Losing My Way
Ever since I was a little girl, I have loved stories. I loved being read them, and I loved writing them. As an adult, I see story as medicine. It has the power to comfort us, connect us and heal us. When we share our stories with one another, we share the experience of what it means to be human.
However, I believe something devastating has happened within our culture: the stories we share are largely stories of love, achievement, and success, while the ones of loss, setbacks, and “failures” are the ones we keep to ourselves or even hide. This is deeply damaging to a culture and its people because it unconsciously reinforces the idea that some parts of us are worthy of sharing and therefore lovable, while others are unworthy of sharing and therefore unlovable.
As human beings, we are intrinsically connected to the natural cycles of the earth, which means we pass through cycles of life, death and rebirth. However, many of us spend our lives trying to avoid death in its many faces because we are collectively disconnected from it. When we hide our stories and experiences of failure, setback and loss, we are hiding parts of ourselves and what it means to be human.
I don’t know about you, but for me it becomes a natural instinct to retreat and hide in my grief, rather than to reach out, express and share it.
As a culture, we don’t completely dismiss our stories of death and loss, but we often only share them once we have come out the other side. Our vulnerability, therefore, becomes contingent upon our success, only sharing once we know we are no longer vulnerable. However, it is our vulnerability that shows our humanness and that which connects us. Don’t get me wrong, there is something deeply important and powerful about hearing stories of overcoming adversity, as they provide light to those of us who are still in the throes of darkness. They give us hope, reminding us that life always follows death as spring always follows winter.
However, when we share our stories of death and loss with our communities while we are experiencing them, we connect ourselves to the cyclical nature of life and to one another. When we share these broken and vulnerable parts of ourselves in real time, we have the capacity to heal ourselves and each other in a way that we couldn’t otherwise. When we do so, we are silently saying to ourselves and to each other that all parts of us are worthy of being seen and heard and therefore are worthy of love.
As humans, we have created so many identities and roles for ourselves and are made to believe that we are loved, admired and respected for fulfilling them. Unconsciously, we are made to believe that they make up who we are. When things fall apart, and these identities and roles fall away, we feel like we lose our value and worth in the world. However, this is the time when we are asked to do the deep work of remembering that we are worthy simply because we are. Simply by opening our hearts to each other at these painful times, we are reminded of this fact.
On Monday morning, I sat in the therapist’s chair, and after having finished my story, the therapist was silent for a few moments and then responded by saying, “The image that came to my mind when you told your story, Laurel, is that a raging wildfire has come through the forest of who you are and burned everything down.”
Tears swelled in my eyes and rolled down my cheeks in a continuous flow. I nodded. “That is exactly it”. I felt so incredibly seen and heard in that moment. I then pictured how my identity as an artist and teacher of the divine feminine mysteries had been burned down in that fire. The fire had also burned down all my hopes and dreams, and I was left barren, lost and vulnerable. I felt so much shame over what happened, so much grief from the loss, and so much fear of what was to come.
The therapist then went on to say how Mother Earth always knows how to bring things back into balance, and sometimes that means an enormous wildfire. He was right. I am part of Mother Earth, and there was a part of me that was living deeply out of balance and this wildfire was needed to bring back balance. When everything had been burned away, it was only then that I could see what I couldn’t see before. The soils of my being, the foundation from which all life from me grows, were sick and needed healing.
So here I am now, tending to the soils and healing the sickness.
The sickness is the belief that I am not enough. Like many people, the sickness or wound that has permeated my being is decades old and was developed in childhood. I have coped by unconsciously overworking in every facet of my life. My wounding didn’t come from any big traumatic event. However, it was traumatic to me nonetheless. Like Dr. Gabor Mate says, “Trauma isn’t what happens to you, it is what happens inside of you.” As an extremely sensitive kid, what happened inside of me was developing the unconscious belief that I was not enough and my unique gifts didn’t have value in the world.
I must journey back in my story in order to journey forward.
As a little girl, I was gifted with being a storyteller and artist, a translator of the earth, you could say. However, when I went into junior high, these gifts weren’t valued. My creative stories didn’t follow a traditional structure and therefore were seen as bad, and my art making was no longer a permissible way to respond to assignments. I really struggled in school, and the story I told myself was that I was stupid because the gifts I came here with in this lifetime were not valued by traditional education. Fast forward to university, and I decided I wanted to change my story. However, I didn’t know that I needed to go to the original wound of not feeling enough in order to truly heal. Rather, I went to the wound of feeling stupid and spent almost every waking moment doing school work and getting support so that I could excel. And I did excel. I left University with a 4.0. However, what I unconsciously learned from this experience is that I had to over-effort in order to do succeed. Again, it wasn’t enough to just be me.
It has been over 15 years since I left university, and I have unconsciously continued to work in this way, feeling like I need to over-effort, over-work and over-achieve in order to be enough. As an artist, this often meant spending hours meticulously and lovingly creating something to then undervalue it and my time. As a teacher and facilitator, this often meant giving my all in order to create a workshop, course or retreat. Although I got to do the work that I loved, I never could financially make it work because of this core wound.
When I dropped out of art therapy school last January, it was because I was guided to create my own teachings and school of sorts. I trusted that The Great Mystery was guiding me, and even though I was scared, I followed the guidance. However, I remember having this thought at the time that, I have to get it right this time, because my livelihood depends on it.
I was guided to work intimately with Grandmother Moon and Mother Earth to create courses on their teachings. It was a dream come true, as I began to communicate directly with them in a way that was uniquely my own, through art and story.
However, I put so much pressure on myself to get it right and to do it perfectly that I got lost along the way. I felt that I needed to work harder and do more if I was to share and offer their teachings. I felt this meant that I needed to clear my channel more thoroughly. As a result, I ended up fasting for nearly a month without food and almost 14 days without water. The result was me almost losing my life. When I reflect back over the course of the year, this wasn’t the first time I felt I needed to push myself to the extreme in order to be enough. It was constant and an evolution of the pattern I had been repeating for years.
The other night, I was reading a book and stumbled across the psychological term, reputation-compulsion, which is the human drive to replay our deepest, hidden wounds until they are made conscious and resolved. Unfortunately, it took me bringing myself to the brink of death before I could see my deepest wound and begin the process of resolution. This was the wildfire. I sadly had to burn everything down in order for me to truly see the sickness within the soil of my being.
When I ended up getting out of the hospital, I was flooded with shame and grief. I wondered how I could ever create something meaningful or teach again if I had gotten it so wrong. I had spent decades trying so hard to be enough, and now found myself broke mentally, physically, financially, and spiritually. I felt devastated. I felt like a complete failure. I had lost my trust in my intuition and myself. I had lost my faith. I wanted to run from my pain and hide from the world. I entered the phase of death, and all I could see was darkness and no way out.
When I finally told a dear friend what happened, tears flooded from her eyes. She was devastated that I didn’t call her and my other friends while I was in the hospital. As she choked down tears, she told me, “We would have been there, Laurel.”
In that moment, something within me began to heal. There, sitting in front of me was a woman that I deeply loved, admired and respected, and in my weakest moment she was showing me that she loved me too. I had kept her and most of the other people in my life at arm's length, telling myself that I would let people in once I became worthy enough. However, in that moment, I realized I was worthy enough and always had been. After that, I began to come out of hiding. I began to reach out, open up and lean on my community for support. I began to share my story as I realized it was medicine and helping me heal. Through this process, I began to register a new story, that people love me for who I am and not for what I am.
I am still in my process of healing, and that healing is coming from patience, compassion and connection. It is coming from tending to the soils of my being, to truly know myself as enough as I am.
Fear arises at the thought of sharing this story with you and my larger community. It tells me, “What if you share all of this and never make it out the other side?” I am learning that this fear comes in the most vulnerable moments, the times when I am being the most real, when I am allowing myself to show my flaws, mistakes and imperfections. This fear is only trying to protect me from a world that runs on being strong, getting it right and being perfect. But this is not a world where I want to live, so I share my story as part of cultivating a new world, one that is more vulnerable, interconnected and real. A world that honours the cyclical nature of life, death and rebirth. So I write you this story as my process of writing a new story for myself and for the world.
With love,
Laurel Birk
Translator of the Earth