There’s no going back

I’ve spent the last decade learning the lesson that once an initiation is complete there isn’t anything to go back to anymore.

There is no going back. There is only moving forward.

The first time I learned this lesson was when I had my spontaneous remission from Lyme disease. I was 20 years old. For the first few months post remission, I floundered. Living in a healthy body felt so foreign, having an open future felt so strange. I tried desperately to go back to who I was before I got sick. I tried to pick back up old hobbies, rekindle friendships that died when this first fire of initiation I stepped into blazed too bright (which really means that we were in our late teens/early 20’s and did not have the maturity to navigate the minefield of severe illness together which unfortunately led to the loss of several close friendships). I tried SO hard to go back.

Until one day, I realized that I couldn’t. There was no back to go to. The girl who got sick was gone, and the maiden I was blossoming into could not become a girl again. I had to forge a new identity.

Forge I did! I finished university, got my first and last corporate job, moved to France, taught English in a lycée, navigated my first serious/adult long distance relationship, explored several different career paths, and then, at 23, I got sick again. Remission gone, illness back; I refused all medications and boarded a plane to my grandparents for the summer. I landed in western Colorado, holding the responsibility of healing my dis-ease and supporting my grandparents as we navigated their declining health. That summer, the mountains taught me to heal, awakened my spiritual gifts further and my relationship with my grandparents initiated me deeper into adulthood. I stepped out of the role of granddaughter being taken care of by them, to start taking care of them. This was the start of my second fire of initiation.

Later, as the summer drew to a close, I healed myself from Lyme (I have never gone out of remission since), my grandparents moved out of their house, and once again I found myself in an in between state. I had gone through another massive spiritual awakening throughout all of this and the way I saw the world had irrevocably changed. Again, there was no back to go to. Almost nothing about who I was before that summer fit any longer. My soul path had opened, and I could not close it. I couldn’t go back. I had to move forward, forging a new path.

A year later, during covid, I again left a path I thought was going to last much longer and pivoted my life, returning to the US from France and going all in on creating my business and healing programs. There was no place to go back to, as my parents had sold my childhood home, moved states and life looked so different when I returned to the US. I consider this to be when my second fire of initiation came to a close.

And so the stories unfold. I moved to Colorado, and went through a third fire of initiation. This one involved a spiritual attack, a massive ego death, a sexual assault, the crumbling of some of my main friendships, and a powerful dose of trauma. This initiation took me the longest to move through, as the third fire of initiation took me back through the first two, to make sure that everything had been alchemized and released, that I was carrying nothing forward with me that was undigested. This initiation was like 10 years of growth and ego death condensed into about 3 years. This was the hardest place to let go of the wish to “go back” to something from before. I so desperately wanted to go back to experiencing the ease and glow I felt pre-initiation. I mourned the loss of my maiden-self, who died through this fire of initiation.

As I write this, on my 30th birthday (just appreciating the joke as well from the old soul part of me who laughs at the fact that this is only my 30th birthday, as in many ways I feel ancient), I have spent my day reflecting on the 3 fires of initiation I moved through in my 20’s. I have come back to the remembrance that there truly is no going back and in truth there is nothing I want to go back to. Well, that’s not true. There are still things my ego would like to go back to because it would be easier. But in my soul, my inner wisdom and my womb — there’s nothing I want to go back to when I’m anchored to these places within.

I spent a good chunk of my morning in meditation today, journeying with my womb and guides, listening to whispers of wisdom and guidance from the stars. The stars have offered me the medicine of forgetting recently. The last few weeks, leading up to this solar return, I have sat with this medicine. What does it feel like to forget the past? To forget pain or initiation? What does it look like to humble my ego and forget? (Because the ego doesn’t like to forget, it likes to count its hardships and successes and parade them out for the mind over and over again). The elixir of forgetting has been humbling and freeing. Today I was asked to practice more forgetting. Detaching from the past to welcome in the future. Because there is no place to go back to. The only path is forward. There is no reason to stay attached to what was, when there is so much of what can be left to discover.

How strange and funny it is to go through 3 fires of initiation, to reach the end and be asked to forget them. The spiritual journey is strange and hilarious. Even still, I find this does make sense. I cannot move forward if the mind and body are pulling me back to the past. Still remembering. The fires of initiation served their purpose and now they are dissolving into the forgotten.

And so the lesson is this: There is no place to go back to. There are gifts to continue bringing forward, but nothing from the past to return to. This is either a terrifying thought or a liberating one.

For me, it’s liberating.

Here’s to the next decade, one that I’m sure will bring so much I cannot yet imagine. One that I am entering carrying (to the best of my ability) only the worthwhile things with me. One I am entering no longer hoping or praying that I might get back to something I used to be. One I walk into knowing that the only path is onwards.

And so it is!