The Path I Didn’t Know I Was Asking For

Maria-63

The Crisis

This story begins in a moment of crisis that unlocked a door to an entirely new identity and life path.

If I had known that my soul was asking for a new direction, I might have recognized what was unfolding. 

Instead, I experienced it as too-much-to-hold, system-overload news. In deep despair, I clung to the comforting idea that there must be a reason that this was happening.  

I was 37 then. I’m 63 now.

At the time, I was heartbroken. My marriage had just ended. Then I was told that I needed surgery to remove a cyst from my left ovary.

I had already been through years of infertility treatments. The drugs, the procedures, the emotional rollercoaster. The kind of treatments that push your body to produce multiple eggs and come with their own risks, including ovarian cysts.

So I was already carrying so much.

Physical pain. Emotional pain. Grief.

I didn’t have the child that I had longed for.

No baby. And now, no husband.

I remember getting the call from my doctor that afternoon. I was alone, sitting in the middle of everything that was falling apart.

I went to the couch, got quiet, and dropped into meditation.

A simple prayer arose:

Please show me the purpose of this. 

Then I fell into a sleep that didn’t feel like ordinary sleep. It was deep and heavy. Like I dropped into another layer.

When I woke up, I felt groggy, but I went to the gym anyway. It was the last thing I wanted to do, but I went.

I walked into the gym lobby, and there it was.

A large sign on an easel announcing: “Reiki Demonstration”.

I barely knew what Reiki was at the time. 

But I did know, completely and wholeheartedly, that this was the answer. This was the next step.

Within hours of asking the question, I had been shown something so clearly that there was no hesitation. I signed up immediately.

Teresa, the woman who led the Reiki demonstration, turned out to be a nurse at the hospital where I was having surgery. When I told her what I was facing, she offered to do a Reiki healing in my hospital room the day after surgery.

In the weeks that followed, she continued to work with me. I recovered remarkably quickly, astounding my doctor.

The Awakening

Something in me had opened. Not just physically, but energetically. 

I went on to learn Reiki from Teresa’s Reiki teachers, progressing from level to level. A new longing to be a professional healer gradually emerged. 

Then, about a year after the first cyst, another cyst appeared.

Same place. Same kind of pain.

This time, my doctor told me not only that I would need surgery again, but I would possibly lose the ovary. I remember begging her, before the first surgery, not to take the ovary. 

I felt tired. Resigned.

But by then, new resources and awakenings had entered my life.

I was working with a therapist who received my longing to be a healer with enthusiasm. He loaned me a book called “Hands of Light”, by former NASA Physicist and healing educator, Dr. Barbara Ann Brennan.

I devoured it in one weekend.

I wasn’t just reading it, I was receiving energetic downloads. The book vibrated with truth and profound wisdom. When I came to my next session, I handed it back to my therapist and asked for Barbara’s next book, “Light Emerging”.

My soul was on fire.

I knew that I was meant to go to Barbara’s school. It was a 4-year commitment, like a medical school for energy healers. I registered for the upcoming Fall classes.

I began working with a local Brennan healer that my therapist knew, receiving healing sessions alongside what I was learning.

When the second cyst appeared, she did focused work with me specifically to heal it.

And it cleared completely. The before-and-after ultrasounds confirmed it. 

My doctor couldn’t accept it. She said the ultrasound machine must have malfunctioned.

I even told her that I had been working with an energy healer, but she just couldn’t accept that energy work had healed me.

But I knew what I had experienced.

That moment shifted something in me.

I wasn’t just curious anymore.

I was committed.

And I had just been given a near-miraculous healing story, one I knew would someday benefit others. 

The Deepening

The truth is, those ovarian cysts weren’t the source of illness in my body.

They were symptoms of an older wound. My body remembered what my mind did not.

My left ovary was carrying a hidden history of sexual trauma. 

Over the next twenty years, I moved through extensive layers of that trauma. I was supported by colleagues, teachers, healers, and friends along the way. Different moments, different experiences, all asking to be seen and healed. 

I understand now that the day I sat on that couch and asked for guidance was an initiation into myself. Into what had been buried. Into what was living in my body as physical pain.

All of the personal growth that came from that path has allowed for the necessary grounding to allow more abundance and stability into my life.

Now I am more present. More boundaried. More empowered in the work that supports me.

My life makes more sense to me. And I can feel how everything is connected.

There is no baby or husband today, but I do have my precious self to love and nurture every day.  

Any relationship built on the shaky ground that I stood upon in the past would not have lasted.  Without the integrated presence and loving self-acceptance that I have found on this side of the journey, I could not have shown up fully.

The Part I Wasn’t Going to Share

There is a part of this story that I didn’t plan to share.

But it feels right to say it.

When I was eighteen, I was drugged, raped and impregnated.

At the time, I was completely unaware.

I had no conscious memory of the incident. 

But my body held it. Deep in my cells. More specifically, in that left ovary.

About four months after the rape, I had a spontaneous miscarriage. I didn’t know it was a miscarriage, because I didn’t know that I was pregnant, because I didn’t know that I had been raped.

Me, pregnant, age 18

It took me two decades to piece that story together.

This trauma was deeply tied to my infertility. It was as though my body had said, no, we are not doing that again.

What keeps being revealed to me are layers of profound disempowerment. This is the impact on my body and my psyche of assault and misogyny. These are the same dynamics that are being spoken about more openly now.

Those stories are my stories.

None of the people who harmed me ever faced earthly consequences. They are all gone now. They had already passed by the time my memories began to surface.

There was no justice to be had in the court system. I am at peace with that. I have forgiven every perpetrator and every enabler. 

But the structures that have allowed this level of harm to exist, and persist, are not sustainable. They are completely out of balance. And the feminine within each of us is suffering as a result.

I understand myself as a survivor of so much.

My body and my mind lived inside that reality and survived.

Now something else is happening. Along with many other women, my storytelling is waking up. 

The truth is demanding to be told. The stories are writing themselves. 

Through me. Through us. For all of us.

The Take Away

If I could say anything to the woman who finds herself where I was that day, sitting in a crisis, already carrying more than she thought she could hold, it would be this:

Life is not happening to you. It is happening for you.

If you can even begin to entertain that possibility, hold onto it until it anchors.

If you have a relationship with a higher power, ask to be shown the purpose of your predicament.

And then trust what you are shown.

Trust yourself also, to understand what you are shown. If not today, then eventually.

There is a parable I remember, not perfectly, but the essence of it stays with me. A farmer loses his cow, and someone says how terrible. The farmer responds, is it terrible? Later the cow returns, and someone says, how wonderful. The farmer again asks, is it wonderful?

Do not rush to label something as good or bad.

Stay with it.

There may be something unfolding that you cannot yet see.

Looking back, I can see I was already being led down a path to a new understanding of myself. And you may find the same is true for you.

It may be more terrible and wonderful than you can imagine today.

It will become your story, one that may take years to comprehend and integrate fully. It will be yours to tell, if you choose to.

Post Script

This story was recorded prior to the publication of a disturbing CNN report about a so-called  R@pe Academy, where, in one month, there were 62 million views of men providing tips and video footage on how to drug and r@pe their wives and girlfriends.

I have an inkling now as to why I felt moved to share my experience of being drugged and raped.

It also happens to be Sexual Assault Awareness Month. If you or someone you love is a survivor of sexual assault please seek support at: https://www.nsvrc.org/saam-2026. 

The truth cannot be contained. It will set us all free.