The Evolving Satellite Baby and Yogi Psychotherapist

I am a yoga and meditation teacher in NYC and completing my graduate studies in psychology and hope to move onto a doctorate philosophy program in the next few years. But it was not always this way. After being separated from my parents as an infant and accepting others as my parents, reuniting with my birth parents at the age of 5 was an intense, unwanted experience for over 25 years. I carried all that anger, fear, and anxiety of abandonment into everything. I never felt good enough for anything as being a daughter meant that I was not worth the financial resources needed to grow. The immense guilt and shame I felt for just breathing air and occupying space allowed people and situations into my life that was not in my best interests. My worth was tied to my productivity. This experience is deemed the satellite baby experience because it occurs so often. I never allowed myself to rest or relax. I verbally abused and took pleasures away from myself if I found myself having thoughts or behaviors that did not feed into this mentality. I could only hear words of the people that bashed my self esteem and allowed people into my life that only ever wanted me to stay small and insignificant. Worst of all, my body did not feel like it was my first home but a prison. This emotional climate and foundation of thoughts gave birth to my addiction to prescription stimulants that almost took my health and my life at young age. No one cared or noticed that I was shrinking away because of the drug use, they only cared that I represented the school system well. But this was because I also did not allow anyone to care for me. After marrying young, I was overwhelmed by clinching tension of the joyless void of a life. Life was cruel and I did not have say in it. Even in the most civilized places like NYC, prejudice against intelligent women of color was ever present. People are constantly trying to tell me what I can and cannot grow and do with my body. The real cruelty came from the inability and prohibition to express myself for no other purpose than to express my emotional life. A perfect storm of my own anguish and a crack confines of the structures that enshrouded me gave way for me to seek help. The tiny seeds of kindness that the teachers of my youth had planted knew hope. A found myself onto a yoga and meditation mat, where I was allowed to experience myself with no purpose than to experience. I quietly began taking back what was mine. The body that felt foreign to me slowly became mine again tear after tear; under watchful, gentle eyes of my many mentors. I learned to observe myself and assert myself with the care for others through my psychotherapist. I grew space to forgive myself and my family. 

In becoming my own witness and being witnessed by others, I let the whole truth be seen in all its rawness and ugliness through letting the story morph over and over again in a circular process of witnessing the hurt, honesty, and reconciliation. Self-forgiveness is about coming to terms with blame, shame, and guilt in the parts that we played. Coincidently, we can only grant forgiveness to ourselves and others by recognizing our shared capacity for committing terrible and great things (both thoughtless and careless and loving and kind). When we cannot admit our own hurt, we cannot fully see the other as a wounded person. Forgiveness is the path to healing. Forgiveness means breaking free of our past, restoring our dignity and allowing space for new possibilities with one another. Space for a new story to be born through renewing the relationships in our hearts and other times releasing certain relationships. 

Forgiving and healing does not mean that we will never be hurt again or that we will forget but we must also give ourselves space to grieve what was lost and what can never be. As a society, we should seek restorative rather than retributive justice through first seeing that not every action to me is a personal attack. By creating a system that allows the offender to take responsibility for the harm and having them take action to repair the hurt. Each of us has a small part to play to booster change on a larger scale. If we forgive, reconcile, and rebuild the broken relationships within and around us, it will ripple out from us. This is a living practice. This process has allowed me to have more fulfilling relationships with my family and around me that I never thought I would be able to experience. 

Healing ourselves is seldomly different from the healing others. We each have our own vibration that extends outward into the world and are part of an invisible yet potent, collective force on this planet. I am a living example of small shift. We affect by who we are, by sharing our energy and that is what I intend to spread with all my education and as a yoga teacher. Powerful avalanches begin with small shifts, says Pamela McFarland Walsh.