This week we unveil The Introduction and PART I of The Charming Siren by Wildly Authentic Author, Linzee Belle
Voiceover by Author Linzee Belle
Sound Design and Artwork by Johnny Lemoine
Narrative Art Coaching and Developmental Editing by Stephanie Fee Maschek of The Wild Larynx
Wildly Authentic Stories are sometimes tales that include the authors experience in transforming trauma and may include sensitive subjects and explicit language that could feel triggering for some of our listeners. The intention is to bring light the author's essence, and tonal expression without filtering so our audience can experience the full spectrum of beauty and lessons that live inside the whole, unhidden truths of our lives. Our authors have used narrative art to further integrate and heal so they can tell stories of pure transformation. The Stored to Storied™ narrative coaching process is designed to help the author communicate their psychedelic plant-medicine journeys and ceremonies through written and spoken word culminating in the creation of a final manuscript. After the manuscript is complete, they complete their work with Designer + Artist Johnny Lemoine to encapsulate their storybook in personalized cover art. For the Wildly Authentic Authors who join us on The Wild Larynx Podcast, we help them through the courageous process of stepping into vulnerability so they can share their story with the world and help spread the positive emotional contagion of storytelling.
Please note that The Wild Larynx does not claim to be a therapist, integration coach, healer or any other medical professional. The Wild Larynx is a storytelling platform specializing in The Art of Transformation through the only collaboration of its kind, combining narrative art, sound and design to create personalized storybooks reflective of the profound work they have done to make the most of their existence.
The Charming Siren
A Wildly Authentic Storybook by Linzee Belle
In Loving Memory and Devotion
I dedicate this storybook to my brother, Ryan,
my sister, Kristi and my Grandma, Lynette
Happiness is to hold flowers in both hands
- Fred and Joyce Day
INTRODUCTION
MY CALL TO AYAHUASCA
Since April 2021, I have struggled to find the right words to explain to the outside world the healing that came out of a 9-day retreat I attended in Sacred Valley, Peru, with Anam Cara Retreats. The experience changed me forever. I have had strong knowledge in my gut that communicating the pivotal moments and understandings from my time there is part of what I am meant to offer others.
My existence, I now understand, is to serve up my truth so others feel assured in presenting their own. Discovering parts of myself that had remained dormant before I took the medicine, I share this with strangers and loved ones alike so you can imagine yourself moving through the world in your most genuine and authentic way.
Before I committed to furthering my integration through creating my Wildly Authentic Storybook, anxiety and fear left me apprehensive about telling the full version of my story. In my first Storied Transformation Session, I realized my vulnerability could benefit others. Once I permitted myself to share, the words began to flow effortlessly.
Before embarking on this journey, I questioned whether what I had to say would be helpful for you. Today, I am convinced of the immense value of my revelations because we all have pain that often remains hidden, sometimes for our entire lives.
When openly expressed, our anguish can create extraordinary connections that can change the world. It is up to me to create something great out of my pain so I can proclaim my freedom from it so you can hear, see and feel the courage you need to find your pathway to liberation.
Please, make whatever you like of my story as long as it is for your growth and good. I invite you to find your meaning and significance by engaging with these tales of transmutation. Imagine my hand in yours as I have imagined yours in mine as a life force that helped me to speak the words on these pages out loud throughout the process of building this storybook.
I want you to understand that you are not alone in your struggles.
For the majority of my life, I believed there was something wrong with me because of my reactions to the emotional and physical abuse I endured.
I offer you my open heart and spirit, ready to share the entirety of my story in a raw and revealing manner.
This story is my art, a gift to those of you who may struggle to comprehend the impact abuse has had on someone you love and to those who have experienced abuse yourselves, in hopes it moves you to create your art out of whatever might be ailing you.
I place immense trust in The Universe…God…The Cosmos…Love - whatever name you prefer.
Through sharing my story, I continue to integrate and heal.
Reflecting on and reading the journal entries I wrote aloud has empowered me to speak my truth and use my voice from a place of wisdom.
Seven journals filled with my darkest moments have been transformed into a narrative that now stands on its own, independent and ready to journey through the spaces open to receiving it.
Before I ventured to Peru to experience the sacred and ancient medicine of Ayahuasca, I had begun the process of transforming my past traumatic experience. Still, I remained at a crossroads in my life.
Having already embarked on various healing journeys, I sought new pathways to work the trauma I had experienced in my childhood and adulthood out of my system. I decided to become a certified practitioner in April 2021 because I was drawn to the embodied elements of somatic breathwork.
Introduced to somatic breathwork by a friend who was aware that I was struggling with alcoholism, the modality took me by surprise as a profound new coping mechanism.
Before I began practicing, I was drinking alcohol to cope with the immense guilt I felt for being alive, in contrast to my brother, who died by suicide, and my sister, who died in a motorcycle accident years prior.
Alcohol took away my authentic way of being, bringing out behavioral patterns that ultimately led to my five-year-old son witnessing his mother in states of self-sabotage.
Using my breath in this new way helped me release the toxicity from my system, and I understood that I could change my behavior and, ultimately, my life.
Recalling the first time I participated in a somatic healing session, upon laying down and settling in on the floor, the tribal music began to play intensely.
BOOM. Just like that, without realizing it, I was experiencing something similar to a psychedelic plant medicine journey.
This was the first time Ayahuasca had spoken to me. In somatic breathwork, you tap into the parts of your brain that produce DMT, also activated in Ayahuasca.
It is said that Ayahuasca will call you when you are ready.
Shortly before the retreat in Peru started, I was asked to travel to assist in breathwork and participate in the Ayahuasca retreat experience with Anama Cara Retreats.
There was no question whether I was going. Even with little notice, my body was at ease, and I considered that there was no question that I needed to say yes. I called my mother to care for my son and departed soon after.
During the nine-day retreat, I embarked on a profound journey of self-discovery and healing. The retreat center provided a nurturing space for participants, with communal areas for sharing, feasting, and introspection.
The heart of the retreat lay in the Maloca—a sacred ceremonial space where we, as participants, gathered to partake in the medicine work.
Ayahuasca unveiled the darkness that had pulled me in due to my struggle with alcoholism, poor body image, and the abuse and grief I had experienced in my life, offering me a new perspective on my journey toward discovering the most raw declaration of self.
I gravitated toward myself with this medicine rather than away from myself when using alcohol and drugs.
Throughout the retreat, I embraced my role as a space holder, providing breathwork sessions for others while also undergoing my healing.
As I returned home, I carried the lessons, friendships, and insights I gained in Peru. I’ve committed to a life of healing, exploring new layers of my being, and dismantling my masculine wounds.
The journey does not come without its challenges, but I remained steadfast in my devotion to myself, even in the spaces where self-love seemed the most burdensome.
My newfound understanding of my love for myself clarified what I seek in partnership and relationship. Expanding my perspective, I no longer seek the “one” but embrace the idea of encountering souls with whom I had shared lifetimes before. I yearn to taste blissful moments in intimacy now and explore the depths of connection with others without confining love within a box of forever to appreciate who and what exists right now.
Isn’t that the point, to be present to stop and smell the roses? To be extraordinarily surprised by what the present moment can offer?
And here, at this moment, I share how I arrived at this place with you.
THE EXPERIENCE
APRIL 2021
Retreat Center: Anam Cara Retreats
Location: Sacred Valley, Peru
8 Days
9 Nights
3 Shipibo Maestros
I want to go to the spaces where it’s the hardest to love God
And spend my devotion there.
Your heart has the power to comfort you
Even when you abandon it.
I want to go to the space where it’s hardest to love myself
And see if my heart is still there.
Does it beat?
Does it live?
I want to invite you in.
Can I invite me in first?
Can you hold me with an open palm without gripping me whole?
Can you turn the lights out and meet me where my demons guard my temple
To cast light on my shadow?
-Journal Entry
PART I: PREPARATION
A Prelude to Love: Heart Opening with San Pedro
The ones I love, who didn’t yet love themselves, sunk their teeth into the soft tissue of my heart. Emerging from the feast, their clothes were stained with my blood. They wanted more. I gave it to them, first with fear and then with forgiveness. That’s what a woman with purple veins, the pulsing desire to have her soft skin caressed, and the piercing green of her eyes embraced embodies.
They used my light to lay down their dark shadows in the chambers of my heart. My wings had been clipped not to spread my tenderness too wide. As I invited them in, unable to fly, I told myself I was safer this way, ignoring the knowledge that I was not. When I opened up, the span of my wings scared them, and even worse, it upset them. A feather fell to the ground with every exploitation until I was forced to fly lower and lower, making it easier for me to remain captive.
Before you invited my heart to come here, I knew nothing of the difference between absorption and saturation.
One is wrapped in the full spectrum, and the other stands out, richer and deeper in hue.
Being bitten, I was soaked through with their venom, but now, my heart was ready to receive the antidote to the poison.
Stars are hot with fire and emit light that only stands out in the pitch-black night. I blamed myself for them noticing me. My illumination of their blind spots burdened them. I thought no one wanted me as a child, but I discovered they wanted to ensure I stayed small.
Growth meant that I was becoming a divine reminder of their inconvenient truths. As their resentment grew, so did my natural tendency to broaden with vexatious luminescence.
Before I met you, Aya, I met San Pedro, an elixir of the heart. A preliminary dance with masculine medicine, a spectrum of golden light from the sun, and I heard my brother in him.
“I am the sun,” he called down to me. I was cradled in a white hammock, swinging softly back and forth, listening to water dripping and insects whistling in the Peruvian Rainforest.
The sun was everywhere, and that meant he was too.
He kept calling through you in light rays, dancing with his apology, coupling up and taking shape through dew drops in the air. His delicate tears were gently moving down to the roots that held up the thin, lanky blades of grass that pointed toward expansion. He fed the soil, and my feet felt the dirt settling.
On the way down, he transcended his pain as I prepared to eclipse mine.
Feeling him as light now, I recalled the darkest moments between us that transpired before his passing.
We were swallowed by the night. They say that’s when the demons come out.
Latching on to the stunted vibration of drugs that knew nothing of earth’s medicine, he wanted to be cradled by a woman’s womb.
Maybe it’s true that the monsters crawl out of the dark, but it’s a fact that the stars dazzle into formations of constellations at that time, too.
He didn’t see his sister in me.
He saw a supernova of comfort, safety and love.
I awoke in the middle of the night, his shadow covering the stars that glowed from the window, and felt his body on top of mine. I saw nothing, but I knew it was him forcing himself inside of me. The force on top of my body was nothing but a nightmare that used his vessel as a home for the devil inhabiting his skeleton.
I froze because there was no more fight or flight left in me.
Exposed and unprotected, the organ that pumped sovereignty through my body told me that I was too royal to remain a servant.
San Pedro reverberated in my chest throughout my recollection of these events.
The presence of a dewdrop, like making amends with what haunts you, brings renewal to nature. My brother's warmth always had the power to breathe new life into me until he hurt me.
I stood with the intensity of his beams as I continued lying in the hammock. Succumbing to the heat, he was taking nothing but my pain away. I could feel the purity of what we had before the blackout, emerging as renewal, allowing the warmth within him to release me from my pain. No longer of the Earth, his glow held mine.
We swayed, loosening the knots of our past, and there, the day before I accepted the first cup of Aya, I knew she was already working.
My brother and I began moving in a new direction. The tall grass embraced us from the depths of the Earth to the starry night.
I recalled my pain, knowing that before he took his life, he touched me one last time.
His hand on my breast, I fought him at that moment.
The moment before he pulled the trigger.
And here, swaying softly, he touched my heart this time because that was all he had ever been looking for.
The sun softened, and as I rose from the hammock and walked through the garden, I reached out to feel the Pampas Grass, a wild, untamed dancer on nature’s stage, twirling with grace and elegance. Painted by the brush of their feathery plumes was a colony of small, white butterflies. My sister emerged through hundreds of them circling me, changing direction as they floated next to me, outlining the shape of my body.
Her message came in the form of them flirting with me, gracing the skin on my fingertips with fluttering-wing kisses. I touched the velvety Pampas Grass again, and the white wings of her angel sprung out from my back.
She told me that she had a master plan.
Before she departed Earth, she was my comfort. I understood she had never left my side. She reminded me that she was always there. She told me that if I looked for her, I could find her and that the first place I should look is in my heart.
San Pedro spoke to me again, “Your heart has so much to say. What if you just stayed? When we can stay in the feeling of it all, we allow it to pass. This is the medicine.”
I fell in love with my heart, weeping in my power. I listened to nature. She was alchemizing my greatest strengths without me knowing what they were.
As I felt my sister’s overwhelming love crystallizing the soft tissue of my heart, my son arrived. He was the lavender in my veins, calming and purifying. I placed my hands on the earth.
The glass rooms in my heart crumbled, and from the pulsating ruble, I understood my capacity to love.
Tune into The Wild Larynx Podcast on Apply and Spotify to listen to more of The Charming Siren along with conversational episodes with host Stephanie Fee Maschek and Linzee Belle as we explore The Art of Transformation through her ayahuasca plant medicine retreat experience.
25. Storybook Episode: A Prelude to Love: Heart Opening with San Pedro - Introduction and Part I