Hurricane Healing
Do you attempt to avoid emotional triggers, or do you embrace them as the healing prompts they truly are? When something in the external world brings up strong and uncomfortable emotions, the average person’s tendency is to run from or try to control the person or situation that appears to be creating them. But when we do that, we miss out on the healing they are here to provide.
Darkness To Light at Horseshoe Canyon
Disaster Déjà Vu
Sometimes, we don’t have an option to run from or control the triggers. In that event, we can either numb out in blatant or subtle ways, or we can meet the emotions and sensations in our bodies head on. Before choosing, we need to grasp that we’re triggered.
Thursday marked the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Milton, which as Hurricane Helene had done less than two weeks prior, devastated many areas I’m deeply connected with.
I would have been in the heart of one of those areas had I not opted to attend Dr. Sue Morter’s Ignite retreat in Arizona. But although I was nowhere near the path of either storm, they provided a plethora of healing opportunities disguised as triggers.
Countless friends, a couple of family members, and many energy healing and pet sitting clients were in the path of one or both storms. One by one, I learned with immeasurable relief and gratitude that despite experiencing great material losses and emotional trauma, they and all my animal friends were safe.
The healer in me wanted to support these friends and communities on the frontlines, but I knew that for the time being, the best way to do that was remotely.
This was primarily because the storms had hit and damaged every single place I could have stayed, aside from a bed and breakfast in WNC that fared better than the rest. Although the road out front was gone, the B&B itself was miraculously in good shape. I’d planned to head there after the retreat, but my friends who owned it were welcoming people who’d just lost everything. The only right choice was to donate my room.
Although it was hard for my heart not to go, I knew this was the best choice for me, also - for the time being. Living in a community affected by a natural disaster takes a toll on one’s body and psyche that’s hard to imagine.
It can be painful enough to watch strangers suffer on the news - when it’s people you love, and you’re experiencing the devastation and environmental toxicity firsthand, it can be downright traumatic.
Most people can show up with their all for a sprint. But a marathon of disaster relief work requires stellar self-care including sleep.
I learned this the hard way while volunteering in Long Beach, New York, a seaside community I lived in and cherished for 14 years Little did I know how little I’d healed from 2012’s Superstorm Sandy…but I was about to find out.
Triggering Treasures
After grounding myself on Sedona hikes, and sending love to all, I headed west to Kingman. It was my first time cruising Route 66 in Arizona, and all the stops along the way were funky and surreal. Normally, I would have loved that experience.
But not even “new adventure mode” could shake me from the shock I didn’t know I was in. Having so many people, animals, and areas I care about suffer simultaneously felt like too much - just as it had in 2012.
The shock kept me in a rare disconnect from my ever-increasing awareness of my body’s intuitive messages, I began to misfire on choices, creating a string of unpleasant experiences.
After bouncing around subpar, overpriced vacation rentals in Cottonwood and Prescott, I found a month-to-month in Sedona. It was a beautiful house in a quiet, non-touristy area that reminds me of the days of yore, before most people had heard of Sedona.
That first evening, I gazed up at the magnificent red rock right before me, which looked more magical than ever while glistening in the sunset glow, and thought, “I am home.”
Less than a week later, I was ready to fight and flight myself out of there. While I loved it, I was providing far too many meals for the indoor mosquitos I hadn’t been told would be freeloading. To this day, I have no idea how they kept getting in, but those suckers didn’t contribute a penny toward rent.
Then a fire alarm outside the bedroom began inexplicably going off in the middle of each night. I didn’t initially realize that the loud, unexpected noise and mosquito attacks were not causing the jolts to my nervous system. My adrenals were already working overtime - I was experiencing PTSD.
“I just want to go home!” I heard a small child cry, before recognizing it was my inner five-year-old.
Her voice helped me finally realize that I wasn’t as okay as I told everyone, including myself, that I was. I caught on that I had PTSD, which the triggers were leading me to heal.
Bonus points - they were also lighting the path of awareness to the childhood experience my feelings of displacement had their roots in.
I’d healed most of my original and multifaceted trauma of my dad’s first heart attack and subsequent several-week critical condition hospital stay, during which I got shuffled around with extended family. But it had never occurred to me just how hard it must have been for that five-year-old to be away from home during such a scary, painful, and confusing time.
After doing some energy healing work with this, I got busy with the next theme that got triggered by last year’s storms…
Rewriting Survivor Guilt
When Sandy hit Long Beach in 2012, I was on a beach in Santa Monica. Deep fog replaced the blue sky as texts arrived from friends who were getting rescued off roofs. One was pregnant.
I was paid to stay in California for two extra weeks “just in case” a client needed me, while everyone back home dealt with power outages, gas lines and so much worse.
Long Beach still looked like the set of an apocalypse film when I returned, but my building had reopened - the first on the boardwalk to do so. I’d lost nothing but my way of life, while most people I knew, including many close friends, lost everything.
Even my car refrained from becoming one of the seaweed saturated movie props that were placed all over town by the storm, facing in every which direction. Neighbors had moved their cars several blocks from the ocean, unaware that it would meet the bay, but mine was safe. Our underground garage didn’t flood.
I used to cringe when running into people for the first time who asked whose couch I was sleeping on. It felt horrible to admit my home was unscathed to people who no longer had one.
Looking back last year, I could see that some people had to be in that position in order to be there for everyone else. Once the Red Cross, National Guard and scores of volunteers who flew in from other states and countries left for the next disaster, we continued to serve each day, supplying physical and emotional support.
Instead of feeling my heart break with the memory of an 80-year-old man who sobbed in my arms before telling me he’d never cried before, I felt grateful I’d provide that safe space for him. I remembered people stopping me on the streets for years to come to say thank you for caring, and for providing them hope.
Any guilt I’d felt melted as I edited my past. I could see how Sandy shaped my friends who’d lost everything into who they are now. Every one of them is far happier than they were before the storm! The storm also provided a brand new 20-million-dollar boardwalk and many other blessings that could only be seen in retrospect.
I realized that my friends who were going through it last year would all be better than okay, in time, also. I knew I’d spend most of the year visiting all of them and supporting in any way I could.
The hurricane recovery tour would last the better part of seven months. Along with being there for others, I continued to heal in ways I didn’t know I needed to, including healing noise sensitivities I didn’t even understand were connected with Hurricane Sandy. I thought they were just an empath thing.
Once I embodied and integrated the PTSD from Sandy, the noise sensitivities slipped off me like gently falling leaves. Since my subconscious mind no longer associates construction noise with living in a disaster community, it no longer makes my heart race. The other day, I experienced several hours of such while writing. I didn’t need to leave or even grab my headphones. I barely noticed.
Another amazing bonus came from doing all this inner work, which I will detail in my next post! In the meantime, visit the B.E.S.T. Energy Healing page to find out how this gentle but deeply healing process can help you released interference related to unprocessed emotions and trauma, and create the emotional freedom that allows for miracles!
