Lately, when I least suspect it, I feel words rise out of me that feel simple, potent and important. Here is one such litany of words I typed out in my Notes app.
In the last year or so I crossed a bridge into myself that I was trying to access for years. After I had my first psychic reading in 2015, really strange things began to happen.
That particular summer butterflies would follow me indoors everywhere I went. Or I would be hanging out in the the brick and mortar shop I had at the time, and casually say to someone, I wish I could have a hand-painted sign on my door, and a person walking by on the sidewalk would pop their head into the door frame and say “Did someone say hand-painted sign? My partner paints signs.” as if I were in a movie.
It was surreal.
It was heart-opening.
It was the first time I felt my true self since I was a small child.
It was my “spiritual awakening.”
When I turned fourteen, I started drinking socially (and heavily) with friends. It is around this time that I started to love the feeling of being uninhibited. (Until I started drinking, I hadn’t realized exactly how inhibited I was most of my waking life, let alone know I needed relief from feeling so tucked in.) I was always a kid who loved more, more, more and could rarely pace myself when it came to anything that gave me a buzzy sense of pleasure. (I used to eat packets of sugar to get a rush in my teens.)
I never heard the word empath, nor did I ever identify as someone particularly sensitive.
I didn’t realize it then, but my insatiable need to push the limits of sensation were also coupled with the deep need to dull of my senses: I was suppressing so much of what I was feeling deep down because I didn’t know how to deal with my burgeoning sexuality, my hyper-creative energy, or my gifts around emotional claircognition. Just like all other teenagers, I wanted to be liked and liked to be wanted. (Or maybe that's just all of us.)
The year of my spiritual remembering was a lot like the Wizard of Oz, when Judy Garland steps into a world of color after living in a grey reality. My hearing changed and so did my sight. I felt I could track and sense everything around me the way I imagined someone could if they lived deep in the woods and knew how to talk to a forest. I was greeted by a belief in and a feeling of magic that had seemed so far away from me for many years, having lived most of my teenaged experience surrounded by the typical American suburban Northeastern culture of parties, mall hangs, and MTV (which my immigrant parents fought tooth and nail to give me by the way.)
In my early twenties I was too intellectual to be hopeful and too embarrassed to be romantic. The early 2000s were my early adulthood: Young women like Britney Spears and the Hilton sisters being exploited was considered the height of entertainment, MTV was making shows about how extravagant someone could make a Sweet 16, 9/11 shattered the sense of safety and normalized cluelessness most of America felt entitled to, and the 2008 financial crash proved yet again that you can’t build a foundation out of a bubble. Turns out those things burst.
My soul chose to incarnate in the 1980s when alternative culture was either public access, yo MTV raps, late-night alternative music videos and catalogs where you could order riot grrrl 7 inches. I was raised with the mythology that the hero’s journey was akin to She’s All That, (realizing that you in fact were popular, you just had to take your glasses off), Ugly Betty (victory is finding a way to be quirky and still triumph in a toxic place), and My So Called Life (you just need to find weird friends and you will feel less weird.) My how our imaginations have changed.
I tried to impose the same plot onto my "Spiritual Awakening.” I was sure if I could find the right modality, the right healing center, the right healer, the right book, something would click into place and I would be at peace with who I am, the world would make sense, and I would feel less anxious about the fact that I exist.
Well, the short version is, I did all the things, found amazing practitioners, studied all the modalities that interested me, tried to find people from my own lineage, sat in silence trying to hear my own guides, and in the end I felt just as inefficient and lost as I did in the beginning, albeit with a way better knowledge of spiritual jargon, and a lot of amazing connections, and personal transformations, too. But I was still searching.
To be continued.
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This piece is part of a short series on finding my place in the world.
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ICYMI: Check out this post for a New Moon message.
Chills upon chills while also the biggest heart smile for the human you are, Xenia 💗🤗 thank YOU for sharing your journey with us! Thank you for sharing your heart, the ups and downs of your path, and the bigness of You.
Thank you for every word you share. Each one shines like it is made of millions of stars all holding each other to form the word’s shape. Their light radiates this Big Love and illuminates the peaceful night sky. I’ve never seen the Aurora Borealis, yet I feel their majesty in your words. Much gratitude, the biggest of hugs, and so much love. 💗🌟✨
To say I’m so infinitely grateful to have crossed your path feels like saying the Northern Lights are ‘nice’. 🤗🤗