Christina-Dancing in the Mystery

My Whole Life Led Me There

I went to my first Shalom retreat in February 2023.

A friend told me about it, but the deeper truth is that my whole life led me there.

I got sober at twenty-one and spent sixteen years in twelve-step recovery. I was deeply committed, active in service, and it gave me purpose, belonging, and a sense of home. I loved it.

But over time, recovery expanded for me. It became soul recovery, soul orientation. I began to feel a softening in the need to numb or escape my experience, and a growing desire to stay present in it.

My friend saw how much inner work I had already done and said, “Christina, this is the fourth and fifth steps for the body.”

A week later, I was on my way to the mountain.

A Safe Place to Heal

Recovery was a profoundly safe place for me to heal. I was young, and I took it in completely. I believed in it fully and gave it everything I had.

I was told I was useful, meaningful, needed. That lit me up. I traveled, organized, connected people, and built community. It felt like home.

But I also entered it as a child with deep unexamined wounds. I overidentified with the system and with my own pathology. I tried to live up to perfect spiritual ideals while still carrying a quiet question: “What about me?”

And underneath it all was an old belief: something is wrong with me.

Something Innately Wrong with Christina

I was raised Southern Pentecostal in Kentucky. Before I was five, I already believed I was bad.

I learned early that my inner experience did not match what I was told was “good,” so I concluded I was inherently wrong. That became my core wound: God does not want me.

There was physical punishment in my home, and pain became entangled with my understanding of God and myself.

I would secretly try to connect with God as a child, and later sneak off to be baptized in rural churches, thinking each time, this will fix it.

But I still carried the same belief: I was unworthy.

Recovery gave me structure, purpose, and spiritual awakening, but also fear. I had a “gonna get you” God inside me, an internal boundary that shut down anything too vast or unknown.

My system was both expansive and deeply constrained.

When Everything Began to Break

As I grew, I began to feel the limits of the culture I was in. I was a young woman in a male-dominated recovery world, asking myself what kind of woman I would be, palatable or honest.

Eventually, the identity I had built began to collapse. It no longer fit what I was seeing and remembering about myself.

At the same time, I had been deeply shaped by Western medicine and repeated invalidation of my lived experience. I was told “nothing is wrong” when my body and nervous system were clearly speaking otherwise.

Then everything fell apart.

I found myself in an abusive relationship while in long-term sobriety. It shattered my trust in the system I had built my life around.

I left with my child, and what followed was the emergence of long-buried trauma. I could no longer enter the rooms I had once called home. My body would not let me.

Around the same time, my health collapsed. I had lived for years pushing through pain, illness, and exhaustion while raising a child without an active co-parent, working, and serving constantly.

Eventually, I broke my back as the result of degenerative disc disease and could not walk.

If It Weren’t for Me, I’d Be Dead

What followed was a long unraveling of my health and nervous system. Migraines, spinal issues, gastrointestinal symptoms, psychiatric symptoms and medications, and overwhelming pain all converged.

I followed every medical instruction. I did everything “right.” And still, I was getting worse.

At one point, I found alcohol I didn’t remember drinking while fully medicated. Later, in unbearable pain, I drank again consciously. Pain had always been the reason.

Eventually, I could no longer function. I was in bed, losing mobility, while my partner tried to hold everything together and begged doctors to intervene.

I was still having panic attacks on high doses of medication. When I tried to come off, there was no clear support. I eventually checked myself into detox and had seizures during withdrawal.

Even with all my training in mental health and recovery systems, I could not find my way out.

I often say: If it weren’t for me, I’d be dead.

It has felt like that more than once.

Being Born in My Divinity

In that time, I kept trying to imagine a simple way to be okay. But every time, an internal voice would return with rules, fear, and limitation.

No one had ever taught me the words agency or sovereignty. No one had told me my worth was innate.

So I had to begin again.

In my bedroom, in withdrawal and collapse, I entered a kind of hermitage. It felt like a death.

And in many ways, it was.

I reached a point where I understood: no one was coming. No one was going to save me, define me, or make my life meaningful.

Something in me had to be reborn.

I began slowly reconnecting with life, making friends with birds and trees outside my window, learning to be with what was still available to me and discovering the wisdom of my direct lived experiences.

Around that time, my father was dying of cancer, and my mother was in and out of psychiatric crisis. I was between two extremes of life and death, and I realized I was not meant to become either of them.

I was meant to become myself.

Learning to Listen to My Body

I began learning to listen to my body as intelligence.

I had previously shut down anything “metaphysical,” but I began to sense I needed connection with the earth, with something larger than my thinking mind.

I couldn’t wait until I could physically move again. I had to learn how to receive life as I was.

I decided that if I was going to stay here, it would be in alignment with something more alive. My worth was not earned; it was inherent.

I returned to physical therapy, meditation, and small acts of care. I began rebuilding my life in tiny steps. I began prioritizing loving and trusting myself.

I also changed my relationship with alcohol, not from fear, but from alignment. It no longer fit my values.

Instead of focusing on renunciation, I began adding what supported life. Over time, what didn’t belong simply fell away.

That is still how change works for me.

Thank You, My People

By the time I arrived at Shalom, I was ready.

I was ready to tell the truth of my life and to find others who were asking how to live from love rather than distortion.

At Shalom, something in me recognized home immediately.

Not confusion, recognition.

When I saw the Shalom skills and principles written out for the first time, I lit up from the inside. I remember thinking, Oh my gosh, I already live this way. But there had still been a question in my heart: Is this okay? Is this real and true? Will anyone believe that we can live from this place? At Shalom, I found people who not only believed it, but had devoted themselves to practicing, cultivating, and teaching it. It was a full, these-are-my-people moment—a kind of sacred permission to trust that living from love could truly be an orientation for life.

At the heart of the experience was being witnessed without being fixed. I began to understand that what we are actually longing for is to stand in the truth of our experience and be met and loved there. In that kind of witnessing, I felt the freedom to live from my fullness and let that express.

I also understood what my friend meant when he called Shalom the fourth and fifth steps for the body. The release I had always looked for through talking it out or writing it out happened through sound, breath, and movement. It happened without words.

The process gave me language for what I had been living: what it was like before I knew I was divinity embodied, what happened, and what it is like now to live in direct relationship with life.

My body became my guide. Everything I feel became data, intelligence, and direction.

I realized I had spent much of my life giving my wisdom away while bypassing myself.

Now I understand: what moves through me is also for me.

Bringing Shalom to Kentucky

At my first retreat, I met Beth Lewis. What mattered most was that she saw me clearly.

I told her, “We need this in Kentucky.” She asked what was stopping me. Something in me already knew: this is what I do. And with her support, I’ve been able to foster this work unfolding within my local community

I returned to the mountain again a month later, then again with my partner. By November 2023, we held our first Shalom retreat in Kentucky. Since then, we have held several more. A community is forming. I have recently completed facilitator training and now co-lead retreats. It is full circle.

I would have done this work anyway, but I would not have been as held without the support of Beth and John. What they offered me was permission: to trust myself and step into service.

A Living Field

Kentucky Grassroots Healing (kentuckygrassrootshealing.org) has grown from this work. Through educational programs, workshops, community gatherings, spiritual programming, ecological stewardship education, and other initiatives, we are working to expand access to holistic healing and community wellness, reduce financial barriers to participation, and cultivate wellbeing for individuals, communities, and the land.

Shalom process work and the skills and principles of loving are central to what the organization is offering and to the kind of healing community we hope to cultivate in Kentucky: spaces where people can stand in the truth of their experience, be witnessed without being fixed, and practice living from love with greater freedom, agency, and connection.

It is still young, still becoming. But it was born from a living field of practice and presence.

I feel most held inside the Shalom container. And I carry that field back into my life each time I return. It changes how I live. 

The truth is simple:

When what we know is no longer enough, we are invited to dance in mystery.

And for me, the practice is learning to follow the yes of my awakened heart, even when I don’t yet understand it.

I am not perfect at it. But I am in practice.