Risk, Reinvention, and the Sacred Practice of Pushing Limits
Some years arrive gently, others arrive like a summons you cannot ignore.
This past weekend marked the start of another new year for me. As I reflect on what was a milestone year, I see it was unlike any other. It was a year that called me to the edge of myself, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
Without fully realizing it at the time, I spent the last 12 months engaged in a relentless, disruptive, and intuitive practice of pushing my limits, letting go of old identities, and stepping into deeper, riskier, more genuine ways of being.
Some of this included:
Releasing a long-held career identity
Immersing myself in unfamiliar spaces of healing and transformation, including a 10-day intensive retreat that challenged my beliefs and boundaries
Exploring new, sometimes uncomfortable frontiers of experience and embodiment
Allowing curiosity, and a willingness to be undone, to lead me into places I would have once avoided
Each experience built on the last, each risk stretched me beyond what I thought was possible, each step moved me closer to a self I had not yet met.
And then came the culmination, a 40-day journey into the Amazon, including a 26-day shamanic initiation that purged the last remnants of who I had been.
It was while deep in the jungle, using bootleg internet, that a friend suggested I was perhaps immersing myself in the Japanese practice of Misogi, the tradition of undertaking extreme challenges to purify the body, mind, and spirit.
Learning about Misogi felt less like a discovery and more like a recognition. Without having the words for it. I had been living my own Misogi for months. Intuitively, I had been engaging in a sacred, self-initiated practice of risk, release, and radical becoming.
The Sacred Undoing
Forty days… on the edge of what I thought I could endure. Pushing limits. Releasing. Becoming.
Thirteen strangers gathered in the heart of the jungle, each answering a personal call toward transcendence.
Working with Shipibo healers has a way of stripping a person down to their essence.
For us, it meant:
Mornings spent at the medicine house
Endless days with no technology, no distractions, no hiding
A restrictive 10 week diet
A significant amount of purging
Ten ceremonies held in the dark of the night
We moved through emotional rawness and physical exhaustion. We trembled through plant medicine treatments, cold showers, makeshift saunas, and ice baths dumped over our heads. We sat for four days of silence (I did this poorly). Terrified, I joined a nighttime trek through the jungle, trailing closely behind the man with a machete.
I pushed my body and mind beyond their imagined limits. It wasn’t comfortable, it wasn’t easy, but it was necessary. Each layer of discomfort peeled back old ways of being:
Roles I no longer needed to play
Stories that no longer defined me
Fears that no longer had power over me
Healing Isn’t Linear
In the West, we often approach healing and change as linear, a straight path from brokenness to "better." The jungle, and the experiences leading up to it, taught me otherwise.
Healing spirals. It circles. It brings you back to old wounds, not to punish you, but to loosen their grip, layer by layer.
There is no gold star for speed, there is no checklist for completion, there is only trust and surrender.
The Body Remembers What the Mind Forgets
Throughout this year, and especially in the jungle, I learned what indigenous traditions like the Shipibo have long understood:
Trauma, grief, and experience live as energetic imprints in the body.
The steel bands across my gut weren’t just tension. They were decades of survival energy, unspoken stories, and trapped memory.
In the Shipibo tradition, healing is not intellectual, it’s energetic. Pain must be released. Old energies must be purged from the body, spirit, and field.
The ceremonies, the treatments, the physical purifications, they weren’t random rituals. They were acts of sacred medicine:
Calling the body to remember
Calling the spirit to release
Clearing the space for vitality, joy, and truth to return
Healing didn't happen because I thought differently. Healing happened because I trusted my body’s ancient wisdom to cleanse, rebalance, and restore.
The jungle didn’t just teach me to endure, it taught me to honor the sacred intelligence encoded in every cell.
The Magic
Amidst the undoing, there was also magic.
The kind of magic you can’t plan for, the kind that appears when everything unnecessary has been stripped away.
Thirteen strangers, each on our own private journeys, grew into something closer than family. We wept together. We held space for each other’s unraveling. We laughed at the absurdity of our shared suffering. We witnessed one another in ways few people are ever truly seen.
In the stillness of jungle life, long, quiet days without technology, deadlines, or noise, the world came alive in ways I had never experienced before.
The plants seemed to breathe alongside us, vibrant and awake. The jungle pulsed with an aliveness so tangible it felt like it was weaving itself into our very skin.
Even the animals, the "pets" who had somehow adopted us, seemed to know when we needed comfort. They appeared at our tambos during our quiet times or in the maloca during our darkest nights, curling beside us without fear, offering their silent, instinctive presence.
It was as if nature itself had become our witness and our companion.
Time slowed. The air thickened with unseen conversations between spirit, body, and earth.
In the space created by so much surrender, joy found its way in. Gratitude bloomed. The sacredness of being alive, not perfect, not healed, just alive, became undeniable.
The Return: New Energy, New Life
When I left the jungle, I felt complete. I thought I had left everything that needed releasing behind me.
But when I reached the mountains, something new began to stir.
The clearing created by all that release became fertile ground. A new energy filled me, abundant, alive, deeply rooted.
The mountains breathed life into what had been emptied out.
It wasn't about "going back" to who I had been, it was about becoming who I was always meant to be.
What I Learned: Lessons Etched Into My Bones
🌿 Disruption is not destruction, it’s initiation. The unraveling was painful, but it was purposeful. I wasn’t breaking down, I was breaking through.
🌿 Risk is sacred. Real growth demands stepping outside the predictable. The risks I took this year weren’t reckless. They were intentional acts of becoming.
🌿 The body holds the stories the mind forgets. True healing happens when we allow the body to release what the mind has long ignored.
🌿 Reinvention begins at the edges. The parts of myself I met when I was most uncomfortable, those were the parts that were ready to lead the next chapter.
🌿 Discomfort is the doorway to vitality. Ease is lovely, but vitality is found in the stretch, the moment when you realize you are stronger, wilder, and more luminous than you thought.
🌿 Sacred pauses are necessary. Stepping away from doing, producing, and striving wasn't a "break," it was a reconsecration of my time, energy, and spirit.
🌿 Where you place your body shapes the healing you receive. Healing is not confined to the Amazon or the mountains. It can find you in a jungle, on a mountaintop, or in your own backyard, if you are willing to meet it there.
🌿 Stillness is the gateway. In the hush of the jungle, in the quiet of my own breath, I remembered: Healing doesn't always come through striving. It comes through listening.
A Closing Reflection
If you find yourself standing at an edge, facing disruption, change, or an uncertain future, I offer you this:
Don't shrink back. Step forward.
Find your Misogi. Choose the path that stretches you. Trust that discomfort is not a detour, it is the doorway.
The life waiting on the other side isn't smaller, it’s yours. 🌿
If this resonates with you, or you're navigating your own Misogi year, I’d love to connect.