Humans of Steemit - An Interview With Heather on Healing, Ancestral Trauma, the Ailments of America, the Sun Dance and Grief Ritual, the Power of Fear, and Discovering Israel

"I am beginning to see that whatever healing you do with yourself will help the generations before and after you. And you can also inherit family trauma. So like if your family came from China, and there is a lot of shit that went down in China… And if your parents could not process or digest that, that will come to you. And so you will be sitting here and you are like “this is cool”. But your body is feeling like it’s in Communist China - I have no food, I am being persecuted, ect. And so that trauma may live in you. I have seen people processing slavery. Slavery has been “done” for 150 years but it does not matter because the cellular trauma is not done…it was intense."

Humans of Steemit Project

Hi friends! I am beginning a new project designed to share people's stories and market Steemit at the same time. It is called "Humans of Steemit" and was inspired after "Humans of New York". Here is the project:

I will walk up to strangers and ask if I can take their photograph and interview them. I will then tell them about Steemit and tell them that if they want, their interview can be posted on my blog on Steemit. If they are willing to do the interview, I will tell them about how Steemit works and offer to give them half of the Steem Dollars that I make from their interview post on two conditions. The first condition is that they make a Steemit account themselves. The second condition is that they share a link of their interview post with all of their friends on Facebook. I have created a Facebook account for Humans of Steemit in order for them to tag the page and verify that they did indeed share the link with their friends.

The main idea behind this is that users of Steemit will be introduced to some amazing life stories. Additionally, the people that I interview will be introduced to Steemit and hopefully share Steemit with hundreds of their friends via Facebook. I have created a facebook page at facebook.com/humansofsteemit. I will create a "teaser" post for each interview that I do, with a link directing people to the full post on Steemit.

The Interview

Me:
If you could give one piece of advice to a large group of people, what would your advice be?*

Heather:
My advice to a large group of people is to meditate every day for more than 20 minutes and just have some rigid form of self-reflection.

Me:
And what has been your process with meditation and self-reflection?

Heather:
It has been a huge part of my life. I was trained as an art therapist and I loved it but I found that there was this divide. There is this divide between psychology and analyzing of the mind and the spirit. And so I worked as an art therapist for a while and I loved it because I am an artist and I was into the arts. But I felt there was a spiritual element missing and I could always feel it in myself, but I did not know exactly how to access it.

When I was a little kid, I used to do ceremonies, like chanting over my dogs grave. I would wrap myself in turbans... And my parents, I grew up in a Jewish New York family, and they were like what the fuck… They were just looking at me, like where did this come from? So I was always tribal, but there was nothing around me to support that. And I kind of explored and I have travelled all over the world. I have been parts of all different kinds of ceremonies.

But one of the things that has helped me connect to my center, as a place to move from and really observe myself, has been meditation. And so I started meditation. And then moved from there and observed the sensations in my body. And the idea that every emotion or thought is actually connected first to a sensation. And so by observing that sensation and not reacting to it, you are then training yourself to do that in every situation. And so that was wonderful.

And from there I have expanded to include other forms. So it is really about looking at what is trapped in your body. And I think there is a level of looking outside of one’s self for answers or for stimulation or to fill the emptiness. And I think it is more like having a relationship with the emptiness rather than trying to make it it not be there.

Me:
Tell me about the time in your life when you felt the most lost.

Heather:
Oh my god that is all the time but…I am really not that good at controlling my world. But I would say…I separated from a partner that I had been extremely meshed with soul bonded. And when I pulled out of that, what I find happens is, just from my experience in relationships… is that certain people will just perfectly fit your family dynamics. And then they will begin to trigger things. It is almost like a key, and they unlock everything.

So all the feelings from my family were unlocked. My mom, and potentially my dad too, was pretty severely mentally ill and so all this stuff started coming up and I was like pretty much incapacitated. I literally did not get out of bed for a year. I just lay there. Went on all sorts of crazy medication.

And I literally had to crawl out of a hole that was so deep that I did not know that I was ever going to make it out. And that process of crawling out of that hole just strengthened me in a way that I cannot even describe. People can say anything to me and I am un-phased, because it just gave me that capacity and awareness. But yes, I did not get out of bed for a year, so that is pretty intense.

Me:
And what was your relationship with your parents when you were growing up?

Heather:
It was challenging, because mom was my primary caretaker and she was just highly emotionally unstable. Like mood disorders. Like, ‘I love you, you are the best daughter in the world’ to ‘I hate you get away from me’. You know, and I would be two years old and I would have to leave the house, and I did not know where to go.

So it was just highly unstable and I kind of never knew what was coming, and so I didn’t feel hugely safe. And as a result I developed very strong sort of fantasies, a spiritual connection you know… It had its good side to it, but in general it was not a super happy go lucky childhood.

Me:
Are you able to cycle your healing towards your parents or family members? Because I have a lot of friends who have gone through the healing work, but they are unable to connect with their family now because of that.

Heather:
Yes… I think it is tricky. So when I started out I felt it was not very safe to connect to my parents on a direct level, like on a human level. And so what I started to do, I worked with a healer who really encourage me to connect with their higher selves. You know because there is a part of all of us that are perfect and whole, and know the right thing to do and the right thing to say. And then there is sort of the personality level where it is like you. I spent a lot of time communicating and working with their higher selves, because I found their kind of everyday selves to be so destructive and damaging.

The other thing is I had a friend, and I was having a lot of trouble with something. And I told my friend, she is like “Heather, I know that it sounds crazy but I did this and it really helped me disconnect from my mom”. And she had been given up for adoption. I mean like really crazy stuff. So she is like, “I did this MDMA journey and I did it with intention. I did it in a ceremonial sense”. And she is like, “I went back…” Because what MDMA does is it gives you a feeling of safety and peace in the world. And so when you mentally and emotionally go back to a trauma, your body does not respond in the same way it would if you were not on MDMA. It allows you to sort of drop into certain places and almost redo them. And so I would picture these scenes that happened in my childhood that were horrendous. And then I would picture something changing. Either like an angel would be coming in and helping. Or my dad would all of a sudden be completely different than he normally was. And he would be his higher self and he would come in and save me. So I kind of re-did that, and that was huge. And I am not a super huge drug person, I am not smoking pot all the time. But in certain situations, I do believe that altered states can be really helpful. I think ayahuasca can be really helpful. If it is focused, if you have intention, if you have someone holding space. So that was hugely helpful for me.

And I think there are stages depending on how abusive or challenging your parents were. There are stages of understanding. And as I am learning more about healing too, I am beginning to see that whatever healing you do with yourself, will help the generations before and after you. And you can also inherit family trauma. So like if your family came from China, and there is a lot of shit that went down in China… And if your parents could not process or digest that, that will come to you. And so you will be sitting here and you are like “this is cool”. But your body is feeling like it’s in Communist China - I have no food, I am being persecuted, ect. And so that trauma may live in you. I have seen people processing slavery. Slavery has been “done” for 150 years but it does not matter because the cellular trauma is not done…it was intense.

Me:
You mentioned that you were an art therapist. And you said that there is kind of disconnect between the psychology world and spirituality. And I am wondering how you find your place in the United States?

Heather:
It is very challenging to be honest, I do not feel super comfortable in the United States. I feel there is a certain superficiality and materialism that permeates in this way that feels oppressive to me. My guess is that I am probably not going to be living full-time in the U.S. ever in my life-time. But the way that I deal with it personally is that I have handpicked people in my life. And I have to say over 50% of the people in my life are from other countries and English is not their first language. Because that is what I am naturally drawn to. And the other thing is just again finding a spiritual community. That really helps.

And you know it makes me want to cry. Our country is missing so much and you can see why people are super depressed and super anxious. It seems very obvious if you just look around. And it is funny because I was in Kenya and I was like, ‘So does anyone have cancer here?’. And they were like, “Cancer? That is a rich person’s disease, no one has cancer here”. All of a sudden my world was just like, ‘oh...’

Me:
Would you be willing to share about a couple of your rituals that you have taken a part in?

Heather:
The grief ritual is so good… oh my god it is so beautiful, I recommend it to anyone. The way she had it setup is she had different alters. And each alter represented something. So there was a grief alter and there was an ancestral alter. And she had this line and said, “No one can cross this line, this is toxic”. And literally she was going to bury it. She was going to do something with it. And it was so serious, and when you went to grieve, you would put your hand up like I am going to freak out, and someone would immediately go with you and they would just sit behind you. Their only job was to be there for you if you needed something.

So you would be like cradling this person sobbing. You didn’t even know why they were crying and you realized that does not even matter. It was just like an endless pool of grief in the world and you were just setting it through. And it was just so powerful so amazing.

Oh and then I went to a sun dance ritual, that was the most amazing. Oh my god that was by far the most powerful. So the Native American Lakota tribe does this ritual. And the way it works is, they cut down a tree and they put it in the ground and they pull ropes from it, and then with fishing hooks they attach the sun dancers. And the sun dancers are pretty much willing to suffer and to draw blood to appease the spirits, so that they will be gentle on everyone else. And so I was like, oh that is a cool idea. And oh my god when I was there…

I could see the energy of god knows what through the tree and over the wires and then through the sun dancers. And then they were each beaming something as if they were acting as a portal for the spiritual energy to come through. And I saw it. I saw my death, I saw my partner’s death. I saw crazy things. I was not on any drugs yet I was fully hallucinating. There is no doubt in my mind that there are spirits, there are ancestors there are benevolent, there is all sorts of shit going on that I don’t understand. But it is very real and it is so unfortunate that our culture is so limited, because as far as I know like 94% of our universe is invisible to the human eye or to our senses.

Me:
You touched on the subject of fear. Do you have a biggest fear in your life?

Heather:
My biggest fear is being abandoned. And so I don’t know whether it is a past life thing. Or if was from having a mentally ill parent being with me and then leaving me over and over again, multiple times per day. And so I think that the fear actually runs so much of how I react in my everyday life. And I have been praying for guidance and healing of how can I release this. Because I don’t want my life to be ultimately on a low level governed by fear. And I think when you sink deep within, you start to see all these kinds of wasteful motivations that are running you, these subconscious motivations. Then there is this huge motivation to do something. And what I have found to help is healing work, whether it is therapy, whether it is meditation.

Me:
And you mentioned that you traveled a lot, what was one of your greatest life changing journeys that you have had?

Heather:
You know amazingly my favorite trip was to Israel. I had a boyfriend there, and you know I am a Jewish person, but I have lived in America. I felt no particular connection to Judaism or Jewish people ever in my whole entire life, like no interest. And I went to Israel because he was there, and when I was there I suddenly was like oh my god, people look like me, they act like me, they talk like me. It was so shocking, I can’t describe the feeling in my body. It was not a religious thing, I do not feel hugely connected to Jewish religion or spirituality. But the culture it is very direct, it is very like kind of in your face, very aggressive.

And I believe I love that it is just out in the open, and I find American west coast culture to be passive-aggressive. Where everybody is smiling and nice to your face and then they want to kill you. So I like the element of direct, in your face. If you are angry you say so and then you just let it go. You are not going to hold a lot of resentment inside.

Me:
Can you point to the last moment in your life when you were completely in bliss?

Heather:
I was just with my ex-boyfriend in Israel and we had this moment of profound seeing and connection. I think for me it is that profound recognition of another soul, and openness. When you do not feel fear, and you do not feel anything in the way. It was really really beautiful.