felt exhausting, not liberating, because the reward did not outweigh the risk in the minds of my inner child and teen stuck in the trauma because at their core they still didn't want to be outcasted, and this new level of growth will require me being seen and releasing the need to be validated by anything outside of me.
INTEGRATION
Beyond this, I feel lighter, and hopeful my mission can continue, and I can find some breathing room to clean a bit of the mess up I've been avoiding and dive into the work that's going to allow me to be seen, be in love, in light and in growth. Because if you're not growing, you're dying. I bow to my elephant and set him free with love.
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