Episode 19: What Does The Alchemical Breakthrough Feel Like?

In today’s episode, I discuss what to look for and when you’ll know you have arrived at the door of your own alchemical transformative breakthrough.  I'll go over what occurs in the pre-awakening stages that can start three to five years before you finally have "the big moment." But there can be signs of what's to come as far back as twenty or more years when you reflect back on specific life events that briefly altered the direction of your life or set you onto a different path. I also cover the most common ages TRUE transformation work begins and why attempting it [or pretending to do it] in your twenties or even thirties doesn't usually work.


Disclaimer: This podcast is for people who are ready to heal body, mind and spirit and are willing to take full responsibility for what that involves. I am not a doctor. I am not a therapist. This podcast contains adult language and themes that are not suitable for young children or those who are easily offended or triggered. The views discussed in this podcast are my own, based on personal experience and of those I have known and worked with for my entire adult life. This show is not meant to take the place of sound medical or mental health advice. You and only you are responsible for the choices you make based on the information you hear on this show. 

"We're all just walking each other home." Ram Dass

Join me on "X": https://twitter.com/LaurelDewey
Join me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thealchemyofnaturalhealing/
Email: laurel@thealchemyofnaturalhealing.com

HERBS, SUPPLEMENTS AND MORE THAT I STRONGLY ENDORSE!

VIBRANT BLUE ESSENTIAL OILS:
Parasympathetic – https://dv216.isrefer.come/go/para/LaurelDewey/
Limbic Reset Blend - https://dv216.isrefer.com/go/limbic/LaurelDewey/
Fascia – https://dv216.isrefer.com/go/fascia/LaurelDewey/
USE: CODE: LAUREL10 for $10.00 off your order.

HYPERION HERBS: https://www.hyperionherbs.com/discount/LAUREL10
USE CODE: LAUREL10 for 10% off your order

ANCESTRAL SUPPLEMENTS: https://glnk.io/2oy4j/laurel
USE CODE: LAUREL10 FOR 10% OFF ORDER

KANNA EXTRACT COMPANY:
Use this link for 10% off: https://kannaextract.com/?aff=20 OR COUPON CODE: LAUREL10 for 10% off your purchase

...

Transcript

            Welcome to Episode 19. Today’s topic is: “What Does The Alchemical Breakthrough Feel Like?”

            I could add onto that what does the alchemical breakthrough feel like and why is it so willingly resisted? I’ll definitely explore that as well in today’s episode. I think this is going to be my longest show so far because I have a lot written down and could easily add another five pages of notes. This episode was inspired by several emails I received from listeners who wanted to know if what they were experiencing was, in fact, the beginning of this powerful transformation process. It got me really thinking and reviewing my own life and the events that led up to my own breakthrough moment and I also reflected on the many people I know or have worked with who shared their own stories with me. So in today’s episode, I will give you to my best ability and, of course, from my own perspective, what to look for and when you’ll know you have arrived at the door of your own alchemical transformative breakthrough. 

            My own experience and those of others I know clearly show that there was pre-awakening period before the major breakthrough/breakdown event. This period could be as long as twenty or twenty-five years. That does NOT mean that there is the same type of intensity as when you finally have the big breakthrough. It means that there will be bookmarks, so to speak, of experiences that rock your world and that could be launchpads toward alchemical healing but the timing of it, or your younger age, or your responsibilities at that time, tend to turn the bookmarked incident into an isolated life event that seems to resolve and you are able to go right back into your old life and maintain your unhealed self and go merrily along. I will use myself as an example. I had my first pre-awakening incident when I was two months away from turning twenty-nine. I was working for an entertainment magazine, had a corner office, doing really well with lots of exciting potential in my future but I was also under tremendous stress that was unending. I was seated at my desk with the door closed and turned to stare out the window. I caught myself and thought, well I should get back to writing and looked at the clock, and two hours had passed. My impression was that it was five or ten minutes, tops. I thought the clock was broken and went into the hallway to check another clock and it was the same time. Needless to say I was incredibly disturbed because I’d essentially dissociated for two hours sitting in the same position staring out a window. I did everything I knew at that time to shake it off but about one week later, I laid my right ankle out very badly and had to be on crutches. Long story short, within two weeks from that, I was no longer working at that magazine. And I began to see the very sudden shift within me of not having any connection whatsoever for the entertainment industry and a need to leave Los Angeles, which I never thought I would do. Three years later I moved to Colorado and never looked back or missed Los Angeles. But I didn’t use that event to trigger a transformative experience, except getting out of L.A., which was externally transformative for sure. 

My next pre-awakening happened at age thirty-nine when I had several big issues health wise and legally regarding a writing contract I wasn’t being paid for and a relationship issue that could have ended up very badly. But I dealt with the health crisis, won the lawsuit and got out of the relationship and went about my merry way. But fourteen years later, everything began to crumble. My motivation to do what I’d always done and what had made me happy ceased making me happy. My husband went through a very serious health problem which terrified me. My writing career was hanging by a thread, basically due to my inertia and inability to focus because of everything else that was falling apart. And the hypervigilance I’d dealt with for my entire childhood and into adult life, resurrected and I was in a state of constant fight or flight. Looking back, I’d have to say that 2014 was the genesis of my undoing but the breakthrough/breakdown moment didn’t happen until April of 2016. And then it was off to the races, as they say. 

            But prior to that, it was all about having these huge experiences but not recognizing those experiences as meaningful and in need of exploration. I was still in conquering mode back then. I was focused on getting one of my novels into the NYT bestseller list or the Amazon top 100. And when one of my novels did drift into Amazon’s Top 100 and then drifted out, it just made me want to push even harder.  So personal transformation was not on my bingo card at that time. And to be fair, part of that is that true alchemical transformation doesn’t really have the potential for engaging until you are at a point where you’ve basically evaded everything up to that point and can’t pretend any longer that you’re okay and can keep going like you always have. Last week, I talked about Maslow’s Pyramid of Hierarchy where the tip of the pyramid is where you seek self-actualization or transformation of self where you learn who you are and strive to realize your highest potential. But that you can’t do that until you have the foundation of that pyramid anchored in your life. So basic needs must be met, family and social relationships, intimate relationships and then and only then, once those are met, can you even begin to turn your focus to your own inner self and explore who you really are. And all of those foundational aspects within Maslow’s Pyramid take years and decades to establish. And while there are those out there who choose the deeply transformative path at a younger age say late twenties or early thirties, they are usually single, often male, no children, no major responsibilities to a parent or anyone and tend to have a nomadic personality that allows them to naturally take off and go deep into their inner world. But there’s a BIG “but” here. If for whatever reason a person is called to do this work in their late twenties or early thirties and they have no responsibilities, their journey, by virtue of their immaturity and lack of life experiences such as marriage, children, holding down a responsible job, risks turning their transformative experience into a very self-absorbed adventure that is not so much based on life experience but on pure exploration for exploration sake. But what are they truly overcoming on this quest at that age? Even if it’s conquering drug addiction, okay, then what? What are you deconstructing? Have you built a sturdy enough structure that is ready to be deconstructed? I think you’ll understand what I mean by that as you listen to the show. 

Bottom line is that with true alchemical transformation, it’s all about building it up so you can break it down. You have to bring the boil to a head before you can lance it. And while that’s a graphic visual, it’s quite true. Inside that boil is your many years of life experiences that have shaped you, destroyed you, traumatized you and locked you into dysfunctional patterns that do not serve you. All that takes time to build up. You have to build something to work with and then you metaphorically lance it, which is the breakthrough moment. You build all this up within you only to undo it and unlearn it. Sounds so odd, doesn’t it? Why can’t we all just be born self-actualized and not have to go through this shitshow? Well, because you are a soul having a human experience and part of that experience is having to work against or overcome something and in your ability to overcome your obstacles, you grow. You learn. You experience another level of life skills. I’m a big believer that our soul requires a human experience and through that experience, we grow and become more self-aware and that allows the soul to grow. That’s how I look at it. If your life had nothing to overcome, it’s just rainbows and unicorns and nothing bad ever happens and not only is that unrealistic, it’s boring as hell!

So, the true breakthrough moment will usually occur around age forty-nine to late sixties. And yes, if you really put it off, it can happen in your seventies. But I have noticed that with women, there usually is something significant that happens to them around age fifty-two to fifty-four. For men, it can happen in their mid to late fifties or right around age sixty-two to sixty-five and then again around seventy-seven. Then the next interesting window for being called to this type of transformative work is age eighty to eighty-four for both women and men. I know two women who were led to this work, one at age 82 and the other at 84 and the 84-year old thrived and the 82 year old ending up dying. And remember these people were strongly drawn at their older age to do this and they believed they understood what they were getting involved in which is the relentless excavation of one’s entire life and point of view. We all experience significant life events, whether those events launch us into doing deep work or not. But I’ve paid attention to the ages that so many people come to this work and the ages I gave are consistent with what I’ve observed. 

So what occurs in the pre-breakthrough or pre-awakening stages? And I would put the true pre-awakening stages around three to five years before the actual breakthrough moment. But more like three years. So if you have already had your breakthrough moment, I encourage you to trace it back three to five years and see what was going on in your life and where the nudges were coming at you. 

What are those nudges? I can describe it best as a quiet unsettledness that operates in the background of your life and mind and that you cannot un-feel or un-sense. I don’t think that’s a word but I just made it one. And that nudge grows into a hard poke and the hard poke becomes a hard punch. Usually the punch is to the heart and the gut. It can start off with the things that used to make you happy or give you a pleasant distraction no longer operates for you in that way. There’s a discontent that follows through this. A kind of “Is this all there is to life?” mentality which can be misdiagnosed as depression. Or a general malaise that you can’t kick. So if you trot over to your doctor to get an antidepressant and think it’s going to take all of this away, it’s not. It may take the edge off for a while but it’s not going to heal your broken self, I promise you that. There is a misunderstood ‘suffering’ that overtakes you at times during the pre-awakening stage. You can’t wrap your head around it and it’s often quite ethereal in its nature but it’s there. Eckhart Tolle has a great quote about this. “Some people awaken spiritually without ever coming into contact with any meditation technique or any spiritual teaching. They may awaken simply because they can’t stand the suffering anymore.” 

Other pre-awakening nudges involve questioning your reality. Who am I? What is my purpose? What is the point of all this? Is what I believe to be true actually true? Often, you might think about what you were taught growing up and never questioned until now. That can lead to the shocking conclusion that what you believe and how you have lived your life up to that point is based on somebody else’s perspective or fears. And that perspective or those fears don’t belong to you. That’s a big moment, believe me. It’s extremely invigorating when you have this realization in your pre-awakening. And it can nudge the rebel in you that you may never have met. I never got to be a rebel when I was younger. And I remember that part of my pre-awakening very much and it was akin to having a delayed teenage rebellion at the age of fifty-one. And that can get you in trouble, let me tell you. Because you have insurance and you’re not opposed to using your deductibles. Oh, the rebel is a very provocative little devil when you’re over the age of fifty. It teases and tempts you with all the things you never got to do or experience. You might go to a nude beach for the first time ever. You might try cannabis for the first time. You might try something stronger than cannabis, totally recreationally at this point because you’re not into the deep, sacred healing potential of these substances yet. No, no, no. You’re not after the spiritual effects at that stage. You’re just doing it because that little rebel is whispering, “Why not? Go for it!” And I’m not going to lie to you. Lots of my pre-awakening was fun at that time. Because there was a lot of novelty to it and I enjoyed giving the middle finger to life as well. 

You’ll spend money on things you never thought you’d buy. Why are you buying them? Because you can, that’s why. If you never got to rebel as a teenager, you will activate that rebel during the pre-awakening phase. And the reason is you must experience the rebel energy while you are alive. It’s a catalyzing energy that is necessary to distinguish yourself as an individual. And if you don’t do it or are prevented from doing it as a teenager, that energy will eventually find you. And you will walk down a few odd little pathways that often shock and confound the people around you who have known you forever. And they will chalk it up to a brief phase you’re going through but no, it’s actually a pre-phase to the big event which will most likely see most of those people leave your life. So in the pre-awakening, there is the beginning of the distancing you will eventually experience profoundly once you are fully engaged in your transformative work. And with this distancing, there’s a lot of self-doubt. Because these are people who you have often shared great times with and had big life experiences with but either they don’t get you or you don’t feel connected to them anymore. But you’ll fight it in the pre-awakening stages and you won’t necessarily walk away from them…yet. But you may find yourself declining some of the invitations you would have normally welcomed. So the other part of the pre-awakening is the beginning of the sense of loneliness. Where nobody understands you and all you want is to be understood and have your confused feelings validated by people who have no damn clue what is happening to you. So good luck with that. 

But the pre-awakening is just a stage and it will pass because it has to pass in order to make space for the big event: the breakthrough/breakdown moment. And there is no way to avoid that moment because in the pre-awakening, you’ve opened the gate and there is no closing it. You are about to come face-to-face with your tipping point. The breakthrough that looks just like a breakdown. Remember, you gotta build it up so you can break it down! What is the final trigger for the big moment that leads to your quest for self-actualization and total transformation of body, mind and spirit? It is usually a major life event. It can be the death, often tragic, of a loved one. It can be a divorce that has been percolating for years or comes out of left field. It can be the loss of your career. It can be shocking news of a family secret that involves you and shakes you to your core, altering your entire internal and external perspective. It is often a serious health crisis or diagnosis that forces you to completely reorganize your life, your daily schedule, and prevents you from moving forward. It can be decades of hard stress you’ve had to endure and lack of self-care that finally shatters you. That is what we like to call a ‘nervous breakdown’ but I would characterize it more as a ‘nervous breakthrough,’ although anyone who has to observe it might disagree. Whatever the trigger is, it always creates the same response. And that is, “I can’t continue my life in the way I’ve lived it any longer.” “I have to upend my life and make huge changes because I cannot do this anymore.” You feel that energy in the sinew of your bones. And that declaration in and of itself is the fuel that drives you forward and into the unknown of your own deconstruction and eventual rebuilding, which is alchemical transformation. 

But just because you jumped into the dark pool of your own deconstruction, does not mean you are going to happily swim in that pool immediately. Chances are, you’re going to be looking for the side of the pool so you can get out of that pool. That’s not going to happen, but it doesn’t mean you’re not going to give it the ol’ college try. I know I did! You may be looking for that devilish rebel to pull you out of the pool, but the rebel has packed its little knapsack and is long gone. You are now a gaping wound floating in a dark pool of uncertainty and terror who is crying for mommy. Because of that, there is lots and lots of heavy resistance when you feel like you are fighting for your very life in that pool. It’s “Holy shit! What am I doing?!” That resistance can go on for months. Mine went on far too long. You may resist it with booze, cannabis, drugs, food and online distractions that keep you asleep but always with one eye open. No, there is no rest with resistance. It’s just a constantly queasy push and pull where you come up with every excuse in the book for why “this ain’t happening!” Resistance really is futile but that doesn’t mean you won’t give it all you got. Why is there so much resistance? Fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of nobody who understands you. Fear of feeling totally alone. You have no ability to have context with the experience because nobody you know has gone through it. If someone had said to me you are experiencing your own brutal awakening, and if I trusted them, at least I’d have had some context. It wouldn’t change anything or make it easier but having an ability to put into context this often confusing and chaotic breakthrough moment would at least have given me something to point to. It’s like with the dark night of the soul and how it’s important for someone to help you understand what a dark night of the soul looks like so you can have a container, so to speak, for that experience and not feel alone or crazy. Every part of a transformative experience is terrifying until you fully embrace and acknowledge that you’re in it and then seek avenues to navigate this path you’ve never traveled. From my own experience, once you are given context about what’s happening to you, it gives you a way to explore it. And that intention of exploration tends to put the fear to the side. It’s like being abandoned on a deserted island – and that’s a good example because this experience is always isolating. But you’re on the island and once you accept that “I’m on the island,” then you can agree to explore the island and recognize where the shore is, where the jungle is located and where the inlets of peace reside. I said it on the first episode and that was that I intentionally set out to produce a podcast that I wished I could have listened to when I was completely lost and questioning everything. And if I could have understood what was happening to me early on, I think I might have been able to stop the ‘why is this happening to me?’ daily dives along with having a better perspective on why everything was falling apart.    

So let me take a moment and describe what a breakthrough moment can look like. I’ll use my own experience and I’ll mention two others who went through it and who gave me permission to tell their stories without, of course, mentioning any names.

I’ll start with myself. My pre-awakening was just under three years and the momentum of the events that occurred during those three years, certainly powered me into my breakthrough moment which was a total emotional and mental breakdown. Imagine five big worlds colliding all at once. That’s what it felt like. It lasted almost two hours, and it was brutal. But I do remember thinking as it was happening that it felt good to finally scream and say exactly what I was feeling, even though a lot of it was chaotic and disjointed. I had no comprehension until that moment of how much grief I was carrying and had never been allowed to express. It came at a great cost because it was as if a hole in the floor opened up and I fell into it and my entire perspective and mood was reflective of that dark and deep hole that terrified me. Shortly after my breakthrough/breakdown, my body quickly started falling apart until I went numb on one side of my face, couldn’t move my neck side to side, or up and down and developed intense muscle spasms in my neck, shoulders and center of my back that went on for hours. I also developed a strange nervous tic on the side of my face and my stutter that I had conquered when I was five or six years old, returned with a vengeance to the point where, at times, I couldn’t get words out at all. I had no idea how to deal with the ricocheting thoughts in my head and the incredibly elusive yet palpable fragmented, very old memories that terrorized me because it felt like I was conjuring them up and I wondered if I was just being oddly dramatic but then over the next two months or so, they became clearer and three-dimensional to the point where I could smell the Los Angeles pavement in the summer time with the smog and sweltering July heat simmering against it. That was the one that truly got my attention. I was like what’s going on here? Because I hadn’t smelled that aroma for quite some time at that point and to have that specific aromatic memory attached to what I was seeing gave it a very disturbing twist. The grief I felt was so deep that I remember thinking to myself I’d injured my sternum because it was always sore but it was from the constant intense jags of crying that I had no control over. I was never a crier so I had a lot of grief stuck inside me and it was finally finding a way out and it was going to take a long time to drain out of me. I had no clue at that time that it would take another six years to empty out of me. The initial effects of the breakthrough/breakdown moment produced an extreme fragility in me that I’d never experienced and that led to a lot of months of isolating and growing fears that I was losing my mind. I had no confidence in myself (and I’d never suffered from that before) but I didn’t trust myself, I was terrified of developing another physical problem and when I would get a new problem I would feel completely and incapable of coping. I became very cautious which was not normal for me and moved very slowly and deliberately because I was scared all the time, and so I began to develop a very tight and tense gait that eventually led to me getting a limp. I became completely incapable of rational thought at times and I was always the one who everyone thought had her shit together. So because of my mental mush, I didn’t talk to a whole lot of people for the first six months and I didn’t talk on the phone a lot and if I did I talked quietly. I started having a lot of freeze responses to basically everything where I would just look off to the side and disappear for minutes at times. And when it happened, I would feel this temporary hovering of where I was tucked into a pocket and time stopped until I came out of it. This happened when I was washing dishes, watching TV or even eating a meal. I would just check out briefly. And then I remembered I did this when I was twenty-nine in my lovely little corner office in North Hollywood, California. When I checked out for two hours and thought my clock was wrong. So in retrospect, that was a little preview to a pattern within me or a reaction perhaps to what I was perceiving as overload and the inability to process any of it. Essentially, when stress became unbearable, I learned to check out and just float away from the scene, which is, as I learned later, a coping mechanism from exposure to long term stress. And I’m telling you right now, if you are experiencing that, you need to talk to somebody just as I did, because it scared the shit out of me. It had to do with the overload of what I was remembering from my childhood and there’s a point where your mind can’t process it effectively and so you go offline and then you get rebooted and you’re back up and running. In my case, I was running from myself. But I did reach out to someone and told them what was happening and that’s what led to digging into trauma release therapies. So that encapsulates my breakthrough moment and the fallout from that benchmark event that started the ball rolling. 

The next example of a breakthrough moment is interesting. I’m going to title this one, “His Heart Wasn’t In It.” This story is about a well-respected, highly successful and wealthy, fifty-year-old, east Indian heart surgeon who had a five-year pre-awakening where he went from being a somewhat cold natured, methodical, atheist to a man who started questioning why he became a heart surgeon and wondering if he in fact, was even capable any longer as he questioned the existence of God. And that didn’t fly too well with his wealthy parents and his wife who basically told him to get back on the horse and start doing that thing that buys all those luxuries. So he struggled internally for five years and during that time, his health began to suffer. He gained a lot of weight, he was often preoccupied, which wasn’t missed by his colleagues at the hospital, and he developed a mystery nervous condition where he would go into full body shaking that he couldn’t stop and would last for two or three minutes at a time. The more he tried to control everything with drugs, the worse it got. When one of his episodes happened prior to a surgery, he was removed from the team. This was a highly embarrassing event for him that he hid from his family and wife until it was discovered and when that happened, his world became very complicated, as he put it when he told me the story. He said he became so completely detached in the days that led up to his breakthrough moment, that he doesn’t have a lot of memories of specifics because, as he said, ‘I wasn’t there.’ So he was barely talking, could hardly interact with anyone for any period of time and secluded himself in his study where he would sleep on a couch. And then one day, he was in this stupor and he had an awakening. And that awakening was that he could not remember ever feeling a moment of true joy in his life. He’d only felt obligation and duty and a need, he thought, to be seen as someone who was a talented heart surgeon, sought after for his abilities and rich. He realized that that was what he’d been programmed from birth to attain. But then in one watershed moment, he had a moment of clarity that shocked him. He realized he’d never wanted to be a doctor. He’d wanted to be a teacher in a small town and live a very modest but happy life, and he’d forgotten that until that moment. He said it felt like he was waking up from a dream when he realized that being rich and sought after were not his personal values and they never were but he agreed on some level to pretend they were his values so his parents would love him. He was, in fact, a very reflective man whose heart – pun intended – wasn’t in his cardiac career. In fact, his heart wasn’t in anything and when the realization of never feeling a genuine and sustained sense of joy ever in his life hit him, it nailed him so hard that he broke out of his catatonic state and doubled over and began to cry and howl and heave and he couldn’t stop. His wife found him and didn’t know what to do so she called his parents and they rushed over. When the father became verbally abusive, his son lashed out and poured out all the decades of buried pain and rejection he’d stuffed inside him for his entire life. At one point the father threatened to institutionalize him and that’s when he packed a small suitcase, grabbed his wallet, phone and keys and left. In the days following, he was accused of everything you can imagine. Losing his mind. Cheating on his wife. A secret drug addiction. Nobody ever came close to his real issue. And that’s because they had helped contribute to those issues and they could not see past their own need to be right and justified. So he took a sabbatical for eighteen months where he traveled on the cheap and did his own “Eat, Pray, Love” thing until he attended a natural healing conference where he learned about heart coherence and something called Heartmath and it drew him instantly. It resonated deeply and eventually, he made this connection which I think was elegant and that was that he wasn’t meant to be a heart surgeon but he was meant to teach other people about the power of the emotional heart and how to regulate and tap into that power. And when he realized that, he said he felt his first genuine moment of joy. And that, to him, was an indicator of being on the right path, even though he had no idea where that path was going to lead him. I met him one month before his sabbatical was officially over and he’d gotten his health pretty back, lost all the weight he’d gained and was enjoying his life. But he had to make a decision, he told me, as to whether he would go back to where he lived and teach cardiac medicine to up and coming surgeons or develop centers around the world that integrated Heartmath techniques and other mind/body principles while also teaching these principles to students of the healing arts. I wish I could tell you which one he chose but he had to leave a day early from the conference we were attending and I like to think the reason he had to prematurely leave was because he was looking at property in some rural enclave where he could build his first healing center. 

The next example I’ll title, “It All Started With A Hat.” This one is about a woman I knew prior to her awakening and then throughout her breakthrough and the explosions that followed. I first met her when she was fifty years old and she was married and had adult children. She’d come from a very religious household growing up and while she didn’t marry a religious man or promote the religion with her children, she carried on the dutiful belief systems that she grew up learning, regarding being a good wife and mother and she took it very seriously. Her family was her life. I remember every time we saw each other how well put together and very conservative she looked, how stable and reliable she was and how truly dedicated she was to her family. But I also sensed that she was on autopilot. Kind of a congenial Stepford Wife vibe. She could keep a conversation going but it was always about surface subjects that never went too deep. About two years later when she had just celebrated her fifty-second birthday – see? I pay attention to this stuff – she called me out of the blue and sounded very unsettled. She said she was reading Dr. Clarissa Estés’ 1992 book Women Who Run With the Wolves which discusses in detail the “Wild Woman Archetype.” She’d always looked at herself as the Mother Archetype and always referred to herself as “the Mama Bear.” So reading about the Wild Woman archetype and how it resonated with her made her very uncomfortable because she was questioning things that she’d never thought needed to be questioned and the more she questioned, the more questions she had. I think we talked over two hours that day and there was this unbridled passion that I’d never heard in her before and a growing sense that she was tapping into something she couldn’t yet articulate but couldn’t stop thinking about. 

She also mentioned during that conversation that she’d bought an old felt cowboy hat at the secondhand store and when she tried it on at the store, and looked in the mirror, she said she felt as if she was looking back at her “real self”. And she had no idea what that even meant. It terrified her but it also intrigued her. Apparently, this hat was in pretty bad shape. It had stains on it and the lining was torn but she didn’t care. The problem was that her family did care and told her she looked silly in it and would make fun of it. But that didn’t matter, she told me, and she wore that hat all the time. She sent me a photo of herself wearing it and I absolutely saw a totally different vibe coming off her. It was a kind of combination of hippie chick meets cowgirl meets poet. 

The next conversation we had was not a happy one. She called me two months later to tell me she’d learned her husband of thirty years had been cheating on her. Obviously, she was devastated but she was also very angry because she was told by her older sister to not talk about it to anyone and to forgive him and move on. But she couldn’t do it and she told me that something in her was about to explode. Her exact words were: “I feel like a thousand vultures are going to erupt out of me and devour everything that is dead inside me.” I was really taken by her ability to create that vivid imagery and told her to write it down and asked if she’d ever thought of being a writer or poet and she told me that she actually had wanted to be a writer when she was a child but it wasn’t a profession that her family encouraged. She also wanted to be a painter but that was also nixed.

I didn’t hear from her for a few months and then I got a call from her husband one day who was panic stricken. He told me he walked into the house after work two days before to find her sitting in a chair, wearing “that stupid hat,” as he called it, a leather jacket, t-shirt, torn jeans and cowboy boots he’d never seen her wearing. Next to her was a large suitcase and two duffel bags and she said she was leaving him for someone else. And when he asked who the someone else was. She said, “I’m leaving you for me.” The first thing I thought about was wasn’t that the name of a country music in the 90’s? And the second thing I thought was Oh my God, she was right. A thousand vultures indeed DID erupt and ate up what was dead inside of her. And apparently spit out a leather jacket, torn jeans and cowboy boots. What followed was nothing short of watching one of the most destructive, deconstructions of a human being. She finally called me after a couple weeks and spilled the tea. But I should say she spilled the whiskey because she’d taken up drinking whiskey. She was nomadic, living out of her pick up that had a camper shell on it. At the age of fifty-two, she told me she’d just tried pot for the first time and she hadn’t laughed that hard at nothing funny for a long time. She’d spent a long weekend at a nudists’ resort where she tried nude yoga. She’d also purchased her first firearm, a 9mm Glock, for personal protection since she was a woman alone out in the world. So she was checking allthe boxes of someone who was actively disentangling her old self from herself. She went from the most vanilla, demure woman to a whiskey drinking, nude nomad who loved getting high and shooting her gun. And it just got more interesting from there. 

She took up painting and she sent me a bunch of photos of her work. They were all spectacular and beautifully done. They were also all highly erotic and focused exclusively on the female anatomy. And they weren’t gratuitous at all. In fact, the first time you glanced at them they looked like modern art. But then you saw what you thought was a cave and then you realized, oh wait…that’s not a cave. But all kidding aside, she was incredibly talented and I could see this explosion of all this suppressed sexual energy erupting out of her. She had incredibly passion underneath all that boring, little mouse type veneer. The cool part was that she was able to sell her erotic paintings for a good price and that’s how she supported herself as she drove around the country. 

But as interesting as that is to hear and reflect on, there was a dark side to her deconstruction. There were times when she was driving through Colorado and she’d call and ask to come over and we’d talk for several hours. Actually, we didn’t talk. She talked. And she was manic during most of it. Most people would say, “That’s not an awakening. She’s having a psychotic break.” And my response to that would be “awakenings can often masquerade as psychotic breaks” as long as it doesn’t go on for a long period of time before consciously subduing your newfound ecstasy. I did everything I could to try and calm her down and she wasn’t hearing any of it. So I just listened for three long hours while she told me that she felt like she’d been asleep until just recently. And when she read about the wild woman archetype it triggered something deep inside her she couldn’t explain and then when she put the felt hat on, she shifted the second she looked in the mirror. And she remembered who she was. And it wasn’t who they all thought she was. And she didn’t want to subdue herself anymore to let another person shine. She wanted to be seen and heard and felt and remembered. And three days later, she was seen, heard and felt and remembered for being put on a 5150 mental health hold in Portland, Oregon and you have to be leaning pretty hard on the pedal of being mentally unhinged for anyone in Portland, Oregon to really notice. You gotta be seen as either a danger to yourself or someone else for them to fill out any paperwork. We lost touch for about two years but she did check in eventually to say she’d settled down in a small town and had an online business and she was still painting. She was calmer but still unsettled but at least she wasn’t manic anymore and she could hear. But more importantly, she listened. And she admitted just went off the deep end and was still in the thick of it but was able to bring herself up occasionally from the darkness and have massive clarity. I told her to send me a photo of herself and there she was but without the hat. I asked her what happened to her hat and she said it was packed away somewhere. And I thought, huh. She doesn’t have to wear the hat anymore in order to embody who she’s becoming. It did its job and now it gets to rest in a box. 

I think you can sense the similarities in the three stories I told today. Being asleep is a common denominator and purposely woven into the concept of transformation because to have an awakening, you have to “wake up from slumber.” Within that wake up, there’s a rush of ‘I remember who I really am or wanted to be” theme. But there is also a massive clarity that is like no other clarity you’ve ever experienced. A ‘knowing’ that you are doing what you are supposed to do, that you have no choice and that even though you have no idea what you’re doing or how you’re supposed to go about it, you are willing to do what it takes because you can’t go back to the old life you’ve been living. And that’s the juice that fuels you. And it gives you the courage to do things you never thought you were capable of doing. And that same awakening stuns and startles and makes one often look “crazy,” “wild” or “unhinged”. So there is a short period of mania, instability or rebellious behavior. But then, all that eventually settles down and what is left is the reality that you are by yourself and you have to navigate a path that you don’t recognize but want to travel down. What follows is isolation from life and family and friends, often by physical distance. There is the predictable loss of people permanently from your life and accepting it like you never thought you could. There can be glimpses of one’s buried talents during this time. There can be a willingness to experience yourself outside the boundaries of what you have maintained for yourself. Through each of those experiences, you discover another aspect of yourself you never knew existed and it terrifies but draws you in simultaneously. You want to learn more. You want to dive deeper and deeper then the fog descends but you keep diving and then you realize you dove so far that all you see is darkness. And you hang in that terrifying place for a period of time until you learn to trust in what you cannot see but now know exists and when you’re ready, you find the rope that was always there and you climb up and out of that hole and into a brilliant clarity. But this is not the same clarity experienced at first from the shock of the awakening, but rather, it is a gift bestowed to you from agreeing to finally feel and release the pain and suffering and that experience is what produces the sparkling clarity. You gave yourself that gift and while the entire experience rocked your world to its core, you’d never dream of returning that gift and going back to sleep.  

That’s all for this week. Thank you for choosing to listen to this show. If you like what you hear, share this podcast with others and follow me. Check out the notes for this episode where you’ll see the links to find me on Instagram and X @laureldewey or thealchemyofnaturalhealing. On all the show notes, I’ve included the companies I personally support and have helped me in my own healing process, so please check that out. And there are coupon codes. Looking forward to you joining me next week when we’ll talk about how the alchemical journey is very much like a story and it follows very specific patterns that all stories have. New episodes drop every Saturday. Until then, remember that “Awareness is a demanding mistress. Once she wakes you up, she won’t let you go back to sleep.”