One year ago today I was living in the Amazon rainforest of Peru when I entered into my 14th meeting with the sacred plant medicine, ayahuasca, for a ceremony that would forever alter my human experience.
That night, I opened a connection with two more plant spirits-- milagrosa and renequilla-- with whom I would learn from for the next two months. For 8 weeks I was guided through ceremonies, dreams, and other forms of energetic communication to learn about healing on a deep level that goes way beyond the physical. I came to understand my own experience of illness in a way that I had never imagined possible before then. Past lives, ancestral karma, trapped and stagnant emotional energies all played a role in the physical pain and symptoms I experienced on a daily basis. I learned how to "tune in" to receive clear messages and guidance about how to heal these blocks within myself, and how to prevent more from happening in the future.
Milagrosa, "The Miracle Plant" in all her glory
November 9, 2013 was also the night that I fully realized the name my parents had given me, Casie, the name I had been going by for the first 23.5 years of my life, was not in fact the name that my higher self wanted to be called. In earlier ceremonies, I was shown very clearly the path that my soul had chosen to walk in this lifetime, and the power behind the names we go by in helping us to achieve our highest potential.
This is how I came to be called Arianna-- this is my "soul name."
This last year has been a whirlwind of growth and development for me in every realm of this existence-- mind, body, and spirit. At this point in time, I can't even begin to put into words the process I'm going through other than that my spirit is going through a deeply transformative process; a process of shedding the layers of everything that is not really, truly me in my highest form. This process is painful and confusing a lot of the time. Each time I shed another layer it's like peeling off a bandage to give the new skin air to breathe. The new layer is sensitive, it's raw and now there's no going back to the old way of being.
It recently came to my awareness (through a number of sources, as my guidance usually does) that, although I have been clear on the pronunciation of my soul name from the very beginning (ARR-ianna, not AIR-ianna), I have actually been misspelling it for a year now!
I resisted this information pretty strongly when it first came through, not wanting to "rock the boat" with changing my name again for a second time. But, as I'm learning again and again, when my truth becomes known, I can't resist it for long before the old becomes so uncomfortable that I have no choice but to move forward.
