Last year did not end for me so much as it unraveled — not in one clean, dignified way, but in a series of losses. Threads gave way where I had once believed everything was tightly woven: my friendships, the place I called home, the horses whose magical presence had quietly shaped the rhythm of my days, and my marriage. When I look at it now, it does not feel like a sequence of events, but like the ground itself shifted beneath my feet, asking — quite directly, and without much concern for my preferences — how will you stand now?
So, I did what I know how to do.
I turned toward my work. I journeyed, cleared, listened, adjusted, and returned to myself again and again, as one does when there is no real way around something — only through.
Please don’t imagine me as someone who can simply muster the Universe on command. I cannot. Many times during those winter months, I found myself in the dark — curled into a ball, soaked in tears and snot, with no sense of grace or mastery in sight. But this is the path I walk. And so, I kept walking.
Shamanic deep energy work. Neurographic integration.
I am not new to this terrain. I know how to follow what is subtle, how to sit with what did not yet resolve, how to remain in the dark long enough for something real to begin to take shape.
And yet, even with all of that, there were places I could not reach. Not because they were hidden or particularly mysterious, but because they were too close — like trying to see the back of your own body without a mirror. You know it is there. You can feel it. But your angle does not allow you to see it directly, no matter how sincere your effort.
At some point, something in me gave way — not dramatically, but enough — to see more clearly the pattern that had quietly shaped so much of my life. The way I had learned to love, or perhaps more precisely, the way I was taught to love. Love equated with self-sacrifice, intensity, and instability. And that Universe is freeing me now from the illusion that I must hold everything together.
It made sense when I saw it. Of course it did. It had family history, logic, and roots that ran deeper than my preference. But understanding something does not mean you can be free of it. If only it were that simple. We would all be done by Tuesday.
So, I did something very simple. And, if I am being honest, something not always easy for me to do.
I reached out.
To another shaman — my friend and colleague – because even a shaman needs a shaman.
We sat together, and she did what good practitioners do. She did not rush to name things or impose meaning where it had not yet formed. She listened — deeply, patiently, in that particular way that makes it difficult to hide from yourself. She followed threads I might have quietly set aside. She stayed with me in places where, left to my own devices, I would have probably moved away. She journeyed.
And then, as it often happens in this work, something began to shift. Not with drama or spectacle, but with a quiet, unmistakable rearrangement.
Parts of me — parts I would not have easily named as missing, though my body recognized their absence immediately — began to return. Not as ideas or insights, but as living presence. As something re-entering its rightful place.
That night, I dreamed. And in the dream, I felt something that language can only dance around: it was as if I had been dipped into something vast and luminous, something that did not ask anything of me. There was a quiet feeling of euphoria to it — not overwhelming, but complete. As if I was being filled from the inside by something that had always belonged to me, but until that moment had not been accessible.
And then I woke, smiling — not for a reason, but from a place…
With a clear knowing: something had been restored.
Not added.
Not improved.
Returned.
This is something I have witnessed many times in others — the softening of a face, the return of light to the eyes, the subtle but undeniable shift that happens when a person becomes more fully themselves again. But it is a different thing entirely to feel it in your own body, to recognize that what you have been reaching for is not something you need to build or force into existence, but something that, at times, simply needs to be brought back into place.
Shamanic work, at its heart, does this. It restores relationship. It returns to us parts of ourselves that, for very good reasons, stepped away or were set aside — not because we were broken, but because something in us was trying, quite intelligently, to survive in the only way it knew how.
And when those parts return, there is rarely an announcement. No grand arrival, no fireworks to mark the moment. Just a subtle sense of wholeness — a little more space in the body, a steadier breath, a quiet sense of being more here. Being more me.