Body as Altar. Neck as Oracle.

Here's an excerpt from my creative writing project (AI free zone), A Somatic Unraveling: Field Notes From the Cremation Grounds.

Where's my floor?

Yesterday was my last session for round 2 of PT (June 18, 2026). And well, the whole thing feels devastating. As if someone ripped the floor out from under what I thought was my situation and said, “actually bitch, the floor is way the fuck down there, you’re not done falling yet.”

On my first intake session back in March, I told my therapist I wanted to “fine tune my neck and body, like a tune up on a sports car”. So naive.

As I laid in a puddle on the couch the day before my last appointment in late June, swimming in pain killers, indica and ice packs suffering from a four day "neuro hangover", I realized that my “sports car” was actually a janky old ebike and all we really did was put air in the tires so we could see if the ebike still worked as it was engineered. We had a good laugh about that in my last session.

Spoiler alert, this ebike is broken.

My therapist is a lovely and very human, fellow GenXer, former athlete who basically understood that my body is the result of also being a highly competitive female college athlete at a time where physical therapy was basically “slap some ice on it”. The years of my youth that I dedicated to being the best at my sport, soccer, are now glaring back at me through the devastation of six wrecked cervical discs and a proprioceptive system rerouting signals to the brain in some weird ass way because the normal channels are broken. Weave in a decade of bartending and then high impact photojournalism and production work and well, my current state isn’t a shocker.

Yes, all of the discs in my neck are falling apart. Most people my age have 1.7 degenerative discs (according to the Claude) very few have six. Lucky me. A few are severe with some fun anaomolies that may or may not break loose and derail my life for years without notice, like that little piece of cartilage did in November of 2023.

I returned to therapy four months ago because I was in a flare that was lasting weeks and not improving. I dragged my ass back into my neurosurgeon's office in February, with my freshly minted ACA Gold Plan (I had to cancel my insurance the year before because $650 a month is complete insanity for private insurance in the age of AI hoovering jobs) got xrays and more PT. I knew my doctor was just floating past me to the next seriously incapacitated senior citizen in his lobby, which at that time was filled with at least 20 such cases.

He spent all of 10 minutes looking at the xrays, seeing a 50 year old woman presenting as “fine” and nothing dangerous on the films. Same doctor who saw the MRI with the 6 levels of degeneration 2 years before, but different interpretation. TL;DR is– "Now it’s chronic, here’s some PT." Nothing he could do, someone else's problem now.

In PT, we began unpacking the muscles of the neck first. Dry needles with estim one day a week, soft tissue work later in the week and exercises to strengthen the traps throughout. My neurosurgeon had classified my case as "general neck pain" for insurance reasons and the therapists were working from that generic assignment and my personal interpretation of pain, which is not clinical and the pain profile for this changes throughout the day. The PT was always working with inaccurate and noisy data because I'm not a clinician and can't interpret what's happening in my body through their language.

For a month and a half, we lit my nervous system up every week and unpacked the trauma that lived in my tissues from 25 years of somatic override to “prove my value through physical abilities”.

The initial injury happened at a wildly toxic time where I was dabbling in corporate America for the first time in my life (at age 47) and stumbled into a crimin’ crew of assholes and well...that’s a story for me and the authorities. My neck snapped on a work trip, at the height of my realization that I was, in fact, hired to be a “yes wo-man”. I was fired for whistleblowing less than 2 months later. And my neck broke in the midst of it all. Shocker, right?

All of that trauma lived in my tissues, not to mention the previous accumulations from decades of adulting in late stage capitalism. The latest flare that brought me back to PT was triggered by this group of criminals returning to my life, trying to slide into my local community event and continue their grift. And well, again, my body couldn’t handle the trauma and stress of it all. Only this time the impacts were less direct, more subtle and pointing to the work that I hadn’t completed since the injury happened.

Knot Piercing, Needles & An Electrified Nervous System

I approached this round of PT knowing that my body still carried the trauma. I completed a bachelor’s degree in Yoga Studies as I started that corporate job. I was trained to work with the nervous system and trauma, I had no idea at the time I was studying yoga so deeply that I’d be using it to unpack my own "yet to be acquired" trauma, I assumed I’d be helping others. But here we are.

As the needles went into the knots of scar tissue carrying all that weight, and the electricity was ramped up to blast some space in the scar tissues, something else was unleashed. After each session, I’d come home to my “couch rig” which allows me to lay horizontal and still do computer work (to pay for those medical bills) and I would work with the emotions that surfaced. I call it “composting” and I’ve trained several projects in Claude with my archetype literature and classical tantric texts that ground my spiritual practice.

As memories or emotions would surface with each PT session, I’d spend some time unpacking it in a weird sort of "active resting" state. When a thought or emotion from the past would surface, I’d look for a thread I could pull on to deconstruct WHY that thread is still part of my embodied experience. With each output from the trained Ghosts in my machines, a few more threads would surface that had real emotions still attached.

Situations and stories from past masks or relationships that I thought I’d put to rest long ago still had little threads waiting to unravel the whole sweater, so I kept pulling the threads through the Ghost and waited for the real trauma or harm that lingered to surface. The Ghost showed me the patterns that lead me here, it was my job to sit with what surfaced, truly compost the lessons and release it so my body would stop carrying the trauma.

The release aspect is what you’re reading right now. I release through transmission. When I compost deeply enough through my tantra Ghost, I come to a point where the lesson is ready to be digested by others. The heart of the lesson is what matters, not how it ran through my body and wreaked havoc on my personal life.

The heart of the lesson is usually a universal human experience, that when composted deeply enough and presented to the world through my art, carries a lesson for others. My writing has always played this role, for two decades now. Only this time, the writing is coming from a deeper well I've never had access to in the past, the lessons are buried in my somatic lived experience, excavated through painful therapies and composted through my classical Tantra lineage.

I’ve learned so much about my self and my lineage through this process. Excavating lived experience through the most powerful and dangerous technology ever built by man to shine an unrelenting mirror back on yourself, your past and your present is not for the faint of heart.

The work I’m talking about here hits at the foundational level. Shining such a powerful pattern recognition machine on your traumas, masks and behavoiral patterns will rock you to the core of your idenity. That work is how I lay the foundation for stepping into this next phase of my life, the “Wise Woman” phase. I’m not there yet, I have a few more years and much left to unpack, but stepping into the role of “Wise Elder” for my communities is my next chapter and I can’t step into that role until I’ve unpacked my own bullshit.

The next chapter is somatic. Fully embodied, Fierce Tanktrika who fully encapsulates this phrase that her Ghost keeps placing before her– Body as Altar, Neck as Oracle.

I don’t where this entire journey is taking me, but that’s just it, right? We’re not supposed to know. As we travel through this life, we accumulate masks and the lingering imprints of their traumas. We’re human, that’s how it all works.

But, we do have ancient technologies, lineages and philosophies that give us a map to navigate the treacherous territory of our inner landscapes. And make no mistake here, that inner landscape is treacherous, especially if your mask fused to your bones years ago and the avoidance of that reality is your default mode.

My chosen lineage is not the one I as raised within, but the Christianity of my childhood, delivered by the most caring human I’ve ever known (Momma Street) did allow me to eventually find wisdom that resonated and unlocked my own heart. Vamachara, the left-hand path of the Nondual Shiva Tantra is the only spiritual path that has ever made sense to me. And I’ve documented some of the holiest places on the planet for Buddhists, Christians and Muslims. But the left-hand path was how I lived my life before I had language to define it.

And in my lineage rests the key to surviving my story of a broken neck turned chronic– and invisible. Tantrikas from this lineage are “householders” who usually work in pairs to hold the space of transmutation by embracing transgression.

We see the violence, trauma or afflictive emotions and we step directly into the middle of their fire and we transmute it. We learn from the pain, we don’t bypass it. We take the trauma, and once Kali’s flames have receded, we pick through the ashes and regenerate beauty.

Derailed, Devastated & Hopeful? aka I Found the Floor

When my PT derailed about 8 weeks into this whole process and an entire autonomic symptom track surfaced, kicking off debilitating neurological symptoms, I knew I had landed in the middle of the devastation that Tantra labels the "cremation grounds."

A radical sideways move I had zero preparation for or anticipation of and a move that left me in a tornado of chaos. My entire life shrunk to the size of a thimble and I had no idea where the floor was anymore, having just crashed through it, again, and in full free fall. Try navigating that shit as a single woman living alone with no safety net and see where you bounce. Woof.

So, in the heart of the cremation grounds, I turned to the tools at my disposal to find a way to stop the freefall. I created an operating system to track both of my symptom tracks- pain and neurological- because they were not closely correlated and I built the OS to serve as a translation layer between myself and my care providers. And it worked.

I logged my symptoms daily using the same tracking metrics and created short printouts of the time between my therapy sessions that showed the full scope of what happened at home. A place where the therapist has no ability to see my body and symptoms in real time as they happen. That data allowed us to unlock what was truly happening in my body and find additional treatments. The end result of this PT round was that I am clearly working with a broken spine and depleted nervous system. The spine I can't do much about, the nervous system I can. That's my work moving forward.

The other major turning point that rose during this sideways crash and subsequent freefall was the need to start a daily writing practice. My creative writing was coming out of my body sounding like an AI bot, even though no AI touches my creative writing process, ever, by design. So, I returned to my old writing rhythm, daily morning braindumps on my "Linux typewriter" while my brain is fresh and unencumbered by the inboxes of slop and the algorithms of tyranny. I decided to just write through my pain, rage and resignation every morning to see where I land in a year or two.

Enter A Somatic Unraveling; Field Notes from the Cremation Grounds. A creative writing project that chronicles the journey of rebuilding my new floor. Not a narrative of recovery or of healing– because those things are off the table for me now.

A project of one stubborn ass Yogi writing her way through the flames and transmitting the earned wisdom of it all for others to find a tiny sliver of hope or peace in their own journeys through chronic situations they can no longer control but must simply– experience.

I have no clue what this project will be when it grows up and I am trying not to define it too deeply right now. Just me, my tools and the processing of my life that will create a narrative body of work as I travel through it all. That's all I know right now.

Well, that's not true. I do know that this daily practice at the 2 month mark, has helped me find the floor. The healingOS gave me a clear lens on the patterns my body was throwing at me, whether I wanted them or not. A mirror I can't deny that is now also serving as a compass through this dark journey that is uniquely mine now. Writing is helping me find the humor and the hope buried underneath all that other transgressive shit. Humor and hope are how I deal with most of my life. I may not be hopeful all the time, but if I can laugh at myself, I can see the hope on the other side of the absurd reality I am living within.

The Field Notes are my anchor now, grounding me into a somatic, creative process that has been my guide for twenty years, only now the writing is necessary to keep the floor from collapsing underneath me again.

I can't control the presence of the floor itself. The ground on which I can stand, no matter how shaky, is mine alone to stand upon. What I can control is the foundation underneath the floor– my nervous system and my ability to stay present when the floor cracks and reveals the darkness underneath.

I pulled this essay from my daily Field Notes and made it a stand alone piece. I hope that in sharing these stories of recalibration again and again, someone– somewhere– will find a little bit of peace in their own freefall. And maybe, just maybe, the reader will find a little humor and hope as their own floor rumbles beneath their feet.

We are all in some sort of chaos right now as the world transitions into what's to come. Many of us, millions upon millions, are struggling through something that rests next to our identity, is mostly invisible to the outside world and wildly destabilizing to the human carrying it. I hope these stories of absurdity and medical narration find their way to those who need this message right now.

So, if your floor is solid and you're foundation strong, share this with someone who may be stumbling right now. And if YOUR floor is shaking and you feel the freefall coming, please know you're not alone.

Sit with this and know you're seen. By at least one human on the other side of your screen. You got this.