*Names have been changed for confidentiality

I had already started purging in the first hour. Shortly after the lovely paper lanterns stopped. I was sick, fast and violently. Heaving uncontrollably with increasing levels of anguish and discomfort.

The next part of my Ibogaine experience was unlike the earlier visuals. This next part wasn’t happening behind closed eyes or inside the mask.

It was happening with my eyes open.

The nurses were worried. I knew it immediately. And not subtle concern.

Real concern.

Even now, over a year later, Clara*, the nurse assigned to me, still stands out in my memory because she checked on me constantly, right up until she left the clinic on my last day. She seemed genuinely concerned about whether I was going to be okay.

I am okay. More than okay.

But that experience made something painfully clear to me.

I have spent most of my life needing to prove that I am a tough chick. The guys’ gal. The outlier. The strong one. The one who will do anything.

And although I have come to know that I have a warrior spirit, I’ve also come to realize I have a highly sensitive, flower-like body.

And Ibogaine is not a gentle teacher.

The nausea became torture. I was pinned to the mat and could not move a muscle without the room swimming and my stomach retching. I felt like a prisoner in my own body.

Getting up to pee was a horrible drawn-out experience. I had to crawl into the wheelchair inch by inch. Once I finally pulled myself into the chair, and they started to roll me forward, I felt like I was falling off a cliff. I remember pleading with the nurse pushing the chair.

“Slower. Slower. Slow. Sloooow…..”

I remember at one point opening my eyes to see how close we had gotten to the bathroom, whining that we had moved too quickly, only to peer through my clenched eyes to discover that we had only moved 2 feet from where I had been laying.

I could not imagine how my body was going to survive feeling like this much longer.

And while all of this was happening, conversations were unfolding around me.

Urgent conversations.

Medical conversations.

With my eyes open I watched doctors and nurses trying to figure out what had gone wrong.

“How many rounds of anti-nauseant has she had?”

“Check her vitals.”

Because hours and hours had passed and I was not showing any signs of delivery from my experience. Instead it was getting more intense. Others in my group were up and walking around - some jovial, some somber.

I listened from my mat to some of them exclaim how amazing they felt. What they saw and felt.

Meanwhile I still couldn’t move - frozen to my mat with images of gruesome death continuing when my eyes were closed and the room spinning when they were open.

I heard the nurse practitioner say, “We need to run labs.”

I watched blood drawn from my arm for the additional tests to analyze what was happening to me.

Hours passed. More vomiting. More horrific hallucinations. More worried looks when my scrunched eyes would open momentarily. Me asking for more and more anti-nauseant to try to get a brief respite from the vomiting.

Then my lab results came in and I watched the nurses read them together.

I watched their faces drop and sharpen into alarm.

And then, somewhere inside my still-Ibogaine-soaked brain, a horrifying theory locked into place.

The yellow dosage slips.

The fallen labels.

The warning before the fourth pill.

I’d been overdosed!

Once that idea landed in my drug addled mind, I immediately yelled it into the room from my prone position on my mat.

“The yellow papers! It was the yellow papers!”

I must have sounded insane.

But I believed they had mixed up the doses.

That I had received someone else’s medication - too much medication.

And that my intuition had tried to save me. And I had ignored her.

Everything fit perfectly.

Too perfectly.

I heard blame ricocheting through the room.

Toward Clara. I heard the head nurse practitioner angrily pronounce under her breath,

“You broke her.”

Clara’s face contorted into shock and sadness.

She tried to defend herself.

Next, I heard her get fired.

I watched her run away crying. And I remember yelling out:

“Don’t fire her!”

I could hear the remaining staff continuing the conversation elsewhere, arguing about responsibility and oversight and whose mistake this really was. I remember them calling in an outside physician to discuss the possible lawsuit on their hands. I remember seeing this outside doctor come down the stairs into the room and haul the Nurse Practitioner into a small room and reaming him out. I remember them calling the owner of the clinic on a cell phone and telling him that he might need a lawyer. I remember all of this like it was yesterday.

I saw it all. I heard it all.

At the peak of my anguish, I suddenly heard a recognizable voice. I heard my dear John’s voice in the room.

I could hear staff talking to him.

Briefing him.

Explaining my condition. Explaining that they may need to transport me to a hospital.

Asking if there was anything they should know about me medically or emotionally. Anything that perhaps I left out that would explain my reaction. He mumbled something I couldn’t hear and they sent him away!

I remember calling out to him before he left:

“John?...John!”

I turned my head to face Julie*, another participant who was sitting up on the mat beside me. She had mostly come out the other side of her Ibogaine journey. “Is my husband here?” I implored. But she simply looked around and shook her head.

“You heard all that about me being overdosed, right?”

I heard her say,

“Yeah. Jane ... I’m so, so sorry.”

She was scanning the room like a protective mountain lion at that point, her military training seeming to kick in. I didn’t understand why but I felt like she was watching out for me somehow, like a fallen comrade.

By this point, I was not thinking about healing.

Or spirituality.

Or personal growth.

I was terrified.

Truly terrified.

I thought I had completely fucked up my life.

I thought there might be permanent consequences.

I thought I might have done something irreversible to my esophagus from all the vomiting, and that my brain would never stop hallucinating. That I was permanently broken.

Meanwhile, people around me slowly began improving.

Returning.

Rousing.

Leaving.

Some of them were sounding excited. Happy even.

And I just… kept going.

Hour after hour after hour of grueling horror when I closed my eyes and visions of my health decline when my eyes were open.

I remember our groups’ mentor and co-leader of our ibogaine expedition, Faith*, coming downstairs to see me in the morning. By this point I’d been tripping at least 12 hours.

She had been away overnight knowing that the nurses were taking care of her charges.

She kneeled beside me. I was still flattened to my mat, afraid to move lest another tidal wide of nausea overtook me. She had deep compassion in her eyes.

“Oh Jane. I’m so sorry you are suffering so much.”

And I opened my eyes when I heard her voice, and I remember answering, completely convinced:

“Well… you know why.”

She looked confused.

“Why?”

“They overdosed me.”

I said it with absolute certainty.

“They fired Clara too.”

I couldn’t understand why this wasn’t shocking everyone more.

Why wasn’t anyone talking about what had happened?

Why was everyone behaving normally?

By then, I had been inside the experience for what felt like forever with no relief on the horizon.

She gently but firmly put her hand on my arm, looked me deep in my eyes and said,

“Jane, you were not overdosed.”

“Yes I was!” I cried out. “Ask the nurse practitioner. Ask Clara! Ask Julie! John was here. The doctor….”

She interrupted me. Look at me intently and said,

“Jane. Watch me.”

She then went over to the nurse practitioner, to Julie, and made sure I was watching while she talked to them. She returned moments later.

“Jane. I just spoke with all of them. You saw me, right? None of those conversations happened.”

“What?! But I…” She interrupted me.

“Jane.”

She took a long moment to look me at me deeply to make sure I would hear her.

“None of that happened.”

And eventually, slowly, painfully…I began unraveling.

Not from the nausea.

Not from the terror.

But from the idea that I no longer had a hold on reality.

I remember my blood being taken.

Watching as the needle slipped into my IV.

Didn’t happen.

Clara being fired. Her tears. Her flight.

Didn’t happen.

The outside Doctor?

John being briefed about my condition?

Didn’t happen.

Now I was left questioning my reality. When I was reaching toward someone for help…were they there? Was she, right now, real or imaginary?

That was the moment the floor really dropped out from under me.

Not because I realized I had hallucinated on another level.

Because I realized I couldn’t tell what I had hallucinated.

For at more than twelve hours these visual and audible hallucinations had been woven seamlessly into my reality.

Completely.

And suddenly I understood something far more frightening…

I no longer knew who was real.

And who wasn’t.

Please read, “Why did I Take Ibogaine?” first to get the context for this chapter.

Two days after taking Ibogaine, I tried to write this story. But my brain-to-paper connection was freakishly slow, and I quickly realized I’d forget half of what happened before I finished. So instead, I created an audio recording. Memory is a slippery thing, and when I listened to the audio file and compared it to what I remembered today, I was astonished how much my brain had already started to edit a sanitized, safer version of the facts.

So, this post is written from that transcript, recorded 48 hours after I emerged from my Ibogaine fog – the complete, raw version of what happened.

Because what happened in that room was… a lot.

I think it is important to note here that the top tier medical clinic I attended specializes in Ibogaine. The doctors, Nurse Practitioners and nurses are all excellent and well trained. It’s also an important thing to know that the dosage of Ibogaine is carefully calculated. Participants receive a certain amount of medication per pound of body weight. Every dose is tailored to the individual patient. We were all to receive 4 capsules over two hours to start our trip.

And I remember something very clearly.

When I had the fourth and final capsule in my hand, just before I took it, I heard a clear, female voice in my head say:

You better check that that’s your pill.

I looked down at the table and saw that each participants dosage was in a clear plastic cup with a yellow sticky note stuck to the cup. I saw my cup and, beside it, the cup of another participant, a larger man with a similar-looking name. The yellow sticky note had fallen off his cup and landed in front of it. For a split second, I wondered:

Could they have mixed them up accidentally?

Then I remember immediately scoffing at my paranoia and answered the voice back:

Don’t be paranoid. They’re medical professionals. They know what they’re doing.

But now?

I think that voice was my intuition.

Sovereign. My feminine spirit guide, trying to protect me.
The same voice that had shown up during Ayahuasca.
Calm. Direct. Clear.

And I ignored her.

Because if I had checked, asked about the dosage instead of allowing the question to linger… maybe I wouldn’t have gone down the rabbit hole I went down.

Or at least not as far or as painfully …although I also think that was necessary now, to receive the message I needed to hear.

I think my guide already knew what I was in for.

I certainly didn’t.

After we took that last dose, we headed to the room set up for us. Each participant was hooked up to an IV and a heart monitor and each of us had a nurse assigned to watch over us. My was a dear young woman named Clara*.

Mats were laid out around the perimeter of the room, with mirrors, rattles, buckets for purging, and a tripping eye mask. Tripping masks look like blacked-out ski goggles. They allow you to open your eyes into complete darkness, making the visuals clearer and less crowded by the real world.

I think I started tripping first in our group. I remember yelling out to everyone, “Here we go!” as I lay down. I remember the room laughed – no one else had quite started their journey yet as far as I could tell. We all felt optimistic but anxious. We had be warned that anything was possible and it was impossible to predict how we would each respond to the medicine.

The rattles started first.

A lot of people started shaking their gifted traditional rattles to bring forth the experience of the medicine. So, I sat up and tried to join in.

Maybe for 10 seconds.

Not even.

Then I was like, absolutely not.

I already felt terrible, so I laid back again.

Then the visuals started. For me they were curious and pleasant at first. The ceiling was gently raining on me with exquisitely detailed and complicated paper designs, like very ornate lantern origami. I would watch them form from the ceiling and start to float down. I remember raising my arms to swipe them away from landing on my face and body. I knew they were hallucinations, but they felt incredibly real. My sense of time was evaporating but I think I was in that state for about 30-40 minutes. I decided to put on my mask to black out my surroundings because I could feel nausea erupting from deep within.

As soon as the mask went on though, newer, more aggressive visuals came.

A large borderless TV news screen was suddenly suspended in the air in front of me.

Crawling headlines at the top.

Ticker tape across the bottom.

Images stacked down the side.

A central image exploding in the middle.

Everything moving at impossible speed.

Hard.

Chaotic.

Imagine a Fox News screen having a nervous breakdown.

The music made it worse.

Part of the ceremonial structure of my experience involved listening to Bwiti music which for me was dissonant, chaotic and aggressive. God, I hated the music! It amplified everything already starting to happen inside me. I tried to breathe through it.

To allow.

To surrender.

But several times I found myself literally covering my ears because I couldn’t tolerate it.

Then the visuals shifted to graphic scenes of violence.

War. Death. Murder.

At one point I thought I was in Ukraine.

At another, some other war in some other century. There were broadswords involved.

Heads getting chopped off.

Then front lines.

Machine guns.

World War I and then II.

Just… horror. People being murdered and mutilated.

Over and over.

I had been told in preparation for this experience, that if I felt what was being shown to me was too much that I could talk to the medicine – negotiate a bit. So, by this point I was saying:

No thank you. No thank you. No thank you. Can we please look at something nice?

But instead, it was like the medicine heard me and thought to itself, Oh that is what scares you? And then it would double down.

Instead of pulling back, the medicine showed me more gruesome violence. More decapitation. More of what was scaring me.

Very occasionally, something gentler would appear briefly in the midst of the horror.

And then it would disappear again.

At one point, John came into my awareness.

Present. Grounded. Comforting. But fleeting.

He appeared a few times during the experience. Probably when my heart rate was getting too high if I had to guess. Like my body was sending a signal to my brain - she needs a break…

The image of John didn’t stay for as long as I would have liked. And my two boys, Thomas and Hugh also appeared, silently – phasing in and out like welcome phantoms. They didn’t address me. Just made their presence known for a few seconds and then vanished. I remember being so relieved to see them safe and not in the battles I was being forced to witness.

And most curious, a cat would occasionally wander through the bottom of the screen. Completely unbothered by the apocalypse unfolding elsewhere in my visions. But as the scenes of violence intensified and my comforting visions appeared less and less frequently, I starting to feel afraid.

Really afraid.

Because of the death scenes.

Because of the chaos.

Because something about this no longer felt remotely manageable.

I knew they were hallucinations.

I was terrified anyway. I was locked in a battle with the worst of my imagination.

Why wasn’t the medicine listening to me?

Why was this so violent?

And then…

things got really fucked up.

Why did I try Ibogaine?

It was an opportunity to flex my inner warrior. For the last time as it turned out. In hindsight, I believe it was necessary for me to fully embrace who I am. And more specifically, who I am not.

But the most honest answer?

I took Ibogaine because I was challenged to do so. And I never, ever, turn down a challenge.

My husband wanted to go to Mexico and try it. He knew of a couple who had gone together, and they both had had extraordinary experiences.

Well… not exactly together.

Couples don’t take the Ibogaine together. You can travel to the clinic together, but your hallucinogenic destinations are visited on separate days, in separate buildings. You journey in parallel. I came to understand all too well why they don’t put couples together. That will become clearer in the next chapters of this story.

Anyway, John invited the wife of the couple he knew to speak with me. After about an hour of conversation, one thing landed.

The thing that ultimately made me decide to go.

She said:

“If you have the opportunity… why wouldn’t you?”

And honestly?

I couldn’t think of a reason not to. Her description of the experience was compelling. And I was deeply curious.

But it’s important to understand that most people who decide to do Ibogaine are suffering immensely.

We were not.

Neither John nor I were in crisis.

For us, it was an opportunity. A challenge. A chance to level up and see what might happen. If it brings patients who are at a -10 on the suffering-o-metre up to zero, then imagine what it could do for someone if they are starting at zero? a 10+ life? What an opportunity! That was our thinking going in.

But plant medicine doesn’t like it when you try to game the system, predict outcomes or rationalize your reason for participating.

Most of the people who travel to Ibogaine clinics are there because they are desperate. Ibogaine is their last hope.

That was true for one member of my group. I met him on the day we drove from San Diego to Tijuana. He arrived at the hotel lobby and within 5 minutes he broke down into sobs. Through his tears he choked out,

“I don’t even know why I’m here. What is this? I don’t even know. A spot opened and my friend just told me to show up. What are we doing?” He continued to tell us that he had already planned to kill himself that week. That he had already started giving away all his belongings. That it was hopeless. But he promised his friend if a spot miraculously became available that he would go.

There was a mother battling postpartum depression and addiction.
A motocross racer who was more metal and pins than bone, living with chronic pain and depression.
A former football star struggling after repeated concussions.
A veteran with PTSD.
A father addicted to Adderall.

And me.

What’s crazy is that I ended up having the strongest reaction to the medication in our group. I learned later, it was a rarely intense experience - according to staff about 5% of people react the way I did.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Why did I really do Ibogaine?

Because I’ve spent most of my life being a tough chick. A warrior. A challenger of limits. Which, in hindsight, may have been exactly the identity Ibogaine came for.

I never liked being seen as the weaker sex.

I wanted to be seen as a force of nature. Someone to be reckoned with. Someone strong.

That started early.

I arm wrestled all the boys in grade school and won 99% of the time… at least until Grade 6.

During boys-chase-girls games at recess, I volunteered to be the referee because I had zero interest in being chased. And the boys had no interest in chasing me as a result. But when the girls got thrown into pretend prison for being caught?

I was the one sneaking in to free them.

I was a warrior.

A liberator of imprisoned people.

I was not girly. I wore overalls. A kerchief tied over my hair. Tough kid cosplay with absolutely no irony. And that became part of how I understood myself.

That continued into Grade 8 when I insisted I should be allowed to join the boys’ wrestling team.

Every time the teacher asked for some strong boys to help lift something, I jumped up to offer MY muscle.

Every time I tried on femineity, like the day I tried blush on my cheeks, one of the popular girls would approach me with a scrunched-up face asking, “What did you do to your face?”

It was very clear that I did not fit there.

I just wasn’t interested in femininity because I perceived it as weakness.

In hindsight, I understand now it was much more complicated than that. After all I had reconciled with my femineity - for the most part.

Growing up, it was women who hurt my feelings more than men.

Women had a way of being mean that cut through my heart much faster and deeper than anything a boy could say.

Hilariously, my spirit guide after ayahuasca, often called the “mother medicine,” showed up as… a tough chick.

“For fuck’s sake, I just got here, Jane. Could you just stop? I mean it. Stop, Jane.”

She was foul-mouthed, ballsy, blunt and completely unapologetic. I got her and she got me.

But a few years later now, she is gentler.

Her voice has softened as mine has.

The more I’ve learned to accept my feminine strength, the more she has evolved too.

Because what makes me strong now is not my rejection of the feminine.

It’s my full unapologetic acceptance of it. And embracing her ultimate power.

Ayahuasca, interestingly, is often described as feminine medicine. My Ayahuasca experience revealed a loving and protective guide who both understood me and offered healing, wisdom and life lessons in a way I could hear it.

Ibogaine, by contrast, is sometimes described as the masculine counterpart. And if summoned, Ibogaine calls forth a blunt, often harsh, life review.

Ibogaine is a stern teacher.

…

And apparently… I had signed up for class.

New here or need a refresher? The Peru story begins here.

I truly didn’t know what to expect when I finally walked the grounds of Machu Picchu.

I had, in fact, quietly prepared myself for disappointment.

There’s nothing quite like having twenty years of anticipation to compete with real life.

Twenty years previously, I had powerfully dreamed about Machu Picchu, and had that dream confirmed by what I am going to call an accidental spirt guide (because I don’t think he knew what he was in that moment.) That experience never really left me.

I had already cried when I first saw Machu Picchu through the Sun Gate. Bursting into tears is not something I am known for. But I had been overwhelmed in that moment with a tremendous sense of peace. Of recognition. Of homecoming.

So, what exactly was left?

What more could there possibly be to feel? I had already cried for God’s sake.

Our guide was wonderful. As we entered the grounds, her stories created visions in my imagination of the people who had built, maintained, traded, worshipped and lived in this sacred place.

She invited us to imagine the school where people were educated, the gathering places and the trading centres where different communities would meet. The temples. The distinct differences in the stonework between the most sacred spaces and those that were more practical in purpose, although very little about Machu Picchu felt practical.

*****

Notably, during the second half of our visit, I had put my phone away inside my backpack.

Deliberately.

I wanted to be fully present.

Fully inside the experience.

No documenting.

No checking angles.

No distractions.

I had closed the leather case over the phone, tucked it into my yellow backpack, and forgot about it for the rest of the visit.

***

There were no lightning bolts of recognition as we walked.

No cinematic spiritual awakening.

It started quietly. Gently.

As we walked, I began noticing a familiar feeling in my body.

A general sense of underlying dizziness.

Buzzing.

Mild agitation.

A little shaky.

At first, I attributed it to altitude. That seemed reasonable. Except... if I was going to experience altitude sickness, I would have expected it much earlier. By now I had acclimatized. I was taking altitude medication. And this sensation felt different.

It wasn’t localized.

Not in my stomach.

Not in my head.

It was through my whole body.

A subtle but unmistakable buzzing.

Even now, writing about it, I can feel the memory of it returning.

It felt like energy.

Not poetically.

Literally.

As though my nervous system had become slightly overexposed to everything around me all at once.

By the end of our visit, the feeling had intensified enough that it was beginning to overwhelm my system.

Machu Picchu carefully controls visitor flow. There are timed entries and departures, and your window inside the grounds is limited.

Our time was nearly up.

But our guide had a personal connection with the gentleman managing traffic flow that day, and somehow, she secured our small group an unexpected gift.

Extra time.

Ten minutes.

Time to meditate.

This was the spot.

We sat quietly.

And as I sat there, I felt something I still struggle to explain.

Energy moving through my body from my feet upward toward the top of my head.

Strong enough that I began feeling nauseous.

Strong enough that I eventually leaned toward Penny and whispered:

“I think I need to step away.”

Even now, as I write that sentence, I’m covered in goosebumps.

For me, goosebumps have long been a distinct signal. A feeling of truth. Connection. Recognition. As a highly sensitive person, I’ve learned to pay attention when that sensation arrives.

When I quietly told Penny I thought I needed to leave, she checked with the others.

As it turned out, everyone was ready to wrap up as well.

***

We left Machu Picchu.

The intensity slowly began to subside.

Not immediately.

But gradually.

Like static fading.

Later that evening, back at our absurdly beautiful hotel, wrapped in the luxurious comfort of one of the most comfortable beds I have ever slept in, I casually opened my phone.

And froze.

My camera roll was full of photographs I hadn’t taken.

Dozens of them.

My phone had been closed inside its case.

Inside my backpack.

Untouched.

Yet there they were.

Frame after frame of saturated pink light.

All taken within roughly two minutes of one another.

Not identical.

Not a repeated screenshot.

Slightly different images.

My camera has never done anything remotely like that before.

And it hasn’t done it since.

Now, my skeptical brain immediately offers explanations.

Phones glitch.

Buttons get pressed.

Backpacks shift.

Technology does weird things.

I understand that.

But these images appeared during the precise window when I was experiencing the strongest sensations inside Machu Picchu.

And I cannot ignore that timing.

I’m not asking anyone else to explain it.

Honestly, I’m not entirely sure I can explain it myself.

But to me, it felt like a message.

Not dramatic.

Not booming.

Just simple.

Subtle.

Almost affectionate.

Hello.

I see you.

Glad you made it.

This story is a continuation from last weeks’ post, which you can read here.

The next day, we left the resort.

I said goodbye to the giant moth that had guarded my door during my stay. Then we boarded the train that most tourists take up the mountain to Machu Picchu.

By this point, I fully trusted our guide.

So when the train surprisingly came to a stop in what looked like the middle of nowhere, I wasn’t immediately concerned.

The six of us stood up, gathered our bags, and stepped off the train. Everyone around us looked puzzled, which made sense.

We were the only ones getting off.

As the train slowly pulled away, the conductor who was in the last car, shook his head at us out the window with his arms raised, as if to say, what on earth are you doing?

It looked like we were in the middle of nowhere standing beside disappearing train tracks in the middle of a valley. There was a single sign: Chachabamba. I had my only moment of doubt. I turned to Penny.

She had a huge grin on her face.

“This,” she said, “is where it gets fun.”

We were about to hike the final stretch of this part of the Inca Trail.

That day turned into an almost 7 hour climb up the mountain. The equivalent of roughly 268 flights of stairs.

At altitude.

It was one of the most physically challenging things I have ever done. I thought I was reasonably fit. But my asthma, combined with the thin air, made it impossible to walk and talk at the same time.

So I settled into a silent rhythm.

Video Penny took of our walk up the Inca Trail

One step. Then another.
Watching my feet. Breathing.

The locals passed me constantly. Effortlessly.

Locals carrying enormous packs moved past me again and again along the narrow trail. Their lungs, trained from a lifetime at altitude, made them seem almost superhuman.

Meanwhile, I kept climbing.

S-l-o-w-l-y.

Our group spread out along the trail, and I spent most of the day bringing up the rear. Slightly embarrassed. But with a huge grin on my face.

Hour four.
Hour five.

Still climbing.

The final stretch was the hardest of all.

The Monkey Stairs.

These ancient stone steps rise steeply along the mountain wall. The climb is so steep that many people go up on their hands and feet.

Which is exactly what I did.

But what waits at the top makes every step worth it.

Before I tell you what happened there, I need to mention one small detail that became a running joke among our group.

Our guide had asked each of us for our birthdays at the beginning of the trip.

When she heard mine was in June, she smiled.

“Ah,” she said. “I may need you.”

Later, she explained that in her Peruvian tradition, people born near the solstice have a connection to the sun.

Our guide taught me the ritual with a playful seriousness that suggested it might be ancient, or it might simply be something she loved sharing with travelers like us.

She showed me what to do if the weather turned, which it often does in the cloud forests of Peru.

And the weather did turn several times during our climb.

Dark clouds would gather. Rain would begin to fall.

Those rocks become dangerously slippery for this panting, out-of-shape Canadian.

Every time the rain started, our guide would pause and wait for me.

“Jane,” she would say.

Then she reminded me of the ritual.

I would stand, breathe deeply, raise my arms, and turn slowly counterclockwise in a full circle, exhaling as if to blow the clouds away.

And more often than not, the rain would stop a few minutes later.

Coincidence? Probably.

But it happened enough times that the other women began turning toward me every time the sky darkened.

As if to say, your move. It became our little trail ritual.

“I’ve got this,” I would joke, spinning slowly.

Later, I learned something else.

My birthday falls on the summer solstice. And in Incan cosmology, that date holds deep significance connected to the sun.

But that realization came later.

At the time, I was just trying to survive the climb.

Then finally, I climbed the fabled Monkey Stairs.

And a few steps later, I passed through the Sun Gate.

The moment you cross that threshold, the mountain opens.

And there it was.

Machu Picchu.

Spread across the valley floor nearly a thousand meters below us.

Moments earlier, I recall it had been raining.

But it seemed to me that just before we stepped through the gate, the clouds gently parted and the sun broke through. The entire city lit up in front of us as if someone had pulled back a curtain.

No one spoke.

We just stood there taking in the magical moment.

Our guide eventually turned to us and said something that surprised me.

“You are fortunate.”

She explained that sometimes that people can make the entire climb and never see Machu Picchu from the Sun Gate.

According to a local belief she told us, the mountain reveals itself only to those whose intentions are clear.

That day, it revealed itself to us. And I cried.

Why?

I’m still not sure. My pragmatic self tells me it was exhaustion. Relief that the worst of the climb was over. My spirit self tells me something else entirely. That I had finally answered a call that had been waiting for me for years.

And perhaps… that I had come home.

We didn’t enter the sacred grounds that day. And I was relieved. I wanted to be fully present for that experience. We made our way down and returned to the hotel. That night, I slept more deeply than I had in years.

The next day would be the day I had been waiting for all along.

Two weeks ago I wrote about the strange physical sensations that reminded my body of Peru.

This is the next part of that story.

Peru was incredible.

From the moment we arrived, I found myself making deep connections with the other women on the trip, Stacey, Brielle, Marlene and Penny. Each of us, in our own way, was on some version of a quest: self-discovery, healing, curiosity. And for all of us, adventure.

My brain felt like it was exploding with newness as we toured the beautiful, historic and fascinating local sites within Lima and nearby communities.

But the real magic for me began once we flew to Cusco – the city from where we would rest and prepare for our journey to Machu Picchu.

We stayed in a stunning hotel perched high in the mountains. The altitude was so extreme that the short walk from the main lodge to my private casita left me breathless. Truly breathless. A distance that would normally take thirty seconds suddenly felt like a small expedition.

For the two days I stayed there, I was greeted by a beautiful giant moth that had taken up residence on my front door. I found him beautiful, and his quiet presence somehow comforted me.

Our journey toward Machu Picchu itself was a perfect blend of grit and grace.

The first moment of true magic for me in Peru came unexpectedly on our first day of adventures in Cusco.

We were driving along a winding mountain road when we pulled up to what looked like a modest roadside destination. When we stepped off the little tour bus, we realized it was actually a privately owned museum housing thousands-year-old Peruvian textiles.

Inside, delicate fabrics were preserved behind temperature-controlled glass. It was fascinating, though not at all what I had imagined we would encounter that day.

But what happened next surprised me even more.

As we exited the museum, we heard music in the distance.

Soft at first. Then clearer.

We were directed to walk behind the building, where a man in traditional Peruvian clothing stood beside a small wooden gate. Behind him was a paddock filled with llamas, vicuñas and alpacas.

He opened the gate and motioned for us to enter. We happily obliged, immediately surrounded by the herd. We were given handfuls of fresh grass and spent a joyful time nuzzling and feeding these beautiful, serene animals.

Original Video - That’s me in the green vest. Notice the clear sky…

Meanwhile, the music continued.

Getting louder.

In the center of the paddock was a small hill. After a while we were gently ushered toward it. As we walked up the hill, the music grew stronger with every step.

When we reached the top, the unforgettable scene revealed itself.

Our brilliant host Penny had arranged a spiritual ceremony for our small group of six women. A shaman from a community deep in the cloud forest had been invited to meet us, accompanied by three traditional musicians. The shaman was slowly dancing. The musicians were playing and singing. We were invited to sit in a circle around them while our guide quietly explained what was about to happen.

This ceremony, she told us, was meant to prepare us for Machu Picchu.

To cleanse our spirits.

To open our hearts and minds before entering a sacred place.

We participated together, each of us following the steps as we were guided through them. It was intimate, intentional, and surprisingly emotional.

I was so absorbed in the moment that I left my own camera in my bag.

At one point though, I helped take photos with Penny’s camera. And that’s when something strange happened.

Through the lens, the light kept changing.

It flickered. Dark, then light.

Video was not retouched for colour - can see the flicker from dark to light at 0:14

Bright flashes of color would appear, then disappear.

The sky would go dark, then instantly light again. White light flickered above the ritual offering. The leaves being prepared for the ceremony seemed to glow.

At first, I assumed I had done something wrong with the settings.

I whispered an apology to Penny as I took the photos, thinking I must have accidentally turned on a filter or changed the ISO – something! But I also knew that all I had done was press the shutter button.

The images through the lens kept changing on their own.

Later I learned it wasn’t just happening with one camera.

It was happening with several.

Multiple women in our group experienced the same strange flickering through their lenses. Bright light. Dark sky. Sudden shifts in color that weren’t visible to the naked eye. Strange images showing up in their camera roll.

At the time, none of us could explain it.

Now, I believe the cameras were picking up something our eyes couldn’t.

Energy.

And the reason I say that with some confidence is because the same phenomenon happened again and again throughout the rest of our trip.

At the time, though, we laughed it off. Cameras glitch. Light does strange things in the mountains. We moved on.

Later that evening, when I returned to my casita, the giant moth was still there on the door, exactly where I had left him.

If you’re enjoying this unfolding Peru story, feel free to share it with someone who loves travel, mystery, or the strange ways life nudges us forward.

I’ve been dragging my feet on this story. I suspect it’s my old pragmatic, thick-skulled, German resistance to this newer, enlightened era of myself.

So, as if in response, my body has recently become a delivery system. Delivering messages with the urgency of 30 minutes or it’s free pizza delivery guy.

The message has been clear.

It’s time to put the proverbial pen to paper and write about Peru. But first I must tell you about the resistance and the messages.

First Message

Last Friday, February 20th, 2026, I woke up feeling off. Slightly nauseated. Headachy. Buzzy.

Not sick exactly. Just… altered.

I met a friend for tea. Then, on my way to my next meeting, my very wise and intuitive healer friend called me. I told her what I was feeling.

“I’m feeling the exact same thing, Jane,” she said. “Nauseous. Lightheaded. Dizzy.”

Then she added that astrologically it was a big day. Saturn and Neptune aligning at zero degrees. A new 36-year cycle beginning. And the first time in recorded human history their meet-up has been in the creation point degree of Aries, suggesting we are witnessing the messy, live birth of a new era.

I don’t know how much stock you put in the stars. I honestly don’t fully know how much I do. But I’ve learned not to dismiss the way my body responds to certain energetic shifts. And this was a big one to all the sky watchers.

“You need to eat something,” she said. “And drink water. Now.”

Eating was the last thing I wanted to do. But I trusted her. I ate. I drank. I felt better.

For awhile.

Later that afternoon I went home utterly exhausted and collapsed into bed. This is not like me. Cat napper? Yes. Middle-of-the-day shutdown? No.

As I lay there, my organs felt like they were buzzing. Vibrating. I slipped into a strange in-between state. I was having a chaotic non-sensical dream, but I could stop the dream by willing my eyes to open. When they closed the dream continued uninterrupted. I couldn’t move my body without serious effort. It felt like I was pinned under ten weighted blankets.

I roused in the evening for a few hours to honour a commitment I had made to see a friend’s show and came home and went back to bed. That night I woke at 3 a.m. and couldn’t fall back asleep. So I went to my desk and wrote.

That became last week’s Substack: This Is Not a Renovation. It’s a Teardown.

While writing, I again felt dizzy. Slightly nauseous. Charged. Like an overfilled battery inside a human frame.

It didn’t feel like illness.

It felt like voltage. The next day it had receded.

Second Message

This week, Thursday February 26th, I completed an introductory class in Therapeutic Touch. It works with the human energy field. It brings balance. It anchors and settles energy that has become scattered. It was enlightening and wonderful.

And when I received treatment, something shifted.

It felt like a switch was flipped.

Suddenly I was bone-deep exhausted again.

I drove home blasting loud music to stay alert. Walked in the door. Went straight to bed. Middle of the afternoon. No logical reason.

Again: half-awake, half-asleep. Heavy. Dizzy. Slightly nauseous.

But this time, I recognized it.

I had felt this before.

In Peru. In Machu Picchu.

And that’s when it clicked.

My body was telling me it’s time to write about Peru. And what it taught me.

If you haven’t read the story about the day my Peru quest was assigned to me more than 15 years ago, please read that story below first for context.

Planning Peru

The opportunity to experience Peru and visit Machu Picchu appeared early in 2024.

My dear friend Penny Light, who runs Grit and Grace Adventures, announced she would be taking a small group of women to Peru for the first time.

I knew immediately I was going to be on that trip. Knew it in my bones.

I had been talking about Peru for fifteen years. This was it.

At the time, I was disentangling myself from a business partnership that had become heavy and painful. Booking that trip felt like placing a marker in the ground.

A new era was beginning in November 2024.

The timing was delicate. I was leaving at 3 a.m. on November 24th. My husband was turning 60 the night before. I wanted to celebrate him fully. And we both knew this trip mattered deeply to me. So, we did both.

We hosted a huge birthday celebration in our home. Weeks of planning. Friends and family filling every room. We celebrated late into the night.

At 3 a.m., my ride arrived for my 6 a.m. flight out of Toronto.

I kissed my newly sixty-year-old husband goodbye.

And I left.

An awe-inspiring journey full of grit and grace was waiting for me.

Something in my soul was singing.

And something was shown to me on that trip.

Something I still can’t explain.

But it happened.

And my body has decided it’s time to remember.

Video of me I took walking the Inca trail within view of the magnificent Machu Pichu

For the last six years, I’ve been recording my dreams. Not just the profound message dreams that I have written about so far here on Substack. These ones are more of my run of the mill nighttime subconscious reveries. Garbled half-asleep rambling voice memos made moments after walking. Notes that begin with, “Okay, this is weird but…” and end with me forgetting how it ended. Funny, I never really went back to read them. They accumulated quietly in the background of my life like psychic voicemail. That is, until Friday February 20^th to be exact. In a move that felt somewhere between curiosity and low-grade obsession, I gathered six years of dreams into one document in the wee hours between 4 - 6 am when sleep was again elusive, to see if there was… I don’t know… a plot. Or a message – from my subconscious to me.

Turns out there was a storyline (albeit deranged) with a six-year-long arc. Cars hurtling toward head-on collisions. Me in the passenger seat yelling, “Merge. Merge! MERGE!!!” Tigers running obstacle courses. Electric cars contaminated with gasoline. Detectives searching my cluttered house. Me floating in space trying to line up planets so I can get back to Earth. My husband John dying and then not dying. Ancient tunnels full of statues waiting for me to remember my own name. Gladiator arenas. Killer bees. Execution by trampoline. Flying paper harnesses I couldn’t quite get my hands on. And, of course, the horses asking for theatre tickets.

During this same timeframe, things in my waking life were getting… complicated. COVID rolled in and rearranged the planet. My body decided to stage its own protest with sudden and severe sciatic pain which required hospital visits and heavy-duty pain meds. My business partnership really started to strain in ways that felt both subtle and seismic. I was still functioning. Still showing up. Still driving in the fast lane. But underneath it all I felt horribly undermined and unstable. So, while I was arguing about operations, numbers and strategy during the day, my subconscious was staging car crashes, drownings, and elaborate escape plans at night.

What started to hit me, reading them all together, wasn’t just how dramatic my subconscious is. (No surprise there.) It was how afraid I’ve been. Afraid of things blowing up. Afraid of missing something critical. Afraid of not catching danger in time. And underneath that fear? ANGER. Anger that I was the only one scanning the horizon. Anger that I kept feeling responsible for preventing impact. Anger that I was running obstacle courses in my sleep while trying to smile politely in meetings during the day.

And then there was the profound (to me anyway) tunnel dream about a year ago. January 2025. I’m walking through an ancient stone corridor with a non-human companion. The walls are lined with magical, powerful statues from different civilizations — massive, silent, watching. I’m told that to move forward I have to say my name to activate each statue. Upon activation I am given access to that piece of wisdom from history and can move on. Easy peasy! Except as we go travel further, it becomes harder and harder to remember my own name. I look at the statues, each waiting in anticipation to animate, and I open my mouth…and nothing comes out. Or the wrong name comes out. I feel the panic rising. How do you forget your own name? And yet there I was, standing in front of history itself, blank. The deeper I went, the less certain I became of who I really was.

The thing is, during an Ayahuasca ceremony the summer before, I had been given a name. Not metaphorically. Very clearly. “I am Sovereign.” It landed in my body like a heavy bell. So, standing in that tunnel, unable to remember my name, felt almost absurd. Hadn’t I already been told? Hadn’t I claimed that? And yet, in the dream, I couldn’t access it. That was the moment it clicked for me reading these dreams back: it’s one thing to be handed a revelation. It’s another thing entirely to live like you believe it. My subconscious wasn’t confused. It was testing me. Are you stepping up or out?

Just a few weeks ago, I dreamed that my family and I were about to be executed by a hyper-religious church cult. We had all been accused of blasphemy. We were calmly waiting to be killed. As if we had accepted the inevitability of it. Then, in a moment of sudden clarity, I realized the severity of what we had so easily accepted. I snapped.

In the next moment, I was screaming into the phone, “We love God! You don’t get to tell us if we love God!!” And then, because I am apparently very evolved, I added, “You fucking bitch!!!”

It was PURE FURY.

I screamed at my family, “What are we doing?! We’ve got to run — NOW!!” We threw clothes into bags. We ran. As we tore down the middle of the street, I turned around mid-flight and pointed a finger gun at the girl who was chasing us with her parents. They were enraged that we had the audacity to run. I pulled the imaginary trigger at her head as we slipped from their grasp.

I woke up, heart pounding. And what stayed with me wasn’t fear. It was the rage. No one gets to define what I believe, who I am, or how I’m allowed to exist.

But also this: it isn’t noble to die for every fight. Maybe sovereignty also means leaving.

It feels like my subconscious has been dragging me, sometimes kicking and screaming, toward one thing. Sovereignty. This word has stalked me for years. I grasp it. I lose it. I am handed it in ceremony. I forget it in tunnels. And still it comes back, relentless.

If my ego is a house I built to survive my life, midlife has exposed the structural rot and slapped a bright red CONDEMNED sticker across the front door. This is not a renovation. It is a teardown.

(I asked AI for an image for this story (sorry again Blythe) an this image both made me laugh and wince, so it’s a winner.)

No more being the responsible one. The peacekeeper. The merger, the manager, the absorber of impact. The woman who quietly lines up for execution if loyalty requires it. Underneath that posture is rage. Clarifying rage. The kind that says I will not erase myself to keep the system intact.

And here is the part that feels almost subversive. I refuse to age into disappearance. I refuse to become the softened, supportive background character society seems to expect of women in their fifties. I am not going quietly anywhere.

Individuation, for me, is not enlightenment. It is extraction. It is pulling myself out of roles that once fit but now suffocate. It is refusing to keep performing a version of myself that keeps me small. It is time to be honest, not about who I have been for everyone else, but about who I am when no one is defining me.

When I look back at six years of dreams, the pattern is not mystical. It is consistent. I am placed in systems where someone else is driving. Where I am scanning for impact. Where I am accused, hunted, evaluated, or expected to comply. And in almost every version, I either carry the burden or prepare to sacrifice myself.

Until I don’t.

The shift is subtle but undeniable. In the later dreams, I stop waiting for impact. I stop accepting execution. I run. I fight. I leave. I remember that I have agency.

That is what sovereignty means to me now. Not spiritual superiority. Not independence for the sake of rebellion. It means I do not outsource my authority. I do not quietly volunteer to disappear. I do not accept roles simply because they were handed to me early and fit for a while. I choose. And if something requires my self-erasure to function, I am allowed to step out of it.

Midlife is not softening me. It is clarifying me.

And if my subconscious has been staging car crashes, cult executions, gladiator battles, and talking horses to get that message through, I suppose I should finally listen.

It was coming from my mind, but it wasn’t me. It was someone else speaking directly through my own consciousness. It was bizarre. But I wasn’t scared. I was relieved. The voice felt welcome and familiar.

Before I continue, you need to understand something. My mind has never been a safe place. I spent years staying intentionally busy, building, doing, multitasking, because slowing down meant allowing dark, intrusive thoughts to rise. Silence was not neutral. It was dangerous. It left me feeling broken, damned, sickened by my own mind. So I solved it the only way I knew how.

Stay busy.

“I am Sovereign,” she repeated.

And suddenly my mind was quiet. Except for her.

It was peaceful. Beautiful.

But my busy brain was still there too. I was desperate for answers to my midlife chaos, so the questions came fast.

Are you my spirit guide? Will you stay? What should I do next? Start another business? Teach again? Study AI? What am I supposed to do? Tell me what—

She cut me off.

“For fuck’s sake, I just got here. Could you just stop? I mean it. Stop, Jane.”

My mind and body froze.

That didn’t sound like a spirit guide. That sounded like me. But it wasn’t me. There were two voices in my head. Me, and someone else.

“What?” I asked.

“Stop. Just stop. Be still, Jane. That’s all you need to do. Stop and be still. Do nothing.”

I was still sprawled out in the dirt, grateful for her, but afraid to move in case my ethereal guest disappeared. I did not want to disturb whatever had allowed her to arrive.

Jake appeared beside me and placed a hand on my shoulder.

“How are you doing, Jane?”

“Really good,” I squeaked, careful not to disturb my visitor.

“How do you feel about getting up?”

In hindsight, a woman in a long white dress face down on a forest floor might have been mildly concerning.

“That’s probably a good idea,” I said.

He helped me back to my chair. And for the first time in my life, my mind felt like a place of rest.

No fighting. No managing. No controlling.

My body was at peace. My mind was at peace. And I had been given one very clear instruction.

Do nothing.

For those who know me, that is the hardest command imaginable for me. I do not sit still. I never have. Busyness was survival. An occupied mind felt safer than an empty one.

Because when I sit still, darkness comes. Terrible mental alleyways. Memories that may not be mine. Imagined futures. A sense of evil twisting my own thoughts against me. I have felt this since I was a child. I have felt broken for most of my life.

And here was a force telling me my healing would not come from motion, but from stillness.

So I was still.

(AI representation from memory - but I definitely didn’t look that good after lying in the dirt).

For hours I sat in that chair, watching the fire, the night sky, the beautiful firelit faces around me. No striving. No planning. I went to sleep that night with a huge smile on my face.

The next day, I remembered what Jake had told me.

“You are Sovereign.”

But it had felt like a dialogue between me and something else.

That precious night, my spirit was given a voice loud enough to rise above the din of my overactive mind. My spirit, my sovereign self, spoke, and I heard her.

That voice was me. My spirit. My soul. My intuition. Whatever you want to call it.

And since then, whenever I search for her, I feel her quite literally. I remember the voice telling me to stop. I remember the “for fuck’s sake,” which should have been a significant clue that it was me speaking, because I swear like a trucker! When I seek her now, I get shivers up and down my body.

It has been such a gift.

But little did I know that this was only an initiation into a much larger breakthrough months later.

Stay tuned, dear reader.

The first thing I noticed was my vision.

It was not double vision. It was triple vision. Everything in my field of view appeared layered on top of itself and there were three of everything. My eyeballs felt like they were buzzing, as if they were rapidly vibrating in their sockets. It was not painful, just strange.

I told myself, no wonder you’re seeing triple. Your eyeballs are buzzing.

Then I began to feel dizzy and queasy. I started breathing deeply and slowly, trying to calm my increasingly agitated body. A familiar thought surfaced.

What have I done?

As has been my pattern in this lifetime, and I suspect in many lifetimes before this one, when faced with challenge (self induced or not) I knuckle down when I should let go. Instead of allowing the medicine to move through me and letting whatever needed to surface do so, I tried to control it. I tried to control my body. I tried to control the experience.

Just keep breathing, Jane, I told myself. You’ve got this. It’s going to be okay.

Only in hindsight can I see that my self talk, the phrases I have always used to soothe myself in moments of uncertainty, were not helpful here. They were actively preventing what needed to happen. I was containing and managing instead of allowing and accepting.

After what felt like a long time of trying to calm my buzzing body, my left arm suddenly shot straight up into the air and then dropped. It was completely involuntary and caught me off entirely off guard.

It’s okay. You’ve got this.

Moments later, my other arm jolted out.

Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

Then one of my legs violently sprung away from the mat. Then the other. My heart began to race and I started feeling panicky. It felt as though something inside my body was trying to escape. Something was clawing at the inside of my skin, screaming to be released.

Each time my body jerked, I pulled inward and tried to control it.

It was utterly uncontrollable. So of course I tried to control it.

The involuntary movements intensified in frequency and duration until my entire torso, arms, and head were also being pulled up and dropped back down onto the mat again and again. It felt like a beating from within. And it was exhausting. This went on for what felt like hours, though it was likely much less time than that. I had lost all track of time by this point.

I clenched my jaw. I gritted my teeth. I rolled onto my side into a fetal position, trying to pull all the energy inward and contain it. But my body continued to flail.

When I could, I looked around the room. Some people were purging. Some were walking around quietly, and some not so quietly. Some were gently talking with each other. Some were crying. Everyone was experiencing the medicine differently.

But I did not see anyone else fighting it the way I was. But I didn’t even know I was fighting it – I had no frame of reference for what this experience was meant to be for me.

Throughout all of this, there was beautiful live music filling the space. Wind chimes, gentle gongs, prayer sticks, and the soothing voice of our shaman inviting us to continue the journey, to allow, and to release.

After some time, the group decided it might be helpful to go outside. It was a beautiful, warm summer evening. But I needed help walking. I do not remember if anyone else did.

We gathered around a campfire, each of us in our own chair. I remember shakily lowering myself into mine, and suddenly dropping into it like a sack of potatoes. I remember pulling my knees into my chest, pulling my hoodie over my head, and trying to disappear from the world, from the experience I was having. I closed my eyes and made myself as small as possible.

AI image generated from memory - again, I didn’t look this good but hey, I’ll take it! (Sorry Blythe!)

I wanted it to stop. I was exhausted and deeply frustrated.

Is this really what this whole experience is going to be like?

I thought about John’s experience. I thought about Thomas’s. And I remember thinking, what a ripoff! They found joy, bliss and deep connection to spirit and it seemed like I was just going to feel sick and shaky and disappointed.

I stared at the fire for a long time. My body continued to twitch and convulse whenever it could. My self talk continued.

You’re okay. You’re okay. You’re okay.

And then suddenly I knew I was not okay.

In an instant, I went from controlling the ayahuasca to having no strength left to do so. I felt suddenly violently ill. I rushed out of my chair, away from the group and into the darkness beyond the firelight and walked towards to the forest a few steps and dropped to my hands and knees and began retching.

As I was vomiting, tears streaming down my face, I crawled backward in the soft, cool dirt. I was grateful to be outside, away from the eyes of the group, the noises of the fire and forest masking me. I remember feeling ashamed. I had told myself this would not happen. I wouldn’t be sick.

After it passed, which wasn’t long, my body, hot and slick with sweat, I crawled a little further towards the forest. Then I felt myself slowly sink into the earth beneath me.

The forest floor welcomed me. My body dissolved into the dirt. And suddenly there was peace. No nausea. No convulsions. No fight.

Just ease.

Then I heard a voice that was not my own.

I am Sovereign.

AI generated image from memory. (Sorry Blythe! But this is so close to how the scene looked and felt except I didn’t look this good. ;)

Sometimes I need a nudge.

This story begins with my husband, a men’s group challenge, and a question about end of life that unexpectedly led me toward ayahuasca. At midlife, after years of responsibility, partnership, parenting, and apparent stability, I felt myself being pulled toward psychedelics not just out of curiosity, but also out of necessity. I was searching for clarity, for my own intuition, and for a way back to myself that did not require dismantling the life I had built.

My husband is part of a local volunteer men’s group. One of the practices they work with is challenge: physical, emotional, practical, and spiritual. In 2023, he was asked to prepare for the end of his life, not because death was imminent, but as a way of clarifying what matters.

Part of that challenge was to ask our three adult children a single question.

If I were to leave the planet tomorrow, what is something you would wish we had done together that we have not done?

Their answers could not have been more different.

Our youngest, Blythe, asked him to read to her again, like he had done when she was young, and to go stargazing. Our son Hugh realized he had never thrown a baseball with his dad. Our eldest, Thomas, then twenty-three, asked for something else entirely.

He wanted to go on a hallucinogenic trip with his father.

John said yes to all of it.

In November of 2023, John and Thomas traveled to a beautiful farm in southern Ontario to take part in a legal ayahuasca ceremony facilitated by a shaman who brings the medicine from her family lineage in Mexico. Not surprisingly, their experiences were vastly different.

John’s was filled with joy, laughter, and love. Thomas’s was intense and spiritually transformative. He returned with a quiet clarity and a changed relationship to himself and to spirit.

When I heard their stories, especially Thomas’s, I knew my next challenge had arrived.

I booked my own ceremony for July of 2024. I chose to go alone. I wanted to be among people who did not know me. I had no expectations. I understood by then that this medicine meets everyone differently.

The owners of the farm prepare people carefully. There is extensive information, a preparatory video call, and follow up guidance generously given in the weeks leading up to the ceremony. It was during a preparatory call that I first saw the beautiful owner, and her peaceful partner seated beside her, who did not speak on the call. Later I learned his name was Jake.*

I arrived on a warm, cloudless afternoon. I was dressed in white as is the custom for the ceremony. John dropped me off and lovingly wished me a wonderful journey. I met a few of the other participants as they quietly arrived.

Then I saw Jake and we locked eyes momentarily.

I approached him to introduce myself; he smiled and said he had a message for me. He said it had come through during the preparatory video call we were both on, and that it was meant specifically for me. He asked if I wanted to hear it.

I understood immediately what he meant. I have delivered messages before. I have been asked, at other points in my life, to pass things along that did not belong to me, messages that were meant for someone else. I had learned to respect that responsibility. But this was different. No one had ever arrived with a message for me.

Obviously, I said yes.

Then he proceeded. He told me he was instructed to say the following:

You are sovereign.

The word landed heavily in my body. Who am I to be called sovereign? He went on to explain what the message meant to him through his own spiritual framework - what he suggested I take away from the missive. I listened, nodded, thanked him, walked away and feeling overwhelmed.

Minutes later, standing near the fire pit and talking with another participant, I realized I could not remember a single word he had said! Not the explanation. Not the context. Only the sense that something important had just passed through me and vanished. Instead of rolling it over and over in my mind, which would have been typical, I had somehow completely erased the message!

I tried to retrieve it. I could not. The harder I tried, the further it slipped away.

I felt embarrassed but I went back to find him. I apologized and told him I needed him to repeat the message. I explained that I knew it mattered but that I could not remember it at all. He paused, searched for it, then said it once more.

You are sovereign.

This time it stuck.

I did not try to analyze it. I did not ask follow-up questions. I simply held it and walked away hoping that whatever it meant would unfold in its own time.

That evening we gathered in the barn. Each of us had a blanket, a pillow, and a bucket. The beginning of the ceremony was simple: there was beautiful music played by Jake on drums, gongs, bowls, and fans setting a mood of peace and exploration. Our shaman guided us into stillness and asked us to set an intention.

At that point in my life, I was struggling. A shared business was unraveling. Menopause was relentless. The empty nest was approaching. I felt trapped by expectation and responsibility. I felt completely at sea with no idea where I was supposed to go.

I asked for guidance. I asked for my intuition to be louder so I could hear what I was supposed to do next - what I was meant for - what my heart wanted.

The shaman came and sat with each person, searched us deeply with her compassionate eyes, and set our dosage based on what she saw. I received a small amount of the brown syrup in a cup and shot it back. Once everyone had been served, the journey truly began.

I had hoped this experience might be easier than my previous mushroom journey. I thought perhaps I had earned something gentler.

That was not what happened.

I am a stubborn woman it turns out. On a multitude of levels. And the person standing in the way of connection to myself was me. So what followed was another battle. This time it was between who I was determined to be in that moment, and who I knew I wanted to become.

This journey marked the beginning of acceptance. It was the first real act of deliberately attuning to my intuition. Years earlier, I had jumped out of a literal airplane, trusting that the parachute would open. This time, the jump was internal. I stepped out of a life I had built from expectations, rules, religion, and obligation, without knowing what would catch me. I only knew that staying inside what I had constructed was already costing me my spirit and my happiness.

Jumping was my only option.

The landing is another story.

I didn’t expect a full-blown spiritual brawl.

It makes sense in hindsight. When I decided to do this psilocybin trip, I was a completely different person than I was in my 20s. In so many ways, I had become locked down, even though I loved my life. I knew that I was unhappy, not with my marriage or children, but with nearly every other way I was showing up in the world.

To any outside observer, I looked successful. I was a partner in a thriving business. I held the respect of community leaders and fellow entrepreneurs. I was fulfilling a responsibility to become successful in business.

But always—quietly, aggressively, my muffled intuition gnawed at me. That persistent voice whispering: “You’re heading down the wrong path.” And subconsciously I did did everything I could to drown it out, because listening would have mean dismantling my life in a way I wasn’t prepared to do.

As you can imagine, with all that locked and loaded in my subconscious, this mushroom experience was nothing like my first.

The dosage suggestions on the package helpfully indicate the amount to take for the kind of trip you wished. So, feeling cautious, I took what was considered a moderate dose. I also intuited that I’m a lightweight when it comes to psychedelics (something that would be affirmed over and over again in the coming years.) Not long after, I noticed my hands. Every single cell on their surface became exquisitely detailed, as if I were examining them under an invisible microscope. I was mesmerized, flipping them over and over, observing the psychedelic medicine transform my body.

Then I needed to lie down. Fast. I was getting heavier and heavier by the second. John guided me to the bed in our sun-lit cottage by the lake, where I curled into a fetal position, and I was immediately hurled deep into the past.

I met up with the past versions of myself, iterations where I made the wrong choices by not following my intuition. I saw a life that ended as I walked into the sea, after my beloved town had been destroyed. Another life where I was disemboweled for speaking out against corruption. Another ended too soon, fueled by unwillingness to temper my anger, causing suffering for myself and my family. All these versions of me were despondent, frustrated, angry. And there were so many.

All these selves came at me in my vision, desperate to harness the reins of my current life to make up for their past mistakes. They arrived dressed in clothing of the century in which they had lived, at the age they had passed. It felt like an invasion as they argued among themselves and with me, each one demanding their turn to rewrite their history using my current life as a way to correct the terrible mistakes of their past. I don’t remember seeing a single old woman. Or any men. They were all youngish women full of regret and rage. Every single version of me had unfinished business and a sense of urgency.

The argument swelled to its peak. There was yelling, confusion. Then I felt John, gently stroking my back, guiding me back to the present. I remember him pulling me up from the melee of my deep subconscious, and after I slowly opened my eyes he gently asked, “Are you okay?” I recall so clearly saying, “It’s a war zone in here.” Then, letting my eyelids fall, I drifted off again into that liminal space between consciousness and unconsciousness, that strange threshold where I was thrown once more into the fray—with all those frustrated, angry, sad, regret-filled women.

They circled me, every version of me vying for attention. All were desperate for me to choose them, to fix them, to hand over the reins. At first, panic gripped me. Then a tidal wave of outrage and anger surged through me. I could see the current version of myself, the me of 2022, growing larger and louder, arms raised high above my head like an orangutan on the attack! I shot up until I was forty stories tall, screaming down at these smaller versions: “It’s not your turn!! It’s my turn! You had your chance. This is my life, and I’m going to choose it!”

It was violent, a battle—but I was enormous. A giant. My spirit had exploded out of my body, expanding to fill that liminal space. Slowly, one by one, these fragments of me either stepped away or simply dissolved in front of me. I began to shrink back to my human size, my spirit awkwardly squeezing itself back into my body, like stuffing myself into an ill-fitting suit.

I don’t think my body moved for hours. The entire battle took place within the tight coil of my mind, my body curled in a fetal position for the journey.

Later, when I’d found my legs again, I told John everything. We sat at the kitchen table in our small, beautiful rented cottage. He said, “You should write that down.” I probably should have then; I did try actually, but the pen would not move then. I wish I could have written it down because there was so much more detail than I can recall now. But I didn’t want to write it then. So here I am, finding the words now—feeling that enormous spirit well up inside as I do.

My life. My choices. No one’s responsible for it other than me.

You’d think that would be enough. Loud enough for me to listen. But I’m a stubborn woman as it turns out, and it took me a few more journeys into that liminal magic space to fully embrace my current life. Those stories are next.

Stay tuned dear reader.

This is an real photo of me (not AI, so Blythe may be happier about this one) on the set of Billy the Kid (film credit to Jordan Kennington, Joshua Amar, and Matthew Pancer). It was the image that came to me as I struggled with a visual for this story. It feels like one of the versions of me that showed up to brawl.

If you’ve read my earlier stories, you may already sense it: I’ve always had an adventurous streak. Skydiving was just the beginning. There was bungee jumping, trekking through the mountains of Thailand, backpacking across central Australia, hiking Uluru (when it was still allowed). Scuba diving in Mexico. Each adventure came with its own brush with danger, its own moment where the universe seemed to intervene — to teach me something or quietly save me.

And yet, somewhere along the way, I realized my thrill junkie tendencies might be a practice in avoidance. Because the most frightening journey — the one that mattered most, wasn’t a adrenaline-seeking trip at all. It was the inward journey. The act of sitting still. Listening. And facing what my intuition had been patiently trying to tell me all along.

All through my young adult life, I’d had these brief, unexplainable glimpses—memories, perhaps, from lives I’d lived before this one. These are the stories I started to tell here. The rational part of my brain always brushed them off as “cool experiences.” But until I started this Substack, I’d never paused long enough to weave the threads together, to recognize the subtle yet persistent calling from my subconscious. It has always been there, waiting.

A few years ago, I found myself deeply unhappy with my work life, even though I was the architect of my situation. It became intolerable—a silent weight, suffocating and all-consuming. And yet, I felt unable to move. I believe now, I was far off course from where I needed and wanted to be, and my intuition was suffocating, like it was under 10 wet blankets. I couldn’t hear it anymore.

It was during a much needed vacation with my dear husband, John, our first trip to the eastern shores of Canada together, that we decided to step into something deeper. We sought guidance and release. We promised to lifeguard one another on a journey through uncharted territory: a deep trip on magic mushrooms. The cozy, lakeside chalet where we stayed for our journey was called Luna Rosa, which means pink moon, and spiritually it is often interpreted as feminine energy. I didn’t know it at the time, but the namesake of our chosen location for my inward travel was foreshadowing what would be a challenging and intense journey into my past.

I’d only done mushrooms once before, back in my late 20s. That first time, the experience was sheer bliss—an overwhelming sense of joy, unity with the earth, aliveness, sensuality. I was exquisitely aware of my body and senses, but still very much anchored to the world. In retrospect, I wasn’t ready for what the mushrooms were waiting to show me—not then.

That first journey, cracked open the door to my body and senses. But, looking back, I see now that was only the beginning of my unfolding; I had to take this first step so I could eventually give myself over to the real work, the brave and necessary inward dive. Perhaps that’s why, when I approached my second journey on mushrooms, in that summer of 2022, I did so with equal parts hope and gentle caution.

If I’m honest, I was still hoping for ecstasy and revelation. Although that would have been beautiful, I believe the universe sensed I was ready to begin the real work of this lifetime’s soul contract. So this time would be very, very different.

I was soon to be visited by many women in my visions – all with their own urgent, competing need to be heard.

In Part 2, I’ll tell the story of my psychedelic journey that brought me face to face with the women I once was — furious, afraid, unfinished — all demanding I get it right this time. Stay tuned dear readers!

In fact, about fifteen years ago, on my birthday — June 21 — I decided to take myself out to lunch alone. The decision was inspired by a powerful, vivid dream I’d had the night before, filled with jungles and temples. This dream lingered with me in a way most don’t. I’ve had many dreams of places I’ve never been, but this one was especially poignant: sharper, more insistent, more alive.

That next morning, I realized I was completely free. My job at the college was done for the summer, and my husband and children were all out at school. I seized the rare quiet and headed to a local café with a good book tucked under my arm.

The afternoon was beautiful and sunny. I imagined myself slowly savoring lunch, reading, and enjoying the gentle hum of the restaurant — alone, and perfectly content.

I walked in, chose a cozy table for two, ordered my food, and opened my book.

That’s when it happened.

I became present to a strong feeling that someone was watching me. Not a casual glance — an intense, sustained stare that registered through my peripheral vision and whatever sixth sense I trust in moments like this. I tried to ignore it, determined to protect my peaceful birthday solitude. But curiosity won.

I looked up and locked eyes with an older man — gentle, balding, with an academic air about him (probably because of the large book in his hands). I didn’t recognize him. I quickly dropped my eyes back to my book, hoping to communicate: We are strangers.

But just at the edge of my vision, I sensed him standing up.

A flicker of dread crept in as I watched my quiet lunch teeter on the brink of interruption. He approached my table, visibly nervous, almost shaken, and stopped in front of me.

I looked up as he began to speak.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I never do this, truly, I never do, but I had such an overwhelmingly powerful feeling that I was meant to show you this.”

He was clutching a book tightly to his chest. After my cautious, “Okay… sure,” he turned it around and showed me a drawing.

I gasped.

The image on the page was exactly the structure I had dreamed of the night before. I knew instantly, without a doubt that I had seen this place in my dreams. I must have gone pale. I blurted out, “Oh my God. That was in my dream last night. Where is that? What is it?”

The man visibly exhaled, relief washing over his face.

“Oh, thank God,” he said. “I was so afraid you’d think I was crazy. That I was crazy.”

I assured him I was grateful, and urgently asked again, “What is it? Where is it?”

He pulled out the chair across from me and sat down, telling me about Peru, and about the magical place called Machu Picchu. He spoke of the Inca people and the purpose of this ancient site, offering a brief but reverent history lesson.

When he finished, we sat in a quiet, knowing silence.

Finally, I looked at him and said simply, “I think I’m meant to go there.”

He nodded. “I think you are too.”

Then he stood, politely excused himself, and left.

I never saw him again.

It took me a long time to give myself permission to visit that sacred place. But I’m glad to say it did eventually happen. Specifically because of that dream, and that unexpected encounter the next day, I would one day find myself on a plane to Peru, heading toward Machu Picchu.

But not yet.

Before that journey could unfold, there were other thresholds to cross. Experiences that cracked me open in ways I could never predict. Those journeys dismantled old fears, loosened long-held identities, and shifted something essential in me. They are not side stories. They are part of how I found the courage to listen, to say yes, and to step fully into the unknown. Into Peru.

So, this is not the end of the story — it’s the prologue.

Before Peru, before temples and mountains and pilgrimage, there are other stories I need to tell. Because it was through those experiences that my current journey truly began.

Stay with me.

Looking back now, that Peel Regional Hospital robbery after my highway car accident (the one that torched my entire U.S. identity) feels less like theft and more like angelic intervention. Sometimes the angels don’t arrive with wings; sometimes they kick your life’s scaffolding out from under you so you stop clinging to plans that no longer want you. Seems sometimes the angels are thieves in hoodies, and sometimes they are two total strangers in the Lincoln tunnel between New Jersey and Manhattan.

So as you may have guessed, this story is another car mishap adventure, one that happened in 1993.

My last year of grad school in Delaware turned me into a master of survival economics. To get my MFA, I had to complete an unpaid theatre internship for my final year credit (because my MFA program had exploded – but that’s another story.) I worked full time for free at The Delaware Theatre Company, worked part time as a courier for $80 a week, and drove a lovely little Honda Civic whose gas gauge didn’t work.

And because twenty-something me assumed I could beat the odds, I never fixed it.

Which is how, on a freezing December night in 1993, I found myself rolling into the Lincoln Tunnel on fumes with exactly ten dollars to my name, all of which I had to hand over for the toll.

The car sputtered, coughed, and died spectacularly in the middle of the tunnel, instantly causing a symphony of rage behind me. Horns. Screams. Swerving headlights. A wall of Manhattan impatience barreling around me and my stranded car.

I got out, grabbed my trusty plastic gas can, which I had made a habit of carrying with me, and started walking, because what else do you do when you are 25, broke, and delusional about danger?

Thirty steps in, a sleek black sedan slowed beside me.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m out of gas and money. The only option is to find a gas station and beg,” I stated with false bravado.

“Your car won’t be here when you get back.”

I looked back at my stalled Civic like a stubborn child I was abandoning, and muttered, “Well, I don’t have any other option!”

Before I could defend my terrible logic, another car, a VW minivan, honked sharply. The driver wildly signaled a universally understood sign through his windshield:

THROW IT IN NEUTRAL.

I sprinted back, speedily found neutral, and he literally pushed my Honda out of the tunnel with his van.

ChatGPT AI generated image (sorry Blythe!)

We emerged out of the tunnel simultaneously as police sirens hurtled toward the mess I’d caused. Then the van guy disappears without even waiting for thanks. The cops glanced at me, saw the situation was no longer exploding, and… drove on.

Then with timing too perfect to be coincidence, the black sedan reappeared.

He rolled down his window again.

“Now what are you going to do?”

“Still Plan A,” I said. “Walk to a gas station. Beg. Come back.”

He shook his head. Laughing I think.

“Get in.”

Everything in my mind flashed danger, danger, danger — woman alone, no cell phone, no money, no backup.

But something deeper whispered, you’re safe.

So, I said a quick prayer and got in.

He drove me to the nearest gas station, filled my can with five dollars of gas, drove me back, and waited long enough to make sure my car sputtered back to life.

I braced for the ask: phone number, favour, quid-pro-quo. Something. No one, especially in rough lower Manhattan, was going to be kind just to be kind. But I was wrong.

He drove away before I could even thank him.

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Later, in a dingy lower Manhattan diner with my then boyfriend, I finally thawed enough to feel everything: the fear, embarrassment, adrenaline, and yes — gratitude.

Was it divine intervention? Dumb luck? Good people doing good things?

I still don’t know.

But here’s what I do know:
There are moments when help arrives faster than logic should allow.
When timing feels choreographed instead of coincidental.
When strangers act with precision that feels… directed.

Guardian angels rarely look like stained-glass seraphs.
Sometimes they drive minivans.
Sometimes they appear in black sedans, asking, “What are you going to do?”

Have you ever felt protected by something you couldn’t see?
Experienced timing so uncanny it felt scripted?
I’d love to hear your story — the world needs more evidence of these invisible hands.

And he brought a message.

Before I go on, I want to acknowledge my sister Mary, my niece Theodora, and my nephew Henry. I would not be sharing this story without their full blessing. It’s close to home in every possible way, and we still carry big feelings around Glenn. But this message-story feels like one that wants to be published.

Glenn was 44 when he died—far too young, taken by a rare and vicious cancer. I don’t think any of us believed he’d lose that fight. At least I didn’t. He was a force. Brilliant, spiritual, artistic, a man whose mind was always alive with literature, music, and meaning. In life, he was deeply connected to the written word. It makes perfect sense that in death, he would use books to speak.

And this wasn’t the first time. As Mary likes to say, Glenn was an equal opportunity ghost, and I’ll add, a prolific communicator, and that part of the story is important. Glenn sent messages through books almost immediately after he passed to other family members—though those stories belong to others, not me. This is just my part of a much larger story.

November 10th, 2010

All day, Glenn sat heavy on my heart. Grief can be quiet sometimes—just a persistent presence, like a shadow sitting beside you. By the time I arrived home that evening, I felt wrung out.

I walked up the steps of the front porch—the one Glenn had complimented the year before.
“You did a fine job,” he’d told me.
That memory hit as sharply as the cold air.

Inside, John took one look at me and knew.
“Today’s the day,” I said.
He held me for a long moment, both of us remembering, wishing we could ease the weight still on Mary and the kids.

Then he went to one room, and I wandered upstairs.

I’d been on the second floor only a few minutes when I heard it—a thunk, loud and startling, the kind of sound a heavy object makes when it hits hardwood. We had no pets then. No open windows. No reason for anything to fall.

I walked downstairs slowly, a strange calm settling over me. Before I even reached the bottom step, I saw it.

A book sprawled on the floor, pages down, spine up.

Not just any book.

My complete works of Shakespeare.

It had been shelved tightly between other volumes, the kind of book you have to tug free with two hands. And yet here it was, as though it had launched itself from the shelf.

The message was immediate. Undeniable. Him.

I picked it up with trembling hands. The book had fallen open—naturally, effortlessly—to the very first page of one of the Henry plays. I’m nearly certain it was Henry V.

And that’s when the significance hit me like a second wave.

Shakespeare wasn’t random for Glenn. It was our shared language.

We had performed together with Tactus, the Renaissance vocal ensemble he helped found — Glenn weaving music with the Shakespearean scenes I performed with John, in a way that felt almost alchemical. And in 2007, the two of us had stood side by side in the MacDonald Stewart Art Centre in Guelph, staring at the Sanders portrait — the one that claims to be the only portrait of Shakespeare painted during his lifetime. I remember the thrill of that afternoon, the quiet reverence we both carried.

He knew how much I loved language, performance, art.
And I knew how deeply Shakespeare lived in him.

So when that book — of all books — launched itself from my shelf and landed open on Henry, his son’s name, the message was undeniable.

This wasn’t just a visit.

It was Glenn choosing the precise medium and message that I would immediately, instinctively understand.

A father reaching across the veil — through the art he loved — to speak to his boy, who at ten years old was already showing the same fire for performance. In that moment I knew this wasn’t just a nudge — it was a blessing. Glenn was sending his son a message of love and encouragement, a reminder that the artistic path was in his bones and he wasn’t walking it alone. And as a fellow creative, I understood instantly that part of my role was to echo that support. And now, all these years later, Henry has grown into the beautifully gifted artist his father always knew he’d become. It was eerie, comforting, and absolutely Glenn.

Why the Messages Matter

I’ve written before about dreams that warn, nudge, or interrupt my life with eerie precision. I’ve written about moments where the universe whispers—or yells. But this was something different. This wasn’t dream-space. This wasn’t symbolism. This was physical. Audible. A book thrown from a shelf, opened to a name.

I don’t pretend to understand how the spiritual dimension works—why some loved ones show up, why others stay silent, why the timing is unpredictable and the signs feel both fragile and enormous. But I believe they do show up. I believe the veil is thin. And I believe some messages are delivered because they simply must be.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could call them on demand?
But that’s not how this strange universe seems to work.

Instead, we get these rare, luminous moments—where the boundary between worlds blurs, and someone we loved steps close enough for us to feel them again.

This was Glenn’s moment.
And his message still lives in me.

One violent afternoon and poof — my US life disappeared.

Why the Universe Had to Scream

Before I tell you Part 2, I need to rewind a bit. Because as loud as that crash was, in hindsight it probably had to be that loud to get through to me. My head was stubborn, my heart was armoured, and I was very determined to do life my way.

By 1994, I’d built an independent life far from my family and most of my friends. I’d finished my graduate degree in performance from Binghamton University in New York, where I’d lived since 1991. A theatre in South Carolina had offered me an unpaid internship starting that fall — a chance to earn my Equity card, the golden ticket every ambitious actor wants.

The plan was simple:

• May: my sister’s wedding.

• June: a job at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.

• Mid-August: pack up, drive south, and start my new life.

I had my path. I had my green card. I was not going to be the girl who moved home and stayed there.

And then I met John.

The First Decision

John was a working actor with the Stratford Festival. I’d known him a little before we started seriously dating in May, but I convinced myself it was a “summer fling.” Low stakes. I was leaving. He was a straight man at Stratford; let’s just say I did not picture him being lonely once I drove off into the sunset.

That’s probably why I had the nerve to ask him to my younger sister’s wedding. Big family, big emotions, big risk. To his enormous credit (and bravery), he said yes.

And then things moved fast. The intense, stupid-grin, can’t-stop-talking kind of fast.

We were inseparable until I left for Mount Holyoke. Then we were inseparable on the phone instead, talking for hours every night. On my birthday, the morning of a 12-hour tech day, I opened the door of my dorm room to find all six-foot-three of my exhausted, smiling man, holding a handful of wilted roadside flowers and singing “Happy Birthday” to me in the archway.

He had finished a two-show day in Stratford, driven through the night—over eight hours—just to surprise me.

We had 24 intensely romantic hours before he had to drive back. And in that tiny pocket of time, my heart quietly started doing the math:

Do you really want to move 1,000 miles away from this?
Are you sure you want to walk away?

But I didn’t want to blow up my life plan over one grand romantic gesture. I was too skeptical (and frankly too proud) for that. But I’d be lying if I said that overnight drive and sad bouquet weren’t part of what started tilting me away from South Carolina.

A good friend asked me the question that did the rest:

“Why on earth would you move to South Carolina when Toronto and New York are two of the top three acting centres in North America?”

She was right. The only real reason I was clinging to that internship was gratitude and people-pleasing. They’d offered me something, so I felt obligated to say yes, even if it made no strategic sense.

I finally admitted to myself that the South Carolina plan was… not it. I let it go.

But I was still determined to keep my US life. New York City was very much still on the table. And at that point, if I wanted to keep my green card, I needed to live in the States.

Which is why, in the moments right before the accident, my brain was ping-ponging between two futures:

New York City or Toronto?

Seconds later, the universe made its opinion crystal clear.

The Double Tequila and the Waiting Room

You already know the crash part. The screaming brakes. The spinning across four or five lanes. The concrete wall rushing toward me. No airbags. Seatbelt bruises. Somehow, still breathing.

After the ambulance, the ER, and the discovery that my purse and wallet had been stolen, I hit my emotional limit.

My dad arrived, took one look at me, and said:

“Looks like you could use a drink.”

No argument there.

We went to a nearby restaurant, and I ordered a double tequila and, for the first time that day, let my body register the simple miracle of being alive. Now, as a parent myself, I understand the specific kind of relief I saw on my dad’s face. That look of: I almost lost you.

The drive home is mostly gone from my memory. Shock will do that. But I remember walking into my parents’ living room.

And I remember who was waiting there.

The Second Decision

My mom was there—steady, dry-eyed, but visibly relieved in her own quiet way.

And beside her was John.

From the hospital I had told him to go on and do his show that night. That I was fine. I’d see him soon. But he’s stubborn, like me, and had other plans. He had called the stage manager of his show at Stratford—for the first and only time in his career—and told them to get his understudy to go on for him, so he could get in the car and drive straight to me.

No debate. No dithering. No “let me see if I can make it work.”

He just came.

The hug we shared in that living room told me everything I needed to know—about him, about us, about the future I’d been holding at arm’s length.

Up until that moment, I’d kept a careful distance. I’d told myself that moving back to the States would create an easy exit ramp if I needed it. I could love him and still keep one foot out the door.

Standing in my parents’ living room, bruised and shaken, that illusion fell apart.

He had shown me exactly who he was and where his priorities lay. And my guard, my stubbornness, my carefully curated independence… they all suddenly looked a lot like fear.

In that moment, I made the second major decision that changed my life:

I chose to stay.
I chose him.

The Whirlwind

Once that choice was made, everything accelerated.

• September 1994 – I moved to Toronto.

• October – John moved in with me.

• November – we were engaged.

• September 1995 – we were married.

Fast? Absolutely.
Reckless? Maybe on paper.

But in my body, every step felt natural, inevitable—even, in some strange way, foretold.

The universe had ripped up my American life in one afternoon. It had stripped me of my ability to default to “the old plan.” And in that cleared-out space, something better had room to grow.

The Real Message

Looking back now, it’s easy to see the symbolism:

The crash.
The stolen documents.
The man who refused to let me face it alone.

Sometimes the universe doesn’t whisper. Sometimes it slams you into a concrete wall, steals your wallet, and sends one stubborn, loving man to stand in a living room and show you who he really is.

I’m grateful every day that I listened, and that I was brave enough to stay.

Because that choice—to build a life here, with him—set off a chain of events that led to everything that came after: the kids, the careers, the collapses, the reinventions… and this very “Eat, Pray, WTF” chapter I’m in now dear reader.

Stay tuned. There is so much more.

P.S. Happy almost birthday baby, and here’s to 30 more years. ❤

️Me and John, September 2nd, 1995

In the summer of 1994, I had a horrendous car accident.

I was flying down the 401 from Kitchener to Toronto for a TV audition, in the left lane, at good speed, making a lane change. Just past Milton, a brown sedan slid into the exact same spot I was aiming for—in my blind spot. I saw him too late.

I yanked my steering wheel left to avoid him, which shot me straight toward the concrete median. In a panic, I hauled the wheel back to the right—hard—while the sound of cars behind me rose into a chorus of brakes and burning rubber as I slid across four or five lanes at highway speed. In less than a second, I could see I was now barreling toward the other concrete barrier.

I over-spun the wheel again, cortisol pumping, trying desperately to regain control. Instead, I locked the wheel left one more time, and this time… there was no correcting. I had a date with that wall.

And yet—apparently—it wasn’t my time.

Time truly does slow down when you think you’re about to die. Those final 3–4 seconds stretched into a long, soundless eternity. Everything went silent. The barrier drifted toward me in slow motion, millimetre by millimetre, until the final instant before impact when—

CRASH.

The front end of my little Honda Civic folded like paper. I was thrown forward and then everything stopped. I sat there, stunned, alive. My car did not have air bags.

So the only reason I was alive was because I’d worn my seat belt.

Which, frankly, was a miracle in itself. I had a long, stupid habit of ignoring it. This was the ’90s—your car would beep for ten seconds and quit nagging. And I routinely ignored it.

But a few months earlier, I’d started dating a man who refused to start the car until I buckled up. I remember rolling my eyes, griping, muttering. But I did it. And eventually the habit stuck—even when he wasn’t with me.

He saved my life that day. The belt bruised me from neck to hip, but it kept my skull from meeting concrete at 100 km/h.

AI generated image (sorry Blythe!)

The Kind Stranger & the Free Ambulance Ride

A man knocked on my window moments after the crash.

“Oh my God! I’m so glad you’re not a bloody mess. I was sure this was going to be awful.”

“I’m fine, I think,” I said, though I had no idea.

The ambulance arrived. Although I remember almost nothing of the conversation, other than that I was arguing with them that I was ok and didn’t need to go to the hospital. I recall the paramedic saying something like, “Look, it’s not like you’re driving anywhere. Let us take you. Free ride, free phone.”

Fair point. I had no car, no plan, and I was standing on the shoulder of a five-lane highway. And even I knew that I was probably in shock.

I let them take me to Peel Regional Hospital. I don’t remember the ride at all.

The Pay Phone, My Dad, and the Worst Possible Timing

In the ER lobby, I used the pay phone—because yes, this was 1994 and no one had cell phones—so I pumped in one of the three the quarters I had in my wallet.

My first call: the new boyfriend, John. The guy who had insisted I wear my seatbelt. I misdialed and got a confused stranger. Lost the quarter - I was definitely in shock.

My second call was to my father. I knew that number.

“Dad, it’s Jane. I’m at the hospital. I’ve had a car accident.”

“You’ve had an accident. How’s the car?”

Classic German pragmatism. That’s my family.

I reset and tried again: “Dad, I’m in the hospital.”

“Right! How are you?”

I said I was ok but I need a ride home. (My German pragmatism in play now.) He said he’d come to get me.

I went and sat down. My last quarter. Hell, I’ll try John again. I may lose another quarter but it was worth a shot. This time I got him.

“Hey baby!”

His cheery voiced immediately started to sooth my nerves.

“Hey hon… I’m going to miss your show tonight. I’ve totalled my car on the highway. But no worries. I’m fine. Just waiting at the hospital. My dad is on his way to get me.”

His reaction was everything my body wanted to hear—concerned, warm, immediate. He offered to drop everything and put his swing/understudy on for his show - he was performing with the Stratford Festival - but I knew that was a big ask, so I told him to go onstage and that I’d see him afterwards.

Things could have ended there. But no.

My day wasn’t done with me yet.

AI generated image (sorry Blythe!)

The Moment Everything Truly Fell Apart

While using the pay phone that last time, I’d put my wallet on top of it. My purse I’d unknowingly left where I was sitting. After the calls, in my stunned haze, I forgot the wallet at the pay phone.

When I sat back down, something felt off. I reached for my purse—it was gone. I frantically started searching everywhere it could have been.

Remembering with some limited relief that I’d left my wallet by the payphone, I scurried to check that it was still there - and maybe my purse was too? Wishful thinking. My wallet was gone too.

Someone in the ER had been watching me. Waiting. And the moment I was distracted, they took both.

I ran to the nurse’s station, panicking, telling her everything that had happened with sincere incredulity.

She looked up and sighed. “Sweetie,” she said, “it happens all the time. People already having the worst day of their lives? Easy targets. I’m so sorry.” She offered to have the police come talk to me, but warned me that everything was probably long gone by now.

And that was it. I broke.

I remember crying - even yelling. Every nerve in my body hit overload. Because what they had taken wasn’t just cash.

They had taken my entire US identity.

My US Green Card.
My US driver’s license.
My US Social Security card.
My US insurance papers.
Everything.

And because I was spending the summer in Canada, had given up my US apartment, and hadn’t established a new address yet… my Green Card was not replaceable.

My car was gone.
My legal US status was gone.
My entire American identity had been wiped out in one afternoon.

And here’s the kicker—the last thing I’d been thinking right before the accident?

Whether I should move to New York City or Toronto.

One violent, surreal afternoon later, the universe had delivered its verdict with a sledgehammer.

I looked up at the hospital ceiling and muttered to the universe:

“Wow. No subtly today”

Toronto it is.

But that day wasn’t just the end of my American life.
It was also the beginning of something far more important.

The path that would lead me to the most loving, transformative relationship of my life.

And that, dear reader, is Part 2.

Stay tuned.

The message came to me about twenty years ago; I’m fuzzy on the exact date, but it’s as vivid as ever. I remember being startled by the level of detail in the dream. In it I wandered out of a deep green forest and stumbled upon a two-story, octagonal wooden building—new, almost impossibly so. It has an outside wooden staircase that led to a second-floor exterior deck that held an elegant outdoor dining area. At a table for two, waiting for me was a former schoolmate, one I hadn’t spoken to in at least fifteen years.

The conversation between us was animated and purposeful. We spoke of self-love and forgiveness and how important it was. It all felt very urgent and present, and I woke feeling that familiar feeling of being burdened with a message for delivery.

Track him down, my mind insisted. But my stalker vibes started to worry me. Was I getting weird? He’ll probably think I’m a nut job, and he’d be right. I hadn’t spoken to him in at least 15 years at that point, maybe longer. Who listens to dreams this way? Me. I do. Certain dreams anyway. So I sat with the dream message for a few days as I struggled with how to go about finding him. It was the early days of LinkedIn and I decided to try it – it’s the only place I thought he might have a profile back in the late 2000s. Miraculously, there he was.

How do you tell someone you haven’t seen in a decade and a half that your subconscious has something important to say to them? You don’t, if you don’t want people to think you’re a bit unhinged. So I embraced my inner crazy and contacted him. And to his credit, he wanted to hear about it all and gave me his number to give him a call. When I found the courage to call him shortly thereafter I described to him the dream, scene by scene, in as much detail as I could: the deep green forest and grass, the wooden octagonal building, the steep staircase, the beautifully constructed deck, the elegant dining area and table we sat at – and of course, our conversation about self love and self forgiveness.

He went silent for a moment, and I remember him saying something along these lines (it was 20 years ago so this is an approximation, but it’s close):

I’ll be honest. I thought it was a bit strange the way you reached out and why; it’s not like you, at least what I remembered of you. But naturally I was curious about your dream. The thing is Jane, you just described in exact detail the carpentry job I just finished. I just built that deck on that building you described. It was a huge job for a golf course. You described it precisely. And what you are saying about forgiveness and self love, well, it’s very well timed. I’m in the midst of a bad break-up. And since you saw that complicated deck in your dream, I feel like someone really wanted me to get your message, so I’ll take it to heart. I don’t’ know what else to say, other than thank you.

We ended this impactful and memorable (at least for me) conversation a few moments later. I’ve not spoken or heard from him since – and never dreamed about him again. I wonder if he even remembers this conversation?

I wish I could understand why some dreams are so clear and some are talking horses, spaceships, rollercoasters and tsunamis all at the same time. Ya know, my more typical dream!

I have received two more special messages since this one – however, these next ones were sent from that liminal message filled space to a specific time in my waking life where the timing of the message was part of the message. One whispered, one screamed.

Until next time, dear readers.

The most recent time was when I met Chandra Pepper a few years ago. I was immediately struck by her joyful and powerful energy – and a deep knowing that she was meant to be a part of my life going forward. And she felt the same, so we became fast friends - so much so that together we have launched a podcast! TODAY in fact. (Which is why my substack is almost late!) The show is called The Sage Stage, and it can be found everywhere you listen to podcasts! It’s a show that is a bit raw, unedited and a testament to showing up, even when you are scared! (Kinda like us!)

But the first time I met a woman with red curly hair was quite a different set of circumstances. And that, my friends, is the story for this week.

There are nights when sleep for me, is not a rest. Occasionally, a passageway opens into a liminal space where messages gather, waiting for a recipient. On such a night years ago when I was in my late 20s, I found myself pulled into a dream unlike any I had known, its intensity seared into my memory.

In the dream, I was outside myself—watching myself, as an unseen observer hovering above my own sleeping body, suspended ten feet in the air. Next to me on the bed was a woman I somehow recognized yet could not place. Her hair was a wild, beautiful tangle of bright red curls, and like me, she was fully clothed, lost deep in sleep. We lay side by side, unaware of each other, adrift in the same silent bedroom.

Then something began to change. Above us, a round dream bubble appeared—a surreal image straight out of a comic strip, slowly forming above the beautiful red-haired woman. The contents inside the dream bubble were initially protected by a transparent sheet of protective glass, delicate and perfectly intact. I could see through it, but there was nothing to see – at first. But with a sudden ear-splitting crash, the glass shattered, and her dream bubble instantly was filled with rancid, black smoke. I watched my sleeping body from above, as I slowly realized I was being strangled. I was still asleep beside her, but now gasping and choking, as if invisible hands had wrapped around my neck. My limbs thrashed, my hands clawed, desperate to break free, while the woman beside me remained undisturbed, her dream bubble filling with even more thick smoke, until the dream bubble was fully black, obscuring everything within it. I continued to watched myself fight and thrash —harder and harder—against whatever force that was trying to suffocate me.

As the struggle peaked, I managed to break free and I watched myself suddenly wake up, gasping, my chest heaving the air cold, sharp air. I caught a few precious breaths, then I gingerly reached out and placed a gentle hand on the woman’s shoulder, whispering in her ear, “You’re safe now. I’ve got you.” And in that moment, the dream instantly dissolved, releasing me back to waking life.

The message echoed in my mind.

“You’re safe now. I’ve got you.”

I awoke with a particular feeling that this dream was meant to be delivered. This dream felt different. The image of the woman with red curly hair was vivid, insistent, settling in my bones with the unshakable feeling of a secret I was responsible for carrying onward. The only problem: I had no idea who she was.

It wasn’t until later that day, as I drove down the 401 highway to a photo shoot in Toronto, that realization struck. The woman who would be doing my makeup—someone I had only met once before—had striking red curly hair, every shade and curl echoing the figure from my dream. Suddenly, the abstract grew startlingly concrete. The message was for her. I knew it. But was I really meant to tell her? Would she even want to hear such a strange, fragile story?

Hesitation followed me right into the makeup chair. But as she worked, the urgency grew louder and louder. I gave in, rather abruptly turned to her and confessed, “I think I received a message in my dreams last night that was meant for you. Would you like to hear it? Or, if this sounds a little too out there, I totally understand.”

She paused, set down her brush, turned to face me and looked directly at me. “Please—tell me everything.”

I shared every detail: the floating vantage point, the woman’s presence, the shattering glass, the suffocating smoke, the desperate fight for air. I spoke of the overwhelming conviction that at the end of it all, the message had reached through the darkness to offer her comfort and protection.

When I finished, she exhaled deeply. “I’ve been waiting for that message,” she said softly. “Thank you. I needed it right now.” She told me briefly why it was important to hear – but that is her story to tell, not mine.

In that moment, any doubt I had dissolved. The message had found its way home.

There have only been a few nights in my life when a dream has arrived carrying such urgency, but when it happens, I know I can’t keep it to myself. They feel urgent and sticky, like glue in my brain. I may never fully decipher the why or how of these messages, but I do know this: when the night delivers a calling, I listen. And sometimes, that’s enough.

Stay tuned—this is not the only time thick black smoke has been part of a delivery.