My Saturn Return

My first introduction to Spirit & Energy Work was in 2014. I was 27 years old. My Saturn Return. I remember Robin telling me it was my Saturn Return and I had no idea what she was talking about.


“You’re so scared of losing everything that doesn’t mean anything.” - Factory Girl 

“Relationships are strange. I mean, you are with one person a while, eating and sleeping and living with them, loving them, talking to them, going places together, and then it stops.”- Charles Bukowski


I had moved away from my life in Los Angeles, California, where I had lived since I was 18 years old, to go live on a farm called The Light Center in Baldwin City Kansas. I could sense I was changing and my friends weren’t. We were no longer on the same page. We were growing apart. My friends in LA had become my family, they were my main source of support. I felt like they were all I had and I was losing them. Subconsciously this loss reminded me of my original abandonment wound, the one from my birth family, and brought up some extremely uncomfortable feelings. I loved living on the farm, I loved the animals and learning about how to grow food and making herbal potions. At the same time I felt like I was all alone and had some serious co-dependency issues. I was afraid to be alone and on a new path. I wanted someone to come with me. And I won’t lie, the “coolness” factor also played a part in my resistance to going my own way. Drugs and partying and fashion (my previous interests) were accepted in the current culture, even glamorized and celebrated, especially in LA. I recognized that my new interests (growing food, truth, energy) were not accepted in the current culture (this was 2014), and not only was it not “cool” but it was seen as crazy and weird. None of my friends understood what I was experiencing, they weren’t at all interested, and they didn’t care. They thought I was losing it. Because these “friends” had become my “family”, this rejection scratched my deepest, most painful wounds. My core wounds, like so many of us, are rejection and abandonment. I was not prepared for these “losses”. I didn’t know any “Spiritual” people except for Robin (I admired Robin but at the same time felt like I could never be like her), I knew nothing about the Spiritual Path, I didn’t understand that these kinds of “losses” were all standard practice, that this was part of the deal. I thought maybe I was going crazy and I did not want to be a crazy person. I wanted out. I wanted to go back to my old life. 


“In some ways that was simpler, being too fucked up to see. I didn't have to wake up to the world that was around me. And now we are awake and it seems too much to take. I want to close my eyes because I fear my heart will break. I want to look away, I want to look away. I want to look away,” - Florence & The Machine, Light of Love 


I remember it was at TLC that this idea of “loving myself” first arose. “I do love myself”, I thought. Little did I know at the time that I wasn’t even aware of who my real self was.


Because my original attachment wounding happened when I was so young the emotions behind expressing my authentic experience had been suppressed for decades and they had become extremely intensified (humiliation, shock & terror were the main emotions I experienced as a child. Fun, right?) When you’re a child, being rejected and abandoned by your caregivers is literally life-threatening. Your body remembers this on a molecular level. Rejection for me at the time genuinely felt life-threatening. It felt like I was literally going to die. Like I wasn’t going to survive. And I was freaking out. My permaculture teacher at The Light Center introduced me to kratom when I started having severe back pains. I started taking it all the time. I felt like the kratom was the only thing keeping me afloat. At the time the flood of emotions that wanted to come through was very confusing for me, it was hard for me to understand what was happening, it was so intense. My main strategies were disassociation, avoidance, freeze, and flight. To say it very kindly I was not skilled in emotional awareness. I have what they call “fixed and automatic dissociative tendencies”. It’s common for people who have experienced ongoing trauma. What I have come to understand is that my patterning around the feeling of rejection was a freeze response, and then I would *immediately* abandon myself (dissociate), enmesh with the rejector, then take something (pills, alcohol, cocaine, kratom) to numb the pain I would experience in my body. Because this patterning developed when I was an infant (as a child I sucked my finger for comfort and then moved on to binge eating and bulimia when I was in my teens) the response happened so fast it took me YEARS to figure out what was going on. Years. Like almost 10 fucking years. Terror, shock, and shame are some of the most difficult emotions to be with and it took me a long time to develop a safe enough space within myself for me to heal. I still have to focus on creating new internal pathways for myself every single day. 


What happens when you have a “Spiritual Awakening” is that your Psychic System is receiving more light, which pushes out any darkness, traumas, or pain, you’re carrying. When you have decades’ worth of suppressed emotions, Ancestral pains, endless traumatic events… you can understand why I was freaking out. It was a lot. I didn’t have the proper support and/or guidance and I didn’t know how to ask for help. All I knew was that I wanted it to not be happening. 


“Our Nervous System is 100% connected to our psychic ability. Our physical Nervous System stretches into our Etheric & Astral bodies interweaving into an Energetic System. When we start to develop psychically both our psychic & physical nervous systems light up. This brings up pain and trauma stored in the body. Our nervous system is not only receiving information but storing information. Could be from this life or others. A lot of the time our psychic system shuts down because of this pain and trauma and if you begin to take on more psychic information than your nervous system is ready for, you burn out. When there is a lot of trauma, lighting up your psychic system unleashes massive pain, like an octopus releasing ink into the water. This can cause paranoia, depression, anxiety, visions… weird memories coming forward. When you let too much light in at once it can feel like your nervous system is shattered into a million pieces. When you are a clairsentient (empath) this can be a full body burnout. When you’re doing too much psychic work and not taking breaks and coming back into your body and bringing yourself into your Holy Space (slow, deeply loving & peaceful), it can have a shattering effect on your nervous system. If you have fear about the messages you’re receiving, fear about being right, it can cause you to begin to slowly disassociate (your essence coming out of your body) This causes damage because of the distance between your Spirit & your body. When you are doing psychic work you need to be slow, warm, grounded, and at rest, allowing Spirit to come to you in your Holy Space. It is tempting to go out of your body at first because you’re excited and there’s that urge to go fast but you must bring yourself back to your Holy Space. Developing too fast is what causes burnout.”- (paraphrasing)Gigi Young


Now, I didn’t realize it at the time but living at The Light Center LIT MY PSYCHIC SYSTEM UP. I had a major awakening there and it was completely unexpected. I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t even know what a “Spiritual Awakening” was much less a “psychic system”. Gigi describes it perfectly: it felt like my nervous system was being shattered into a million pieces. I wasn’t afraid of the messages I was receiving I just didn’t like them. I felt like I must be insane. I did disassociate. My main skill was disassociation. Holy Space? What’s a Holy Space? I had zero references for the feeling of warmth or safety. Zero. I kid you not what felt safe and warm for me was chaos and danger. Love and danger were fused for me. It’s something that happens when you’re primary caregiver is a threat because as a baby your primary need is bonding and so your system learns to fuse love and danger so that you can bond… Sigh. I felt most comfortable when disassociated. It was my main state. I didn’t know it then but I had spent most of my life disassociated. It’s all I knew. I’m still recovering from burnout. 


I was also very attached to the “wild-party-girl-no-one-can-hurt-me” identity. This identity is what Internal Family Systems calls the “Protector”. This is the identity that got me through. She kept me safe for a long time and it was very, very, very hard (yes, 3 very’s) for me to let her go. It took me years. I didn’t feel like I would survive without her. I seriously felt that there was no way I could ever survive without her. I didn’t know what I would do or how I would be if I wasn’t her. How I would make it in life. I loved this girl. I still love her. I always will. She’s the one who got me out of some very tough situations. She was a fighter. She knew she deserved love and pleasure and just didn’t know how to find it in a healthy way, understandably. Later on (years later) I would come to realize that I was going to have to develop an Inner Mother who could take over. This was a huge source of anger for me because I did NOT want to be a mother. I never wanted to be a mother. Even as a little girl, I remember knowing I would never have kids. But I also knew this was something I was going to have to do for myself. 


While at TLC I experienced intense depression and fatigue. I cannot emphasize enough that I didn’t understand what was going on. I was so confused. I had suppressed some very hard truths about my reality and had been living in a kind of fantasy (I’ll go into this in another essay). I started taking kratom every day. I felt like at least it was a step down from alcohol and cocaine.  


“Give me your hand. Do you know what this is? It’s my heart. And it’s broken. Can you feel that?”- Great Expectations (the movie, 1997) 


For a long time, as a subconscious attempt to gain control, I completely blamed myself for why I felt so sad & depressed. It was too much for me to face the truth about my childhood. My lies sounded so much better. I didn’t yet possess the skills I needed to soothe myself and let my body know that I was safe, that I was able to hold myself and feel what I needed to feel. A rage seethed inside. For nearly a decade I would continue my old patterns of numbing & running away. I refused to go back into my childhood. My thought was, “the past is in the past.” Instead of facing my truth I entered into a Dark Night of The Soul.


“I love conflict, got an obnoxious (what?) subconscious (yeah). I'm afraid to unlock it (Nah). Keep those monsters in the closet” - Eminem, Zeus 


A deep sense of self-hatred sunk in. I felt like I must have done something seriously wrong to be feeling so much pain. A story developed that I had done something wrong. That I was being punished. (This is what they call “Victim Mentality”) I was taught emotions were something you could control. Crying, sadness & anger were all demonized and harshly punished in the home I grew up in so it makes total sense that I resisted them so vigorously. It took years for me to learn how to let myself cry. Even longer for me to allow myself to express my anger in a contained, healthy way. When I was younger I would get into fights and say terrible, mean, cruel things to people. Sometimes when I got drunk I had outbursts where I would scream & break things. I’ve broken windows. I’ve hurt people. I’ve been sent to the hospital. I’ve yelled at doctors, nurses, therapists & police officers. I’ve been arrested. Eventually, I learned how to hold it all in because I didn’t like hurting people. It felt awful. I felt out of control and like it was my fault that I was unable to just “be happy” & that I must be a “bad” person to be experiencing these kinds of hardships. A child’s mind was running the show, as you can see. I had not yet developed “Inner Parents ”. I was a terrified little girl running around in a twenty-seven-year-old body. I desperately wanted out. I didn’t want to be on this path of pain. I didn’t want to lose my friends. I didn’t want to be seen as “uncool”. I didn’t want to revisit my childhood experience. I didn’t want any of it. My coping mechanisms were all destructive and unsustainable. I didn’t know how to be with myself through all of my intense feelings. I took it all so personally. I wanted to die.


“Anger ventilated often hurries towards forgiveness; anger concealed often hardens into revenge.” - Edward G. Bulwer- Lytton 


To face and accept the truth, to face the fact that the world is unfair, that good things don’t happen to good people, that our entire society is built on lies, that pain is an initiation into greater wisdom… I was not at all ready to accept any of it during this time in my journey. I didn’t like it one bit. My mother always used to say, “The only fair is the state fair and it only comes once a year.” I hated this fucking phrase. As a kid, I really thought the world was fair. Accepting it’s not even close to fair was a very hard pill for me to swallow. (Maybe in the long haul it all evens out, like over lifetimes, but it definitely doesn’t balance out in one life.) I was pissed and decided to fight the Universe to see if I could somehow escape its unjust grasp. I had a ridiculously huge ego. And also I was projecting my parents onto the Universe at Large, which isn’t uncommon, and the rebellious teenager in me was like “FUCK YOU, UNIVERSE. See if you can catch me”. (One of my favorite childhood books was Maniac Magee.)


I stayed in Kansas for nearly a year. Going back and forth with my boyfriend at the time who I was using as a crutch to stay in my comfort zone. In the end, I told myself I needed to leave because I didn’t like the cold winter weather & missed the West Coast. After nine months on the farm I tapped out and headed back to LA. 


“King Cnut sat on the seashore and tried to command the tide not to touch his feet, but the sea ignored him.”


I feel there was a choice point here: 


At The Light Center I was introduced to both Energy Work (Healing Touch) & Kratom. I could have chosen to go deep into studying Healing Touch, which is clearly what I was being pulled into. Alas, I was not ready and decided to fight against the wind. I had not yet seen a representation of someone “Spiritual” that I liked and/or aspired to be like. I admired Robin but at the time I felt like I could never be like her. I didn’t want my life to be like hers even though I admired her. Laura Odell, my permaculture teacher, introduced me to kratom when I was having back pain while working in the garden. I loved kratom. I chose to continue to numb and run away. I was not prepared to fully own the truth or the pain of my past. At the time I thought kratom was a healthy choice coming from alcohol and cocaine. 


“Our lives are defined by opportunities.Even the ones we miss.”- Benjamin Button 


Sometimes I feel this choice is one of my greatest regrets and I’ll fantasize about where I would be had I gone with the wind. But then sometimes I think about how I wouldn’t have as much experience to pull from had I not put in such a good fight, now would I? Is there even such a thing as a Full Life without A Dark Night? ;)