Wow are we lucky to have Priscilla Lowery here to tell us about her deeply personal journey with Mother Nature. I can so relate and feel, being out here in Sequim, WA, how very needed Mother Nature is for us Earthlings right now! She has so many messages for us. Thank you for sharing your beautiful journey with us Priscilla.
Carl Jung wrote, “Every country or people has its own angel, just as the earth has a soul.” These words ring true with me and my words can never be enough to express the profound healing power of our Mother Earth, her plants, trees and animals––the mystery of it all and our interconnectedness of being here. I remember once being asked, who was my first teacher. I replied, “Nature. Nature was my first good and true teacher.” For me all of God is revealed in nature. To illustrate Nature’s healing power, I will share some of my personal story about what happened to me when I began to face and heal from early childhood abuse and neglect.
In November of 2014, I experienced what psychologists call on the DMS5 a ‘Psycho-Spiritual Crisis’––yes, it is a real diagnosis. Later, I would learn, there are actually many spiritual names for such an event and that ancient tribal traditions all over the world understand and have healing rituals for receiving and guiding individuals through this kind of crisis. However, here in the West, we are ill-prepared and prone to distancing ourselves from those in crisis. It’s understandable, as we have been severed from such healing practices and lost touch with our indigenous selves. Even in my Quaker circles, where mystical experiences are often revered and used in teaching, it became quite apparent to me that it was unacceptable to have a modern-day mystical experience. After all, as one leader told me, when I tried to share, “We can’t trust everyone’s spiritual experience.” At that time, I only knew myself as a Quaker and practiced contemplative prayer. This was disheartening to me as I was already feeling very isolated. I had no ground to stand on, or so I thought.
That November of 2014, I was attending a Jungian Healing weekend sponsored by my Quaker brothers and sisters, whom I love dearly. While participating in a psycho-drama exercise, I relived a repressed childhood trauma. It was violent. Without knowing how I got there, I found myself lying on the floor and it felt as though I had been shocked from my feet up through my head. It was such an electrical force that my head splintered with a headache and my eyeballs and ears felt on fire. I became ice cold, my teeth chattered, and my body shook as though I was in shock––mostly likely I was. Words screamed from me that I did not know were stored deep inside by body. Later, I would describe the amazing feeling of having an enormous piece of me return—what I now know was a kind of spontaneous soul retrieval or what some may call a gift from The Holy Spirit–I called it a ‘ballroom for dancing!’ as the space was seemingly endless. After the experience, I began having odd physical symptoms and psychological/spiritual phenomena that led me into a state of crisis. I went to the only spiritual teachers I had access to––Quaker pastors and tried to tell them what had happened. They lovingly listened, but I could not make words describe the mythological experience. They didn’t understand and I began to feel very isolated, so I hid what was going on as best I could. It was as though I had gone somewhere amazing, had the lights turned on for just a second and upon return had no one to receive, guide, or believe me. Every self-identified and rigid construct that I had built to support my life crumbled away and I felt as though I was drowning. I would not wish anyone’s personal transformation to be so sudden and violent. The counselor/healer, who saved my life, called it, “A giant bitch-slap from the universe!”
In the first two weeks after the event, I felt the most profound sense of oneness and love. I was inseparable from it and I went about telling people how loved they are. I wanted to touch everyone and tell them this truth. The love was so strong that nothing bothered me and for a time all judgement fell away. I could see the palpable suffering on people’s faces. I wanted them to know they can be healed. I really believed they could understand. In the first few days, several people saw light come out of my eyes and others began to cry when I talked to them, but I also made some people uncomfortable. I learned to stop. I could see my own crazy. In the coming months I found myself in a space of no time and I described time as having viscosity–a thing one could touch. As I began to come out of that liminal space, I had panic attacks and referred to myself as “she”. For a while, there seemed to be no “I”. This trauma-induced descent to soul was akin to a near-death experience and after an initial bliss state, I was plunged into dark despair and I began to disintegrate. I was riding a roller coaster of emotional upheaval that took me to the depth of a planned suicide where all I could think of was returning “HOME” to the greatest height of joy I had ever experienced. It was a state of nonattachment to this world that I cannot explain and there is no fear of death in that space. In the early months of this painful birth, I didn’t know how to find help. I spent a lot of time shaking. Even though I had a wonderful counselor, I couldn’t seem to get a handle on myself. I was at the mercy of an unseen process and was learning to surrender.
On March 28th of 2015, I opened the door of my sons’ abandoned and uninsulated tree house. It was cradled in the arms of an eighty-year-old apple tree. Without thinking, I announced, “I am so moving in here!” That evening, I asked my family not to take it personally and assured them their needs would still be met. I lived in the treehouse for ninety days. During that year, I could not bear any news or any negativity—it physically hurt me. I wore headphones and sunglasses all the time to dampen the sensory overload of our modern world. I actually felt sound as pain in my body. Nature was my healing balm. In the treehouse, I studied spiritual texts, received guidance from spirits in dreams, and accessed the inner medicine that widened my Quaker circle to include Shamanic, Sufi, and Buddhist teachings. In a book by Dr. Stanislof Grof, I learned about the Spiritual Emergency Network (SEN). I was so desperate for someone to help and understand me that I contacted them. To my surprise, they replied and put me to work with a transpersonal psychologist, who spent many hours over several months interviewing me, teaching me, and “normalizing” my experience over Skype. He had done his PHD dissertation on Kundalini and explained that this is what had happened to me. It was comforting to find someone, in addition to my counselor, who understood. In one session, the doctor asked me, “How did you survive the initial onslaught of energy?” I laughed and told him that I returned to my first love and she saved me. “Who was that, he asked”. “Mother Nature,” I replied. I told him about how I would rise before dawn and drive to the hiking trail at the Trappist Abbey and walk four miles barefoot every morning, so that I could make myself stay and keep serving my family and students. I had a deep inner knowing that running away was not the answer. I told him how I would lay down on the ground, so as much of my body could touch the earth as possible. Laying on the earth and laying my body against trees would calm panic attacks that arose during the healing process. It seemed intuitive and natural to do this. I have since learned that shamans in some cultures would bury very ill people in the ground with only their faces showing in order for the person to receive as much as the earth’s healing power as possible.
I told this psychologist about my fascination with what I called, “The Love Incarnate leaves” on the trees and how when I was really needing comfort, I would sit in the boughs of our Red Oak Tree in our back yard. I told him about how the plants don’t speak with words, but rather vibrations and that they love us and communicate vibrationally. I told him that I didn’t know how to fit into this world anymore and that I just really didn’t want to be here and wanted to go home. This doctor listened patiently and without judgement. He did not tell me I was crazy. What he told me was this, “My God, I’ve been teaching all my courses at Stanford out of order! Ecopsychology needs to be first.” He taught me to record my dreams and learn from them. Among the countless valuable teachings I received from him, he said, “You need to find your tribe.”
“Where are they?” I asked. He gave me several suggestions and assured me, “You’ll know them when you find them.” That’s what led me to my first Shamanic workshop with Hank Wesselman. When I first met Hank, I sidled up to him at one of the outdoor picnic tables in front of the lodge at Breitenbush Hot Springs. I remember nervously telling him about the spirits that had visited me. “Do you think I’m crazy?” I inquired. “You’re in the right place, kid,” was his affectionate reply. Little by little over these past few years I have been learning to live as Zen Master, Chozen Bays told me, “In the world with a big left foot and a small right foot.” I am so grateful for all of my teachers—from the Quaker and Sufi mystics to the Buddhist somatic meditation practices that continue to support my healing journey. I am just an ordinary person committed to freeing myself from my own faulty thinking. I do this daily through prayer, gratitude, and meditation like so many of you. As Earth Day approaches, I am most grateful for our healing earth––here to support each of us until the day our physical bodies return to her.
Over those ninety days in the treehouse, I watched the emergence of buds on limbs turn into blossoms. I watched blossoms turn into tiny green apples. I harvested and ate those apples. During that time of living in the arms of the apple tree, I was replanted, went through growing pains and pruning, blossomed, and wondered what it meant to fruit as a human on this earth. My first counselor/healer once asked me, “Why are you here?” The answer was so very clear. “I am here to love well.”
Being human isn’t easy and loving well is what each of us is ultimately called to do. We will make mistakes. We will say the wrong things and constantly fall into our pre-conditioned patterns that extend back through generations. We will even hurt people, including ourselves, but once we can see this, we can respond, change, and grow from the lessons. We are truly perfect in our imperfection. We are all on a journey to learn to fall in love with ourselves, not in an egotistical manner, but in the same way we view the wonders of creation because we are not separate. In the space of awareness, love is always here manifesting itself through Mother Nature. “The world has a soul,” and the great mystery is that we humans, too, are the manifestation of that soul’s love. Whether open to it or not, love is always here for us.
The following poem during that time of living in the tree.
Breath Brand New
4/25/15
Mystery is knowing I’ve been invited
To the Grove of Titans
Two Thousand year-old liminalists
Calling me to come
They live in secret
No physical map to take me over their threshold
So I must close my eyes to enter
Barefoot on forest duff
A quiet so still
An encasing silence
A doorway to the Eternal
Laying down
And gazing up at Sacred
Become entwined in the sensual boughs
Lifting me through descending mist
Surfacing, I take and hear my breath
Brand new
From the hands of Giant John the Baptists
Priscilla Lowery lives outside Portland, Oregon and is a teacher specializing in dyslexia. She teaches students of all ages to read using a multisensory language program. When not working with her students, she enjoys backpacking, gardening, and writing poetry. She is currently studying somatic meditation and trauma healing techniques with the goal of helping others heal from trauma. She feels especially called to work with children. Priscilla decided to share this very personal story because she wants those in healing roles: pastors, teachers, and healers who are front-line responders to become more knowledgeable about the depth of the human psyche and its incredible capacity to heal with guidance and love.
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