Potential Trigger warnings - childhood sexual abuse, trauma.
I just passed the anniversary of my childhood sexual abuse memories coming back. As it was last year, this year brought another layer of memories and trauma remnants I had to sift through. There’s been an awareness that’s awoken within me as I’ve peeled the layers back. As that awareness has grown, the more I’ve felt the uneasiness and shifting that happens as I confront the toxic pain within me.
I am becoming more and more convinced that the longer you hold on to, or continue perpetuating the generational cycles of trauma every person holds, the more sick and more “messed up” you’ll become. This is not an option for me. I am doing everything I can in the present moment to shed and release and end the cycles of abuse and trauma. It is nothing anyone else can do for me. It has to be my decision and my choice to step into the tangled up mess.
I’ve known for a while that a massive shifting was coming and I knew this week would bring it. I’ve been gearing up for the shift and I knew it would be a difficult battle – but a battle I would win as long as I willingly entered the fray. I felt things starting to move over this past weekend and two nights ago it reached its peak. I still have one more significant thing to move, but what I did two nights ago was absolutely incredibly healing.
I chose the bath, as I don’t have any other body of water to use as a medium, and settled in to face what was coming. I chose to use a vehicle of Dragon Shakti Breathwork to allow for me to enter that transcended realm so I could do the work I needed to do. It didn’t take long to drop in, but I remember having a moment of “do you really want to do this? You are passing the threshold and there will be no turning back.” My immediate response was a resounding YES. I have learned that to hesitate, to allow things to stew, is how things are not processed or released.
The journey I was embarking on was a soul retrieval ritual. I was stepping outside of time and traveling to the aftermath of having been sexual abused as a 4 year old. I knew a piece, a rather large piece, of my soul has been ripped from me and left there. I have felt her missing and have felt lost and disconnected and split within myself. The more aware I become of my own spirit and the way it is intertwined with the magick around us, the more I’ve felt that massive missing piece.
Spirit and my ancestors and their magick was with me, pushing me forward, and guiding me to where I needed to go. I was going in to battle and it was a fight I was willing to face. It took but a moment to find her and enter that moment. She was sunk in the corner of the room I remembered, curled in on herself, lost and broken. We have spoken before when the memories first broke through two years ago. But this meeting was for the purpose of bringing her home and restoring our soul. I held her in my arms and sobbed over our pain and the destruction that happened in that moment. I cannot go into details of everything we talked about or what she told me, but when I asked if she would come back with me and help me restore our soul, she said yes with two conditions. She released her hold on that place and returned with me to this current place in time. She has brought such a sense of joyous wonderment and has restored joy within me that has been lost for a very very long time.
One of the conditions she gave me was that I forgive the man who had done this to us. I have struggled with the entire concept of forgiveness for the past decade. That word and action was used to manipulate and guilt me as a child. My ex-father, yes the man who sexually abused me, would yell at us with those demon possessed eyes on the way to church, demanding forgiveness. Forgiveness was a hall pass. If someone said “I forgive you” then there was no responsibility taken for what was done. It was the clean slate without having to change behavior.
But my heart has been shifting towards that word lately. One of the things I need to be able to do as I go through this Shamanic initiation is to forgive and bless those who seek to harm me. It’s seeing and acknowledging the human and the pain others hold. Forgiving my father for what he did to me is one thing, forgiving my mother is another and one I will have to approach at another time when I am ready to finish facing that massive wound.
I exited the bathtub feeling deeply released and feeling a new sense of life within me. I felt for the first time that I could truly forgive the man who wrecked so much havoc on my life. My younger self had already given me the words so I gathered up my cauldron, a piece of clean paper and a pencil with the crystals I had used during the soul retrieval.
the note I wrote 
I Forgive You Sigil 
watching the paper burn with some rose petals, star anise, and dragon’s blood oil
This forgiveness does not mean that I will be allowing this man back into my life. This forgiveness means that I see and acknowledge his own wounds and it was through those wounds that he harmed me. I created the sigil you see above as a further releasing and way to add more power to my forgiveness. I do forgive my father for the damage he caused to me. I forgive him for ripping me to shreds. I forgive him for acting out his own pain on me. I do sincerely hope that maybe one day he can forgive himself.
As I watched the paper burn and watched that sigil disappear in flames and smoke, I knew it was done. A weight has been lifted and it is done.
Profligate Truth 