Over the course of the summer I decided to embark on a challenging path with the end goal of quitting smoking. I asked my ex-smoking friends on Facebook how they managed to quit nicotine for good and received a lot of standard solutions – may of which I have tried in the past. There was one suggestion that stood out – something I had not tried. One of my friends suggested Ayahuasca ceremonies and working with a shaman.

I have long known my smoking habit was more than a physical addiction. A previous Ayahuasca ceremony had taught me my smoking and the physical weight I had carried for eight years were unconscious shields I used to separate me from intimacy. I have been aware of my commitment phobic tendencies for a long time – but I had always blamed bad dating experiences or my own pickiness for that isolation. It hadn’t really occurred to me to look much further back.

I realized the only way to truly conquer that formidable obstacle was to dredge up all the subconscious emotional crap wrapped around smoking and finally lay those demons to rest.

At first the process seemed easy but then as time progressed I discovered there was more crap behind the crap. It was like peeling rotten layers off an onion and discovering more layers of rot behind it. Each emerging issue seemed to be connected to another issue behind it. I discovered so many of my adult issues started at the same root. That root was the moment in my life where I was placed in a foster home as a three year old.

I barely remember the foster home other than a twelve year old girl named Theresa who used to always hit me, a dog named Sadie whom I liked to feed, Sesame Street, and lots of reading and colouring. My little brother was there as well – but I oddly have few recollections of interacting with him during that time period. Although we lived in the same place it was like we lived in separate worlds. That separate world dynamic also continued to his eventual death.

When I look back on that period with adult eyes I can only imagine how terrified and confused three year old me felt in my first days in the home. At that age my mother would have been the center of my universe. My one true love. The source of my survival and soother of my insecurities. She was my everything and suddenly she was gone – and I didn’t understand why.  I can only imagine how I must have cried for her return – completely unequipped for processing her disappearance.

Back in those days smoking was commonly done indoors with no concern about second hand smoke. The smell of smoke coming under my bedroom door may have been soothing – giving me the illusion that my mom may be near. To this day smoking still has a soothing aspect to it.

I was five years old when my mother regained custody of me. Mom said I was afraid and resistant when she came to pick me up. I cried and shied away from her. Our bond had been broken and I was distrustful of her. From that point on – until her death we had a complicated often estranged relationship.

My mom never told me the whole story about why I ended up in the foster home. The only thing she said was my fathers mother lied to the judge by saying my mom had a prescription drug problem. She made it sound like it was some great injustice that had no foundation – yet by my teens I was very aware that she had a problem with prescription drugs. She mixed them with alcohol and it frequently contributed to our stormy relationship.

So how on earth did our lives gain the attention of the courts to begin with? What triggered this intervention?

I was too young for true critical thinking at the time I asked Mom about the foster home so I took her explanation at face value, never pried for more details, and simply filed what little I knew as an inconsequential part of my life story. I had no idea how it was impacting me and setting a tone for my life. Now that all the characters of that story are dead I find myself as a middle aged woman questioning the story and trying to connect the dots between what I witnessed and the snipppets of stories I remember from my mother.

One day while working with an amazing shaman, Angela Prider, a story finally came together….

I remember one day as a small child visiting my mom in the hospital. I can still see in my minds eye the white leather shoes I wore. They had bells on them and I was fascinated by the way they jingled when I ran. My  mother usually made me wear them as a means of keeping track of where I had disappeared to – as I guess I often did. Everything looked so large. The bed my mom was laying in loomed high over my head. When I was lifted up to see her I remember being confused about the bandages on her hand. Later in life she told me she had had surgery on her hand. For the rest of her life she was unable to bend one of her fingers. The tendon in it had been severed and beyond repair.

Here’s the story behind the surgery:

My father has talked her into doing LSD. At some point in her trip she looked at my little brother in his crib and hallucinated that his skin was gone. He was just veins, tendons, and muscles. This vision freaked her out so bad she clenched the glass in her hand to the point of breaking – thus slicing her hand in many places.

Obviously this event required a trip to the emergency unit at the hospital – and outsiders have to be called into the situation. One of two things must have happened. Either my grandmother was called to care for my brother and I while my parents went to ER to deal with my mothers severely cut hand or the two of us were packed up and brought to the hospital with them. I suspect the latter scenario happened. Regardless of which scenario happened my parents were ultimately exposed as people who did serious drugs in the presence of their children – therefore unfit. The hospital would have been morally and legally bound to alert the authorities.

This also where my mothers pharmaceutical addiction started. This is probably where she discovered pain killers as an escape from not only physical pain – but also the deep emotional pain that forever ran in the background of her consciousness.

Even when Mom physically returned to my life,  her frequent escapes from her constant pain prevented her from providing the unwavering presence needed by the little humans she was raising.

Hurt people hurt other people.

I myself was filled with subconscious pain running in the background of my mind. Kind of like a computer virus running in the background of my cerebral CPU. On the surface I seemed normal – even somewhat successful in many areas of my life but underneath that surface was a subtle disconnect from others that prevented me from connecting deeply with others in the same way a normally functioning person might. Yes that disconnect has hurt people I love in the past.

I decided I didn’t want to be this way anymore. The most powerful transformations seem to happen when I travel with intention so I have decided to do another  soul pilgrimage. My destination: The ancient Mayan city of Palenque in the state of Chiapis, Mexico. My plan was to find a shaman, do a peyote ceremony, and symbolically leave my pain in the jungle.