Self Healing through STD's

I’d slept with three people in my life at that point. Though many of my friends had far greater numbers in the promiscuous department, I was always the, “if anyone’s going to hurt me, it’s gonna be me” kind of chic who used drugs where other girls of my kind used sex to elicit some kind of connection to anything at all. I’d let other people hurt me enough at that point to want to control my own pain and sex felt like an invitation for it at the time.

My mom had always projected onto me that I’d be a pregnant teenager, and as my universe projected, I commanded. By eighteen, I fulfilled her prophecy with a bulging belly of life in a womb that’d never felt anything but lifelessness.

Five months pregnant, my grandmother whom I’d lived in the same house with my whole life, died.

The day after her funeral, I sat on the couch staring at the blue and white striped wall paper when I listened to a woman on the other end of the phone tell me I needed to contact an Oncologist because my PAP came up with vulva dysplasia which in layman's terms is pre-cancer of the outside of the vagina and birth canal.

I’d just spent months fighting incessantly with my mother to accept my decision to keep my baby rather than abort it, and here I was, an eighteen year old catastrophizing that I’m about to die and leave her with it. That was not at all the story I wanted to go down. I decided in that moment, I was done dying, and I’ve follow the trail of genuine living ever since.

I had a couple surgeries while I was pregnant, one of them which they literally burned holes in my vagina, making my once pink flower look like mars after being on fire for a week, ended me up (on top of being) a martian vagina, with a wicked herpes outbreak, after which they told me I also had HPV.

I can still, very literally, hear the sounds of my own screams in the night from pain that no amount of pill could’ve candy coated. For days and nights, pregnant and used goods, I knew every decibel of the sounds it took to keep me sane somehow, stemmed from deeply seeded sexual shame. My body was speaking very, very loudly, and I heard her message, very clearly.

I’d rejected her in so many ways, denied her of so many things, stuffed her with toxic things for comforts sake, and abandoned her the second I saw her cellulite, escaped her the minute she felt pain, and scolded her the moment she had a need.

I knew the kind of whispering she’d been doing for years was a kind of silent scream, the same one I’d been mentally silently screaming for decades, that had erupted to a place I couldn’t deny listening, just as I’d wished the world would’ve done for me.

I knew, I had to listen to her, to let her matter, and more importantly, to clean up the mental cobwebs I had about what it means to be a sexual being in an apparently, unsafe-to-be-sexual-because-as-a-woman-we’re-asking-”for”-”it”-if-we-don’t-turn-ourselves-off-for-the-sake-of-not-turning-someone-else-on-because-then-we-owe-them-something-if-we-do, kind of world.

For almost a decade, I’d sunken level by level, from resistance straight into acceptance into being a person living with HPV and herpes, slowly changing the story of what that meant about me as a person.

I’d given birth to a daughter two years after my son was born, which erupted shame that far surpassed my own. I knew from the memories that resurfaced, the feelings I’d do anything to push away, the images I saw, that I was dealing with more sexual trauma than just my own, and it was lineages deep. (Read more about this in Imperfectly Sane if you’re into it)

The capital W Work I’d done in the time between diagnosis, and the time I walked into my Oncologists office to tell him I wanted another test because I was 100% positive these viruses no longer inhabit my body, he told me he’d give me the most extensive DNA test we have which would be a complete waste of my time and money because “these are lifelong viruses in which he knew I had,” was dark, intense, and the only Work worth working for on the planet (IMO).

The day I got my negative results from the DNA screening for both herpes and HPV in the mail, shaking, I called them up to be sure those indeed, were my results. “Yes ma’am, they’re all negative.” Jumping up and down, negative test results in hand, I knew the Work worked.

From cleanses, which always include mental cleanses, to shamanic journeys, sweat lodges, coaching and a daily practice of embodiment and self attunement, I don’t know what exactly did the trick, I just know all together, the glory of the trick, was all mine.

I’d like to offer some perspectives if you’re wanting to cleanse yourself of STD’s that I adopted (or they adopted me) in my acceptance “of” having the STD’s phase, that may just help heal you.

You have a virus that you likely reject, and you already know what you resist, persists. I won’t ask you to be its friend, but I will ask you to be it’s student and furthermore, treat it as if it’s a guest in your house.

Be a good host. (Yes, I did just say that).

The more time we spend rejecting, shaming, blaming, or avoiding our visitor, the more certain we can become that that visitor, becomes our ghostly stalker in the night desperate for our attention. Look right at it, invite it in, offer it rest, tea, love when it’s most in pain, take it in as a part of you and sink into its cries rather than screaming at it for crying. No healing happens by way of punishment. None.

Invite it to stay until it feels strong enough by way of love, to move on.

Be a good host to the virus, but be a genuine friend to your house.

You may feel stagnant, dense, and stuck in your body constantly trying to escape her, but she’s the only friend that’ll spend every second with you from first breath to last.

Every one of her messages is valid, and every one of her symptoms is a result of a mental whisper gone unheard that your body, being the subconscious mind itself, the very thing that casts your own shadow (physically and psychically), created to be in communication with you about what you’re not hearing, in a way that you can’t not hear it anymore. In that way, she is literally saving the rest of your life by forcing you into a place not only that you are forced to heal, but that you can no longer deny giving yourself room to take the rest you’ve needed but didn’t allow yourself to deserve without a solid, matter of fact reason. Learn to listen before she has to hurt herself to get to a point that you can hear her scream.

Give her what she needs without needing her to have an excuse to need it.

Once you’ve received the emotional messages your guest has come to share with you, thank your guest for the beauty of her insight rather than asking her to pack up and leave right away.

Explore having open, intimate relationships with others whom you shamelessly share that if they’re going to be another guest in your house, they must also be aware that you’re hosting a virus that plans to stay, and notice how many people stay, guest in house, and all. You’ll be surprised how your guest is there in service of guiding you into the kinds of connection you’d desired when you let her in in the first place. Not in vain, not in void, but in fullness and in love.

I truly believe that the reason I’m “void” of STD’s today is not because I “rid” myself of anything but because I filled myself so full with my Truth, that my body no longer needed a messenger to ensure I truly listened to my desire to heal, without needing an excuse to. I settled all the way “in” to my body in acceptance rather than trying to get the bad, out by way of rejection.

I healed far more than just my body in the adventures of exploring my shame, my trauma, my shadow, my scripts manufactured in scarcity consciousness; only because my body offered me insight about ease, by offering me the contrast of dis-ease in exactly the places I’d felt most vulnerable. I accepted my vulnerability until my vulnerability taught me to accept myself. From that place, healing had her way with me. She took me where I needed to go, I trusted her, and she Worked through me, as I trust if you’re reading this, she’s intended to Work through you.

Your guest isn’t using you, it’s serving you. I know it’s hard to swallow that, but until we embrace it, healing is nearly impossible. You are not trash, and your guest can teach you of your own treasure if you let it. Once she does, she will have nothing left to teach you and well fed, well rested, and assured of her students teachings, she will be on her way.

You do not need to rid yourself of any more of your parts (including your disease) but to love the parts you wish you could rid yourself of.

Healing hurts. It just does. Expect it to. Any wound in the healing process hurts. Invite it by choice, trust that the pain is like childbirth and just on the other side, you get to look your own innocence straight in the face and love it without reason, but with unconditional heart.

Happy inviting my friends. Healing is so ready for you!