That Which Makes Your Fall is That Which Makes Your Rise
Estimated reading time: 14 minutes
An exploration of childhood trauma and a yogic practice for healing
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How did I find myself in my bathroom naked, covered in egg yolk, banging on a drum, screaming and shouting at the top of my lungs? I had just cracked a raw egg over my head. And I had never felt so powerful and fierce. As I stared at myself in the mirror, I saw clarity and resolve in my eyes. I felt free. I knew I had released a power in me that was ancient.
Years of doing spiritual practices led me to this point of self-initiation that marked the moment I resolved to take back my power. It was a ritual, a reclaiming of a part of me that I had forgotten. The power of my deepest Self was waiting to be revealed, renewed, and nurtured.
The face looking back at me in the mirror wasn’t much different from that of the eleven-year-old who had stood in the junior high school bathroom in Huntington, New York, several decades earlier covered in broken eggshells, streaks of bright-yellow yolk dried against my dark brown skin. Three girls had just attacked me on the school bus. They didn’t like the way I wore my hair, the way I spoke, or the way I dressed. They didn’t like anything about me. And they had been diligent in making sure that I knew it every day of the school year.
From the first day I put on my first pair of thick eyeglasses in the third grade, I had been bullied.
I became used to the name-calling— “Olive Oyl,” “Four-Eyes,” “Ugly,” “Stick Figure”—but there was something different about these girls. They wanted
