This is the story I have never known how to tell. Because it isn’t linear. It isn’t pretty. And it doesn’t fit neatly into the categories people are comfortable with...mental illness or spiritual awakening. It has been both. And the truth is… for the last six years, I’ve lived at the intersection of trauma, mysticism, nervous system dysregulation, divine feminine awakening, and something Eastern traditions call pranic overflow, when your life-force rises faster than your body can contain it.
What the Western world calls “mania,” the Eastern world calls Vata derangement, prana rising, kundalini spikes, unprocessed samskaras bursting through, and a soul trying to be reborn through a body still learning how to stay alive.
This is not a story about pathology. This is a story about simultaneously unbecoming and becoming.
The Moment Everything Split Open
Six years ago, my life fractured. Not only externally, but internally. Something ancient, buried, and unbearably painful ruptured open inside of me. Trauma I never knew I carried. Memories I had dissociated from. Patterns I was still loyal to. Spiritual sensitivity I didn’t yet understand. Ancestral wounds I didn’t realize I was born into. It wasn’t one event. It was an unraveling that arrived like a tidal wave. And in that unraveling, I had my first manic episode.
I didn’t know that “mania” could feel like:
- revelation
- symbolic meaning
- synchronicity
- visions
- divine connection
- destiny
- memory
- past-life bleedthrough
- a torrent of intuition
- and an unbearable, electric overwhelm of energy
But it also felt like terror. Like drowning in light. Like being pulled out of my body too fast. Like my nervous system didn’t know how to hold the voltage. Western medicine had one explanation: bipolar.
Eastern wisdom had another: your prana has risen too quickly, and your root is not strong enough to hold it.
Somewhere in between those two languages was the truth I had to figure out myself.
The Years of Death Cycles
The last six years have been a series of death and rebirth cycles so profound I barely recognize the woman I used to be. Jobs ended. Relationships collapsed. Identities dissolved. Egos shattered. Dreams died. Old versions of me were ripped away before I was ready. Every time I thought I had reached the bottom, another layer broke open.
In Vedic philosophy, this is called the destruction of the old karmic body. In trauma psychology, it is called integration after dissociation. In mysticism, it is called ego death. In bipolar language, it is called episodes.
I’ve lived all of those definitions. All of them are true. However, none of them are complete.
The Body That Remembered Too Much
My mania was not random. It had a rhythm, a pattern, and a purpose. Every episode came during a spiritual opening, a heartbreak, a trauma layer surfacing, a dissolution of identity, a moment of awakening too fast, a nervous system stretched beyond capacity, or after smoking marijuana (which I now know destabaliizes me instantly).
Eastern medicine explained it perfectly. My consciousness was expanding faster than my body was grounded. My spiritual evolution outpaced my physical container. My system flooded with light before it built the structure to hold it. It wasn’t that I was “broken.” It was that I was unrooted. And the truth is, trauma unroots you long before kundalini ever rises.
The Cemetery That Became My Temple
During one of my darkest seasons, I drove with no destination and stumbled into a cemetery I’d never noticed before. A little pocket of earth tucked between the mountains and the Indian reservation. Windchimes hanging from trees. Sunlight pouring through branches. Offerings left by people grieving those they loved and lost. It felt like the quietest place on earth. A place where souls were still speaking.
I sat there and cried until I couldn’t breathe. And something inside me softened. I began returning every time I entered a death cycle. Every time a version of me was dying. Every time life was asking me to shed more, surrender more, rise differently.
Sometimes I feel called to leave wildflowers on the headstones. On my last visit, I left 5 sunflowers at the base of a tree, a new ritual, an offering, a prayer (5 for my life path). Something in me knew, Every death asks to be witnessed. Every rebirth asks to be honored. That cemetery became my initiation ground.
The Rebirth I Didn’t Know I Was In
People think rebirth happens once. It doesn’t. Rebirth is a lifestyle when you are called to a path of awakening. And I resisted this path for so long. I wanted stability. Predictability. Normalcy. A life untouched by the chaos of spirit and the weight of trauma.
Instead, I was given initiations, dark nights, nervous system ruptures, spiritual emergencies, ego deaths, ancestral clearing, heartbreak, and a sensitivity to the unseen that terrified me. But slowly, I started to understand that my sensitivity was never the problem. My lack of grounding was.
Becoming the Woman Who Can Hold Her Own Light
These last six years have forged me. I've had to learn how to stay in my body, how to anchor instead of ascend, how to regulate my nervous system, how to close spiritual gateways, how to strengthen my root before opening my crown, how to live in this world while being wired for another, and how to carry light without letting it burn me alive.
And in that process, something miraculous has happened, I’ve started building a life that could hold me. A slower life, softer and grounded life. Not the fantasy life I thought awakening would give me. But a real one. A stable one. A life with structure, embodiment, and intention. A life where I am not running from myself anymore.
Hera Jewels: The Rebirth Made Tangible
People think I make jewelry. I don’t. I make talismans. Anchors for the soul. Objects infused with intention, consciousness, ritual, and meaning. Pieces that have held me in the moments when my mind fractured and my soul stretched. Hera Jewels was born from my phoenix years.
Every piece I create carries, the woman I became through the fire, the pain I alchemized into wisdom, the heartbreaks that awakened me, the nervous system I rebuilt from the ground up, and the promise I made to myself; “If I rise, I take others with me.”
My jewelry is proof that rebirth is real.
Where I Stand Now
I am no longer scared of my "episodes." Because I understand them now. I have a protocol. I have a body that can hold my spirit. I have a nervous system I know how to tend to. I have boundaries with the unseen. I have grounding. I have clarity. I have sovereignty. And most importantly, I have a life that is being rebuilt on solid ground, not trauma, not panic, not chaos, not dissociation.
Rebirth doesn’t mean becoming someone new. It means meeting the woman you always were beneath everything that broke you. And that’s who I am today. Not healed. Not finished. But present, rooted, wise, awake, and becoming.
This is my path, a sacred, messy, humbling initiation into myself. If my story reaches one person who feels lost in their own darkness, then every death I lived through had purpose.