Some of the first reactions I got to this to this photo was "whoa, dirt in your butt! In your hair!" "What if you get tics?" "That looks uncomfortable!"
News flash, I did get dirt in my butt and hair, and bit by dozens of tics. But I took those suckers out by their heads, and done. (Shoutout to growing up in Brazil where we lived with them on the daily)
Then I wondered, why do we have such an aversion to nature?Why do we immediately revert to the negative for different situations? Why do we shun nature, the very thing this earth was created for and what we were meant to live with, in favor of disinfected everything, bleached this, protected that. We are so far from nature that we created a whole other world of modern diseases and medicine for that world 💊💉
I recently fell into that trap, taking medicine for side effects of other medicines until I decided, no more. What I need for this time, my body can provide. Modern medicine has its place, yes, but it's not the end all be all, nor the only option. To me it's a last resort. I'm a faerie, and that shit does not feel good at all. What does feel good is letting that go, and using nature to heal.
Witches are dirty, nasty, playful, fun, unpredictable, and connected to the earth. They don't rely on modern medicine cause they know everything they need for healing nature has already provided for us. Faeries are literally nature. The bridge between the seen and unseen world. The sprites who only show themselves to those who they respect and recognize as their own kind.
I'm bringing nature back to humans in a way they haven't seen before. I'm helping others heal their trauma and connect to themselves using only what's provided in nature. I'm forging a new path that allows you to be who you are, with all dirtiness, discomfort and primal nature you were born with, but lost along the way. You don't have to be afraid of yourself, nature, or disease anymore. You can just be. Isn't that a relief.
Come be a Faerie Witch with me!
How to turn your stressors into strengths
I have been struuuuggggggling lately.
Not happy about where I'm at in life, stressed about not finding a place to live and a bit lost as to whether I even want to settle down or keep traveling.
All that stress and worry has affected my health. I've developed multiple health issues that could turn more serious if not attended too soon.
One of the main things I've struggled with from my childhood trauma is extreme anxiety and chronic stress. This is from me constantly trying to predict where danger will come from next so I could protect myself.
When you're in a constant state of fight or flight this affects everything from digestion, ability to focus, immunity, mental health, sleep, social life and...breath.
I feel my body tensing and not breathing. I see myself not eating and resorting back to caffeine to keep me going, making it even worse as that wrecks my adrenals and wreaks havoc on my body and digestive system.
When I'm in a downward spiral like this, one of the things that helps to get me out this funk is gratitude. And there is always so much to be thankful for!
I'm thankful for my family that has houses I can stay in when I get back to Texas. I have an amazing vehicle that allows me to travel the country and gives me no issues whatsoever. I have a healthy body that moves, can get up in the morning and heals quickly from disease. I have friends and family who support me. I have income I can rely on. And, how exciting that I don't have a home! The world is open to me and I can do and go wherever I want.
Turning stressors around to something beautiful is so key when you are going through hard times. I mean, how cool I don’t have anywhere to live, the entire world is open to me and I can go wherever I want!
The next time you've got a stressful issue or in a trauma spiral like I am, use Byron Katie's 4 questions to turn it around.
Ask yourself:
Is it true
Can I absolutely be sure it’s true
Who I am with this thought
Who am I without this thought
Now change the thought around
This technique works and will help put you into a better mental space right away. Try it while taking some deep breaths, and let me know how it goes.
Living for now...what does that even mean?
Breaking down the concept of living in the moment.
There is a passge I read from The Art of Self Love, which has always stuck with me.
“There is no time wasted or lost. There’s only this moment, and its complete within itself.
Go beyond accepting and forgiving yourself. Love yourself profoundly, but not the idea of yourself with all its vanity. Love the essence of who you are, which is the essence of every single one of us.
Learn to let go, trust, and learn the essence of it.
There’s nothing more to add.”
I love this poem and ruminated on it for awhile. At the time hen I read it, I had no idea what self love was or what “living in moment” was. Since then, I’ve built on this thought little by little, to where I think I can explain it much better for others now.
Living in the moment…what is it?
I guess you could also call this mindfulness or being present, or what I like to refer as, “just being”. It refers to the practice of fully engaging with and experiencing the present moment without being distracted by thoughts about the past or future. Without distractions about what you will say in this conversation, or what you should have said in that conversation. It involves being aware of and fully immersed in the current sensations, thoughts, and emotions without judgment or attachment.
Living in the moment entails directing your attention to the present without dwelling on regrets from the past or anxieties about the future. It means acknowledging and accepting your current circumstances, experiences, and feelings, whether positive or negative, without trying to change or control them. Instead of being preoccupied with what has happened or what might happen, you focus on what is happening right now. Essentially, you become neutral to your past experiences and thoughts. You choose only perfection, you choose only love, and you chose only being.
By cultivating mindfulness and living in the moment, you can develop a greater sense of self-awareness, mental clarity, and emotional balance. It allows you to fully appreciate and enjoy the simple pleasures of life, engage more deeply in your relationships, and savor the richness of each experience.
See that tree you’re passing? Look at those vibrant colors! Or that adorable child waving at you. Or look at that cute old couple, still just as in love as the day they met 50 years ago. When you start living in the moment you start appreciating everything around you and realizing that everything in life can be beautiful, if you choose to see it.
Living in the moment doesn't mean disregarding or neglecting your future goals or responsibilities. It means finding a balance between planning for the future and being fully present in the present. It encourages you to make conscious choices and take deliberate actions in alignment with your long-term aspirations while still fully immersing yourself in the present moment.
Practicing mindfulness techniques such as meditation, deep breathing exercises, or simply paying attention to your senses out in nature can help you develop the ability to live in the moment and experience a deeper connection with yourself and the world around you.
My favorite is walking in nature, barefoot, looking at flowers and appreciating the colors all around you. Being in silence with yourself, removing all outside distractions like your phone, other people’s voices, listening to podcasts, anything. Getting back to your core and enjoying being with you.
If you haven’t tried living the moment, try it today. Take a walk in nature. Go barefoot, without your phone or earbuds. Listen to the sounds in nature. The birds, the bugs, the wind. Everything is perfect. Nature is perfect, unspoiled, exactly as it was meant to be. That’s how we are. We just need to remember it and get back to our true selves and our core, where there is nothing left but perfection.
How to know when you've broken the trauma cycle
When “boring” means stable and “exciting” is actually abusive and toxic
I had an interesting experience recently that made me think a lot about how far I’ve come. I realized that there are some very clear signs on how to know when you’re healing from extreme trauma, and one of those is that you simply stop perceiving stability and peace with boring and normal.
Listen, I get it. Trauma is an incredibly difficult thing to overcome. It shapes the way we think, feel, and act, and causes us to feel stuck in a cycle of negative patterns that we can't seem to escape from. Also ,when you’re so deep in it, you have NO IDEA that you’re even in that cycle until you finally get to a point where enough is enough and you are ready to face some hard truths about yourself.
When you finally do accept you need help and healing, breaking free from trauma will start to bring a profound sense of freedom and clarity. It allows us to see the world in a new light and discover the safety and stability that we may have been missing. It also allows us to see that safety and stability as something natural and peaceful, something to be sought after…not something boring.
Breaking free from my trauma was a long and challenging journey…it still is, in a way. I honestly can’t even say I’m done with the journey or completely healed, but I do have a massive toolbox of modalities to help me when I am triggered, not to mention a completely different mindset to go with it. And that is what counts.
It took years of therapy, self-reflection, thousands of dollars and hard work to finally realize that the chaos and instability I was so accustomed to was actually…not natural at all. I grew so used to chaos in my life (that was a constant in my childhood), I didn't even realize it was STILL causing me harm in my adult life. Only when I started to break out of the trauma cycle I realized how much damage it caused me, and how avoidable all the chaos in my life was.
Most importantly, I realized that the chaos in my life was NOT normal. I was not doomed to deal with one dramatic situation after another, I was just so accustomed to this happening that I continued to welcome in chaotic people and situations, and actually REJECT calm, stable, non-dramatic individuals and environments.
Because what I perceived as boring was actually safety and stability and my default state of chaos was fear and drama, everything else felt dull and unexciting. When I began to unpack some seriously f’ed up patterns in my life that were repeating from my childhood, I knew I had to break the cycle.
So I accepted I needed help, and sought out anything I could to begin to heal and regulate my nervous system. This included therapy, plant medicine, energy work, movement, breathwork, journaling, being in nature, even new diets. It also included parting with people in my life who were also living in chaotic patters and severely draining my energy. Only after that did I start to see glimpses of the beauty in the calm and the serenity of safety.
Deconditioning decades worth of negative patterns is a gradual process. But I continued to work through my trauma, and incorporate simple habits to help regulate my emotions and find joy in little things. Things like appreciating the stability and predictability of my day-to-day life. Finding comfort in a simple routine, being at ease alone with myself, allowing myself to sit with my thoughts, to feel sad, feel discomfort, feel confusion. To feel all the emotions that are often suppressed when you are in a constant state of chaos, because your body remains in fight or flight.
Most of all, I worked on forming healthy relationships, both with myself and others. I sought out and connected with individuals who either healed from their past trauma, or individuals I knew who lived a calm, steady, peaceful life. A life I wanted to emulate. From there, I started to create a sense of safety in my own life that I hadn’t experienced before.
At times this change was not easy. Often I found myself back in the beginning of trauma cycle and could feel myself returning to the chaos that felt so familiar. But for me, there was no going back. I was not repeating those cycles. So I gave myself grace, and bowed out of the cycle before it took over.
Breaking trauma cycles is not easy. But it is possible. For everyone. You’ll know you broke it when what you thought was once boring is actually the key to the safety and stability we all need to thrive.
If you’re struggling with trauma cycles, don’t give up. Keep going. Continue your healing, use whatever modalities work for you. If you fall back into a cycle, don’t give up or judge yourself. Just acknowledge where you are, and move on. One day, you will see someone else’s life of chaos and think “wow, I used to be there. And I am never going back.” That’s when you’ll know you built a foundation for a fulfilling and happy life.
Most of all, you’ll realize you just found a sense of peace and happiness you once thought was impossible.
Every decade is our prime decade
There is no time when life suddenly starts ending or getting worse. Life is only what you make it.
With incredible sights like these, it's hard not to find an immense amount of gratitude for life, for this beautiful world, my health, my healing, my happiness and how far I've come on this journey we call life.
Life does not end, slow down or lessen because you reach some arbitrary age. We are not “passed our prime” after 40, or 50, or whatever society tells you. Every year is our prime. Every decade is a chapter in a long story called life. So make it count.
This is only the beginning.
How to get comfortable being alone with yourself
Once you’re comfortable being alone and happy with yourself, life will change dramatically for you
In 2021 at the beginning of my 6 month road trip I felt pretty miserable traveling alone. I was also going through some intense personal stuff and many times I just wished I had someone with me that I could share these beautiful experiences with .
Then something shifted. The more alone out in nature I was, the more I realized what an incredible opportunity I had to go on this adventure alone. I didn't answer to anyone, plan, or work my schedule around someone else's. It was all about me, whatever I wanted to do (or not) at every second of the day.
So many people ask me how I did this alone. Was I afraid, did I get scared, did bad things happen, how did I prepare for bad things. How did I take my photos? (Many of my followers thought I had a secret photographer/bodyguard following me around for six months taking photos 🤣🤣).
Nope. This trip was all me, all solo, many times away from cell reception and humans, forcing me to be alone with my thoughts and in turn face some hard truths about myself. Yes, it was lonely at times, but I knew others would only serve to interrupt my solitude and the important things I knew I had to focus on for my own healing.
So yes. It was a blessing to be alone, both when I reveled in the solitude and when I loathed it. I was able to focus my time and energy only on myself, without any other distractions from the outside world unless I allowed it.
If you don’t feel comfortable being alone with yourself, now is the time to start. You don’t have to make a drastic move like I did and start traveling around alone. You can start off small. Take a walk alone, without your phone. Have a meal out alone, without your phone. Read a book alone. Then gradually build up from there.
When you’re comfortable being alone and enjoying your own company, it opens the door to creativity, expansion in your own life and confidence. Because you know you don’t need anyone else. You know yourself and you know you are enough. Those who come along in your life are just bonuses to what you already had before.
I know many people will never experience this, and I feel incredibly blessed I get to travel solo and live life on my terms, with all its ups and downs. I highly encourage you, in whatever state of life you are in, to try being alone. Start small, in the best you know how, and go from there.
Let me know in the comments below what are some of your favorites ways to enjoy your time alone! The possibilities are endless!