Brooke, the self- acclaimed curly- haired Yogic Activist, #EmergesProud with her story of transformation…

Brooke West’s brave account of the stages of her transformation journey clearly shows how there was deep meaning for her in the behaviour that was deemed “madness”.

Brooke describes her emergence through trauma, to re-empowering herself to become a channel for the flow of life:

#EmergingProud is important to help eradicate isolation and to offer support.

Things were really bad in my family and I couldn’t scream loudly enough for help.

No one had been listening to our traumas and, if they did, they were pushed away for fear of the sandcastle tumbling… until I tumbled into Wonderland. My older sister, D’Arcy, was addicted, unwell, eventually suicided.

~~

When I become neutral about thoughts, witnessing, noticing, without categorizing or judging, my spiritual connection strengthens.

Yogas chitta vritti nirodha – Yoga Sutra 1:2 – Yoga neutralizes the whirlpools of feeling.

I was raised as a Christian Scientist: Think yourself well.

Alchemy: From Psychosis to Prescience

So I thought about how different things could be… I hated my university and the student loan. I wanted curly hair. I did not want to be the wife or mother to the five babies about whom my jock boyfriend dreamed – not me. I did not want to live.

So

I spent all my money at a toy store to make up for the toys I never got.

I slept with strangers to make up for loving, unfulfilled.

I wanted to wear white and garden nonstop because it felt productive and calming:

Moments of mindfulness, completely absorbed, peaceful, beyond time, in the garden

With and as Spirit

So

I broke up with him

I quit university

I gardened in white

I walked around in my linen dresses carrying a stone the size of a prayer book in my hands, checked the fuck out, content.

Taking charge of my own life, finally happy! Family freaked out.

I was forcibly hospitalized and medicated. I was impotent, confirmed in solitary confinement. For days. Alone.

Those days, locked in that cell, I passed some of the time by following a rainbow across the wall, my face pressed to cool, thickly painted cinderblock as my sole comfort. A glass block formed a small, opaque window that connected me to the rhythms of time and the magic of Light and nature, saving me from madness inside of madness.

I promised to myself that, if I survived, I would find gratitude and God and a rainbow every day. The hospital released an activist.

~~

Now a Yoga therapist, initiated into a Yoga meditation tradition, as all Kriyaban initiates are, wearing white, my Yoga work, practice, and consistent, purifying, daily rhythms provide a constellation of stability, impossible to segregate.

I forgive every day.

And I got what I wanted:

Although I was drugged and made to go back to school and into debt I earned a degree horticulturist, a trained gardener.

Medication caused my hair to fall out!

It grew back in curly!

Alchemizing the medication which disabled me, my student loan debt was forgiven!

I keep no more selfish boyfriends, having found the love of my life in a woman!

I lead meditation and spiritual emergence self-help support groups!

I pray today for an eco-village life, agrarian, principled, contemplative.

I am more psychic today than ever. I move electricity. Everything I need comes to me, as promised by the siddhis in Yoga lore. I am powerful because Life flows through me

and Light

Sound

Joy

Love

Peace

and

Wisdom

Just like it flows through you.

AUM