I couldn’t orient

How my recent trip to Mexico helped me renegotiate an old body-story:

*This essay has some intense themes so tread gently with yourself.

In May, I went to Mexico City for the last phase of my PSIP training that concluded with becoming faculty and instructor for the Psychedelic Somatic Institute.

My body was in a hard NO about going to Latin America. The last time I was there was 45 years ago in a war zone and my system had not updated that I am a grown adult woman and that I can keep myself safe now.

Living in El Salvador in the 1980s as a pre-teen was terrifying.

The civil war in El Salvador, which I now understand as a proxy war between the Soviet Union and the US government, was being waged on the sacred, ancient earth of the Mayan peoples. Communities were divided and enlisted into a civil war that destabilized the region, decimated water ways, mountains and soil; and left large voids for the industrial ag and mining companies to do harm. The US government was not only complicit, it opened the door for the continued rape and pillaging of the sacred lands and the genocide and mass migration of its indigneous people. The war between communism and capitalism left 75,000 dead and 1.5 million displaced as they fled hopelessness (to this day, fleeing to the very people who perpetrated the horror in the first place). Leaving behind their mango trees and native corn, leaving behind thousands of years of memory and oral tradition taught by the sacred reciprocity between the land and her people.

Having lived in 8 different countries, I have been on so much precious earth - earth with ancient stories of remembering that we belong to this blue planet. My work is to let-that-in with each exhale, to remember I belong here. But when I was 12, I had no sense of the sacred. My body was an enemy, wrong, a sinner; there to control, dominate and shame. I hated my body. I hated myself. The self criticism was chronic and debilitating, like spikes in my ribs if I moved too freely or let down in any way. I had to drink myself to sleep for years. Letting-down any other way, was paved with dismembered memories that came in flashes, mass murder, bombs, experience after experience affirming that I CANNOT belong here, no one can. The original wound of separation from the sacred mother re-enacting all around me in horror, war, genocide - and I was complicit.

I know, I was a child and I didn’t know any better - but I still live with the fact that I cheered for the death of the The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), a coalition of leftist guerrilla groups, which received support from the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Nicaragua (Sandinistas) - they were the fathers and brothers of the land. And they were the enemy, the monsters in my parent’s story.

I remember the day I was anointed in the tribe of “us vs them.” My parents gave me a contra-bullet casing that I wore around my neck. The Contras were essentially a proxy force in the Cold War - armed by the U.S. to fight communism in Central America, regardless of the cost to civilian life. They were the brothers and fathers of the land too. Both were accused of serious human rights abuses, including killing civilians, targeting aid workers, and terrorizing rural communities. The war caused tens of thousands of deaths and widespread suffering. That bullet casing had blood on its cold, metallic hands and was empty at its heart. I proudly wore it over my little heart fully indoctrinated into the myth of separation.

We spent 1980 to 83 in El Salvador. I was 12. Prepubescent, confused as to why they would allow children in an active war zone and desperate for someone to share my reality that this was a terrifying and overwhelming place to be - bombs and gun fire in the air, the smell of fear intertwined with tortillas on a comal, and the soft perfume of the flor de izote blooming despite it all. There was no safe place, my feelings dismissed as “too much” while alcohol numbed the grownups into the illusion of separation.

2026: The morning of my flight to Mexico, my neck was frozen stiff. I could not turn it…I could not orient to danger - just like the time I heard my friends, the marines get gunned down around the corner from my house in San Salvador. My cheek pressed up against the brick, barbed wired wall, eyes searching, ears ringing from the machine gun sound - the sound of AK47s killing my protectors. I buried that trauma deep into my pelvic basin and joints, waiting for the right time to feel that swirl of terror and helplessness that to this day lives in the rhythm in my eyelids - the rhythm of the AK47, in my eyelids.

2026: My body was in a full on HELL NO but I was determined to get on that plane and finish my training. The flight was paid for, the plans were set and I wanted completion. Feeling like there was no other way, I got a muscle relaxer that got me through the flight and into the kind eyes of Gerardo, the sweet older Uber driver who picked me at the airport and delivered me safely to my Airbnb.

As I took in Mexico City over the next several days, my body began to unwind from the terror of being kidnapped, raped and murdered. In fact, I have never felt safer in a city. In some ways, going to Mexico was a psychedelic somatic (PSIP) session. I gently stayed with the pain and rather than staying within my window of tolerance, I walked myself outside of it and into the perceived nightmare, renegotiating the old story. And now, I have a new friend - Mexico City and her glorious trees woven by the aching call of the Inca Dove.

PSIP sessions over the last four years reestablished a conduit in my nervous system for the trauma to unwind. My nervous system began to realize that there are new, different experiences beyond the default prediction of danger. PSIP allowed my nervous system to find safety and support (the city, my colleagues) in the echos of terror rather than continuing to manage and avoid it. Three years ago, I would have avoided it all together in the name of safety.

PSIP also helped me unpack and soothe a desperate searching that had never stopped since that time in El Salvador. Because I couldn’t orient to the danger when the marines were murdered, I was left searching for it. Ever since, my daily life had a default pressure and searching, a hyper-vigilance, constantly looking for danger. In PSIP sessions, my body showed me intense tension in the eyes, constantly searching, stuck in this pattern of trying to orient to danger.

PSIP has been revelatory in my healing as it has brought forward the material that I have been exquisitely managing for decades. Now I can orient to it. I see it. I believe it. I can receive support in those places and love myself through it.

For more information about the model, you can check out the PSI YouTube channel.