How to Stop Being So Hard On Yourself

When you have chronic pain and symptoms, you live a double life. There’s what people saw on the outside: A fearless girl following her heart, living the dream, spiritually attuned. In a soulmate relationship. Who had started a psychedelic coaching business in the middle of Covid and was leading transformational retreats. I had escaped the system and was thriving. And I was helping other people find their way home too.

All that was true. AND…

What was actually happening on the inside: I was riddled with mystery symptoms. Chronic and escalating back pain, unable to sit or stand for very long, muscle spasms, heart palpitations, IBS, chronic bloating and pain, insomnia, neck pain, foot pain, numbness and tingling on my left side, sciatica in both legs, food sensitivities, binge eating, insomnia, and crippling anxiety. I had PTSD from working for an abusive shamanic healer. And the cherry on top: depression and total retreat into myself, because living like this is exhausting and makes your life really, really small. It makes you not trust your body or your emotions or your mind. Everything hurts, all the time. It steals your joy and your presence and your time and your money. And no one else can see it.

It took me years to unravel the link between my brutal inner critic and my chronic pain. I simply didn’t have the consciousness or awareness to see it. Yes, I found plant medicine and immersed myself in building a new life. The pain was still there throughout, but quieter. I answered the call to service and became a coach and facilitator. And all the while, my pain came with me. It grew louder. It became part of my identity. And solving the pain became my #1 job in life.

Calling on the Medicines

At the height of Covid hysteria, I went to a mushroom retreat in Mexico. I had an intense healing experience next to the ocean, where I saw my maternal line sacrificing themselves for love. I saw the emotional labor of the women on both sides of my family. The way they gave and gave and suffered in silence. The way they coped by not needing or wanting anything. By putting everyone else first. I felt into their way of understanding love, and saw how I needed to change if I wanted to feel better.

I was shown how the self-sacrificial way of loving is incomplete. Not wrong, but just not the whole picture. How it creates enmeshment and codependency and enabling disguised as unconditional love. I saw the illness it created in our bodies. The roles our brothers and fathers and sons were playing, how this dynamic was harming them. Because they in turn were lost, unreliable, irresponsible adults who never grew up. Many of them suffering with addiction and lack of purpose and integrity. Because they had been severed from their emotional power and healthy masculine and feminine energies.

I heard the voices of my grandmothers and felt their ancestral pain. One grandmother was successful and abundant on the outside. But on the inside, living in a body ravaged by self-doubt and lack of self-love that manifested as alcoholism, extreme physical pain, chronic scarcity, rheumatoid arthritis, and stomach cancer.

Over giving and over functioning had put my other grandmother in a paralyzed state, unable to speak or take care of herself for 20 years following a series of strokes. A once vibrant, fun loving woman spent the last years of her life trapped in a body she couldn’t escape.

I saw this self-abandoning, people pleasing energy in me. I wept for the women. All the women. For my brother and father and cousins and uncles. I cried and wailed to the ocean and asked to be freed from this way of being. To heal the feminine energy in me that was out of balance. I was held by a beautiful male facilitator who helped me release this deep grief in ceremony.

I was finally able to see that I was the one creating my digestive issues through stress, worry, and perfectionism. I threw out my bag of supplements and starting eating all foods again. I stopped monitoring and analyzing myself and trying to follow some perfect path of eating, working out, and being spiritual. Over several weeks, the bloating and pain began to subside. I had absolute proof that I was creating my own illness.

And more pain and symptoms rose up to take its place.

Over the next three years, I tried everything. Physical therapy, diet changes, veganism, dry needling, massage, acupuncture, chiropractic, stretching, weight training, yoga, supplements, hormone healing, a nutritionist, blue light glasses, MDMA, LSD, breathwork, kratom, and mushrooms. I discovered John Sarno and TMS and Curable. Alan Gordon and Howard Schubiner and Nichole Sachs and Dan Buglio. Things were finally starting to click. I began to believe new things about where pain came from. I learned about neuroplastic pain. I stopped all medical and physical treatments. And I started watching my thoughts instead.

I finally went back to Ecuador for help from my master plant teachers, and from the family who taught me everything I know about healing. That retreat was so hard physically. I was in constant pain from sitting in hours long ceremonies and sweat lodges. I had to confront my physical limitations over and over. And then a lesson came through in an ayahuasca ceremony that changed my life forever.

My teacher Fernanda was singing. She’s a very powerful, amazing medicine woman. And she sings like a really special, unique bird. Her voice is like honey that soothes and salves. It’s magic.

I’m listening to her sing , hearing this angelic voice come into my body, and I start saying to myself, “Wow, you really are not a good singer. You need to learn more songs. You should be ashamed of your singing. It’s really embarrassing.”

Instead of being present and receiving the gift of Fernanda singing, the healing that she was offering to me with her voice, I just started making everything about me. This mind chatter is a distraction from what’s happening in the ceremony. It’s a blockade. It’s a wall that I put up. It’s telling me how terrible I am at everything.

Instead of being where I’m meant to be, which is fully engaged with what’s happening and receptive to the moment, I’m now having a referendum inside of my head on my own worth.

And just like that, the last puzzle piece of my mystery illness just popped into place. I realized, “Oh my God, I do this all the time. Not just in ceremony, but everywhere. I constantly compare myself to other people and tear myself down and I don’t listen.”

The Way Out

In that retreat, ayahuasca and San Pedro very clearly showed me that my inflammation, my suffering, and my pain were all coming from my intense disapproval of myself. From my inner criticism, my judgment, and my comparison. My savage inner critic was the root cause of all my physical issues, my addiction, and my suffering. And it was ingrained so deeply in me as a belief that there was something unlovable about me. I believed I didn’t deserve to be well. So I created illness. I believed I was broken, ugly, and fat. That I needed someone (a man) to choose me and love me. To make me lovable. And I was willing to sacrifice myself and abandon myself to be chosen. I hid inside myself under countless illnesses and an identity of suffering.

Those moments in ceremony radically changed my life. But they were only part of the story. Each step on my journey was crucial to the unwinding of these deeply ingrained ancestral patterns. Medicine work, self-inquiry, coaching, therapy, dance, meditation, integration. We need it all. Sometimes for a long time. Don’t get down on yourself if your journey is taking months or years or even decades. It took me years. But now, I’m participating. I’m loving myself through it.

Now, I am conscious of my self-criticism, and compassionate when I see it. I no longer choose to compare myself to others. And I can now say that I am chronic symptom and pain free. That doesn’t mean I never have a twinge or even a flare from time to time, but I am no longer dominated by a tyrant who lives in my head and tells me I suck. And when I do get a symptom popping up, it lasts a few hours or days instead of years. My body may always speak to me in pain and symptoms, but now I can listen to whispers with softness instead of fear and panic. I don’t need it to be so loud anymore.