c-PTSD Journals

All healing starts with beginning to accept yourself and love yourself; even your flaws. – Bryant McGill

I woke up with my neck and back stiff again and my head hurting. I am so inflamed that everything hurts. I think it was the way I slept and also smoking weed before bed makes my head hurt. I don’t know why I do it sometimes. I think at the moment that I’m holding the joint in my hand I can escape my reality for just a little bit. 

But I am ready to heal my body again. I have detoxed myself recently from a caffeine habit I’ve had for the past couple of decades. I’ve also stopped taking any medications – after speaking with my physician first. I still have an alcoholic drink here and there and I always feel ew and ick afterward inside of my organs, like something has swelled and is poking my guts inside. I am wanting to detox from refined sugars and wheat products as consuming them just makes me feel stuffy and heavy and like I am dragging around a carcass that I don’t recognize. My brain fog lifts and my moods are better too when I am without these things in me. I am ready to be cleansed within and without and to feel better.

I am ready to do my life’s work. I don’t even know what the fuck my life’s work is but I am trusting in Higher Guidance to help me to find it. This Sunday will be my time to create and work. I will start setting aside creative morning time to do sacred work, my painting, even though I am not the best at it. I know in time I will be able to transition from working for someone else in conditions that are not so good for me to doing fulfilling sacred life work in a way that is optimal for my well-being and growth. I am ready.

I am also finding myself turning or growing away from hard, stuck paths and belief systems. I am in some flow and want to stay in this stream of change. It is scary but if I keep my eyes forward and my mind open to adventure, like a rafter on a raging, frothing river, the fear lessens as I lose grip on old realities. Ideas that are hardened and inflexible are not for me anymore. I know there is so much more to God and moving towards enlightenment than what I’ve been taught. Stern and rigid dogma that I’ve been taught from the Bible and the churches that I have been in seem like a small and stuck thing to me now. The Bible is here for so much more than what it has been used for. I am going to move away from the traditional Christian world. I may try a new and uplifting way that feels so much lighter and in the path of truth and love. Or maybe I can look at it in a way to integrate or uplevel my old ways of thinking and old beliefs into newer and better ways of existing and thinking. A step up. More expanded.

I am also coming across things that are lifting me up. I am coming across documentaries that are opening my eyes and heart, like The Dance of Liberation and Healing the Luminous Body: The Way of The Shaman. I am ready for movement in my life, too, like when I used to randomly dance in the store aisles and run until my heart was pounding and I poured sweat. I have been stagnant for too long in my own cesspool of darkness and stuck-ness.

I learned about Dr. Alberto Villoldo’s work from watching Healing the Luminous Body: The Way of the Shaman and I started following his work because the word “shaman” kept coming up over and over the past couple of months. It came up strongly one day at work and I thought “what the fuck am I thinking about shamans for? Don’t they dance and rattle and call up spirits from Hell or something?” An old fear of being warned to stay away from anything that dealt with the spirit world, outside of a Christian church, came up. Images of ghosts and demons that taunt in the night made me shiver in the middle of the day. 

But I Googled “what is a shaman” and the search has been going deeper since. It is a wondrous journey and it has led me to some incredible help that I have been searching for. I even followed along a YouTube shamanic dance tutorial yesterday in my living room and it brought out a release of tears and electricity seemed to run out of my limbs as I stomped around in circles and flailed my arms, saliva flying out of my mouth as I cried and blew air hard out of my mouth in rhythm over and over until I felt exhausted.

But in reading Dr. Villoldo’s book “Grow a New Body“, he talks about the time that he was near death, his body, and brain riddled with parasites and worms from years spent in the jungles of the Amazon, Africa, and Asia. He had a deep knowledge of healing at the time and one of the things he was led to do in his maddening brain fog as the bugs were all being killed off by medications, was to face the darkness within him, his fear, and his anger.

I stopped suddenly when reading this and looked around the dining room I was sitting in. It was like my anger and fear stood there, like dark, controlling parents, their arms crossed, and me knowing that I must face them, along with all of the other parts of me that make up my darkness, my shadow nature: my jealousy, envy, rage, manipulative and passive-aggressive tendencies, my lying-to-look-good, me learning how to stealthily be less-than-real, my blackened and twisted sexual nature, the subtle racist ruts that seem to still run subconsciously in me, my critical and judgmental nature. An ugly image stares back at me when I look in the mirror to see all the parts of me that I like to pretend I have dealt with or that they simply aren’t there. I’ve hidden it oh-so-well…or have I? 

I know it is there and that is what matters. I cannot ignore her any longer. How am I to look at all of this sickness and know it is me? The first part of shadow work, I am learning, is to illuminate all of this darkness. Become aware of it. Feel it. Know that it is all ME. That is the fucking scary part. If I can just start with my fears, that will be progress. 

I am afraid to love another person intimately. I am afraid of being rejected when I am being vulnerable and naked. I am afraid of being abandoned by someone I think that I need. I am afraid of losing what I have. I have fears of being homeless and destitute. I have a fear that food will run out and my stomach will ache with pangs of hunger. I have fear of physical pain and will do anything to avoid it. I have fears that I am not enough as I am and I must still change this or that to be lovable. 

Just writing these all out is helping me to face them and to ultimately integrate and accept myself, love me because that is where my healing starts. No one teaches us how to LOVE ourselves deeply, fully, unconditionally, and without any reservation. How to support ourselves emotionally. One of the ways that I have started to accept and love myself is through tapping (Emotional Freedom Technique) and it is helping me shift somehow as I tap through. “Even though I am terrified about life, I deeply, fully, and unconditionally love and accept myself. Even though I am afraid that I am twisted in my thinking and being, I deeply, fully, and unconditionally love and accept myself. Even though I don’t understand why am like this, I deeply, fully, and unconditionally love and accept myself…” Answers and new more positive patterns emerge as I go through this process.

Instead of blaming the family I grew up in, or the people around me and my environment, or the whole matrix that I am beginning to be aware of more and more, I am taking ownership of my shit, and it is only from there that I can start to become whole, heal, and ultimately change these things in me. Awareness of my flaws and shortcomings, instead of continuing to pretend that they don’t exist and loving myself anyway, taking responsibility for my sickness and that parts of me that are less-than-lovely and still accepting myself, is the path to truly loving myself to an upgraded and better way of thinking and being for me. 

I will be the change that I want to see on this planet and in this Universe.