Through Portals of Body and Soul

Life sometimes rearranges you from the inside out. The past several weeks have been intensely transformative. They

have held portals: endings, beginnings, crossings, dissolutions, revelations, and reckonings of both body and spirit. Casey’s transition and what followed with the manifestation of my own physical crisis have felt like one continuous teaching, one movement of energy. I’m still inside it.

I’m not ready to tie this experience into a tight conclusion because nothing about it has been simple or easily explained. It feels more like a plant medicine journey than a sequence of events: an initiation that is still revealing its layers, and may continue to do so for a long time.

When Casey transitioned, the movement of her essence into Charlie was profound. It was more than symbolic, it was felt. Visible. Real. There was a transfer of soul-presence so astounding that it took my breath away. Charlie carries Casey’s light, her knowing, and a familiar quality of presence that lives forward in a new body. The love changed form.

And then, a different kind of initiation followed. One of the body.

The pain didn’t come out of nowhere. If I’m honest, I’ve been living with pain in my body for years: sometimes low, sometimes intense, often workable enough to keep functioning. I became skilled at pushing through discomfort, at recalibrating around it, at enduring in silence.

But in the weeks leading up to the hospital, the pain sharpened. It became louder, more insistent, and more demanding of attention. Then suddenly, I hit a breaking point: a physical threshold where my body refused to be overridden any longer.

I was sick from the pain, shaking, unable to manage it but I still believed it might just be dehydration or temporary crisis management. When I went to the hospital, part of me still expected it to be minimized because I’ve been conditioned to minimize it myself.

So when the scans revealed that my gallbladder was, in the surgeon’s words, “nuclear,” infected and dying, and there was a stone lodged in the bile duct, there was a shock of recognition that went deeper than the medical diagnosis.

It was the realization that:

• I wasn’t exaggerating

• I wasn’t dramatic

• I wasn’t oversensitive

• I wasn’t misreading my pain

My body had been speaking truth, and I had been trained to doubt it: by culture, by medicine, by conditioning.

More than a physical crisis, this was a rupture in a long-standing pattern.

I can’t push through pain anymore. I can’t override the signals. I can’t put my body last. And I don’t know yet what this will mean for my choices going forward, for the pace I work at, for how I show up, but I know that something reorganized inside me.

These experiences: Casey’s soul-transfer and the hospital initiation, feel like expressions of the same deeper current. A recalibration of how I inhabit my life.

These weeks of stillness and recovery have drawn me into a different rhythm of being. I feel myself stepping back into the work through a subtler doorway. One that invites greater attunement and inner listening. There is a softness in how I’m arriving, a slower tempo in my energy, and a widening awareness of the soul moving through the body. I’m letting this new current orient me.

So I’m not writing this to explain it. I’m writing because something is still unfolding.

Because some transformations want time instead of translation. Some medicine works slowly, revealing itself layer by layer.

If you’re also living through something that you don’t yet understand... something that is working on you even while you’re still in it, something that may take months or years to integrate... I want you to know there is space for that.

You don’t have to rush the meaning. You don’t have to translate the mystery. You don’t have to know yet.

I’ll share more as more emerges. For now, I’m letting the experience speak in its own rhythm.

With love,

Leena