The Initiation

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The poems in this book came through at a time in my life of gut-wrenching instability.  When I was 28, a mold contamination not only made me so sick I thought I would die, but to save my life I had to give up every single material possession I owned. At the time I was studying for a Masters in Contemplative Psychotherapy and Buddhist Psychology and living in Boulder, Colorado. To outrun the mold, sick and scared, I returned to my childhood home in Washington Heights, New York City.

In the midst of the mold, I grappled with an abusive relationship, heartbreak, ongoing housing and financial instability, and identity/soul crisis. Astrologers might call it my Saturn’s return, mystics may call it a curse. As a psychotherapist with my mixed lineages of Dominican (African, Taino, Spanish) brujas and curanderas, I understood it as the initiation that all wounded healers must go through. As a Buddhist, I understood it as an opportunity to awaken. 

I’d like to share with you, and by the magic of sacred witnessing, release what has been kept in the shadows of secrets and shame for generations. I’d like to tell you how I fell in and out of love with lovers, yes, and with myself most. I'd like to tell you how I have been undone and reborn again and again, how I lost myself and found myself through the reclamation of my magic and the relentless commitment to healing. 
 

Undoing because there is so much unraveling of generational trauma and karmic knots. Undoing as the medicine of non-doing. Undoing as a spell of letting go and calling in.