Tami Simon: Welcome to Insights at the Edge, produced by Sounds True. My name’s Tami Simon. I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I’d love to take a moment to introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation. The goal of the Sounds True Foundation is to provide access and eliminate financial barriers to transformational education and resources, such as teachings and trainings on mindfulness, emotional awareness, and self-compassion. If you’d like to learn more and join with us in our efforts, please visit SoundsTrueFoundation.org.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Mary Firestone. Mary is a graduate of Princeton University, and she has a master’s degree in clinical psychology from Pepperdine University. Her own transformative epiphanies led her, along with her sister, Lucy, to found their company, Firestone Sisters, in 2012, with the aim of providing for people healing and growth opportunities. With Sounds True, Mary Firestone has written a new book. It’s called Trusting the Dawn: How to Choose Freedom and Joy After Trauma.
It’s a very personal book where Mary shares her own healing journey through trauma. She also interviews people—experts, researchers, and people who themselves have gone through transformational journeys healing trauma. And in it, she then extends a hand to us wherever we are, with a whole set of tools that we can use, in her words, to “trust the dawn.” Here’s my conversation with Mary Firestone.
Mary, as a way to introduce yourself better and to give people a context, really, for Trusting the Dawn, your new book, what was happening in your life that led up to the inspiration for you to write Trusting the Dawn?
Mary Firestone: Well, I had just recently moved to Montecito, which is right by Santa Barbara, California. And we bought this beautiful farmhouse from 1890. We spent maybe four nights in the house between renovations, and then the Thomas Fire had ravaged all of Southern California, and we’d been evacuated. So in early January, we returned back, and the fourth night sleeping in this house, there’s a call for there’s going to be a potential debris flow. We were not in the evacuation zone, so for reasons I’m not sure of, I woke up at 4:00 in the morning. There had been a huge gas explosion, so the sky was this eerily beautiful orange, and we hadn’t put in curtains yet, so I could see this tidal wave of mud careening towards our house at a record speed.
That led to I’m separated from my husband and child and trapped by myself, pregnant, for five hours in the dark, surrounded by toxic mud, sewage, debris, thinking that my life—well, thinking that this was it, basically.
TS: Whoa. And then from that experience and the healing process that you’ve been through, share a little bit about that leading up to the writing of Trusting the Dawn.
MF: Well, I have my background in psychology. I have my degree and my master’s in clinical psych. And I knew that I was experiencing symptoms of PTSD. I had nightmares. I had anxiety. I had panic attacks. And at the same time, I was experiencing this whole new level of connection with something bigger than myself, with other people, with life and love and how I wanted to be here and live it. And so I felt that the seed of this book was really that, was wanting to share with others that just because you’ve gone through a trauma does not mean you need to be perpetually labeled. You’re not cursed by PTSD. Through healing, there can be this even greater experience of life and love. I wanted to write this book as an offering to other survivors.
TS: [Yes.] This new level of connection with all of life, how did that emerge after this traumatic mudslide experience?
MF: Well, when I was trapped those five hours, much of it in the dark—after the light from the gas explosion went out, it was dark and I was in the dark for a long time—and I felt that there was another presence with me, a loving, some kind of protective, divine, beautiful, otherworldly than this world, the 3D reality. There was something else going on. It was almost like in the dark that night, I had some kind of window to something greater than myself. And when I look back on it and thinking how many things had to line up perfectly so that my family and I survived and so many of our neighbors perished that night. So I felt very connected to something bigger than me because of that experience.
And then, in the aftermath—I write about this a bit in the book—but it’s almost like being so raw and having my intellectual capacity pushed to the side. I would think things and put them out into the world like, “Ooh, it would be really cool to…” and then things would just happen. It felt very in the flow of life. And trying to get back to that state is hard when we get back to life and we get caught up in the minutiae, but again, realizing that there’s just so much more going on than what meets the eye.
TS: [Yes.] One of the things you write about in Trusting the Dawn is the importance of how we share the narratives of traumas from our past. And I wanted to understand more about that and for you to actually demonstrate it to us. How might [you have] shared the narrative previously about whether it’s the mudslide trauma or a different trauma in your life? You also write about some early sexual abuse that you experienced. How might you have shared that narrative previously, and knowing everything you know now, how do you talk about it? What language do you use?
MF: Well, first, I’ll start with the mudslide one and then the childhood abuse, because there’s so many more years with that one. But the mudslide, something that really helped me, it was the EMDR that I did and the thinking with the therapist I worked with about my perpetual loop in my head right after the mudslide was, “I almost died. Everyone I know almost died. My mom should have died, my kids.” It was very reactive and very me in the victim role.
Just switching around the wording of, “I survived the mudslide. My loved ones survived the mudslide. We were divinely protected in the mudslide. I survived so that I may help other trauma survivors.” Shifting that narrative from one of victim to empowered survivor, that helped me a lot.
And when I was seven, I was molested by this 70-year-old man, and for decades I’ve been working on it in different ways. But really dragging that story around with me and guilt and shame and all of it.
And then through healing from the mudslide, I actually did MDMA therapy. And in that therapy session, I thought we’d just be looking at the mudslide. And then this understanding that just like the mudslide was a force of nature that came down that mountain and I happened to be in its path, whatever was moving through that man was a force of nature and I just happened to be in his path. So for me, switching that story around again, it actually had nothing to do with me. It had to do with the force of nature.
For me, it was really healing and depersonalizing—is that a word?—in the best way. I think especially with sexual abuse, we can feel like so much it’s our fault or did we do something? And nope, nothing to do with me. Everything to do with this other person.
TS: [Yes.] Now let me ask you a question, because there’s some nuances here that I think are important. One has to do with the use of the word “victim,” which is, I think, some people especially, gosh, a child who suffers sexual abuse, they are a victim, in a certain sense. And yet, I understand the power also of telling our stories from a different perspective. So how do you make sense of that?
MF: Yes, so there’s two things I want to say about that, because I, too, struggled with that. And a lot of spiritual teachings and different practitioners in all different walks would say, “You have to take 100 percent responsibility for everything in your life.” And that was one question I had, “Well, how can you expect a seven-year-old or a child to take responsibility for something so awful?” And I like what one spiritual teacher said. It was, “No, don’t expect that child to take responsibility. You expect the adult that child grows up to become to take responsibility for the healing of that child.” So that was one thing that, for me, I was like, “OK. OK. I understand that. I can wrap my head around that.”
The second thing I want to say about the use of the word “victim” and this idea of victimization, I interviewed this incredible woman named Dr. Edith Eger, who is a Holocaust survivor and she’s written two books called The Choice and The Gift. She’s had a thriving therapy practice in La Jolla for decades. And she says victimization is part of life. If you live long enough, we’re all going to be victimized in one way or another. Victimhood is a choice. We can choose to stay in that state, or we can use what happened to us and transform that experience out of victimhood. And I think what I’m talking about is this survivor state of being. It’s much more empowering.
TS: [Yes.] That’s really helpful. Victimhood, that word “-hood,” that suffix, as a place where you live, where you take up residency versus “Yes, I was victimized in this situation.” I think that’s very, very helpful, that distinction. Now I’m going to keep going on this slightly nuanced track because I think it’s really important, because in the book Trusting the Dawn it’s very powerful how you help us, and you use the word “reframe.” You help us reframe our experiences. And I know from my own life, from various sufferings that I’ve had, reframing it and understanding it from a different vantage point is so useful. How do we do that, though, without any kind of “spiritual bypassing,” without in any way saying, “We’re going to pretend that these awful feelings we have aren’t really there, and we’re just going to shove them aside”? What’s your perspective on that?
MF: Well, I think the first thing is, it does take time. It takes probably longer than most people want it to. I think it also does take healing work. It’s hard to do it by ourselves. I think we can get stuck in these loops, understandably. I’ve gotten stuck in many a loop and needed other people to throw the line down and help pull me out. I’m not suggesting that we Pollyanna anything, and when those hard feelings come up, I think it’s important to honor them. First of all, to name them, to honor them, to journal about them, to work on them with somebody, a therapist—there’s so many different healing modalities I list in the book, so finding whatever feels right to you to begin to massage those feelings.
And one of the key things from so many different schools of thought is this concept of integration of the traumatic experience or the suffering, so it’s not a splintered-off other and it’s not something we’re trying to get out. But it is how can we work with the narrative, reframe it in a way that just becomes part of our story, but not the story, if that makes sense.
TS: It does. And I wanted to talk to you about this notion of integration. You write about how, in many ways, integration may, in fact, be really the key to understanding the trauma healing process. So tell me what that means, from your experience, to have integrated a past trauma?
MF: Well, I think as I was [INAUDIBLE], I feel like anytime we say if it’s a bad feeling or a traumatic memory or anytime we say, “Don’t think of the elephant,” we’re all thinking of the elephant. So how do we begin to wrap our heads around what happened and our hearts around it? And for me, sharing about that seven-year-old experience, through doing talk therapy and then actually the MDMA and then I took ketamine.
You’re talking to a girl, Tami, who grew up in the ’80s, in Nancy Reagan’s “Just say no” era. And I say no to drugs, and I have found the ketamine was so incredibly helpful to me, again, in that depersonalizing and the ability to think about the night of the mudslide and the aftermath and those experiences of sexual abuse in a way that they’re not triggering. It’s not going to send my heart racing or put me into a panic attack. So that, I think, is the goal of integration. How do we de-accelerate, if that’s the right word, or take the charge out of it?
TS: [Yes.] Tell me more. I’d love to get some more of an understanding, both of the MDMA therapy that you did. I mean, you’re quite a trauma healing explorer. In Trusting the Dawn, you offer a whole compendium of different approaches, including describing ketamine and MDMA therapy for healing trauma. But for people who aren’t familiar with how it works, I’d love to hear your personal experience as well and what you discovered.
MF: So I love this idea and this is actually I couldn’t even [INAUDIBLE] it when I was finished with getting my master’s in psych that, intellectually, I could understand and I could talk out and understand things that had happened to me. And then it still felt like there was more that kept coming up that I wanted to get to. So that’s why I just dove into this journey of getting underneath these traumas. So ketamine therapy—ketamine is the most powerful and also the gentlest psychedelic. It’s the only psychedelic that is, right now, legal in our country, so they use it actually, at much higher doses, as an anesthetic for children in hospitals.
If used properly—I did mine with a psychiatrist, and if it’s something that interests you, I’d recommend working with a psychiatrist, doing sessions before you do the ketamine, do a few sessions of the ketamine, and then you have integration follow-up. I think there’s these places popping up where you can just pop in and do a ketamine infusion. I don’t recommend doing that. Don’t do that.
So the way it works is with my psychiatrist, Dr. Jeff Becker, who’s brilliant and kind and gentle and all of it, he talks you through it. He injected it into my upper arm, and it has a very short half-life, so it lasts about 20 minutes. And the only way I can think of to describe it is it’s like all of your senses merge. It feels like you’re falling. It feels like you’re almost in dark velvet or warm water, and you can—not scary like acid trips I’ve heard described. It was nothing scary. It was all very soothing and warm and this love and feeling like, “Oh, my gosh, this level of consciousness is here all the time, but we’re not accessing it regularly.”
But in the first ketamine experience, actually, I had a vision of the mudslide. I was over the Pacific looking back in the mountains of Montecito, and I felt warm and safe. And it almost looked like one of those Renaissance oil paintings. It looked beautiful, and there were these angels that were pouring the mud down the mountain. And at the same time, I could see these golden threads almost of them pulling up the people that lost their lives that day. And it was just this whole, for me, like, “Oh.” It was, again, what I’m saying, it was an act of nature. It was, again, not personal. It just is. After that experience, the triggers around the mudslide abated for me, so that helped a lot.
I also had a vision of that seven-year-old Mary with that 70-year-old man. And out of the darkness, this gorilla’s face materializes. And first I thought, “Oh, am I afraid of this gorilla?” No, this gorilla is a good gorilla. And the gorilla scooped the little seven-year-old Mary out of the scene away from that man and off to safety. And Dr. Becker, after we were talking, he’s like, “Well, that was your fierce gorilla self showing up and protecting that seven-year-old self.” So images like that that really helped tremendously.
TS: [Yes.] Now it’s interesting. You’ve used this word “depersonalizing,” that somehow you were able to get a certain kind of distance from the experience instead of being so identified as “This happened to me.” What I’m curious about, and really, in many ways, this has been a curiosity that has fueled all of Sounds True for almost four decades now, is who or what is that “I” that is integrating these experiences with this increasing sense of depersonalization, if you will? And I’d love to understand your experience of that just firsthand, first-person experience of the integrated self. Who is that “I”?
MF: Tami, I love that question because that kept coming up for me too. And again, when you reach these altered states of consciousness, and you can do it through holotropic breathwork. You don’t have to take any drugs at all. There’s a lot of ways in and meditation even. But, yes, who’s the “I” watching that “I” watching the “I” from the past? Yes, I think that’s something that I’m still incredibly curious about and want to keep exploring different ways to merge the “I’s.” Is the “I” that thinks it was personal just my ego? Or is there some higher Mary “I”? So I think I’m still working to understand that and working to be a more integrated “I” and the “I” that I know exists in these other realms, bringing that “I” to the present as much as I can.
TS: [Yes.] So now in terms of healing trauma as a journey of integration, I want to talk to that person who says, “I’ve had some distance from this thing that happened to me, and I feel it’s integrated, to some degree, in my life story and the narrative. And I can even frame it in a way where I see how it generated growth in my life, but the truth is, I still get triggered. I still get triggered by this or that, and it still happens.” What would you say to that person? That means it’s not fully integrated? There’s more work to do? Or is that just what it is? Is that just how it is for huge events that have impacted us?
MF: I think healing is an ongoing journey. I think we can never “Heal—check!” No, I think that things will continue to come up and that’s OK. And again, that’s not a failure. You’re not failing at your healing if stuff keeps coming up. It comes up for me too. And that’s why there’s so many different tools that I use and people that I turn to and go back to. With EMDR, I did a lot at the beginning, and then I was fine or doing much better, and then I got triggered and I went back. Same thing with ketamine. I did three journeys at the beginning of my trauma, and then I actually wound up getting divorced and went back to do a ketamine session around that and healing that. So there’s going to be the old traumas. There’s going to be new traumas. Again, it’s part of this experience [INAUDIBLE], I think.
TS: And before we move on, you also mentioned MDMA, and I’m curious if you could share what you learned from that experience.
MF: Yes, so MDMA, which street name [is] Ecstasy, is a heart-opener. And unlike ketamine, which is a psychedelic and you’re unaware of your body, your space where you are, with MDMA, you’re still very much aware of your surroundings and your physical body. So I used that as a tool to—the ketamine’s so powerful, and I feel like, again, there’s one more layer. We could keep going and going. And that was the one that was really—I realized with the MDMA, I’m like, “Oh, the triggers for me with the mudslide, at the moment, are pretty resolved. I’m not getting triggered around it. I feel like I’m in an OK space with it.” And then that was where, again, the sexual abuse came up and I had that vision of the nature moving through.
You can do journeys. They last much longer. Whereas ketamine’s half-life is 20 minutes, you can do an MDMA journey that lasts eight hours, so it’s much more of a time commitment. It’s also not legal yet. They are a lot of organizations working to legalize MDMA for therapeutic reasons. So it’s another interesting tool, another way in.
I love the breathwork too. I know we’re talking about the pharmacology part, but for people that that might not be right for, there’s the holotropic breathwork, which, frankly, that was almost as intense an experience just by using your breath alone. And that, again, drops you into this subconscious state, and the man that founded it, Stanislav Grof, he was using MDMA in his work in the Czech Republic, I think. And then when he moved here, it’s illegal, so he developed this way of breathing that can induce a similar state. I would recommend that.
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Tami Simon: You’ve been listening to Insights at the Edge. What happens when we begin to identify as love, you could say, as the soul beyond constructs? What changes when you see yourself and others through a loving gaze? Perhaps everything. With her new book, How to Be Loving, Danielle LaPorte brings us a guide on how to use the intelligence of your heart to create conditions for connection and healing. You can find out more about How to Be Loving at daniellelaporte.com/howtobeloving. And now back to Insights at the Edge.
TS: As I mentioned, you offer a whole collection of approaches and resources and practices that people can use, a wide range. And you write about it from your first-person experience, your own healing journey. You have a master’s in clinical psychology. And it’s interesting to me because in listening to you, I hear the person. I hear the person who sought out these tools for their own healing path. And I’m curious, when you bring in, for a moment, the psychologist, how your training intersected with your own inner journey and inner discovery?
MF: That’s a good question. Yes, and I think it is so personal. And I did want to write this in a way that people felt—I feel like there’s so many books that talk at you, and actually, in reading a lot of those books that I respect and I’ve learned from, that I almost was re-traumatized in the reading of them. So I wanted very much my approach of this book, for the reader to feel like I was with them and that I understood and that they weren’t alone and they didn’t have to do this alone. And maybe that’s not terribly clinical of me, so I think I went the other way with the training almost. I think it offered a good frame.
And in the beginning part of the book, I talk about what happens to the brain and the body after trauma. And then if you want to get into it further, please refer to Bessel van der Kolk’s books. And I also consulted with Dr. Pat Ogden. She’s a trauma specialist, and this is her wheelhouse. So I brought in the more academic aspect, but I really wanted this to feel personal while grounded and framed in science and then some psychology.
TS: And Trusting the Dawn does feel personal, and it feels like a kind of accompaniment, so you succeeded. There’s a sense of a real person, a loving person, someone who’s gone through their own ordeals, reaching out a hand and saying, “We can walk through this together.”
Now in describing your own journey, you talk about the traumas you experienced as a type of initiation, and I wanted to understand more about that. I mean, people sometimes say whenever anything really hard [happens], “Oh, that’s an initiation.” And I think, “OK.” But initiated into what? What were you initiated into?
MF: Tami, I was asking that question for—because it kept coming up. There’s a Jungian psychologist thought, “Oh, you’ve been initiated.” Well, initiated to what exactly? And this shaman in the Arizona desert, “You’ve been initiated.” To what? So I kept asking that question and researching it. Well, in the shamanic tradition, they believe that a near-death experience initiates you.
Any time the veil between life and death collapses, they view it as an initiation, so you’ve seen behind the veil, I suppose. And when I started thinking about it and talking about it, I do think trauma, anytime we’re brought up against mortality, whether our own or someone close to us or someone we don’t even know, but we feel it. Life is so fragile. I feel like it’s the initiation to that. It’s this gift, in a weird way, of recognizing how fragile life is so we can wrap our arms around it and live it more fully and recognize why we’re really here, which is, I think, to connect more, to love more, to uplift more, and to celebrate this incredible planet that we happen to be getting to live on right now.
TS: [Yes.] So did you think of yourself as a healer and a spokesperson before the mudslide event? And then did this initiate you at a deeper level?
MF: [Yes.] That’s a good question. So my sister and I, Lucy, we’ve been running these retreats for women for a decade now. And we really wanted to just offer everything that had been working for us to people. So we’ve done them all over in Ojai and Malibu and Aspen, and we just did our first one in the Caribbean recently, which was really amazing. But so we’ve always been facilitating and leading these smaller groups. And we have an essential oil-based perfume. Everything we put in there is to make you feel a certain way, not just smell good. I talk a little bit about aromatherapy in the book too. So I’ve had that framework. I’ve had that background of wanting to help and offer resources to others and then, yes, I would say that the mudslide was definitely an initiation to a deeper layer of being able to really then connect with others.
TS: You share in Trusting the Dawn that part of the process, for you, of writing the book and healing trauma after the mudslide had to do with coming more forward with your own voice and how that brought up past-life imagery or things that you thought were maybe past lives. But certainly the imagery of, “I’m going to be executed or hung or burned or whatever.” I’ve heard this described in other podcasts that I posted. I’ve also heard it described—and one person that I interviewed described it as the “witch wound.” And I also know in my own life, as someone who’s been through a process of coming forward as a public person, I had to go through, “Oh, my God, I’m going to speak up and they’re going to kill me.”
And it was quite a thing to realize, “No, actually, that’s not what’s happening. You’re going to be criticized, yes, but they’re not going to kill you, most likely. You’re just probably going to get some nasty comments.” So I’m curious to know a bit about that journey for you.
MF: Yes, the witch wound, that’s funny, because that happened. I had, through the breathwork and then past-life regression, and then even in a bit of the ketamine experiences as well, I kept having visions of getting killed or the smoke coming up around my ankles from being burned or being a female knight. I was not Joan of Arc, although I’m like, “Maybe I was!” No, no, everyone’s not Joan of Arc, but I was definitely a female knight and I was killed in battle. I know it was a battle for something good. So I had all these images and this fear too, “Yes, oh, my gosh. I’m going to put myself out there in this way. I’m going to get killed.”
And the breathwork teacher, she, too, she was like, “Oh, yes, the witch wound. Yes. Yes. Yes.” So I guess that is a thing. And I realized this time, a friend just the other day said to me, “Well, no, this time you just had to almost get killed to help others.” So I’m not going to get killed this time for helping others, but perhaps my own near-death experience is what is initiating me to be able to help other people with something.
TS: And what would you say to someone who is in the midst of coming forward more with their voice but does have a fear, a fear of being criticized, humiliated, or killed or anything in that range?
MF: Yes. Well, first of all, I think be willing to just practice it. Be careful who you’re going to speak it to. If you’re in an abusive situation, don’t speak it there, but find safe platforms to begin speaking more, whether it’s close friends, whether it’s a teacher, whether it’s a therapist. Start practicing more and more. And I think what I’m realizing in speaking my truth and speaking up, it gives other people permission to then speak up themselves. And like especially as women, growing up how I did on the East Coast and very proper, and I have a Southern mother and then a WASP-y dad, so it was always, “Just look pretty and do all the things you’re supposed to do.” I love my parents. They’re wonderful. But it was definitely the culture of you definitely don’t speak up.
TS: [Yes.] Now past-life regression and the hypnosis that is part of a past-life regression therapy also seemed to be quite helpful to you on your healing-from-trauma journey. Can you share a bit about that?
MF: Yes. I’d love to. She’s like, “We’re going to hypnotize you.” It’s not going to work, not going to work. It worked! The woman I did it with, Niki Cozmo, she said out of hundreds of people she has worked with, only two could not be hypnotized. So anyway, just want to say that it worked, and yes, I think it was a really powerful experience for me. The one that really stood out the most was the female knight. And again for me in my integration afterwards—was instead of waiting for the prince to ride in and save me, and on the ketamine, I saved myself with the gorilla and I actually rode off on the back of a white horse. I saw that.
In a past-life regression, I had my own sword and I fought for myself and had my own white horse. So I like that idea too of finding, through these different therapies, it was finding my own inner strength, which again, I think goes to speaking up too. It’s all different forms of strength, whether it was kicking it, wielding our sword around…
TS: Now, Mary, let’s say someone’s listening to this, and they’re like, “Yes, this all sounds great. I don’t have the resources to have a ketamine series of sessions or see a past-life regression hypnotist. Once again, Sounds True is sharing a bunch of ideas that are out of range for me.” What would be your response to that?
MF: Absolutely. So meditation is something. It’s a great way in. It’s so widely accessible these days. So I would say you could start with meditation. You could start even, I’ve referred to EMDR a couple times. I reference a woman in the book named Dr. Laurel Parnell. She wrote a book called Tapping In, and she walks you through. And even in the book, I walk you through a little Butterfly Tapping exercise that can be done at home and it’s free. Aromatherapy and flower essences, they’re maybe not free, but they’re pretty accessible. If you have a health food store, the Bach flower remedies are a good place to start with flower essences. And a Whole Foods or something will have aromatherapy. You could play around with that.
TS: Which aromatherapies and flower essences did you find particularly effective for you?
MF: There’s a company I love called LOTUSWEI. She makes flower essences that you can spray on yourself or put them on your tongue. They’re in water. And they’re amazing. I have a whole chapter about that in the book. But they take the essence of the plant or the flower, distill it into water. And everything has an energetic vibration. Different plants and flowers have energetic vibrations. So they will guide you into what you’re looking for and what would be a good one to go with. I think the aspen tree is a good one for trauma. Spotted bee balm is another good one. Oh, and then I also want to say qigong, Chinese medicine. Qigong is a form of energy cultivation that is free, and I have found that incredibly helpful. It’s literally 24 movements, and that’s helped me a lot. Journaling is great. Wow. I reference a couple different books that I turn to, self-help books that have been great resources, so there’s lots of ways to come at this, regardless of your budget.
TS: [Yes.] Now I focused in on the ketamine therapy, the past-life regression, MDMA, and you also mentioned holotropic breathwork. And I think part of it is because I have this interest in how altered states, if you will, or expanded states of consciousness can be helpful in healing trauma. And I wonder what your view is of that, the power of these expanded states.
MF: Honestly, Tami, I say to Jeff Becker, who helped me with the ketamine, “You changed my life.” Accessing those altered states through the breathwork and the ketamine and the MDMA, past-life regression, it changed my life. The way that I look at life now is so much broader and bigger. And it also gave me some—I feel like I had this feeling that there’s something wrong with me that I’ve been in therapy for decades and talking it out and doing my work. And yet I would still feel this underlying anxiety or tension or that there was something more to work on. And I feel like accessing the altered states helped me so much in getting underneath it. And again, just knowing that there’s so many different levels, and should I feel that way again, then I’m going to get right back under there and that I now have the tools to do it.
TS: [Yes.] Now you mentioned, Mary, that you got divorced in the post-mudslide period. Here you are. You’re doing all of this healing work, and now your marriage changes as well. Do you feel that part of it was that you went on such a deep journey that you changed in certain ways? And I wonder if you can speak to that because I think sometimes people can be afraid of doing really deep healing work, because they think, “And it could be the end of my marriage if I do this.” So can you share a bit about that?
MF: Yes. When I started researching, because I have a chapter at the end about relationships in the wake of trauma, and I remember when I started researching it, there’s some research that shows that a lot of couples wind up breaking up after surviving a traumatic event, which terrified me. And yet, I am so passionate about this work. And also having children, there was no way I wasn’t going to do my healing work because I also wanted to not pass things down to them as best I could. And I do think Napper and I are still great friends, and we’re great co-parents. But ultimately, I took this healing journey that opened up my heart and my life and my understanding in such a way that we weren’t a right love match anymore. And I know it can be scary, and I also have to say that, to me, to stay in something that is not giving you the support and the will to do this exploring, that—no. Do it. Make the change.
And actually now I have a wonderful partner who’s a healer himself, and it’s been really such a gift, and Napper has a great new girlfriend, so it all worked out. Sometimes relationships change form, and Shakti Malan talks about that and not being afraid of it. And Mark Nepo, actually. I love Mark Nepo, the spiritual teacher. He shared with me, he said, “If you picture a couple in a body of water, sometimes a boulder gets dropped to the side of them and they get propelled together in a direction. And sometimes the boulder gets dropped between the two people, and they get propelled apart from each other.” So again, this idea that, I don’t know, well, I don’t want to say that’s not personal because it is personal. You’re in the relationship. But not to be afraid and to hold on to something that isn’t right just because the alternative is fear.
TS: [Yes.] I’m going to actually even go a little deeper into that because I am really curious about it. Did you start feeling the tendrils of that change coming as you were doing deeper and deeper healing work? Did you start to sense it, and did you have to then say, “Oh, I’m going to have to work out this fear,” especially with children and everything? How did you work through it?
MF: Well, first of all, I would say Napper and I had been working really hard on our marriage even before we got engaged in our 20s. So this was a relationship where we were always working on it, and I’ve always been so insistent in self-development and altered states and all. And he would come along with me as best he could and as interested as he was or wasn’t. So I just want to make that clear, that we were working on things before the mudslide. And then the trauma thrust us closer together for a while as we were working on putting our life back together, finding a place to live, having another baby.
And then after that, the first thing—it was the very beginning of COVID, and Joe Dispenza, who I love, I was like, “We’re going to do Joe Dispenza’s meditations together.” And Joe Dispenza says when you first start doing this work really intensely, be prepared for your life to look like chaos, and the things that are no longer in a vibrational match will fall away. Don’t be afraid of it. It’s all part of the process. Literally, we did two months of the Joe Dispenza meditation classes and that was when it was like, “Oh, we’re not meant to be together anymore.” So that was pretty powerful.
TS: [Yes.] Mary, what I have to say I’m really appreciating about this conversation is something that I would call “real talk,” meaning you’re just so real with me here as I’m asking you these very personal, challenging questions about your inner life and inner process. And I just want to take a moment and appreciate that and appreciate that in you. It’s a type of confidence in the truth that I don’t always find, and I just want to acknowledge you for that. Thank you.
MF: Thank you, Tami.
TS: Now you mentioned that you interviewed Dr. Edith Eger as part of your book. She’s written a book called The Choice. And I couldn’t help but note the subtitle of Trusting the Dawn, How to Choose Freedom and Joy After Trauma. And I wanted to talk a little bit about this notion of the power of choice and how you see that and the choices that we make. Maybe some people think like, “God, all these feelings. I don’t have a choice. This is what’s going on. I mean, I’m suffering.”
MF: Yes, and sometimes we don’t have the choice. I feel like even the other day, “Gosh, I’m so anxious today. I don’t know why, and I’m feeling really overwhelmed with that.” So I think, again, going back to our earlier conversation of acknowledging the feeling and do I have a choice in that immediate moment to feel joyful? Maybe not. But I’m choosing to acknowledge the feeling. I’m having the feeling. I know it will pass.
Back to Trusting the Dawn, that was meant metaphorically that when we’re in a dark moment, trust that that moment will pass. And yes, Dr. Edie was so inspiring to me, thinking about, my gosh, if this woman can choose her joy and happiness after surviving Auschwitz, then it was very encouraging and inspiring to me. “Well, she did it. I’m going to do it too.” And that’s what I say too. Someone asked me, “Well, but what about my trauma’s not as bad as your trauma kind of thing?” And Dr. Edie says there’s no hierarchy of traumas. Everyone’s trauma is the worst, because it happened to them. So I guess I tangented off away from your question on choice.
TS: I think what you’ve said is powerful. It’s powerful. Now you mentioned even the other day you started feeling anxious. And I know after the mudslides, you write about in Trusting the Dawn how you experienced panic attacks. Do you ever have a fear that you’re going to have a panic attack again? And what do you do when you start feeling anxious that gives you confidence that you’re not going to have a full-blown panic attack?
MF: Yes, they’re really scary. I’ve always been pretty disciplined with my daily practices. And I say even when I’m feeling great, “Everything’s great. I don’t need to do it today.” No, that’s exactly the day that you need to do it because keeping a steady foundation, for me, then in those moments like the other day when I dipped down into feeling anxious, the dip is not as long and the coming back to my steady state is that much easier. So every day I practice qigong. I read something inspirational and do a gratitude letter. I write to God, but I know that’s triggering with some people, so higher power, the universe, myself, whatever. And that helps me set the tone for the day.
And yes, I think I know the anxiety will pass. I physically move my body, exercise, shake, jump around. I also take propranolol sometimes, which it helps with anxiety, public speaking, things like that. So those are some of my tools.
TS: All right, Mary, what is your hope that readers will get from Trusting the Dawn?
MF: My hope is really for people to know that they’re not alone and that if I can do it and if some of the other trauma survivors I interview in the book can do it, then you can do it too. And that life on the other side of healing from trauma can be that much more fulfilling and connected and wondrous.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Mary Firestone. She’s the author of the new book Trusting the Dawn: How to Choose Freedom and Joy After Trauma. And if you’ve ever been curious about all of the different approaches that exist for how to work through a trauma, I can recommend Trusting the Dawn because Mary goes through in quite some detail and shares the methodology, the experience, and the results that she experienced as well. And it’s a beautifully written book. Your heart shines through, Mary. Thank you.
MF: Thank you, Tami.
TS: Thanks for listening to Insights at the Edge. You can read a full transcript of today’s interview at resources.soundstrue.com/podcast. That’s resources.soundstrue.com/podcast. If you’re interested, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app. And if you feel inspired, head to iTunes and leave Insights at the Edge a review. I absolutely love getting your feedback and being connected. Sounds True: waking up the world.
