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Somatic Grief and Converging Timelines
My personal experience of working with deep grief across multiple timelines.
When my daughter called to let me know she had an unexpected week off in October, going to London to visit her seemed like a great idea. There'd been no vacations listed in the University's calendar, so I hadn't expected to see her until her study-abroad semester ended around Christmas-time. It was a nice surprise, and we both thought it would be fun to spend the week in the countryside. I cleared a few things at home, booked a flight, and found us a cute house set on a hill in the small town of Glastonbury. I'd never been to Glastonbury before, but I knew from friends that the place of Arthurian legend was a power spot for goddess/priestess energy. The pictures looked magical, and despite the need for an array of COVID precautions, I was excited both to see my daughter and to immerse myself for a week in the energy of Glastonbury.
My "Glastonbury initiation" (aka "my week of tears") started the day before I was set to leave. That morning, my daughter called to let me know someone in her building had been diagnosed with COVID. Her school was asking her to quarantine for the next 10 days. If I came, I would likely not be able to see her. After hanging up, I talked with a few friends, cried about it, confirmed there would be no refunds, and then decided to go anyway. I'd gone to the UK in my twenties to write a book, and the thought of having a week in England to write again felt like a worthy consolation prize, maybe even an interesting twist of fate. Although I wouldn't get to spend the week with my daughter, at least I could see the college she was attending, and maybe rediscover some creative part of myself in the process.
Without going into every detail, suffice it to say there were significant real-world challenges that week. From the window in my hotel room in London not closing, to my ATM card being cancelled by my bank, the week was a series of slowly-unfolding disasters. The house in Glastonbury was beautiful, but my required "Day-2" COVID test that was waiting for me when I got there was a nightmare. I'd thought the Day-2 test was a rapid test to be taken on the honor system. I discovered it was actually a bar-coded and officially recorded test that needed to be overnighted within a certain number of hours to Northern Ireland. Over the next 12 hours, I learned that no courier service - not even the British Royal Mail - would handle a COVID test. I had no idea what not complying would mean for me, and in the end had to pay a taxi driver (God bless him!) $100 to hand-deliver it to a COVID drop box an hour away. By mid-week, I had $4 in my wallet, and a call into American Airlines about an earlier flight home.
The reason I say Glastonbury was an "initiation" and not merely a disaster is because of everything else that was going on just below the surface that week. I didn't recognize it when it first began, but now I understand there were multiple timelines merging for me in Glastonbury, with a collection of very deep wounds looking for a way to heal. Challenging experiences from my adult life, childhood wounds, deep soul traumas imprinted from other lifetimes, even the frustrations I've carried from my ancestors, all found a point of connection in Glastonbury. The real world chaos of cancelled ATM cards and COVID tests created just enough of a crack in my defenses for them to all come roaring to the surface, asking to be seen and held, and healed once and for all.
I started to sense there was something bigger unfolding while I was waiting in London for my train to Glastonbury. I'd started crying on the walk from my hotel to the train station, and was struggling to hold it together enough to figure out where I needed to go. I had purchased two tickets, and I was sad my daughter wasn't with me. I walked to the boards, but my train wasn't listed. Paddington Station is one of the busiest stations in London, and it was packed with people that afternoon. I was one of the few people wearing a mask, and anxiety began creeping up on me.
Before long, I was swimming in an inner soup of sadness and fear, treading water but just barely. Though the fear and sadness could be mostly explained, I was aware that both felt out of proportion. Yes, I was sad, but I didn't actually feel devastated. I was going to write, after all. And yes, I was afraid of COVID, but not that afraid. I had my N95 mask, was vaccinated, etc. I also felt guilty, for no apparent reason.
I reached out to some friends for support, but the emotional tide kept rising. By the time I reached the house in Glastonbury, I was unable to speak to the woman showing me around. The view from the porch of the town below was breathtaking, and for some reason, it made me cry even harder. I was utterly grief-stricken, swamped with guilt and terrified.
I did my best to "feel what I was feeling" in the present moment, as I frequently advise my clients to do. I knew there was likely more to this puzzle than I was comprehending just yet. But the emotions didn't clear. I cried and cried and cried, and still felt just as grief-stricken. I allowed the fear to turn my body ice cold, but I still felt just as afraid. I looked in dark corners for reasons to feel guilty, without clearing any of the guilt itself. I felt like I was going to crawl out of my skin.
It occurred to me that the bulk of what I was feeling didn't feel connected to the present moment at all. It didn't even feel connected to my real life. Yes I was afraid and sad, but what else was happening here? It felt like something had been imprinted upon me, or like there was something in my astral field holding these patterns in place.
In the weeks before the trip, I'd been doing some elemental rebirthing work, going back to the womb time and recalibrating by connecting with the elements. When my mother was pregnant with me, her father had passed away, somewhat unexpectedly. She'd been alone with him at the hospital, and had spoken sharply to him moments before he died. She'd been very close to him, and the loss had devastated her. She'd struggled with guilt that their last words had been ones of anger. She'd been unable to understand why a loving god would allow her father to pass while she was pregnant with her first child. She deeply mourned the fact that he would never see me.
As I reconnected with that womb time experience in Glastonbury, it occurred to me that my body had been formed within a field of deep grief. The water my body was swimming in had been saturated with grief, fear and guilt, and my cells had taken it all in. The deep sadness I was feeling - the loss, the sense of overwhelming aloneness, the fear, the grief of "not seeing her" - was somatic in nature. Yes, some of it was real in the present moment, but much of it was old stuff stored in my tissues. It felt out-of-step with the present moment because it was. I wasn't so much grieving not seeing my daughter, as allowing the grief I'd taken on from my mother to be expelled from my cells. It wasn't something I could stop or make sense of, because it had never been mine to begin with.
The realization helped give structure to some of what I was feeling, though the strong feelings didn't completely clear. That night, I journaled, meditated, corrected my self-talk, and then didn't sleep a wink. The next morning, I woke up exhausted. I meditated some more, seeing a flash of a vision at one point of a woman or a demon disintegrating into ash. I had no idea what it meant, but I decided to try to make the most of the day.
Glastonbury is a bit of a geological wonder, with a hill known as the Tor at the edge of town. You reach it through pastoral fields of grazing sheep. Its terraced slopes rise sharply, offering a view of several surrounding counties. Some believe King Arthur's Holy Grail is buried at the top. At the base of the Tor, there are two natural springs. Though they emerge right beside each other, they come from different sources. The Red Spring (aka Chalice Well Spring) is named for its iron deposits. It meanders through a sunlit garden, cascading from spigots, flowing into wading pools and collecting in peaceful reflecting areas. The nearby White Spring is full of calcite, flowing in haphazard ways out of a windowless, stone pump house, lit only by candles and decorated by pagan shrines. It all lies on the Michael Ley Line, and both springs are known for healing.
I spent the day walking the Tor, bathing in the springs, praying and trying to find my center again. Tears and fears were ever-present, but I imagined the waters of these two beautiful springs were clearing the waters of my cells and recalibrating the waters of my mother's womb. I waded through the icy water, holding the intention to release whatever I could. I prayed and tried to be present in my body. When the tears came, I cried. When the fears came, I breathed deeply.
By the end of the day, I was exhausted, though feeling a little better, as my daughter had taken two COVID tests (both negative), and she was going to come visit the next day. I thought for sure I would sleep that night, but shortly after laying down, I started getting a weird sensation in my breastbone. It got worse when I put my hand there, as if there were something heavy and hot sitting on my chest. Waves of anxiety rose up. The heat spread, and then my lungs turned icy cold. Anxiety, on the edge of panic, kept me up most of the night. When I woke up the next day, I was dizzy, shaky, and my stomach hurt. I'd dreamt of a woman dressed in white, crying and bleeding as she struggled to climb over something. At one point in the dream, I'd been walking with an injured sheep strapped to my back, yelling in a demon's voice to someone just out of sight. "Where is she?!" I'd screamed, waking up to new waves of rage and terror. More than anything, I just wanted to get out of Glastonbury.
Though my daughter came that afternoon and we had a nice dinner, by the end of the day, I'd learned that my bank had cancelled my ATM card. The sense of grief had lightened considerably, but the anxiety was only growing stronger. Again, I saw the disparity between what was happening and my reaction. Yes, there was no way for me to get cash to pay for the cab back to London, but I had other options. I didn't want to ride the crowded train again, but I could use my credit card to purchase a ticket if I had to. Despite all logic, the fear that I might be stuck in Glastonbury was overwhelming. Suddenly, the people seemed inhospitable, even dangerous. The government felt untrustworthy. I was sure no one would help me if I got sick.
As I journaled that night, I asked myself why I might've chosen to be born into such a strong field of grief, guilt and fear. I'd walked through the ruins of the Abbey in town the day before, and had learned about the horrific end of the Last Abbot of Glastonbury. I wondered if some of the fear I was feeling didn't belong to another time. I was visiting Glastonbury at the time of the year when the veils were the thinnest. Was I reliving something from a time I no longer remembered?
Over the years, soul path work has shown me that we frequently carry difficult past life experiences forward by creating "echoes" of them throughout our childhood. The remnants of a past-life challenge can be carried forward in a childhood experience with a similar emotional tone. In this way, it's not necessary to remember the past life experiences, as we have an echo of the deeper wounds buried within our childhood wounds. As we work the childhood wounds, we're simultaneously working the past life wounds. This allows us to work with things our souls haven't fully processed, without having the emotional and mental weight of difficult memories to deal with.
So why had I chosen this? What past-life experience was buried within all that cellularly-stored emotion? And what was with all the fear? I sensed my in utero experience had strongly mirrored an older experience. In choosing my mother, I'd chosen to bring something forward that was so big and so important, I needed it held in my cells from the start. As an infant, I would've had no idea what was going on. I'd likely been afraid, and feeling completely overwhelmed by what was saturating my environment. I suspected there was a past-life experience that correlated to a similar feeling of being entirely overwhelmed. I guessed it was related to Glastonbury somehow, and that the bloody woman and the injured sheep from my dream, as well as the inhospitable people and the dangerous government I was conjuring up, all had something to do with it.
As I sat with it, I began to feel that I'd lost someone very dear to me - a woman or a girl, perhaps. I'd felt guilty for the role I'd played within it. I'd been alone and unsupported. Perhaps there'd been people in authority who'd abused their power in the process. It was a lifetime in which I'd seen something so terrible, I'd never recovered. My soul had shrunk back in horror. I'd lost faith in life and in other people. I'd lost faith in God. And in my grief and fear, I'd sealed the experience deep enough in my soul to erase the memory of it, without ever letting it go.
The next morning, I had a choice to make. I'd called about changing my flight, and it was possible for me to head home a day earlier than planned. Every cell in my body wanted to run away from Glastonbury. I just wanted to feel OK again. And yet, leaving early would mean not seeing my daughter for that last day. The choice felt exquisitely complex, with all kinds of subtleties. Too many of the pieces were invisible to me still. There was no logical answer. All I knew was that I didn't want to keep being afraid. I wanted to trust life. It was just a glimmer of a light, a tiny hope, in what seemed like an otherwise black mess. I struggled with it, and in the end, found my courage and chose to stay.
My last day was spent in London. My daughter and I took in the sights and then returned to my hotel room for a long nap. We laid in bed for a few hours, holding each other and crying. This crying was different, though. It felt like a completion of something started a long time ago. As my daughter fell asleep in my arms, I worked hard to take in the sweetness of it, and allow that sweetness to repair whatever had been haunting me. I felt waves of sadness for missed time, missed opportunity, and age-old, unidentifiable grief. Even now, I know I've only just glimpsed the magnitude of this experience.
Coming home, I expected that my dreams would keep revealing more of the past life story. That's usually how it works for me. I glimpse something, and then it starts to unfold over months, or even years, and in that time, I'm integrating it, and eventually, it feels complete. Although I've found more pieces (mostly ancestral), I still don't know the story nor have I found the memory of whatever horrible thing I saw in that other time.
One day last week, though, a neighbor's cat killed a mouse and left it by my front door. Though his head was horribly mangled, the mouse's eyes were still open and staring up at me when I found it. The visual was dreadful, and I instantly felt the energetic overlay of another time. Dead eyes staring back at me. It was a reflection, far-removed and dim, but I felt it in my gut.
I found a place near a tree I'd planted this past spring and buried the mouse, trying not to focus on the suffering, but on the inevitable and beautiful returning of form to the earth. As much as anyone can, I did my best to make peace with death. When I later tried to write about the experience, my computer rebooted and erased the entire document. What was left was a blank file with the words "repaired" attached to it.
It felt like another, fainter echo of the same death current that had claimed the mouse... that had claimed the woman in my dreams... that had claimed the Abbot of Glastonbury and all the people I've loved in other places and other times. The swift and unknowable hand of death had infiltrated my computer and erased what had been. Just like that, it was gone.
I took it as a message. Whatever had happened, it's over. The past is gone. A mouse needing to be buried is what the present day brought me, as a small echo of whatever that deep soul wound was. And I could meet the present moment. Whatever happened that week in Glastonbury was also done. Maybe death could be a blessing. Maybe I could accept a clean slate with no story attached to it and allow for a repair.
During that last day in London, when my daughter had been sleeping in my arms and I'd known that everything had turned out alright in the end, I'd been tempted to beat myself up over my lack of faith. I think I've been beating myself up, in one way or another, for lifetimes for whatever happened that hurt my soul so deeply. But that last day in London, I'd stopped myself mid-thought. If beating myself up was an echo of that lifetime, I was ready to let that go, too. I reminded myself that I'd done my best that week. It had been a difficult experience. I'd tried to be present throughout it. I'd tried to be kind to myself and others. I'd showed up as best I could. And in the end, I think something was repaired, though I may never really know exactly what or how.
Now that I'm removed from the intensity, I can look back at my week in Glastonbury and see the perfection that was unfolding within the chaos. I needed to go alone, because I had some deep grieving to do. If my daughter had come with me, I wouldn't have gone as deep as I had. The house I'd rented was the most beautiful and supportive place to be doing deep soul work. It was surrounded by gardens and crystals and statues of ascended masters. In the end, I'd had exactly the amount needed to pay the taxi driver back to London, to the dollar! I'd met the right people. I'd been in the right places. My daughter and I even had a few days of deep and meaningful connection.
I don't generally share this much about my personal experience, but I wanted to now because I think timelines are converging everywhere, and people are being asked to heal and integrate across many levels. Most of those levels probably aren't conscious. I'm guessing many people don't know how or what they're even being asked to do. It's OK. There's always a complex dance taking place in the energetic realm, where long-held thought patterns, emotional complexes, relational and ancestral patterns, and deep soul work are all unfolding simultaneously. It's only our small ego minds that need to understand it, get a handle on it, figure it out, process it, etc. We can't take that part of ourselves too seriously. What I'm learning is that it's enough to just keep letting go into each moment and meeting what's there as best you can. This makes room for feminine wisdom to come in and right the ship.
Feminine wisdom is receptive, so accessing it means slowing down, letting go and listening. It means witnessing what's happening and doing your best to be in relationship with it, as it exists. Your feminine side is where your compassion lives. She will hold your hand and pat your back, and allow grief or fear or anger to do it's work. She's the weaver. She holds all the threads together, and right now, our masculine brains need to get out of the way enough to let her do her work. She moves as a chaotic force and that can be terrifying to our little ego minds, but there's divine order within that chaos. Keep reaching for trust.
