Growing up amidst the vanishing meadows of Long Island, earth grief has deeply affected and shaped me as a person. I share a common story with many artists who moved to New York City in their mid-twenties; I arrived dewy-eyed, wide open, and had absolutely no defenses in place for the overwhelming nature of the city. Soon I developed crippling anxiety and sank deeply into a depression. I didn’t realize it at the time but I was engaging in a self-initiation.
A few words about this…With our culture devoid of traditional rites of passage that mark the beginning of adulthood, something I see again and again with clients—often in the back half of their twenties—at the end of adolescence many people find themselves mingling deeply amongst their own shadows. Without proper guidance to recognize this is a powerfully important—I would even use the word sacred—time to reflect and expand the depth and breadth of their being, it is alluring to dismiss the value of this experience and be convinced something is just wrong with the mind, “a chemical imbalance.” etc.. They take medications, drink and turn to drugs, all the while avoiding and suppressing the experience of their own darkness.
This was a sacred healing journey I embarked on, and it is pivotal to my understanding of myself and how to help others through dark times, whenever they arrive.
I have also walked with grief and addiction. When my father lay dying of cancer in a hospice on my thirtieth birthday, I was enrolled in my visual art MFA. After his death, the combination of the pressures of art school, an ocean of grief, and no guidance at all on what to do with it, I turned to alcohol as a way to both deal with the enormity of my emotions and also find connection in friendships. In my teens, I had unknowingly made the connection that substances allowed people (particularly men) to open up and be more vulnerable as friends. With this foundation of how I thought friendships and relationships were enhanced by being under the influence, and my enormous grief, I sunk far into a lonely and addictive dependency with alcohol. I also believed that my creativity—and my alone time—was enhanced and completed by marijuana; this winding together of my art practice with a reliance on substance was a source of great confusion and pain. My art suffered as did my wellbeing.
It was through my own personal excavations of myself (personal, ancestral, racial equity work) that I was able to begin to understand who I was and how I could be in relationship with a just world. This is a life-long process, and I continue to get new insights and downloads of how to help heal others through the ways I have been and continue to be confronted with my own ancestral / collective / personal wounds.
Through understanding my wounds I learned what my purpose was and my unique way of how I could help the world. I cherish having had gone through dark hours and faced myself—nothing but the lived experience could have offered me such an intimate relationship with my sadness and loneliness and shame—these are tender shadows that I now know how to nurture and hold dear. These are not easy times with culture and nature on the verge of collapse. The practices I have cultivated out of necessity are what keep me balanced and growing and learning; for life is always changing, it gets easy, it gets hard, and back again, the full-spectrum of human experience is what we signed up for.
As a clinician, I travel alongside my clients into their shadows, teach them to tend to them, walk with them in the dark and in the light so that they may learn how they can heal themselves and, in their unique way and in their own unique time, help heal the world.
