What Is Healing Anyway?
What Is Healing Anyway?
Reiki, cacao ceremonies, and shutting the door on the Very Bad Year
About a month ago, I went back to New York to have my final follow-up appointment with the ENT doctor over my perforated esophagus. It was a formality, but one I wanted to keep. I didn’t want any doubts over my organ’s status lingering, like a monster hiding under the bed. The doctor inserted a tiny camera down my nostril and into my throat for all of five seconds. He gave me a clean bill of health, told me I was allowed to scream-sing at the club to my heart’s content, and sent me on my merry way. The physical healing was now out of the way. One of the many quirks of my too-rare condition is that once the holes of a perforated esophagus close up, your body is…fine. Sometimes, the best possible outcomes are supremely anticlimactic. No ongoing therapy, prescriptions, or conditions. You’re just over it.
My mind and emotions are another matter.
It’s weird, this whole brush with death thing. My go-to joke when I describe what happened is that I probably have some undiagnosed PTSD it that will eventually rear its ugly head. I say it because I think people want to hear it, as an acknowledgment that what occurred to me was terrible. The comfort of self-righteous indignation for an era that has, with the best intentions, encouraged women, especially BIPOC women, to call out their traumas, to wear them proudly for not doing so is letting the empire win. Or something like that.
If I am being honest with myself, though, I don’t know if my joke holds any truth. It’s made me more weary of doctors, an attitude I’m actively trying to push through. I’m one medical bill away from taking up arms and beginning the proletarian revolution. Nevertheless, my whole attitude towards life since then has been joyful. Fearless. Restless. A friend of mine mentioned how I’m much softer now, which I took to mean that my particularly Potent Resting Bitch Face has disappeared. I’ve become more of a sap. Every time I tell people about the amount of love and support I got from friends and family during my hospital stay, I cry. I saw a school of dolphins frolicking at the Rockaways and teared up. I watched the SATC episode where Miranda’s mom passed away and I cried. I am not a crier. Maybe I am now.
Still, when I left the hospital, I felt compelled to find spiritual paths to healing. On one hand, I saw it as a preemptive move to avoid therapy down the line (can’t afford it). I wanted to mark a Before and After. I’m not a religious person, but I have the kind of wondrous spirituality and low-key superstition of most Latin American Cafeteria Catholics I know. Which is to say the idea of energies, ancestors, inexplicable phenomena, and the Earth/Universe being one big deity is very tempting to me. Western medicine may have saved me but it also nearly killed me. I needed something transcendent and profound because, though I do not see my shift as “trauma”, I cannot deny that I left the hospital a different person.
Before I left New York, I booked a Reiki session. My body tingled under the warmth of the practitioner’s hands. Bursts of peach, purple, and yellow filled my mind. Whenever any hint of darkness interrupted my sunset-visions, I pushed it out of the way. I was so determined to not waste one more single second of my life on Earth feeling sad. There’s a lot of talk about “feeling your feelings” on social media, but this didn’t feel like repressing anything. More like taking a powerful stance for my own sake. At the end of the session, the practitioner told me that my vitality lied on my feet. I was ready to get up and go, insert myself back into the activity of life again. I was.
In Peru, I signed up for a cacao ceremony, mostly out of curiosity and a lack of social life. According to recent studies, cacao originated in the Peruvian Amazon (sorry, Mexico) but I have no idea where this particular ritual I was about to embark on originated from. Sometimes I too am problematic. But even if it was “Cosmic Andean Vision Lite”, sitting around on a Saturday afternoon while sipping hot chocolate on yoga mats sounded as thrilling a plan as any other.
The cacao rested in a rustic clay pot at the center of a traditional Peruvian rug. Herbs, flowers, leaves, and big cacao seeds rimmed the fabric. Our guide had laid out individual quartzes for each of us and placed oracle cards, face down, on each side of the mat. As we sat on our cushions, the guide announced, “Today, we’re going to focus on the throat chakra” which felt pointed and eery. Until then, I had no idea that the ceremony was going to focus on anything, let alone the most banged up part of my body.
During the ceremony, we drank two small bowls of cacao. The liquid was thick, slightly spiced with cloves and cinnamon, but bitter and earthy. It was supposed to warm us all the way into the depths of our bellies, but the guide asked us to be aware of where the liquid might get “stuck”. My first serving stuck right to the area of my esophagus that had been torn up. “That’s where you need to heal”, the guide said, still oblivious to my medical history. The second bowl broke through to the bottom of my throat, but not much further. “Your voice wants to be released”, she said. At the time, I took this to mean my creative voice. After so many months of writing taking a back seat to all my tragedies, I was finally putting words to paper again. Now, I take it to encompass the entirety of my expression. The further away I get from my Very Bad Year, the more I understand how shutting my voice exacerbated so many disasters, even the ones where I truly had no agency. I kept a lot of needs and desires locked up inside, yes. But I also stifled my fears and complaints, succumbing to the delusion that if I didn’t speak them into existence, then all the things I was holding onto would remain in my life. Instead, they tumbled down anyway. You can’t outsmart a falling structure.
She guided us through several meditations after that, with breaks in between to share our visualizations and any breakthroughs. I mostly stayed quiet, not wanting to ruin the flow of the experience with my over-analysis. Before we drew the event to a close, she asked us to pick a quartz. “Whenever you need to advocate for yourself or express something that makes you nervous, press the quartz against your throat chakra.” Anything to make me more confident when talking to the hospital about my bills, I thought wryly. I waited for the attendants to pick theirs, but was pleasantly surprised when the quartz I had an eye on was still available. Our guide said that quartz choose us too, which leaves me with a lot of questions about what kind of attachment issues this quartz has to choose ME.
Then she asked us to choose an Oracle card. This time, I didn’t waver or politely wait for people to get their fill. One had been calling to me since the beginning and I grabbed it, beating two other people whose hands were lunging in that direction. Spiritual ceremonies are not the space for greed and possessiveness, but this was my card:
Listen, as much as I love my woowoo practices and listen to too many astrology podcasts, I am also a person who aced her Logic course in college and want to throw The Secret into the dustbins of history. The mind seeks patterns, connections, and order, and I am willing to accept that my superstitious nature could be the result of my neurons going into hyperdrive to find meaning where there is only chaos. However, I believe the origin of these coincidences—whether they are determined by a supernatural force or an evolutionary-driven analysis—doesn’t really matter. What matters is what they reveal to you about yourself in that moment. What it revealed to me was that, for me to be ok with almost dying, I need it to spur radical, transformative, positive change. I need it as an excuse to make long overdue shifts in my life and my attitudes.
In other words, maybe I’ve been burying a deep desire to be a sap and a cryer for years but fretted about what it would do to the persona I had carefully crafted through much of my adulthood. Well, now I have an excuse. I almost died, bitches and a card said it was going to transform me. So buckle up, cause I’m going to spend hours ugly sobbing while watching Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.
I have a lot more to say about healing, within the context of my travels to New York And Chicago—trips that had very mundane, quotidian objectives (doctor’s appointments, a wedding) and ended up being almost cosmically fated correctives to my poor, battered soul. I’ll write about those in my Back on My Bulls**t guides.
What I’m Reading
Trying to squeeze in three months of social activity in six weeks means that I’ve sacrificed my bedtime reading to the party gods. Sometimes, when I have a wee bit of time before going out or a long ride on the bus, I pick at The Hunter (my first Tana French and of course it’s the slow burn one where nothing gets resolved lol), Martyr! (deliciously neurotic), All Fours (I’ll keep an open mind but I’m gonna need some narratives soon about people who actually LIKE being married and/or being a mom for, like, variety), and Good Material (it’s pleasant enough, but wondering why it got such rave reviews).
These bangers:
What I’m Watching
The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is NOT the wholesome, campy lark into Mormon culture I thought it would be. It’s not even a chaotic romp through the insular culture of Salt Lake City like RHOSLC. It is DARK. UNSETTLING. A LITTLE QUEASY-INDUCING. Of course these cast members are participating in soft swinging (not a term, but ok), porn addiction, gambling addiction, all sorts of addiction, unplanned pregnancies, cringetastic and unsavory Tik Tok dances while you newborn is super sick, and Chippendales-induced panic attacks—they’re living out their messy 20s on TV WHILE married WHILE raising kids WHILE being under the oppressive watch of a very patriarchal religion. Am I going to hell for enabling this trash? Yes. I’ll save you all a seat there so we can talk about it in the afterlife.
What I’m Listening
“Summer’s Over” by Jordana and TV Girl, for all of us NORMAL, WELL-ADJUSTED PEOPLE that do not care for the pumpkin spice life.
What I’m Downloading
Reckon True Stories with Deesha Philyaw and Kiese Laymon is the type of podcast that wants me to get back into writing, and writing well.
Shameless Self-Promotion
I’m currently sweating my boobs off in this 30 Celsius Chicago weather (sorry, Fahrenheit goes beyond my comprehension), so December feels very far away. However, the end of the year will probably creep up on us quicker than anticipate as will all those pesky residency and workshop applications. On December 2, I’m teaching a two-hour virtual class on navigating the artist statement via StoryStudio. I promise to make it useful!
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