Chap. 16 - From Ascension to Descent ...
🌿 ...The Recovery of Wholeness
For many years, I believed I was healing because I was rising—climbing ladders of light, practicing forgiveness, speaking only of peace. It looked beautiful on the surface. But deep inside, my body held truths I had never learned to listen to. My nervous system carried stories of terror that no mantra could erase.
And then came the collapse.
I’ve written of that day elsewhere in these pages—the moment my body met the floor, my mind fractured, and I cried out in a pain beyond anything I had known. At the time it was devastating. Now I see it as a collapse that was not failure, but a holy unraveling. It was the first real prayer my body ever prayed.
That collapse marked the true beginning of recovery. Not just from alcohol and drugs—I had left those behind decades before. But recovery from disconnection. From spiritual bypass. From trying to escape a pain I had never truly met.
In those first fragile weeks, I reached for what I knew: I returned to AA. Not because I felt I belonged to the label in the way I once did, but because I needed the rhythm of showing up, sitting down, and—without words—saying I need help. From there, I found a trauma-informed therapist. I returned to a psychiatrist I had seen before. A gentle path back into my own body.
These past two years have been the most courageous recovery of all. Not heroic, not dramatic—just real. Tender. Messy. Alive. I’m no longer chasing enlightenment. I’m learning how to stay.
⬅️ Chap. 15
➡️ Chap. 17
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🕊A Living Memoir
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