I Went to Haiti to Find God and Lost My Religion

I had a spontaneous kundalini awakening on a mission trip in Haiti when I was 19…

In March 2014, I wanted to find God…not religion.

Yet my lens for connecting to God was through religion.

It has taken me years to integrate this experience, to add language to a story, to find the words that could encompass what actually happened.

In the year leading up to this trip, from 2013 into early 2014, I had been in depression—PTSD flashbacks from childhood creeping in, and doubting my faith. As a last ditch effort to “save my faith”, I chose a mission trip to Haiti.

I wanted to find God again. To feel the “Holy Spirit.” I had nothing to lose and everything to gain.

There’s a potency in the subconscious of someone with nothing to lose, a way that you’re able to live in the void state of possibility.

I had spent that year on and off experiencing suicidal ideation, so this trip was truly intended to save me.

On one of the later days of the trip, we were taken to Saut-d'Eau, a sacred waterfall to the Vodou people of Haiti. Every year there is a Vodou pilgrimage to this site, where the largest annual pilgrimage takes place. To obtain the Miraculous Virgin’s favor, Vodou practitioners conduct a purification ritual. Most practitioners make the pilgrimage in summer, but the ritual is possible at any time of the year. The ritual is called a “luck bath”.

Being that I was on a Free Will Baptist mission trip, there was NOT a Vodou pilgrimage happening. It was just another day in Sodo, Haiti, where many people escaped the heat to journey into these sacred waters.

As our group began to climb the hill of the dirt road to the waterfall, I felt the hot sun beaming down. As I stepped onto the land, the energy shifted.

Something inside me, something I couldn’t name, that I had no language for, shifted spiritually.

I felt feverish. Way too hot.

Externally? I likely just looked hot, tired, annoyed. I’m masking so hard I should have received an academy award.

Internally? I’m unraveling with each step we take through the wooded trees, covered in Vodou symbols carved into the bark—symbols that began to feel like they were glowing.

Mentally I’m freaking out thinking…

Am I just dehydrated?

Am I going to pass out?

Did I get sick from the water?

Is this a hallucination?

I remember saying to someone I felt hot and was going to drink water. I felt protective over whatever I was feeling…somehow I did not want to voice or name it, to allow anyone into this personal process.

The group went ahead to the water as I followed the pull of a symbol in a tree, one that looked like two serpents climbing upward.

I turned my back and slid down the bark, hotter than I’d ever felt. Profusely sweating.

Wondering what the hell was happening.

My tailbone hit the soil of the earth.

BOOM.

Huge rush of energy up my spine. Blinding light. Intense heat all over my entire being.

Symbols, codes, and light frequencies that I still don’t have words or language for moved through my consciousness.

My entire being felt connected to the oneness of everything.

I felt connected to God.

I have no idea how long this moment was.

All I know is that it stood outside of space and time.

I heard from the divine that I had a bigger purpose, that I was here for something greater. It was the first cognitive moment I can remember of having a clair-auditory experience.

I had a profound auditory channeling that this religion was a lie, that God wasn’t found in a book or in a church, that this feeling of connection is oneness with God. That my mission was to help the world awaken to higher consciousness.

When I came back, I was no longer hot. The waterfall looked brighter. I felt much better in my body. I had no idea what to make of what just happened.

I sat there for a moment, drinking water…

Wondering if I was losing my mind?

Wondering…is it so bad if I do lose my mind? Why hold onto this mind anyway?

I stood up and a young Haitian boy ran over to me, beckoning me to the top of the flowing river area. The stones and rushing water created a natural waterslide that went down into the basin.

He was a Haitian boy who, from what I understood, did not speak English—yet he looked me dead in the eyes and, in perfect English, said, “Why you believe Jesus”

I said, “I don’t,” and he just smiled, nodding his head as if he knew all the secrets of the Universe and I’d only discovered one. It felt like he was channeling something just for me in that moment.

He pulled me down the natural waterslide, into the flowing water, landing in the basin. It felt like a reverse baptism.

I came out of that water, purified.I never knew until years later that these waters were known for purification rituals.Yet, I knew that my life would never be the same.

When I came back to the group, the fear and doubt settled in like an old blanket on my body. I began to fear that what I’d experienced was demonic. I began to doubt if it was even real.

And I didn’t have language for it. I didn’t know spiritual awakenings. I didn’t understand animism. I had no capacity to integrate or even comprehend what happened to me.

There was no one to say, hey let’s do integration and actually build a life where you can feel a little bit of that frequency again.

That’s okay, it was my role to find it. So my quest became to find this enlightening feeling I had accessed.

Of course, I, like any good Christian girl, faked the mission trip high. I pretended to be “on fire for God”.

It didn’t last.

Something in me had already broken open—and there was no going back to what I had believed before.

March was the mission trip, and by June, I was taking LSD at Bonnaroo. The potent realizations being that 1) I’m sexy AF and 2) the Bible formed in the stars and shattered into a thousand pieces.

Any doubt I had between March and June was blown to smithereens.

I tried LSD, mushrooms, DMT…all of which expanded these states, affirmed my beliefs, and deepened my spirituality into something that wasn’t religion or dogma.It was entirely rooted in exploration and experimentation.

My upper chakras were blasted open, my lower chakras slammed shut. I spent the next few years walking between realms. I had a deep shamanic practice of taking spirit children to the other side. I had no psychic boundaries, saw spirits often, telepathically communicated to trees, to spirit guides, and was open in a way that wasn’t always safe.

My house was almost always haunted in some sense.

Simultaneously to experimenting in astral spaces, I was also a party girl. After shedding Christianity, nothing was wrong.

It was one of the most liberating times of my life in shedding shame…and there were a LOT of illusions in this “liberation”.

I’d party all night, snorting cocaine and chasing sunrises. Telling my heart to people I thought were friends, only to realize later, the only thing we had in common was drugs in dirty bar bathrooms.

The desire to be seen, to feel connected, to build community…and the illusion of chasing that through partying. I somehow worked two jobs, graduated college with honors, and managed to build a relationship with my husband.

All while mildly disassociated from my body.

It was wild, chaotic, beautiful, alive…Disembodied, insane, and a bit dark.

The disassociation was so real that I totaled 4 cars—sober.

I fell madly in love with Eric and the two of us navigated spiritual and psychedelic awakenings with zero support, integration, or comprehension of what to do with the information we were shown.

We were endlessly curious, delightfully adventurous, and fully unhinged.

The co-dependency I felt with him was unparalleled—he was reason for living, for breathing. Our souls were intertwined and everything would be perfect forever because we’ve had past lives and and and…

Except it wasn’t always perfect. (More on that later)

What I didn’t have?

Sovereignty

Confidence

Understanding of myself

Healing

Secure attachment

EmbodimentDevotion

Everything was for the idea of who I was. Sometimes I felt like I was a walking performance for someone to consume.

It wasn’t until I moved away from Columbus, the plan we had to do communal living fell apart within the first two weeks of moving across the country, Eric and I had to find a new place to live…the friendships we had…weren’t what we thought…

That I started to realize how much I’d just been floating from one thing to another.

How much my decisions were rooted in old narratives.

How much I couldn’t stand to be alone.

Did I party because I wanted to, or was it just another way to avoid sitting with myself?

I hated being alone. When I was with Eric, or partying, or with friends…I could avoid all the trauma in my body begging to be heard, to be seen, to be felt.

I tried parts work. Became certified in Reiki. Practiced yoga on and off via YouTube and mostly worked out with Eric…inconsistently.

These things helped. They were little balms to my soul. Gave me deeper context to my internal world. Validated my trauma. Provided a soft space to land for a moment.

But ultimately, it wasn’t enough to truly make lasting changes in my life.

Nothing held true routine or structure very long.I had no capacity to follow through on my word.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to keep my word…my nervous system could not hold the tension to actually do that.

I finally found my first embodiment mentor when I was 24, living in Boston, at a psychedelic storytelling event. I heard her speak about healing sexual trauma through Ayahuasca and knew that I didn’t know what she did, but I wanted to work with her.

I went up to her after and asked if she did Reiki. I only knew there were therapists and Reiki healers. I’d never heard of anything else.

She said she coached women on conscious menstruation.

Internally I cringed. I HATED my period.

Wanted to have a hysterectomy after kids. I was currently bleeding in this conversation…I’d taken about 14+ ibuprofen that day.

And this is what took me from my experimental psychonaut era into my TRUE healing girl era.

PS. Stay tuned for my come back to Jesus (Yeshua) moment in my healing girl era...spoiler alert, he appeared wtih Mary Magdelene. ;)