Let’s talk about spiritual awakenings.
Mine happened at a week-long yoga retreat in Nosara, Costa Rica in July 2021, the last stop on my Frantic Attempt to Find Myself™ World Tour. At that time, my life felt like the Wizard of Oz, but on an alternate timeline. The one where Dorothy and the Tornado had a lovechild: me.
Before the retreat, I felt truly lost in every sense of the word. I realize now that I was in a mixed bipolar episode. For those familiar with Polyvagal Theory, I was living this chapter of my life in dorsal vagal shutdown. Tldr; everything hurt and nothing helped. I was desperate to stop the spiral, so I pulled the trigger on a kundalini yoga retreat with absolutely zero experience.
I had dabbled in yoga, mostly taking vinyasa classes that were focused more on asanas (physical poses) than the other aspects of yoga. The kind that felt more like going to the gym than going to church. This was not that. Kundalini, the “yoga of awareness,” incorporates other exercises like breathwork to awaken dormant energy.
Each day was devoted to a different chakra and it was Sacral day that got me. If you aren’t familiar, this chakra is associated with emotions, creativity, and sexuality. I was feeling extremely emotional and creatively blocked at the time, so I was eager to get to work.
Toward the end of class, I spontaneously started to shake from my core. It grew from pins-and-needles in my legs to a full body tremble. Like there was a Theragun in the center of my body beating me from the inside out.
My hands started to lift into the air and my fingers curled up and froze into claws. Oh yeah, and I was seeing things. Colors, symbols, eyes, stars, space. You name it, it was flying past me at warp speed. Similar to psychedelic drugs, but this time I was the drug.
As this intensified, I realized I didn’t know how to stop it. I instinctively tried to touch my chest, but I couldn’t. My hands were like bouncing off of what felt like an invisible forcefield. I tried to touch my stomach and the same thing happened. I attempted to sit up and felt like I was chained to the floor. At this point terror enveloped my body. The loss of control really scared me. Looking back, I consider this experience to be life-saving, but at this moment I thought I was dying. Around then is when I started to panic. SO many things started running through my head.
Is this how I die? Am I already dead? Did one of these yoga bitches spike my green juice? What did those symbols mean? Is this what’s supposed to happen in yoga? Am I psychic? Did I just go to space? Are aliens real? Am I going crazy? Why can’t I control my body right now? Are the other girls shaking? How do I stop this?
Before I could unpack all of that, what little control I had completely left my body. I could feel Kim K ugly-cry tears streaming down my face. I was powerless to stop them. I did not have the tools at the time to ground myself, so I’m very grateful to my retreat leader (and now dear friend) Lakshmi Dev for noticing what was happening. She came over and did some kind of literal magic (energy healing) and helped calm down my system.
When the class ended and I was finally able to function, I walked over to her and and asked my most burning question of all: What the FUCK just happened to me? She held my arms and compassionately looked in my eyes and she said: “Sometimes that happens when someone has sexual trauma they haven’t processed.”
I started sobbing. I hadn’t told her about my sexual trauma. In fact, I could count on one hand the amount of people in my life who knew about it at that time. (I’ve recently told a few more.)
In that moment, it all made sense to me. My depression wasn’t really due to COVID or my relationship or my stressful job. It was over three decades of trauma and unprocessed emotions. My attachment wounds. My dysregulated nervous system. My lack of awareness. My unhealthy lifestyle. It was all the work I hadn’t done and the feelings I’d never felt and the words I’d never said. The root cause of my suffering was clearer than ever. My reality shifted so drastically and suddenly that day that I had no choice but to surrender to it.
I’m forever grateful that this energetic shift sparked the clarity I needed to get better. Could there be a scientific explanation for this? Sure. Maybe it was my body’s reaction to the sudden flood of oxygen. Maybe it was my nervous system purging the decades of trauma stored in my body. Maybe it was a spiritual awakening. Why can’t it be all of those things?
Whether you believe in the spiritual part or not, the takeaway here is that whatever it was that happened to me triggered the epiphany I needed. So even if it was just a physiological reaction without anything cosmic at play, it still started me on my path to healing.
And that is spiritual enough for me.