If you would like to listen to this post as an audio file, I have recorded the story here:
The Jaguar & The Butterfly
I went into ceremony last weekend. Ultimately, I felt excited. I recognize that excitement is the same as nervousness, and I know now that I mask well with courage. I mask with excitement so that I don’t have to befriend my dark passengers.
This revelation was one of many on my journey, but it was what Pachamama would teach me first.
I don’t know where I get my faith, but there is something inside of me that allows me to open myself to things unknown with a lot of curiosity. And by curiosity, I don’t mean questions. I don’t mean analytics. I mean just… sure, I believe it. Yeah, I’m in. OK.
That person who goes with the flow in so many ways, I can embody, and I do often embody.
I think I built a lot of this because of my father, who is a great adventurer. I didn’t want to let him down. I wanted to be his best buddy. I wanted to embody the fearlessness that he praised.
I have jumped out of airplanes. I have ridden in helicopters. I have scaled walls. I have dog sledded. I have started businesses. I have loved hard and fast.
I can jump blindly into so many things.
What I actually struggle with is not finding the confidence and courage to do new things. It’s knowing whether or not I’m making that decision to do the thing out of confidence and courage to seek affirmation or appease others, or if I’m truly doing it from a place of alignment.
Walking into this ceremony, I approached it like everything.
My husband had already done this style modality and praised it, and the way he spoke about it spoke to me. It made sense.
Yes, let’s talk with plants.
Yes, let there be a medicine woman.
Yes, let’s circle and heal one another for we are all healers.
I believed all of this without a doubt. I was in full faith that this concept, this idea would work. And I think it called to me, so I said yes.
But I don’t know why I said yes.
When I was asked what my intention was, I didn’t know. It was hard to find. It was just: I’m excited by the unknown. I like the idea of healing. There’s something on the edge and I’m willing to jump, so let me jump.
Through that initial meeting to set my intention, I did realize some things, and they were beautiful. I very much thank my guide for helping me get under that layer of excitement and expose what I was truly there for.
There were three things.
- I wanted to put back on the rainbow glasses I carried as a child and see the world through colorful eyes. I wanted all the colors of the rainbow to appear to me.
- I also wanted to be all the animals. I wanted them all to visit me, and I wanted to experience them and move fluidly between them. Elephant, owl, jaguar, snake—anything. Let me embody these creatures.
- And the third one was this: let me sit with this shame. This bizarre feeling I have so little experience with, but I know is lurking in the shadows. Let me sit with it. Let me befriend it.
The beauty of this practice, and the beauty of having a guide, is I got exactly what I asked for.
The Jaguar
I walked into that room and took the tea with fearlessness.
And I was met by the jaguar.
The jungle engulfed me. It hugged me. It welcomed me. As soon as I saw the jaguar—the same one from my dreams previous to the ceremony—I petted it. I stroked it. I loved it.
It purred.
It was me, and I was it.
I felt powerful. I felt like I was there to heal myself and to heal everyone else in this room, that together we have this limitless, unstoppable, expansive power that would change all of us.
The Dream
For context, my dreams earlier in the week were just that: a jaguar guiding me through the jungle and me blindly following, getting smacked by branches and going deeper and deeper and deeper into this unknown jungle. It told me its name was Aya and it asked me to follow it. It kept saying, “Come with me, come with me.” I did not ask questions, I just ran with it.
I had no idea where I was going. I couldn’t see the path. But I trusted that this brilliant, beautiful creature was going to show me where to go, and that if I followed it, if I surrendered to it, I would find where I should be.
And I did.
There were flashes of so many beautiful things happening, and they were happening so quickly I couldn’t wrap my brain around what I saw. But I knew what I saw deep in my bones. I kept saying to the jaguar, “I can’t keep up. I don’t know what I’m seeing. Slow down.” but it kept its pace and only said, “Don’t worry, you will.”
I could understand it in a way that only dreams can give you understanding—that liminal space that helps you know what is unseen but yet so visible to our souls.
I knew what I was seeing, and yet I could not articulate it.
That happened two nights in a row.
The first time the jaguar was black.
The second time it was a colorful beast—geometric, beautifully painted.
And it was powerful in both.
It was my leader in both.
And I was never scared of it.
It never growled. It never terrified me. It embraced me. I embraced it. We were friends immediately.
During some work with my energy class, another healer of mine told me it’s possible I was seeing the future in these dreams. Those visions I couldn’t quite grasp on the peripheral, those would be the visions I would see in the ceremony itself. It’s possible that I had traveled in time and my dreams had brought the future to my present, just not in full capacity. She would be right, as she often is.
To make things even cooler with this jaguar story, we were wandering around a bookshop and saw a book called Animal Power with a colored black jaguar on the front. I immediately purchased it, knowing that this would hold important portals of knowledge.
The Voice
The same day, a week prior to the ceremony, I was in a song circle with the guide and with her church. There were so many beautiful people sitting in a circle that I had never met before. And we sang.
I have been working diligently on my voice for a couple years now through writing and through podcasting and sharing—generally sharing my story with the world little by little here and there, breaking open that barrier that kept my interior speaking to myself, my truth hidden from the world.
What really spoke to me and allowed my voice to step into its full power during that circle was a woman named Melanie, who I mistakenly heard pronounced as Melody (appropriate for what was to come).
Her voice resonated like a Celtic goddess releasing energy into the room, creating vibrations I could feel in my throat, and I could not help myself.
By showing and bearing her soul, she gave me permission to sing.
And I sang.
For the first time in so many years, I released my voice from the depths of my bowels. I roared and sang, and I could feel the harmony between our voices.
And I was scared the whole time.
Doubting myself.
Thinking I’m interrupting this song circle. I’m overpowering other people’s voices. I’m taking up too much space. People are annoyed by this. I’m not harmonizing. I am creating noise.
And yet I sang through it.
And I felt a release.
So much release.
I did not know yet that that was the portal I was walking into for this ceremony.
The voice.
The jaguar.
The courage.
This would be my first night.
Night One
When I took the medicine, the entire room transformed.
It became a jungle full of animals, vines, birds, the sounds of creeping and crawling, and I was not scared. I felt at home.
I cannot describe all of what happened, but I do remember that the first drop-in moved from this jungle into these beautiful gold, colorful geometric patterns that were on repeat, and they were folding in on themselves. They looked like brass or metal containing pieces of colored glass, like beautiful artwork that you would find in a market.
As these images folded in on themselves and transformed into more images of the same thing, they warped from jaguar faces to antique puppeteer houses to a myriad of other things that I can’t remember.
It was like calling my head down, and then the portal below me opened, and it felt like this underworld that I was entering, but it was brilliant.
And I would fall deeper and deeper and deeper, like Alice through the rabbit hole.
Until I experienced this terrible sound, this scary, uncomfortable sound that took over my body. I was feeling hot and nauseous and sad and angry and confused, and the chaos, the chaos, the chaos, the fear, the fear, the fear, the emotions were amplifying loudly around me.
And I could tell the entire room was feeling the same thing.
I was not alone.
I was in this held space where all of us could feel the exact same emotion in our own unique way.
I saw out of the right corner of my eye a toad, previously a woman, one of the participants, transform into a toad, a sick, disgusting toad, moaning and crying out for help, deep guttural sounds that were not just inhuman but demonic.
And this entity filled the room.
And all of us were purging.
Quite literally ejecting vomit from our bodies, thick slush sludge that felt like slugs coming slowly and violently through our throats into the buckets below.
I was sweating and it was painful and it was hard.
And there were facilitators moving around the room in these staccato movements, bright white, dark black, fanning, shooting energy, pushing the air, pulling the air, moving things around, using tobacco to clear the space.
They had little lights on them and things that jingled and jangled.
And I could hear the Ikaros from the guide as she was singing, getting louder and louder, her body spinning in circles with more momentum.
As she purged, we purged.
The spirit sang.
The jungle pulsed.
And this huge amount of energy came up from the bowels of my body through my throat again.
And I sang.
I sang at full volume with the power of Ikaros.
I was singing in Shipibo, sending my energy towards our guide, helping her with the song, amplifying it, trying to banish this beast, trying to release this woman from whatever anchors and chains she was carrying.
I was behind our guide, turning my head, singing my songs directly towards her, amplifying that music.
And the room was helping.
Each of us in our own unique powers.
Creating peace for this woman and for ourselves.
And it was the most beautiful thing.
During the night, I remember looking over at my husband who was in the bed next to mine. And he was moving energy with his hands. He was so powerful, helping the facilitators unblock energy, shift energy, create space for the guide to do her work. There was also a moment in the evening when I seemingly lost my voice. I was inhibited and could no longer sing, and he held my throat without touching me, his hand sending energy into my vocals and reopening them until I sang loudly again. And it was beautiful to watch him be a healer, unleash his own power, become this force, become this gentle force that could help me, that we could work together in tandem to help heal ourselves and the rest of the room. I felt so grateful in that moment to be on this journey with my soul buddy.
As our guide moved through the room, I kept singing.
I kept singing Ikaros.
I was amplifying the song for our guide in all these different people.
And I was vocalizing emotions that felt not just mine.
Thoughts that felt not just mine. But the whole room.
“When will the chaos end,” I cried.
“This is so weird, isn’t it?” I moaned.
“How long do we have to do this?” I begged.
Sometimes I was told to shush. And sometimes I just kept singing.
There was something inside of me that had to be released for my own healing.
Sometimes it was funny and I would make the room laugh.
Sometimes it was peaceful and I would make the room sigh.
My voice is my power.
And releasing it through not just words but song was a new vibration, a new way to amplify that power.
And it needed to come out.
The Ikaros I received felt short.
It felt easy.
It felt fluid.
I felt alive.
Like I was just being welcomed into this space.
And I sang all night long.
When someone brought out a guitar, I sang with them.
And yes, I still felt little moments of shame and guilt, questioning my voice, wondering if I was on key or tone, wondering if I was taking up too much space.
And yet I just trudged on.
Whatever my voice was called to say.
And it didn’t feel like me.
It felt like something coming into me and releasing through my voice.
I was not just me.
I was all.
I was the plants and nature and the animals and all of these beautiful visions accumulating in a way that came through me through the music.
And it was incredible.
The Next Day
I slept very little and was so hungry the next day. I gobbled up everything in sight. I wrote in my journal. I did some watercolor. I built a mandala with fellow participants. I shared my story. I let them share theirs. We healed together. We cried together. We felt each other yet again.
And I was just so excited, so excited to go in for another night.
And all I kept doing and thinking was more. Let’s do more. Let’s bring all the healing to the world. And my intention was to keep healing myself and to heal others.
I had seen the colorful animals. I had seen with rainbow glasses and become the animals. I could move fluidly between them. I embodied everything beautiful in this world. The medicine and I played.
Prior to that, I had spoken with our guide who had mentioned during our earlier integration call that she had had a vision of me.
I did not have the courage to ask her.
Until we were building the mandala, and I finally did.
“Would you share your vision with me?” I asked her.
And she gently giggled and said, “I think it’s obvious. You already showed it. My vision when I first met you a couple weeks ago before the ceremony was that you would be a healing piece of the ceremony. You would participate. And not just participate, but help me. You would sing.”
And I wanted to ask questions, and I wanted to know more about what this meant, but I knew.
It was confirmation that what I had believed I had done last night was true.
I had sang in a language I did not understand, but yet I knew. I understood because my soul knew, not my brain.
And I had healed myself and others through my voice, by sharing myself, by expressing myself, by being my whole self.
The Massage
The day after, I also received a massage, but this was not a normal massage. This was not just pressure on the body, which of course it was. It was the movement of energy.
The healer that I worked with was pulling my body in all different directions, but she wasn’t just in that three-dimensional space. She was feeling my ceremony. She was tapped in, and the music was amplifying this beautiful explanation of what my body needed in that moment.
And what sticks out to me the most is as she was pulling my body forward, me fully naked on the table, being thrown from side to side gently, like the sculptures of the Renaissance where a woman is laid over a table and just draped.
She was opening me. Opening my body and my soul.
And she was pulling on me and expanding what she referred to as my wings, my shoulders. A space that I’m working on in this physical body. They often do not have the space to move the way they need to, to free float. And I’ve spent so much time opening them so that I can fly.
And she said these words that would become a portal.
“You cannot always be the jaguar,” she said, not knowing anything of my visions or my dreams.
Sometimes you must also be the butterfly.
Knowing nothing of dreams even further back that were showing me purple and blue butterflies, the sigil of my guide from the ceremony as well.
The messages were being laid out in front of me, crystal clear.
Last night I was a jaguar, and I had planned to enter the second night as a jaguar.
But I would do no such thing.
Pachamama had other plans for me.
I would not enter the second night as a jaguar.
Night Two
No, I did not enter the second night as a jaguar.
The fear had started a few hours before the ceremony, but courage kicked in and I took more medicine than before, despite that I was petrified of doing it.
Having taken more medicine, a full cup, which admittedly surprised my guide… I caught a momentary glimpse of her face in the candlelight going, oh, with her eyebrows, which did leave me with a seed of doubt that probably followed me all the way into my journey.
But as I sat there on my mat, wondering when it would hit, the jungle reappeared to me. The geometric patterns folding within themselves reappeared.
But I did not fall into a deep, dark, beautiful place.
I still felt the same emotions rise up in me, but I was having trouble purging.
I was agitated. Uncomfortable. Struggling.
I felt like I was fighting all of it.
I couldn’t see the jaguar. I couldn’t see any color.
And so I began to do what I think my body and nervous system has been trained to do.
I started to shut down.
To pull inward.
To cave in on myself.
To lie down in the fetal position, curled in a ball, feeling alone, abandoned, shamed, guilt.
All of these deep dark emotions taking control, making it impossible for me to use my voice.
I did not sing.
I did not dance like the breathwork we did earlier in the day.
I could not bring myself to do anything.
I was exhausted.
When my guide got to me and sang Ikaros, it was exhausting to lift myself up. I felt heavy and drained, and this immense weariness came over me, and all I could do was yawn.
All I could do for anyone else was yawn.
I was just sort of rocking, trying to calm myself.
I couldn’t throw up. I wanted to so desperately, and yet something was blocking it.
I felt helpless.
This Ikaros, unlike the first night which lasted what only felt like seconds, this felt like hours.
This felt like it would never end.
And all I kept asking myself is:
When will this end?
Why do people do this?
How long do I have to endure this?
I’m so tired.
How much longer?
Can we be out of this yet?
Are we there yet?
I was miserable.
And the whole room was amplifying my discomfort.
I can’t remember if anyone was purging for me. I know I wasn’t purging for myself, and I certainly wasn’t purging for others.
This heavy weight did feel like mine.
But it also didn’t feel like mine.
I kept having visions of my mother and her mother, my grandmother.
I don’t know why this weariness that they carried, this inability to choose, that the path of their lives was just laid out in front of them and they had to diligently follow it.
That I did not want that.
Nor had I done that.
And somehow that felt like it wasn’t mine.
This weight, this burden, is no longer mine to carry.
I could release it.
But I could not release it.
I could not let it out of my body, no matter how much I recognized that it was not a part of my body.
I just yawned.
And I kept grasping at my womb.
There was something there.
This emptiness.
This hollowness.
This recognition I would never have children.
And maybe that wasn’t bad.
But something about my mom and her mother and this lineage of women.
This pain that they were carrying for so many generations would somehow stop with me, would be broken, because I was not having children.
But yet I did not feel barren completely.
Yes, I did grieve that I would never be a mother.
But I would rejoice that I could be a mother to so many.
Not just the blood that I would pass.
While I am feeling my womb and I am feeling lost and I am feeling alone, despite so many helpful people being around me and nature being my guide the night before, I returned to this fetal position.
Not knowing what happened.
Completely disconnected from the room.
In this deep dark spiral for myself.
I slept through all the songs.
I did not sing.
I missed the delicious fruit that marked the end of the ceremony.
I missed everything.
My Moon Cycle
I was on my moon cycle during both ceremonies, and I don’t know if that played a role.
Apparently you cannot be on the first two days of your moon cycle, for women are too powerful to take ceremony at that time.
I had started on Wednesday eve, exactly 48 hours before the ceremony on Friday eve.
When I had started, I thought, I can’t do this ceremony, and I was devastated.
I texted my guide to tell her and spent time being disappointed and missing out on this opportunity with my husband, who was to join me as a participant.
He would get to do it.
And I would not.
And it was this terrible burden.
But I did move through it.
I did recognize that there was some higher calling.
There was a reason I would not.
And that would be okay.
About an hour later, the guide texted and told me this information about only the first two days.
So I had just skated by.
And I could still join.
And that felt heavy, ironically and comedically, because now I had to go through another roller coaster of emotion.
I had already succumbed to the fact that I would not be there.
And now I had to convince myself that yes, I was supposed to be there and go through all of those same emotions again.
What a telltale of what would come in the pendulum of life that would be mirrored in this ceremony.
After Ceremony
I felt so blah the next day.
So empty.
So confused.
Disoriented.
Disconnected.
It was not anything like the ecstasy I had felt the night before and the day prior.
I just wanted to leave.
I just wanted to sleep.
I just wanted to be done.
Before we left and closed the ceremony, the guide checked in on me.
And I felt low.
I think she knew it.
She told me that we had spent a lot of time healing my womb, but not expanding upon what that meant.
It gave me some comfort.
But I still felt a strong sense of nothingness.
Of void.
An absence.
Integration
I was thankful that the next day I had very little to do, but I still had to work. In hindsight, I would have taken Monday off, given myself breathing room. But alas, I didn’t know what to expect, so I couldn’t plan for it.
I went through the day in the best way I could, but it was definitely hazy. Everyone seemed very concerned about me. I know that I looked different. I was not me. I was a shell.
And I did spend a lot of time in the beginning part of this reintegration thinking, I’m not going to do that again. This is not for me. How am I taking steps backwards? How am I not taking steps forwards?
The irony, of course, is that this is how you move through things. It is not linear. And those lows are necessary. The valleys are necessary to recognize the highs, the mountains.
And so in that space, I was learning, but I did not have the tools to understand that learning.
My Healers
Thankfully, sometimes my head is incredibly intelligent, and I had done exactly what I needed the week prior. I had set up my post-ceremony week with numerous healers. I set up a call with my energy healer. I set up a movement session with my healer. I set up an appointment with a new healer who I did not know had roots in Peruvian practices.
I also did not know that that song circle had set me up with so many people who would check in on me prior to the ceremony and after the ceremony. Strangers, people I had met only once, were the ones who showed up for me on bookends of the ceremony.
I had also set up time one-on-one with my business partner for our weekly Pilates session. And she and I spent time together after work, talking about a future presentation, but ultimately the messaging of isolation at the core of that presentation topic would lead me to share my journey with her. My closest friends were mirrors for my story and gave me so much space to process.
The week unfolded exactly the way it was supposed to.
Part of it was prior proper planning, and part of it was just being held and allowing myself to be held by the comfort of strangers, by the love that is in this universe when I let it in.
And throughout this integration, I had big epiphanies. The pieces slowly started falling into place, and I could see the medicine continuing to work through me and for me.
The Full Picture
I got to fulfill my third intention on the second night.
The medicine showed me, quite jarringly, the old story that I carry deeply rooted in my body: that no matter how many people are around me, no matter how much courage or clarity I receive, I am often in this feeling of loneliness.
It is my deepest wound.
And I do not have the tools to befriend my dark passengers. I have no practice.
I have well practiced my courage and my capability, my confidence, and that is part of who I am most certainly. And it is a beautiful, incredible power that I will continue to amplify.
It is my jaguar. It is my warrior.
But it needs to move aside as a protector. It can no longer hold that role and keep me from knowing the pits of my shadow self.
This wound needs space. It needs my time, my energy.
When I was meeting with my healers earliest in the week, and I was still feeling low, I felt like crying when they were talking to me. I could barely move my body. I couldn’t conjure anything positive.
Yet they gave me what I needed anyway.
I did not have to show up in order to receive love. I only had to ask for help. And even if I don’t ask, the help appears, because I have given it very freely.
My energy healer reminded me that I am a hedgewitch. I am soul connected to nature.
And I realized in my talking with her that I had leaned on nature so heavily when I felt so isolated from the human world, but I was more so an observer rather than a participant.
I would run to my dogs before a person when I felt sad. I did not know how to connect with my own kind the same way I knew how to connect with my dogs, the trees, the flowers, the birds, and all other kinds of wild animals.
But as I began to open myself to humans, I started abandoning nature.
And so is my typical story—swinging from one extreme to the other, not knowing that I can have both, not working from a mindset of abundance that says and rather than or.
She reminded me that I can have nature and humans. I can have connections to both.
And what a luxury and a privilege it is for me that I am already connected in nature.
Amplify it.
Sing to the trees.
Dance with the wind.
Commune with the animals.
Do not forget that my place is among them, is with them.
We are one.
And therefore I am never alone.
My movement throughout the week reminded me that I am a butterfly.
Through dance, I release any of that tension I hold in my shoulders, and I fly with ease. Grace. I am beautiful when I dance, when I allow myself to release the burdens of my ancestral past. The burdens of my mind, the weight that holds me down.
I float like a butterfly.
I often tell my clients that butterflies are the compass. It means that if you feel scared, that is the portal. Don’t go around it. Go through it.
And that was my reminder.
When I dance and sing, I can move through those deep dark emotions. I can be friends with them. I can play with them. I can hear them. I can feel them.
And I do not need to be them.
The new healer that I met with is a pelvic floor and jaw physical therapist. She worked on my mouth. And the beauty of that is that it’s a continuation of my voice.
She called me tongue-tied, and I giggled because yes, I am trying to untie that tongue.
I am trying to stand in my truth and sing my song, the same song as the trees.
And she opened up my neck and released some tension that has been there and been deeply there for far too long.
During that session I also met a woman who shared the grief of losing her grandson. I sat with her in that emotion and shared my own story of grief from my grandparents’ death.
And I asked her for a hug, which she freely gave to me.
The warmest, tightest embrace.
One that I had wished from a grandmother of my own and did not receive when I was young.
But the beauty is I can manifest that in my life now.
I can receive those hugs from matriarchs who are powerful lovers.
And through the connections with all these beautiful people, both strangers and close friends, I processed this journey and its beauty and its devastation in all the ways I needed to.
Grounded
Yesterday, my husband and I grounded ourselves. It is part of the process where you bring salt and other things removed from your dieta into your body.
I was able to wake up today and meditate with a ritual.
Cleansing myself.
Grounding myself.
Opening the sky.
Receiving the wisdom of my guides.
They told me to keep singing.
To keep dancing.
To keep playing.
To keep creating.
To keep healing.
To keep sharing.
To just keep doing what I had been doing.
And now just add in befriending my dark passengers.
So I did.
I sat with my loneliness.
And I struggled.
It was not easy, and it was not for long, but it was one step in many steps to harness that new power, to shine dark spaces with light.
And when I came out of my meditation, I sang a song with the trees and danced with the wind and fluttered with the birds.
And I could feel the love song all around me.
From my closest confidant, Pachamama.
Right there.
Still with me.
Through a journey of power.
Through a journey of pain.
She was holding me the whole time.
