Rebirthing the Spirit

It’s easy to feel like an alien here on planet Earth, but Embodiment & Transformational Mentor, Hannah Goldberg, is here to help you feel more hvman. Ever think a big portion of our everyday suffering is due to the fact that we’re all pretending? Yea, us either… Anyway, Hannah is here to tell us how she dropped the act & the magic that ensued. Take notes*.

I came into this world with nine lives. Like a cat.

My first life consisted of entering into this world, but struggling to fit into it.

I was born at home to parents who baffled society as they wove between shoulder-padded yuppies in Reaganomic America by day yet spouted bohemian values and artistic, philosophical musings by night.

These were the same worlds I learned to straddle too as I grew up, with all the grace and hope that a goofy, sensitive, dramatic and artistic child could muster.

But over time, straddling both worlds felt impossible, and I felt forced to choose between them:

Would I choose the one deemed acceptable by society? The one that rewarded ‘good behavior,’ declaring loudly: if you choose me, you’ll have ‘the dream’?

Or the one that made my heart roar? Like there was a glowing, golden ember of light surrounding it? The one whispering softly: if you choose me, you’ll become ‘the dream’?

My human desire to be loved and accepted won out in the end and so I chose the former and domesticated myself completely.

I did everything ‘right:’ I went to college. I got the desk job. I met the man. I got the ring. I bought the house. I got promoted - multiple times, across various fields.

In other words: I did all the things in that first life of mine. All the ‘acceptable’ things anyway. And I was rewarded for them.

That’s of course when it hit though:

Like a spark of eternal, oracular, Spirit-fire lighting me up from inside, growing only more voracious and erratic over time;

Like the cry of a caged wildcat, starved and humiliated for one too many years in captivity, summoning her remaining tendrils of wildness to be set free;

My Spiritual Awakening had arrived. My gloriously messy Saturn Return was here.

Only I didn’t know that then.  

I only knew that I burned from deep, unmet yearning, and I began craving things I’d always denied myself:

Like depth and meaning in my interactions.

Like starved sexual desires that now grumbled…loudly. 

Like solitude and silence.

But still I did my best to deny it all, hoping it would just…go away. Would just…die.

Death is a funny thing though. It comes in many forms and guises, and inevitably, it finds us all in the end. 

My first Death came with fire, and when it arrived, it did so swiftly. Mercilessly. 

First, Death came for my body and I could no longer dance. Or yoga. Couldn’t even breathe without being in sharp, stabbing pain. And without movement to distract me, I was finally forced to turn inward.

That’s when Death came for my relationships: I stopped speaking to my father after years of enduring emotional abuse, and then I questioned my marriage after realizing I’d somehow developed feelings for someone else along the way.

So I went to therapy.

I began meditating.

I changed my diet and stopped drinking.

I got clearer. 

I started working with Shamanic plant medicines (my first experience with psychedelics ever), and I began praying even though the rituals felt foreign to me.

My marriage ended.

I fell out with my yoga community.

I fell out with my teachers;

My mother too.

I moved 15 times in 3 months, eventually landing and living on my own for the first time ever at the tender age of 31. 

I got a new nose to match my new life. (The new me.) 

I somehow managed to both quit and get fired from my job at the same time and found a new one.

[Insert pandemic here.]

I navigated sex and romance (and heartbreak) with someone new for the first time in nearly a decade.

My once strong, supple body softened into doughy squish.

I looked under the rug of all my ‘open,’ liberal white woman ‘colorblindness’ and saw the sweepings of socially ingrained truths that left me feeling shattered and humbled.

I made peace with the uglier parts of me that emerged from these shadows.

I danced naked in my living room with them.

I cried about them - cried more in 12 months than I had in 15 years. 

I built an altar and continued to pray and the words began to feel less strange.

I repaired my relationship with my parents.

I quit my new job and started yet another.

I decided to finally leave the place I’d called home for years, but never really felt at home in.

I sold most of my things and stored the rest.

I bought a plane ticket to a country I’d never been to before and didn’t speak the language of.

I fell out with my parents…again.

I quit my third job in one year.

I traveled solo internationally with no plans - no comprehensive understanding of how I was going to pay for it. 

I made friends with the unlikeliest of characters.

I hiked mystical mountains and celebrated near-endless beach sunsets. 

I spent more time alone and without touch than I had in my life.

I also experienced what it felt like to be worshiped by a sexy, artistic, sensitive and kind man. 

I flew back to the place of my birth and healed deep family wounds.

I felt at home for the first time in years.

I traveled across the world and landed on another continent in a different hemisphere altogether. 

More heartbreak. More rage. More shadow. More tears -

But then - 

Seemingly out of nowhere - 

That raging fire I’d felt for so long within me began to soothe as Spirit swept through like a blessed monsoon after too many years of drought:

My throat chakra opened - I couldn’t stop singing! Light language spilled from my lips.

My sacral chakra relaxed and I remembered why I danced.

My crown chakra activated and I realized I was Spirit made flesh. A droplet of God in a single human form. 

My third eye cleared and I saw that everyone and everything else around me was God too. 

Energetic weight I’d been holding for years sloughed off like dead skin, and I felt my solar plexus chakra grow strong once again.

I experienced what it meant to live in true community and my root chakra grounded. 

And then one day, when I least expected it, the once-starved wildcat within me broke fully free from her cage and I tasted the honeyed drippings of ecstatic, passionate bliss:

My heart chakra had finally burst open, and with it, my understanding of what it meant to gaze upon the earth from the Eye of the Heart as an embodied being of Love. 

It’s true, Death arrived and asked me to turn into a pile of ash. To tumble off the edge of the cliff. To freefall into the abyss of an unknown world of darkness. Of fear. Of strangeness and sorrow. 

So I did. I walked through the fire. I turned to ash. I fell off the cliff and in darkness I sat.

I did ‘the things.’ All of them. 

In other words, I died. 

But from that same death, I was also reborn into the fiery, nimble-footed lioness I was always meant to become. And it is in this sensual, embodied form I now stride towards my new life…

All eight of them left…


Mentor with Hannah through her 12-week, 1:1 online self-discovery and embodiment program, Intuitive Artistry