Anchoring Into My Lineage

Three years ago I sat in a car on the side of the road feeling like I was dying.

I was driving cross country after leaving a love I thought could never end. A hell ride of a trauma-bonded love myth that had awakened every forgotten piece of my soul, my essence, my sexuality and dreams of union.

We had spiraled into a psychotic chaos, and crashed down into a living nightmare that begged for rebirth. Yet I couldn’t leave.

Until one night, my spiritual teacher came to me in a dream. We were in a key place of my childhood, a place that symbolized the root of the feminine wound in my family.

We stood face to face. She was dressed in all red, and her blue eyes were on fire. She looked at me intensely and told me with no words, in a transmission from her being to mine, “You are so much stronger than you know. You have forgotten your true feminine power.” She held me up against her chest, letting me feel this total power of the feminine, embodied in her body. She was ablaze with Divine love and knowing, and I felt awe-struck by her unfathomable strength.

Then she said, “You have already made The Choice.” I knew in my heart what she meant. This was the choice my soul made long ago, to be a part of the body of the Goddess on earth, to be her emissary, her love, her eyes, her voice, her body. A commitment and a sacred contract that transcended all else. And at last, she told me, “This isn’t a decision, this is an entire directional shift.”

What she meant was that it wasn’t about whether I would stay or leave the relationship, or stay in the part of the country I was living in or not. It was about turning away from the small man and choosing to turn to the swirling black hole of the Great Mother. The birth canal of love, that asks us for nothing less than everything. To ‘sacrifice’ the pain of the old, and the consuming of our traumas, to be willing to ‘die,’ to give everything for a chance to know true life, true love. I was being asked to choose the timeline, the direction, the orientation that would pull me at last from the illusions of a false love, and set me onto a unique path and frequency where true union would be possible, where my full self would come alive in relationship with the intelligence of Life.

So I left. I packed my car and left. There was no ceremonious goodbye, no loving closure. There was no right way to do this. I had to get the f*ck out. 

As I started driving away, I was overcome by a panic attack. I couldn’t believe I was leaving. I pulled over at times, feeling I would just die on the side of the road from the pain I felt. I’d spent years in personal development and healing learning to process my emotions, but this was soul pain, larger-than-life pain that threatened my very life. 

I stopped at a motel that night, laying in the blackness, my body convulsing in violent currents of fear. What would happen now?

I called my family, I reached out to what I knew for support, but it wasn’t there. There was just a simple, “No, can’t do.”

Then, a small miracle happened. I knew I couldn’t survive unless a container showed up. So I searched far and wide in the surrounding region, and found a small retreat center one state over in Tennessee, in the middle of the countryside. I called and asked if I could come. They said the retreat center would actually be completely empty, including no staff, for a period of 3 days, and that I was welcome to come.

I arrived in this beautiful place, and there, all alone, I truly felt like I died. I felt overcome with terror and despair, and the biggest disillusionment I’d known, that ripped my soul in half. What I had trusted in my very bones was rotting and dying from the inside. Like a tsunami sweeping everything up in its tide, it had deleted everything I knew about love.

It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t “spiritual.” It had nothing to do with anything I had ever learned in a teaching, or a workshop, or a session with a therapist. I truly started falling down the black hole, as everything I believed in disintegrated. Engulfed in the Void, it was just me and my pain, free falling in terror.

That weekend, something unexpected happened. Something I couldn’t have imagined before. 

I felt my lineage appear energetically, all around me and within me. My lineage came and it picked me up, and claimed me. It anchored me into a continuous river of souls who have done this from the beginning of time. It told me I belonged to it, it showed me.

I had had no concept or true understanding (or even interest!) at the time of what a “lineage” was. But I knew from this moment on, nothing would ever be the same. I would be existing from this place, living and choosing and acting, as part of something larger than me. A living current made up of many beings of love, physical and non-physical. Including many, many human men and women, who have courageously treaded the path of living a human life on earth, with an unending commitment to rebirthing all distorted energies into new life, with a total faith in the power of Love, and in the sacred bond that unites us with our earth mother, each other, and all of creation. 

It would take me weeks, and years, to understand what I had experienced that weekend, and to begin to consciously journey with my lineage. In the following days, I found myself in a profoundly altered state, sometimes delirious, sometimes euphoric, sometimes silent, as if I had been cracked wide open and rooted deep into the soil of my human life at once. It felt as though Shakti came alive in the collective voice of my lineage, and began speaking to me in every moment. I heard her fierce, whimsical, radical love in every thought I had, in every choice, in every emotion and sensation I felt.

What I would grow to discover is that my lineage was a simple and infinitely vast explanation for all I had loved and felt connected to since I was a child: my belief in magic when I was young, my fascination with ancient Egypt, my love for smell, sensuality and touch, my adoration of the Arthurian legends as a little girl, my deep resonance with gnostic and alchemical teachings, my feverish conviction that true love stands as a spiritual path of its own. They all converged in this frequency of existence.

The beauty of the lineage is that it allows us to understand the weaving of our personal life as part of a grand, deeply magical, majestically beautiful, larger whole. It shows us that we do have an energetic, spiritual home here on earth, as well as specific flavors, energies, and frequencies that we naturally love, feel connected to, and are destined to embody. My spiritual lineage is an endless source of inspiration, and support. Feeling my place in it allows me to relax, to feel more alive, and more connected to the intricate web of Life and Love that underlies every moment, interaction, and relationship.

Recognizing what other courageous men and women have done and stood for before me is an invitation into spiritual maturation. Like an energetic backbone and a root deep into the earth, our lineage supports us to fully take our seat in the circle of Life. Our lineage can also be like a north star that helps us orient in times when we feel lost, or to be discerning of what is meant for us, when there are conflicting voices within or around us.

And I have had so much fun exploring the universe of knowledge and experiences that my lineage continuously pulls me into! Like a never-ending rabbit hole into a multidimensional wonderland, I’m always guided (or mysteriously magnetized!) to the next step. I can recognize that what I’ve come upon a lineage piece from the unique resonance I feel in my body, heart and womb. From fascinating art pieces, books and movies, to shamanic journeys into other worlds, magical synchronicities, and pilgrimages around the earth, as well as meetings with incredible human beings and initiates walking the same path. There are always delicious surprises around the corner.

Anchoring into my lineage has made the journey sweeter, intimate, and deeply meaningful.

I wish for each of us to find the loving space where we can safely root, and from there, joyfully blossom into our destiny.