Completing this week’s hat trick of vulnerable posts is an essay that I don’t know how to title because the most succinct title I can think of (above) sounds so cheesy, but everything else I’ve tried seems either too vague or too clever to make the point I am trying to, which is this:
In the past eight years, I have had an uncommon—even extraordinary—opportunity to slow way down and look deeply into my psyche to understand who I am, how I was formed, and what I would benefit from changing. And I want to share what I learned in case it can help others.
There’s a passage in my memoir, Men, Myself, & I: Revelations of an Opened Marriage that describes the metaphorical place I found myself early on in my hero’s journey:
I felt like a fraud. I had practiced yoga for more than 20 years and taught for ten. I had created a vegan blog and considered myself a health-minded and spiritual person. I’d spent two years in an immersive study of energy medicine. I had led yoga retreats and worked with clients and advised them on their most personal issues. But I wasn’t applying any of what I knew. I was a smoker and a drinker and a slut. I was on a path of self-destruction with no plan of how to stop it.
This is what led to The Healing (or the awareness of the need for it, anyway).
I’m relieved to say: my life is nothing like this any more. I have changed, and I finally feel poised to reach for my fullest potential, which has been a lifelong curiosity. I want to see what I am capable of offering to this life—for my son, my loved ones, for humanity at large…and for myself.
Perhaps a before and after list would help to further illustrate The Healing:
Before: Consumed by fantasies of my latest love interest.
After: Consumed with gratitude there is (finally) no love interest.
Before: Incapable of friendships with men because I had no idea how to relate to a man I didn’t want to have sex with.
After: Some of my dearest friendships are with men, and they are entirely platonic.
Before: Living with chronic stomach aches and a short temper because something was off in my relationship that I was afraid to address.
After: Experiencing a glorious sense of vitality in mind, body, and spirit.
Before: Using sex as a shield to avoid authentic presence and vulnerability.
After: Aware of this former pattern, and committed to changing given the opportunity.
Before: Living in the future of the would-be (or actual) relationship.
After: Living in the present.
Just this morning a friend said to me that I seemed happy lately.
“Not happy like, YAY! But happy like…calm.”
She is right, I am calm. I am peaceful. I am home in myself in a way I never knew I could be. And I am writing this post to offer ideas for anyone else who might be looking at their life and feeling a little off, or who knows precisely what they want to change about their life but has no idea how. I’m also writing it in response to a friend’s challenge to write about the sacred work of being alone, because everything below describes that sacred work.
First, a quick chronology of my eight years in the wilderness (feel free to skip ahead if you prefer—it just seems useful to flesh out how things progressed lest anyone get the idea it was a linear process, or remotely tidy):
2017: Attended my first ayahuasca retreat. Suggested to my husband we open our marriage. Continued seeing the therapist I had already been seeing for a couple years. Created a food blog called Eat Like a Yogi and did a lot of yoga.
2018: Dated a lot. Drank a lot. Fought with my husband a lot. Quit the blog. Was confronted with divorce. Went back to work in software marketing. HATED IT. Moved out of our family home.
2019: Went to my third ayahuasca retreat, which led to me leaving the job I hated. Continued to date and drink to an extent well beyond my nervous system’s capacity for regulation. Met a guy I liked. Worked all summer as a camp nurse. Signed up for a year-long writing program when I got home. Quit drinking alcohol. Started writing prodigiously. Kept seeing the guy.
2020: Finished a first draft of my book and worked on the second, third, and fourth drafts. Sold our family home; moved from West Seattle to Seattle. Stayed (Cali) sober. Kept writing. Endured Covid (great for writing, actually, and my unemployment was extended—a gift from the Universe). Capped the year off with my fourth ayahuasca retreat, which revealed that I wanted different things than the lovely guy I had been dating non monogamously.
2021: More Covid. More book drafts. More therapy. Several ayahuasca retreats. Ended my relationship. Dated some others. Continued not drinking. Went to my first 12 Step (AlAnon) Meeting. Began recovery in earnest. Had a spiritual awakening that led me to pursue hospital chaplaincy.
2022: More book revision—finally finished! More dating. More Covid, therapy, recovery, and ayahuasca. Starting drinking again occasionally, feeling like I had learned what abstinence had to teach. Started a chaplain internship, finalized my divorce, and embarked on my first monogamous relationship in five years.
2023: Finished the audiobook. Finished the internship. Finished the relationship. Continued the therapy. Continued the recovery. Continued the dating. Got into a bike accident. Had to put my dog down. Released my book on Substack and then Amazon. Started my chaplain residency.
2024: Finished the residency, was hired full-time as a hospital chaplain. Started and finished another monogamous relationship. Went to the first ayahuasca ceremony I had been to in a couple years. Continued recovery work.
2025: Started writing again (this Substack). Crossed an invisible threshold into a new awareness that something—the thing?—had finally changed: the core wound was finally healed enough to stop influencing my life the way it had. Realized an accordant ease and depth of relationship with myself. Quit seeking to date.
So you see, these last eight years have been quite a time.
If someone had stopped me along the way and asked what I was aiming for—what my quest was all about—I would have had no idea what to say except that I knew something was off on the inside. I have since come to realize: I was working towards an absence of that anxiety, and a realization of my potential. I was seeking Peace.
Following is an expanded list of practices that describe how I found it. Your mileage will vary, obviously, but maybe something here will interest you. If you’re like me, your most vital medicine is probably the practice you resist the most.
Quitting drinking
I first started to consider that my life was awfully well organized around alcohol in about 2016. At the time, I didn’t ever socialize without alcohol and had at least one glass of wine most nights at home. Though I wasn’t getting shitfaced, blacking out, or having hugely awful consequences, I felt the effects: labile moods, interrupted sleeps, a puffy face, and prevailing sense that I was probably dimming my light in some important ways.
The moment of truth (horror) came one night in early 2019. I was wearing a cheetah print dress from Rent-the-Runway with red lips and blown out hair and had just finished dinner with a guy who might have been plenty nice but who I thought was profoundly boring, which was my excuse for having two cocktails and a glass of wine during dinner…there might have been more. I knew I was drunk when we left the restaurant so had him drive my car to his nearby condo, where I dropped him off, because I had a party to go. It was a sex party in Bellevue. It was already close to midnight.
Moments later I was crossing the I-90 bridge when I accidentally veered into the next lane of traffic, which I hadn’t intended to do. Shocked to attention as I pictured myself careening over the edge, into the lake, all the way to the bottom, and imagining what that would do to my son, I determined to FOCUS. A minute later, I did it again—crossed a lane of traffic without meaning to.
This was one of the lowest points of my life. By the grace of God, I made it safely to the party. When I arrived, I promptly got stoned to try and shake the reality of what I’d just done. I sat in a corner until I fell asleep and drove home around dawn. A few hours after I got home, the guy from the night before came over with coffee and pastries I was too hungover to eat and I gave him a blow job even though I didn’t care if I ever saw him again.
Without a doubt, quitting drinking a few months later was one of the most vital steps I took toward healing my relationship with myself. Had I not done that, I am certain I would never have written my book. I doubt I would have joined AlAnon (for family/friends of someone with alcohol use disorder) and I would not have pursued my decades-old dream of hospital chaplaincy. I have no idea what my life would be like today nor, I suppose, if I would be alive—alcohol abuse tends to be progressive, and I was in a downward spiral.
Additional resources for the sober curious:
Quit Like a Woman, by Holly Whitaker
Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget, by Sarah Hepola
Therapy
I sought a therapist in 2015 because I wasn’t relating well with one of my sisters and it was making me unhinged. I had a friend who was learning body psychotherapy, which uses a broader range of therapeutic modalities than talk therapy alone, so I looked for someone who knew about it and found her, Dianne.
It’s been ten years now that we have worked together. One of the most powerful things she has taught me is also perhaps the simplest: how to stay with my feelings and why it matters. I used to plow right through subjects that made me sad. She would invite me to stay, which I absolutely hated. I think I have harbored a fear that my sadness is so large it will overtake me. So I pushed it away, but it creeped out elsewhere, in bad moods, over-functioning, perfectionism, and absolutist thinking. It’s a cute little adage but I think it’s also true: we have to feel it to heal it.
Working with Dianne all this time has allowed me to develop a critical trust and degree of familiarity with her that allows me to be completely honest and occasionally even tell her to fuck off when she gets too close to a still-tender issue. We both know I don’t mean it, but it’s empowering to have a container where I can defend my tenderness in this primal way, which allows me to access my voice on my own behalf, and to practice my instinct for self protection—urges that are often trained out of women. Also, it’s healing to have a grown up I can be testy with who will still accept and love me. It usually makes us both laugh.
Dianne has helped me to understand that when I get into black and white, all-or-nothing thinking, it’s a sign I am speaking from/feeling from a younger version of myself (versus my adult/executive self). Our long relationship has allowed me to see my progress.
Though I rarely see her these days, it helps to know she’s in my corner, and I can call on her when needed. In fact, I just made an appointment for next week because I want to work on compassion for myself, including the past version of me that got wasted and risked her life driving to a sex party. I’m still a little haunted by ghosts of my past. I am ready to release them.
Ayahuasca
I was asked in a job interview once what my favorite technology is, and this was my answer. Then I thought the better of it and said SMS instead, but this was my real answer, because I am fascinated by the world this plant medicine has opened to me.
Working with ayahuasca has enable me to expand my perception, process grief, hone intuition, and develop a deeper relationship to my spirituality and the immaterial world. I have received prescient insights and cultivated dimensions of reality I could not perceive otherwise. Which all sounds kind of hippie-dippy, but I don’t have other language for these things. It’s hard to describe a non-ordinary state.
As I understand it, the reason ayahuasca is so effective is that it works on our Default Mode Network, which is a part of our psyche that forms when we are very young and pre-verbal. In other words, before we have language to understand the world around us, we form our identities based on our environment through the Default Mode Network. If you grow up with reliable caregivers in a physically and psychologically safe environment, your wiring develops accordingly. If your environment is toxic, things can go a bit awry.
What this means to me is that my blueprint for relating to the world around me may have some blips that haven’t even registered in my unconscious (much less sub- or conscious) mind, because I didn’t have language to comprehend my surroundings when the blueprint formed. Thus, talk therapy could never help identify and repair those blips. I don’t have awareness or words to describe them.
Ayahuasca, however, seems to have a capacity to redraw the plan to support the practitioner’s well being. And the result is revelatory. I can only speak from my experience, but I will say that I think this could be one of the most powerful and efficient tools for healing and the expansion of consciousness. It is a spiritual discipline I am committed to for the foreseeable future.
Community
In addition to powerful healing, ayahuasca typically is offered in a group setting, and I have never experienced a quality of relating with complete strangers like what happens in the context of a medicine meditation.
Community is, from what I can tell, missing from many of our lives. I don’t mean friendships, or a few neighbors that you know. I mean a feeling of being knit into a fabric of humanity that supports you, to whom you also offer your service and care. There’s an aspect of participation and accountability that elevates a group to a community.
For me, I find community with people I have sat in medicine meditations with, but also in yoga classes, recovery meetings, and among writers. It’s a feeling of being in the trenches together, understanding the challenges, and validating the shit out of one another when it’s called for. This is vital to feeling our place in the world. We all need a place in the world.
Staying open, slowing down
The summer after I quit my tech job I found myself, unexpectedly and with next to no notice, working as the healthcare manager for a summer camp that I grew up attending as a camper and working as a young adult. I’ve had more fun at that camp than anywhere; it’s another community that has been absolutely vital to the person I am today.
In the summer of 2019, it was also a safe haven from the chaos I’d been perpetuating. I couldn’t drink, obviously, or smoke, or date. I didn’t even have WiFi, so I had very little contact with the outside world except on days off. I worked from Reveille to Taps—long days tending kiddos with maladies as varied as bee stings, twisted ankles, and panic attacks. I spent most of my time outside, or at least in open air, and came to feel held by the earth. It slowed and steadied me.
It might sound crazy to quit your job and do something similar, but what I have learned in the last several years is that when you act in accordance with your inner guidance, opportunity knocks (eventually). A path rises to meet you. There is absolutely no way I could have willed, predicted, or decided my way into the course that has been revealed to me step by step over the past several years. I had to trust my gut, walk in faith, and follow through. And none of it ever would have happened if I hadn’t had the courage (desperation) to leave behind the most money I’ve ever made in favor of something that didn’t kill my soul.
Ceasing to date married men
I don’t mean cheating…
As a woman who was for many years consensually non monogamous, I had the opportunity to date whomever I liked (provided he also liked me back). This included a few men who were partnered or married. For awhile, these escaped my awareness, but over time, I made some crucial realizations that I decided I was very not okay with:
Coupled men have the security of partnership that I would like to have. Many are ignorant to this couple privilege, and it can feel to me like being used.
Someone who hasn’t walked in my shoes cannot relate to what it’s like to go through divorce, co-parent, face financial insecurity, lose friendships…basically, to start over. I want my intimates to have a deep understanding of me; a married dude never will.
At the end of a date, whether an evening or an overnight, a partnered man will go home to his partner, and I will be alone again with the desire I still have to be partnered. That is a sucky feeling no matter how many times I tried to tell myself it was okay because I had a freedom they didn’t. I didn’t like it, and it’s a relief to say I’m never doing it again.
Non monogamous relationships index heavily on sex, which creates a pressure to put out and for every date to be novel; partnership is a more natural rhythm of waxing and waning desire, activity, etc. Closeness is built in quotidian chores as well as moments of the sublime. I want both, and everything in between.
I have a lot to offer a man, and I am well resourced to love another person well. A married guy that is essentially seeking variety or escape or a feeling of being alive or whatever else he may be looking for almost certainly is not going to give as good as he gets. His energy is too dispersed, which seems to me like a waste of my energy.
When push comes to shove, any man worth his salt will choose his spouse over his lover. This is the way it should be, but I don’t want to be treated like a second priority or of lower importance. Trying to heal a self worth wound while putting myself in situations where I’m not chosen is obviously counterproductive.
Scheduling around a married guy’s wife and kids is a constant reminder that you are the accessory to the main outfit. I know I’m sort of saying the same thing over and over again, describing different aspects of the same shape. Maybe it feels good to name what used to hurt me—a way of reminding myself why this is and will remain a NO for me.
I have seen very few non monogamous relationships that seem to be honest, accountable, and high functioning. I don’t want to participate in a relationship that has lowers standards than I would maintain for my own primary relationship.
Taking supplements
After I started my chaplain residency, I quickly found myself can’t-sleep-can’t-eat anxious. I was working at a level II trauma facility where we had three ICUs, and I was also responsible for covering the Labor and Delivery and Mother-Baby units. Within the first two weeks, there were six stillbirths. One of them was the same day as my first son, Vox’s, birthday. (He was stillborn in 2010.) Having that grief hammered so intensely was traumatizing.
Somehow I stumbled into a cocktail of supplements I started taking every night, which I am certain has helped my executive function as well as quieted the anxiety. My protocol: Omega-3s with vitamin D, magnesium glycinate, ashwagandha, and a combo capsule of l-theanine + GABA called Moment of Zen. Plus in the mornings I take a B complex and multivitamin.
I didn't realize how much these were helping me until I gradually used up and didn’t replace the bottles. Similar symptoms started creeping in relative to my mood and sleep so I started the protocol again and felt better within a week.
This is not medical advice, just a note about what has helped me.
Joining AlAnon
Remember how I said I have occasionally told my therapist to fuck off? This was one of those times. August 2021.
“Why don’t you try AlAnon, Minda?”
“Uh, isn’t that kind of a cult?”
“No, it might be helpful for you. I have a lot of clients who have really benefited…”
“Nah. I’m not really a joiner. I can’t see myself doing that.”
“I want you to go to one meeting by the next time I see you.”
“Well then you can just fuck right off!”
I smiled as I said it and noted a faintly queasy feeling that told me I was going to have to do it because I respect my therapist a great deal and am not one to back down from a well reasoned challenge.
And I did do it—I went to a meeting on Zoom, and I cried through pretty much the whole thing. Clearly it resonated.
From there I got a sponsor and started working the steps. Since then, AlAnon has changed my life more than I can say. Open your heart and mind and find the right meeting/s and you, too, can learn to set boundaries and say no. It’s nothing short of a personal a revolution.
Humbling myself
The first day I met with my AlAnon sponsor, I mentioned during different points of our conversation that I was dating, that I had a boyfriend, and that I was technically still married. This gave her pause, and she called me out.
“Have you ever heard of SLAA?”
“Nope.”
She took out her phone and showed me a list that was, basically, “You might be a sex and/or love addict if…”
As I read the list, I related to several items on it. Most of them, in fact. I looked at her, stricken.
Like the old timer she is, she laughed and said, “Go to a meeting! It won’t kill ya.”
After we said goodbye that day I looked up online meetings and realized there was one that had just started. I clicked the link and listened in. Again, I cried through most of the meeting. This time I was crying because it resonated, but also because I found it so excruciating to opt in to a group called Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. It was like taking medicine called “Imma Loser” or applying a salve labeled, “Whatta Freak.”
It was hard to join, much less talk about with anyone outside the group. But it was also a profound comfort. Because in those meetings, I realized I wasn’t alone in the ways I chased and pined and abandoned myself. There were even women I judged as sicker than me (you’ll often hear in meetings: some of us are sicker than others…) and at the time, I needed that to feel like I wasn’t a hopeless case.
Turns out, I wasn’t hopeless at all (and neither is anyone). Just a sad, scared girl in a grown up woman’s body who was reaching for coping mechanisms of dubious efficacy. Learning this, and defining the contours of my dysfunction, enabled me to start being different, and now I am.
I will say that I think labeling oneself an addict can be problematic for a number of reasons, but if you can take what you like and leave the rest, there is profound wisdom and healing in the 12 Steps. And they have groups for just about every method we humans have found to fuck up our lives try to cope with the hardship of being human: gambling, overeating, overspending, you name it.
There were other ways I was humbled. For a couple of years I was unemployed and couldn’t get a job no matter what door I knocked on. I was turned down for the first residency I applied to. I had a friend ask me why I always talked about myself and never asked about her life. The response to my book was largely lackluster. My ex-husband moved in with his partner (who I am very fond of, but that was an ouch I didn’t see coming).
These experiences were each painful, and some leveled me. But I grew a thicker skin, learned how to care for myself through heartbreak, disappointment, and humiliation, and kept going.
Confiding in a friend
In 2021, I was profoundly lucky to connect with a woman who was also in early sobriety, recently divorced, and willing to chat via Marco Polo, which is an asynchronous video messaging app.
Though she is in Georgia, and I am in Seattle, connecting via Marco Polo made it seem like we were hanging out, sort of, except we didn’t have actual conversations—we traded monologues. It sounds weird, but it helped—a lot! Together we each charted progress in our lives, which we shared with the other. It taught me the power of being witnessed.
There were many times in the last eight years when I felt face down in the dirt…utterly hopeless. So many times I asked myself what the point of “healing” was at all, whether I was being self indulgent trying to work on my shit, wondering if I was ever going to find the bottom and if it was truly possible to change.
She listened, affirmed, encouraged, and loved me, and I did the same for her. We have each made significant changes for the better, and I’m so grateful to have had a partner on the path.
Writing
I wrote my first memoir about my first son. It was a catharsis, so perhaps it’s no wonder I turned to writing again when I needed to make sense of the mess I made of my marriage. Writing the early drafts was a purge of sorts, which was useful in itself. But revision is where the meaning of it all started to come together, and by the third and fourth drafts, I found the text was instructing me in understanding myself.
I have found journal and automatic writing to be useful in a similar way. Sometimes it’s whatever is on my mind, other times I write to a question or theme. My therapist suggested an exercise I have used several times now: to make a list of all the positives I gained from a situation I didn’t like. It’s a very effective alchemy, transforming something I wish never happened into an experience that informs me and leaves me feeling grateful.
Learning to abide reality
I wrote about this earlier in the week, but I have to list it here again because it has been so profoundly life changing. I check myself regularly, and the result is feeling pretty well aligned most of the time.
Getting honest about my motives, owning up to my shortcomings, admitting when I don’t know, acknowledging things I’m good at, naming the obvious, listening to what’s really being said, considering invitations through a filter of how they feel in my body, speaking directly…these are examples of what I mean by abiding reality. It is the opposite of bullshit: pretending to like something I don’t, placating others to avoid a confrontation, making choices that harm me. I’m done with all of that. I want to live in truth.
Your quest may cost you sadness, grief, awkwardness, humiliation, correction, and/or despair, but these are temporary, and each will grow your capacity and strengthen your mettle. You were not made for comfort and security alone! I promise: a more beautiful, harmonious existence is possible. What else are you gonna do with your wild and precious life?
You have such a gift for engaging, pulling one in and telling poignant and profound stories. 🫶🏽