In the Garden of Hollyhock
I drop my heavy suitcase on the wooden floor and survey the room. A double bed, chair, fold-up writing table, and a closet too small with too few hangers to accommodate the outfits I’d brought for the week-long Hollyhock writing retreat. No worries. I’ll make do.
A small passage leads to a bathroom and another door which opens into a large room with three beds, a kitchen sink, wooden counters, and a fridge. There are no guests yet, but I’ve checked in early. I may be sharing a bathroom with three other people. From within, entitled Judy rears up, sparking that familiar nudge of irritation. I dampen the five-year-old down, reminding her this is not a usual vacation. We’re here to grow. We’re trying to find our way into a new sense of purpose. Away from the recent burden of emptiness and aloneness.
The wound deep inside throbs. I sit with it, refusing to do what I have done most of the sixty-plus years I have lived. I will not flee. I will not discard these unpleasant sensations or dissociate to my usual happy-happy Judy self. I will stay with the discomfort reminding me of my recent losses because I understand I must move through my pain if I am to grow.
Five months ago, my soul mate of over forty years died. I felt his death as if we were still married. As if we hadn’t separated sixteen months before, him moving to Thailand while I stayed behind on Vancouver Island. My body responded to his death five days before I received the news. Thirty-thousand feet in the air, on a flight to Mexico with a woman friend, unreasonable bouts of tears flooded my body. I dismissed the weird episode, thinking myself overwhelmed to be visiting the country I’d only ever visited with him.
During the next five days in Mexico, I became confused when sudden bouts of grief left me feeling disorientated. Surprising salty tears appeared out of the blue as I splashed in Bahia de Banderas Bay. In Sierra madre natural pools, my tears mixed with crystal clear water. I sobbed on the rocking back of a horse as we rode through the Mismaloya countryside, back to the hotel, where I finally discovered why my body was behaving so strangely. A Facebook text revealed the news. Roelof had died in Thailand, his death coinciding with that first spate of tears thousands of miles from where his body lay.
In Hollyhock, almost six months later, I still reel from the shock of loss. His death allowed me to finally grieve, to feel fully the impact of separating from the man who changed in my eyes as I began my healing journey. It had taken me ten years to extricate my slowly awakening self from his grip. I feel the tug still, the ties woven into the fabric of my being. When I left him in September 2024, I hadn’t allowed myself to fully grieve the loss of my future with the man I’d been in love with for so long.
I coped after the separation with my familiar survival tactic, numbing myself. I blocked him from my life, terrified co-dependency and trauma bonding would allow him the opportunity to return into my life. Early in my twenties, he’d been my anchor when family dysfunction drove my family and me apart. He’d helped me survive the unthinkable rejection of my parents and siblings. Our mutual childhood traumas created a pathological bond, a bond that eventually led to suffering.
When I finally acknowledged he’d become my chain, I physically extricated myself from the relationship, but we were still woven together, his presence with me. Even my work as a family physician seemed intertwined with our history of togetherness. When he died, I floated free, but without purpose. I felt unmoored. Free, but lost. I am skeptical of this writing retreat being able to heal this deep a wound. My body feels the urge to flee, but I actively resist the urge to leave for home to wallow in that recurring state of aimless flatness. Instead, I walk through the wooded grounds over fallen leaves, stones, and twigs to our first gathering.
I meet with eighteen other writers for a dinner on the deck. The ocean glitters. Seagulls, eagles, and cormorants swoop in invisible currents. Herons wade through low tide. Crows join the excited chatter mingling with the clatter of cutlery. I’m roused by fellow writers who dazzle me with their conversations. The encounters lift my spirit, but the in-between spaces reek of a sense of not belonging. Apartness.
On the second night we meet in a high-ceilinged room, eighteen women and a man settled on the chairs and sofa arranged in a circle on the wooden floor. Our ages vary from twenties to eighties. Some writers have met on a retreat here two years before, but most of us are still shyly getting to know each other.
The late afternoon light filters through pine and fir trees. Herons and gulls call from the Salish Sea. Betsy Warland, white-haired, slightly built, and casually dressed, guides us into the space, a quiet force, her soft voice holding us with the authority of a trusted teacher. Shaena Lambert is beside her, her smile radiant with warmth and light. I am not the only one feeling held. This night, each of the writers share the stories we are meant to write. The courage they show in their vulnerability opens my heart.
Each day brings new gifts. The smells from a garden of lavender, stately hollyhock, primroses, dahlias, an unfathomably rich display of color amidst beds of vegetables. The diamond studded ocean and lush ancient tree growth surround us. Drops of conversation inspire opening lines to chapters of the book I’ve been struggling to write. For the first time in a while I feel excitement about my project, the seemingly impossible task of uncovering ways to manage intractable chronic pain. Perhaps I will after all be able to share what my patients and mentors have taught me. Maybe I can make a difference to those living with unresolved chronic pain.
My interest in emotional and physical pain has spanned decades, but it has been my writing journey that led me to the language of healing. Writers like Gabor Mate, Ekhart Tolle, and Brene Brown have shown me the common sources of pain. I’ve learned how unresolved traumas stubbornly persist until we face them, find ways to process them. The journey leads to that light that shines within us all, but to find our way, we need community. A sense of connection to the Universe. I long to find meaningful ways to help others, but the journey starts with the heed for personal transformation.
Hollyhock provides more magic on the third night when as a community we settle in for a long meditation. We share another sacred space. Sixty souls with one purpose. Tapping into the spirit of the divine. I emerge from the deep meditation to a twinkling sense of my own divinity.
The following day I am drawn to a Tarot reading, my first. The cards reveal wounds common to humanity, the impact of childhood traumas, how unhealthy attachments form when we bond to similarly wounded people. The cards also remind me of my desire to find purpose in my life. My Tarot guide emphasizes what I already know, we have it within ourselves to open our hearts to the universe and to love. We have within ourselves the ability to heal from past wounds. I can move on from my past.
Through no fault of their own, my parents were unable to provide me with a stable childhood. Even before I was born, traumas imprinted on my DNA. As my body grew, stress stripped the protective layer coating my genes, exposing the coding for future illness, including mental illness like ADHD, anxiety and depression. But genes are only a small part of my being.
Trauma memories and my wired emotional pathways respond to threat automatically, creating the thought patterns I believed reflected Me. That Me was ignorant of the Self, the deepest part of me connected to the Universe, that free spirit locked behind the repeated patterns of thought and behaviors. I was chained by automatic responses, the deeply embedded brain wiring sabotaging my ability to heal.
My hunger for love and acceptance drove me into the arms of a man my brain wiring recognized as kin, outwardly dissimilar to my father but wired eerily the same. Unrecognized shame and fear held me in an isolating relationship until I found writing communities. Writers shared their personal stories and nurtured me with their friendship. They began to chip away at my old identity. The I that saw herself as nonsocial. Unable to make friends. Through writing I began to find friends. I found safety. I opened again to family. The trauma bond between my husband and me weakened until I was able to cut the ties. Now I’m free to love and be loved. Free to find Self.
The retreat library offers a book, Ramgiri Braun’s, HEARTSOURCING, Finding Our Way to Love and Liberation. The Spiritual Teacher shares his personal quest. I am emotionally touched by his courage and relate to those moments when he reveals his own struggles. I reflect on the hours spent in my apartment, lying on a hard floor, bound by catatonia, staring at the underside of the desk chair, at the dust under the bookshelves, wondering if I will find the strength to move forward. Reminding myself life is supposed to be hard. This is me running toward pain to get through it.
I reach a passage in the book, Ramgiri writing about his physical response reading about his future guru, Neem Karoli Baba. Light fills my chest. Warmth and a feeling of bliss spreads through my body. Tears of joy stream down my face. I wonder if the suggestible part of me has succumbed to the words, but only for a moment. I won’t discount the way my body has responded to that feeling of deep connection to these souls. I can’t remember ever experiencing anything so powerful.
The book guides me with a feeling of light and love as I attend writing sessions and commune with kick-ass writers, teachers, gurus, socio-political and environmental activists, businesswomen, mothers, sisters, wives. The cave of my heart opens to these fellow journeymen. I feel a deep sense of community.
The final night, we hold a ceremony, each of us offering to a flame a piece of paper. Written on the scraps are the words of the things we wish to leave behind. My piece of paper holds the words ‘I am alone.’ The group of writers and the sacred island space have allowed me to realize I am with community. I have a purpose to seek Self and stay connected to the Universe. When those feelings of being alone surface again, I will remind myself of this experience.
The morning of my departure, I notice a brown leaf on the path. I bend to pick up the fragile object. I hold the delicate offering up to the light. A completely intact membrane surrounds interconnected webbing and spaces. The leaf represents to me my reality, my life with more space than form. Somehow, this precious object makes the journey back home, intact but forgotten in the car’s console.
That night, I reach for Eckhart Tolle’s book, one suggested by Ramgiri. I notice what is on the cover. My heart fills with a now familiar feeling of bliss. I’m in my sweatpants, top but no bra, nevertheless I hurry out of my apartment, downstairs, to the parking lot. I fetch the leaf from the car.
Upstairs, I place the leaf over the image of the front cover. An almost perfect fit. A divine gift. I feel a deep sense of Self and a new awakening to my life’s purpose. A search for the God within me.
Judy Dercksen is a trauma informed family doctor, pain mentor, and the family doctor for Pain BC ECHO for pain. She has lived experience of complex PTSD and shares her knowledge of chronic physical and emotional pain in her writing.
