Entering the Chrysalis
Understanding where we come from and how it shaped our arrival in the present, informs the work we must do for the rest of our lives.
In my former spiritual community I was given a name which means “one’s ability to rise up to touch the foot of the heavens while remaining securely connected to, yet not limited by the earth.” Indeed I straddle two identities 1) working for the world’s second-largest entertainment company producing billion-dollar content for advertisers and 2) volunteer teaching meditation to formerly incarcerated men & women at the largest re-entry/gang rehabilitation program in the world and teaching yoga to currently incarcerated men & women. Had you told me 21 years ago before I’d moved to LA that I would become this person, I’d have laughed in your face.
The first identity was attached to climbing the corporate ladder, living in an affluent suburb, driving a nice car, dining out at the best restaurants, etc. But after many agonizingly long drives home from work, sometimes sobbing at the wheel, a storm had developed in my gut for which I had no words to describe. I was unfulfilled not only in my job but in one relationship after another and I felt an intense void in my life. I craved something bigger, something meaningful, and I had no clue where to start. It was out of this longing, out of self-preservation, and a curiosity to find ANYTHING beyond the hamster wheel that many years later my second identity was birthed.
I’d started studying at UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center which I stumbled into after a series of synchronistic events a.k.a. divine bread crumbs laid before me. It was there I met a dear friend/mentor with whom I shared my existential struggle. He said, ‘you should do a vision quest’ and I said “a WHAT?!” But the butterflies in my stomach knew exactly what he was talking about. Five months later, I was confined to a 10ft circle with nothing but a sleeping bag, a change of clothes, and four gallons of water where I fasted for four days alone in the middle of Sequoia National Forest. I emerged emptied, purified, mended, fulfilled, forgiven, humbled, and stronger than I’d ever thought possible.
To some, this may be an extreme step but for me, it was exactly the chrysalis my soul needed and when everything began to transform. I felt alive again, connected to something powerful, renewed in spirit, and had proved I could withstand the darkest of nights with grace. However such spiritual confidence doesn’t come without a price.
Let’s rewind a few decades …
I’m a Portuguese American, born in Lisbon just after the 1974 Carnation Revolution which ended the Portuguese Colonial War and transitioned the country into Democracy. From the 15th-19th century, the Portuguese kidnapped, forcibly transported, and sold into slavery 6 million Africans primarily to Brazil. They contributed to the destruction of these lands and their indigenous culture through mining and economic and social discrimination. Ferdinand Magellan, my distant cousin, led the 1519 Spanish expedition which resulted in the discovery of the Strait of Magellan and his own death by the indigenous people of present-day Philippines. My father served four years in the Portuguese Army with two years in São Tomé, one of Africa’s oldest colonial cities where Jewish children, stolen from their families in order to raise them as Christians, worked profitable sugarcane and cocoa farms.
At the age of 6, my parents divorced and my mother moved us from Lisbon to Chicago into the house where she’d been raised which my grandpa built. The limp he used to walk with, caused by cirrhosis of the liver, and his unbearably strong hugs made me uneasy. As the child of an alcoholic father who physically abused him, he himself became an alcoholic. He sexually abused my mom when she was very young and physically abused my grandma in front of her. My grandma later developed agoraphobia, likely due to the physical abuse and anxiety over the incest. She raised me mostly as my mom commuted to work downtown and often spent weekends at her boyfriend’s. Several years after we’d left Lisbon, my mother too became an alcoholic and would go out drinking with her boyfriends leaving me alone at home. She didn’t want to admit my anxiety-induced vomiting was a desperate cry for attention, safety, and security. By the age of 18, we’d moved 12 times, I had little sense of stability or belonging and unknowingly inherited my mother’s psychopathology of insecurities and defenses. Ten years later, I followed a then-boyfriend to California in hopes of putting as much distance between it all and me as possible.
I share all of this because understanding where we come from and how it shaped our arrival in the present, informs the work we must do for the rest of our lives to break patterns and catalyze individual, familial, and communal healing. My father wasn’t around to teach me how to take risks, be disciplined and patient, regulate my emotions, or trust other men; and what my mom did teach me was to seek unhealthy relationships, mismanage my finances, and abandon my own voice and needs. I had to learn all of these tools as an adult and through many years of hard work and self-realization, I’ve turned what could’ve been lifelong failures into triumphant potentials. Learning and forgiving my cultural and familial wounding illuminated a personality of survival I’d developed over decades and allowed me to envision a new way of being that I owed to myself and my ancestors to create.
I had no Divine Compass …
Earlier I referenced the price we pay for being spiritually confident…putting all your vulnerable little eggs of hope, belonging, trust, and identity in one system’s basket is dangerous. Soon enough my path of healing would reveal that I had to learn to trust my intuition, the inner guru, and not look towards my parents, society, or anyone else for the roadmap. This, among many things, I learned the hard way through another series of divine breadcrumbs that necessitated finding a path of my own. I lost my mother at the beginning of the pandemic and had to let go of the guilt of not seeing her in three years nor ever being able to repair our relationship in real life. I ended a two-year partnership which my intuition knew was not an ideal match yet I felt pressured by my spiritual community to maintain. I then separated from said community after confronting the lies and betrayals spreading within it which both denied the abuse my mother suffered and was designed to protect its image of privilege, purity, and infallibility. I became a spiritual refugee so to speak and sought refuge in things that were seen as “taboo” such as plant medicine and indigenous practices of soulcraft and ancestral healing. My molting kicked into high gear as one layer after another was shed, one belief after another was unlearned, new and sharper tools were acquired, and I became the architect of my own life.
Since then it’s been a beautiful and scary process of many deaths and rebirths over the years. Of digging deeply into the soil of me, studying the environment in which my roots grew, and finding a way to self-nurture the growth I’d always needed. Of feeling into new philosophies, practices, teachers, communities, and language asking if this is where I might plant myself. Of freely embodying and questioning every ingredient of them thereby intensifying the flavors as I cooked my own wholeness. It’s given me confidence that in choosing to be without children, I feed my creative and mothering energies into my fulfilling service and activist work. It’s helped me make amends for the harm my ancestors caused each other and to those in other lands. It’s taught me that in sharing our unique talents in service to others, we not only alchemize our wounds and those of our ancestors but we also contribute to the healing of the greater Earth family. And as I straddle my two identities, I grow closer to the masterpiece that I am destined to become … which we all are destined to co-create with our Creator.
Let’s celebrate this forgotten divine partnership and remind ourselves we’re not 100% in control here. Let’s welcome the many collaborators and experiences that will contribute to the lifelong crafting of our soul’s path in both joyful and not so joyful ways. Everyone of them are teachers and each feeds a soul’s hunger for a life that in its last few breaths can look back and say it truly created the best masterpiece it could with the tools it had acquired.