Jill - A Little About Me, Pt.I
I’ve always had a love of experimentation, puzzling, research, and expression/exploration through physical movement since I was very young. Growing up a competitive dancer and athlete with an aptitude for science and math, I didn’t have a particularly difficult time in the typical Western civilization upbringing… although I always felt out of place. When I was a teenager, I unconsciously began mastering being a chameleon, donning the masks I needed according to where I wanted to fit in. Through this process, I “forgot my magic”, as my mum likes to call it, and began suppressing my emotions and signals from my body.
When I graduated university as a geophysicist in 2011 (after 5 years of flip-flopping degrees) I moved to a new city where I didn’t really know anyone, went through an intense break-up with my then-boyfriend of 7 years, and my mum and dad separated. Still not knowing how to properly regulate my nervous system or process emotion, I quickly dove down the path of burnout - working in an unfulfilling job where the only antidote was partying a lot. I jumped right in to the scene with work colleagues, happily forming drunken friendships. Never really listening to my body, and pushing myself physically, mentally, and emotionally beyond my capacity, I was finally humbled by a knee injury in 2012 that forced me to slow down. I couldn’t get in for surgery for 10 months. Post-surgery, I was put on high-dose anti-inflammatories for months, and then switched to Advil for the rest of that year when those ran out. My general health deteriorated with weird symptoms (which I won’t get into here, but basically my gut was destroyed), although my knee recovery was going well. I started getting more interested in “alternative” medicine to help ease my pain, inflammation, and symptoms, after my physio offered me acupuncture and it was the most relief I had experienced at that point. I started learning about and experimenting with nutrition, fasting, cannabis, and other herbs, but I still had a lot of fucked up ideas about what my body should be capable of, how it should look, and how much I could drink. I also couldn’t do anything physical that I usually did… so in late 2013 I started practicing yoga at the gym where I had my physio.
Hey yoga.
Long story short, my inner landscape began unfolding in overwhelming and exciting ways. I couldn’t believe what my body became capable of after a devastating (to me) injury. But, the practice broke open so much more… and this began a deeper personal revolution. I got a membership at my local studio where I deepened my practice, and a couple years later, in 2016, I went on to complete my 200hr training there.
One thing you don’t often hear about when beginning a transformative healing practice like yoga is that you may potentially feel like you’re regressing, and that things can get worse before they get better. Healing is not a linear process… As my practice deepened, I actually developed severe anxiety as I began to question everything I knew in the realization that I was not who I thought I was. Years of that emotional suppression from my school days came to the surface. Even though the things being brought up were difficult, I knew there was something important to this process, and I would have to move through a lot of discomfort. The anxiety got bad especially in social settings, which led to continued use of alcohol and substances to momentarily feel belonging, but ended up worsening the anxiety as my nervous system frayed. The hangovers intensified. I had no choice but to finally look at all the shit I had been avoiding for over a decade. I found the work of Peter Levine and somatic sensing, which was an incredibly helpful start to regulating and nourishing my nervous system.
A few months after my training, I began experiencing scary systemic inflammation symptoms, including intense pain and blurred vision in one eye, then the other (they would alternate). These episodes continued every few months without explanation, and then one day, I started experiencing strange, severe back pain when I moved in certain directions. This got worse and worse… it would take me almost 2 hours of gentle movement in the mornings just to feel almost “normal” on the bad days. Quicker than most (because of my family history) I was diagnosed with a form of autoimmune arthritis called ankylosing spondylitis. The only option given to me was to take high dose NSAIDs (anti-inflammatories which had already destroyed my gut previously from the knee surgery). It became a necessity to learn more about choices outside of the allopathic medical model. Along with my yoga and breathwork practices (which were incredibly helpful to support my ability to move and take the edges off of my pain), I began seeing a naturopath, playing with food elimination diets and homeopathic medicine. I was super drawn at this time to working with herbs and mushrooms, with which I found some relief, gaining more respect for the intelligence of the Earth and her medicine. I was able to manage a lot better than most with that kind of diagnosis, thanks to my tools and practices. Those few years felt like a massive healing crisis, and I got more interested in consciousness practices like meditation as my reality shifted. I was ready to come home to a deeper sense of who I was, and not just identifying as a body that felt like it was failing me at the time.
