Let us not forget our gratitude:

On new year's eve 2021, I was supposed to be in France, bringing in the year with a long time friend who had moved there a little over four years ago. When my ticket got canceled, I serendipitously received a call from the Massachusetts Vipassana Center explaining that a spot had opened up on their waitlist for me to join the 10-day silent meditation course. Initially I was ecstatic, and my impulsive self said “yes” right away. But then I sat with it, asking a more still version of myself “Is this really a time to go inward, yet again?” The answer became a clear “no”.

I have been engaging in meditation, mindfulness, zen, buddhism and various other forms of spiritual practices since I was 19. To this day I can still credit discovering yoga at the age of 17 to what nearly saved my life from two years of participating in, and working around, the NYC nightlife scene ranging from all-night partying to trialing working at Score’s gentlemens club. Therefore, at 19, as a form of makeshift rehab, I dove deep into the practice of yoga. Within a year I managed to donate my eggs to a fertility clinic and was off to India for 6-months, in pursuit of a combination of school, yogic studies, and a month of morning kriya rituals to purge, cleanse, and find meaning for my 20-year-old soul.

From that point on I traversed both superficially and deeply into all the various forms of psycho-spiritual practices that I could gain access to. Moving from one vipassana to the next, from monastery-to-monastery, from meditation workshops to zen sesshin, all in an effort to return to an experience of wholeness, contentment and love that, at the time, I was unable to find in the same potency elsewhere.  

I began teaching yoga at 20 because of how profoundly it affected me. I taught from the deep desire to give back what was gifted to me by the numerous teachers and books I learned from and under. My teaching was a way to pay homage to the first yoga instructor I had experienced in 2006 at a gym in Astoria Queens. It was there that my teacher Teresa would lit incense for us during our 6am class in an “incense free” gym zone. The olfactory experience, along with her dedication to sharing the Sutras and the philosophy of the practice, is what kept my untethered spirit returning. Even if I didn’t quite make it to bed that night, I would still somehow make it to her yoga class, grounding my overly activated nervous system through a combination of breath, movement, and an environment that supported stillness. 

This was all in my early 20’s. I’m older now. Nearly creeping into my mid-30s,  yet still anxiously hanging tight to the “early 30’s range”.  Since these earlier years, lots has changed and life has been full of crazy joys, explorations, love, extreme hardship and a decent dose of suffering. In short, the human experience. The decade plus since leaving India I was fortunate enough to do formal studies in Ayurveda and Western Herbalism, while continuing to teach yoga throughout the states including New York, Washington DC, as well as northern and  southern California. The California life-style took me on all the forms of alternative medicine paths that our culture is becoming increasingly more familiar with including medicinal animals, plants, and entheogenic ceremonials ranging from Kamobo, Sanaga, Ayusacha, Rapé, MDA meditations, Psilocybin journeys, San Pedro, Cacao among more.

I ended up living in Hawaii briefly where, alongside killing my first chicken for food I also processed medicinal cactus, drinking the medicine on a 500-acre farm with intimate friends. The journeys go on including years of travel, working in Argentine, interning at the Smithsonian, studying in Italy and Spain, Burning Man after Burning Man, working as a food carny up and down the east coast festival circuit, exploring various polyamous communities, directing large-scale performances, and having a solid career as a professional circus artist taking me to Boulder, Colorado for 9-months, following coaching at the San Francisco circus center, performing at Kink.com, along with making it through an invite-only Las Vegas Cirque du Soleil audition to become a part of their database of performers.

At 27, the age that launches one into the ripe and tumultuous years of what people in astrological circles know as “the Saturn Return”, my career and life took a 180. After years of being an aerialist, and admittedly trying to do too much too soon, I endured more head injuries than my ten-digits can bear the burden of. The world that I “knew” had crumbled. All while the world that I had come to “know” in my early 20’s—from my years of meditation and exploration of self—continued to stay the same, catching me through the perils and discomforts that were experienced in my physical realm. 

At this point, career-less and having a long-term domestic romantic partnership rapidly dissolving, I had to decide what was next. Throughout my life I was continuously teetering back and forth between the paths of being a yoga teacher and medicine woman, to that of wanting to be a writer or an academic in the deep desire to share stories, something that had always had a transformational effect on my life personally.

I found an alternative Graduate school in San Francisco, called the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). It seemed like the perfect fit as I could receive a Masters degree while engaging in Whilmoff psychedelic breath practices and conversations around transpersonal development. However, my brain was still fragile and my spirit ended up craving to be around the nurturing energy of plants and, again, more stillness.Therefore, I transferred from CIIS  to the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine to embark on the journey of becoming a Licensed Acupuncturist. I laugh now at how ignorant I was to think that a medical degree as an acupuncture clinician would be any less work than a more conventional Masters degree.

The school took me 4.5 years to finish, not because I went part-time, but because I transferred twice. The first transfer was when I returned to New York to be closer to my family while I was on my initial leg of my healing from my head injuries. The second transfer, after being bitten by the bug of Dr. Joe Dispenza's work, was to our college’s campus in San Diego, California, in the pursuit to heal my brain by changing my environment to rewire my nervous system. The more I reflect on this stage of life, I see now that it was not so differ from my earlier explorations from when I was 19. Where during this earlier era I was looking to broaden my awareness while simultaneously comforting my nervous system through esoteric practices, in my late 20’s I was on the relentless journey to heal an injury that no medical practitioner or treatment could quite get a handle on, leaving me to return to the energy practices that I had cultivated early on. Practices that lead me to believe that there was a healing potential beyond what modern medicine has taught. I needed this desperately, as I needed a sense of hope. Since anyone that has familiarity with the literature of head injuries to the amount that I did know that the odds were not in my favor. I clung to hope, I clung to new potentials, and I clung to the esoteric.

It was through the M.S in Acupuncture that I healed my brain. I am not saying that acupuncture is what healed it, although being in environments among like-minded empaths certainly helped, along with my expanding awareness of the body, the energy meridians, and the enormous capacity that the body has to heal itself. However, it was really through discovering  a combination of my own energy work and those that I surrounded myself with were the antidote to my relentless pursuit to heal. 

During the first two years of my injury I didn’t sleep. This is not an exaggeration. It took me nearly 2-2.5 years to find slumber again. I would hold myself every night, attempting to love my body to sleep. Holding it, cradling it, and whispering “I love you, I love you, you can sleep now”. I was somehow able to stay in my graduate program even without sleep. Although many were shocked at the time, I now realize that it was the studying that allowed me to stay well, as it not only gave a sense of purpose and belonging, but it was also the potent teachings of Chinese Medicine, as well as showing up for others, that allowed for me to supersede my own physical discomfort throughout those first 2.5 years. 

When one is in a desperate state to heal, or “get back to normalcy”, as I was, they are willing to run the circuit of options, exhausting time, money, and resources. I did all three. I explored Neurofeedback, Reiki, Cryotherapy, Hyperbaric Oxygen chambers, various energy healers, the “Healing Codes’ (by Dr. Alexander Lloyd), Cranial Sacral, Acupuncture, Medicinal plants and psychedelic mushrooms, daily chants of the Hawaiana song Ho'oponopono ( I love you, I'm sorry, please forgive me, thank you), among many (many) more.

However, I have to give credit where credit is due and it wasn’t until I found a combination of the right diet for my new brain, by way of the help of Dave Asprey’s podcast “Bullet Proof”, as well as tapping into fields of energy that were beyond my knowledge including doing a workshop with Dr. Joe Dispenza in Vegas, along with daily Qi Gong, and the cultivation of other’s transformational stories that provided the motivation to move beyond the need to heal and needing to feel better, and instead began to accept where I was, something I had begun to come to terms with the The Forum Workshops. It was upon this acceptance that I miraculously began to sleep again, as a result, getting increments of my “former self” back. 

This was a little over three years ago. There are still strong “no’s” that my body has most of the time, however, this oscillates depending if I am in a state of more or less stress. No sugar, no alcohol, no gluten, no processed food, no caffeine. I also have a hard “no’s” around nicotine and most dairies, but these were never really a part of my lifestyle.  It took a while to realize that not even honey or most fruits were acceptable for this new version of self.

Removing caffeine was the thing that really allowed for my “new normal”to return. There is so much hype around caffeine these days that, unfortunately, doesn’t take into account the subset of people with head injuries. Being that caffeine constricts blood flow to the brain— and being a brain that already has a decrease in blood flow from injuries—it was wreaking havoc on my system. The exact thing that I initially found as the “solution” to my sleepless nights was in fact perpetuating the very issue that I was attempting to resolve. It took getting into CAFFA, a fellowship for caffeine addicts, to really severe this habit. And from there my life got better, and continues to, slowly, day-by-day, with tons of forgiveness, love, and radical acceptance.

Now I am a Licensed acupuncturist as well as about to graduate from Columbia University with a second Masters in Oral History, finally finishing the leg of the journey that I had wanted to carry out when I was 27,  still teetering between the medicine world and being a writer and a bearer of stories. As I continue to believe that other’s stories are what saved me this second time around.

However, none of these experiences or degrees mean anything if I don't do something with them. It is for this reason that I realized upon receiving the call to the vipassana meditation center, that it was not a time to go inward, it was a time to share. Because the continuous pursuit to learn, acquire, achieve, and to “self develop” begins to become masibatory if there isn’t an extension of the offerings and experiences that are reaped by the individual. And if we don’t share our journey’s and tell our stories, who will?

Yes, I believe deeply in acupuncture, yes I believe deeply in meditation and energy practices, but more than anything, I believe in us, in humans, in our individual and collective experiences. I believe it has been through others sharing their stories with me, whether in person or via books, podcasts etc, that I was able to survive each difficult day from years of struggle.

Therefore, it was for this reason that I woke up on January 1st, 2022 and decided to share fragments of my experiences of my life and healing through my blog (for now), in hopes that my story, the stories that I will share of other’s I have met along the way, as well as the tools that I found that worked, can provide solace to those who might be seeking support in the way that I was for many years.

What I have shared thus far is about 10% of what I have experienced and another 10% of what I have to offer. In the upcoming year I will be submitting weekly blog posts on my website to go over all the dynamics that allowed for me to recover from head trauma, sleepless nights, endocrine issues, and central nervous system exhaustion. But most importantly what I will be sharing is my lived experience and my relationship to the world, along with the importance of pleasure and joy needed in one’s healing. 

Lastly, with everything I offer, let us not forget about the simplest, most affordable practice of all: gratitude. Gratitude for all of life's gifts, challenges, gratitude for difference and diversity, gratitude for various worlds that we have no awareness of and that we are humbly constantly learning from and through, and a deep gratitude for the life that we have been given. 

There were times for me that to go on another day was literally unbearable because the pain in my central nervous system was so loud, so difficult, so big. But when I was able to remind myself that I still had my fingers and my toes, along with other souls to smile at, I was able to get out of my own story and show up for the life that is omnipresent all around us, and ready to hold and support one another no matter what state we might be in. 

Therefore, in each of our journeys of growth let us not close the door on others. Because at the end of the day “we” are the medicine for one another. And to think there is anything to seek beyond the boundless potential of authentic human heart-centered connection just furthers isolation and disconnection, pushing healing further away. 

So let us not forget gratitude and communal joy. It is for this reason that after all the nutrition, medicine, and energy practices I have explored, I continue to return to practices of stillness, to soberly ground and remind me of the striking awe of our lives, lived among one another.

This is all for now. Much more to come.

With endless amounts of love,

k