Prison State & ChaIn[ge]
I worked to change myself by unchaining myself, working with my counselor in therapy sessions to undo beliefs that I held about myself, but I also worked with others to do energy healing that was definitely not something I had known about before being introduced to a wide variety of healing modalities and healers, including a shaman and a witch, which was very eye opening.
Over the course of my healing journey, I worked to heal my inner children, using the archetype of the wounded child to heal the myriad traumas in a type of meditative visualization that my mentor taught me:
My inner children, infancy to teenage, were imprisoned. Some were chained in prison cells with giant links secured to a set of giant padlocks with cuffs that wrapped round wrists, ankles, waists, chests, and throats.
Some had fractured from me and had to be brought back with soul retrievals – a part of me that flew away before the sexual abuse began and which was tied to purity and part of me, which was filled with rage in pure defensiveness at all who hurt me.
Other parts of myself had hidden away within my psyche and required me to understand them, their needs, their feelings – the memories and emotions that I had suppressed for so long. The visualization really helped me to get in touch with my deepest psyche. My inner five-year-old with these two very dark patches over her eyes crouched in a fetal-like position inside a tiny, dark, airless, room, secured behind a thick, wooden door where she felt safe. My inner nine year old, hissing and spitting, crouched like a feral cat with a pageboy haircut and clothes two sizes too big in my childhood bedroom. The red-faced infant me with a shock of jet black hair simply wailed, abandoned and alone, tightly bundled in a blanket. My ten year old with her painfully slim body and dark patch-covered eyes stood in abject shame and misery as her period ran down her legs and stained her clothing.
I comforted each child as I couldn’t comfort my adult self. I mothered my inner children, giving them what I didn’t receive when I was those ages – mentally envisioning holding, cuddling, rocking, or just setting them free and letting them be for the first time with no expectations. Giving each one what she needed with love before returning them to my psyche, I set them free in my inner meadow, which was a shamanic visualization of my inner psyche – my own inner sanctuary and garden, which expanded over time as new areas opened for me to explore and more awareness of myself filtered through.
This inner meadow was filled with sunlight, tall waving grasses, a giant rock and fallen tree for them to scamper and climb upon, and hundreds of butterflies. The teenagers held the youngest ones, and they all sang and danced and held hands with smiles on their faces and sunshine warming them. They were free from the dark, the dark patches peeled from their eyes so they could see themselves clearly, the hurts healed, and the emotions soothed. They were safe. They were joyful and they were free to just be.
Through this meditative exercise that I repeated many times, I healed many of the hurts to my pysche, beginning to rejoin the fractures with the gold of compassion and self-love, just like the Japanese art of Kintsukuroi.
Kintsukuroi is the Japanese art of rejoining the pieces of a broken object with gold. The object is made whole again and is regarded as more beautiful for having been broken and mended.
When we mend the broken parts of ourselves, we can see our beauty, a beauty that is richer and deeper because we understand what it is to go through being broken, we understand how to heal the brokenness, and we make ourselves whole again.
When I freed myself from my metaphorical prisons, broke the chains, I changed. I released my minds from old ways of subconsciously feeling, thinking, and believing about myself. I began to understand that I do deserve love, comfort, and compassion.
I knocked down those prisons, snapped the chains, and stepped into a freedom. I had begun to change my neurology and my biology.