Life is Freaking Cray Cray! By Rebecca Schmidt

Jul 27

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So usually when people ask me about my move to Costa Rica in 2012 I pull out my magical story of winning a contest and a trip to come here. I tell them that when the plane first landed on that first extraordinary vacation that I felt a sense of home or belonging like I had never felt before. I mention how my friends and I headed to this cute little beach town called Nosara on a whim and stayed there for less than 24 hours and that as we were leaving I saw a sign that seemed to glow (it said Nosara Yoga Institute). I tell people how I told my friends that I could see myself living there and that when I returned to Toronto, I decided to work one more season of my job and that during that time I worked hard to prepare my body to be healthy enough to live the healthy active lifestyle that I imagined. I sometimes share that I had a million to do lists and that I gave away most of my belongings, packed 2 suitcases and a backpack, said see you later to my loved ones and moved here to Costa Rica. That is all true and I am still amazed today that any of that actually happened to me and how decisive and fearless I felt through that period. Winning that contest changed my entire EVERYTHING and you can call it fate or destiny but it took a lot of hard work and courage either way. Little did I know the REAL hard work and call for courage was about to begin soon after I arrived.

Just a few days after arriving in Costa Rica I was standing in my kitchen chopping vegetables for dinner in the casita I had rented and I heard it before I felt it, To me, who had been living in the T.O. (pronounced T dot O dot aka Toronto) it sounded like a streetcar, Mac truck and bus all passing by at the same time. As the earth below my feet started moving, I quickly realized it was an earthquake. A month or so before I landed in Costa Rica there had been a magnitude 7.6 in the same area that had caused a lot of damage and plenty of aftershocks. I knowingly moved here anyways but c’mon who really understands what that might be like if you haven’t experienced it firsthand. As fate would have it, I did not experience a magnitude 7.6 earthquake but I got myself a beginner’s luck magnitude 6.5 which was no laughing matter. What I recall the most is the kind of outer body experience I had while being very much in my body. Looking back I can see that I reacted with a freeze response but I knew nothing about trauma back then. As everything rattled and shook, I quickly ducked under the cement counter I was standing at and crouched with the knife still in my hand watching the fridge bouncing up and down and hearing glass breaking and items falling. I reminded myself to use the deep breaths I had learned about in my recent yoga classes and told myself that this would soon pass and even giggled at the fact that I was still holding the knife which was in no way protecting me! I am not sure but it probably only lasted around 30 seconds maybe less but it changed me in ways that I now believe to be part of a very destined plan.

Once the ground stopped moving, I came out from under the counter and saw that one of the 6 foot panes of glass at the top of my high ceilinged casita had crashed down onto my bed and that another was hanging by a thread. Next I heard someone outside my door yelling if I was okay. What a way to meet the neighbours! I felt instantly blessed for them and to have them come check on me. I remember having issues getting the key into the lock that was located on the inside of the door and was a double deadbolt and the man outside asking excitedly if I was stuck or if the door was jammed which made me feel a little panicked for the first time since it had begun. Once I got outside I saw that the chairs I had been sitting in 10 minutes before the earthquake were covered in glass and that the man was now accompanied by a neighbour and her small dog. Another very pregnant woman was waddling over as quickly as she could. Turns out that she was almost 9 months pregnant and her partner (the one who had come to check on me) was clearly in shock as he instantly began to sweep up glass. The pregnant woman screamed about the possibility of aftershocks and for all of us to get away from the glass pane swaying above us. I grabbed my purse and went to their place which had fared much better. I was able to get a signal to call the only friends I knew who had also recently moved there and they picked me up and allowed me to stay with them for a few nights. Nothing was the same after that earthquake. I wasn’t the same.

Once I returned to my casita with the newly installed windows, I found myself constantly preparing for another quake. I made game plans with exit routes on how to get outside as quickly as I could and kept an emergency pack near the door. I made sure that I left the key in the door and practiced turning it. I even started only using one of the double lock options so I would have one less turn of the key to make to get out. I took the quickest showers of my life and showered less frequently than usual as I feared having to run outside naked. I even made a plan that had a robe within arms length that I could throw on as I ran. My seborrheic dermatitis flared red and angrily all over my face and I was drinking small amounts of alcohol sometimes by 10am just to feel less edgy and I was scared to go out places to explore. This weirded me out the most as I used to walk home from work at 4am sometimes or would take the streetcar when I lived in the city so why was I scared to walk 5 minutes away in broad daylight? What was I so scared of? Everything became a plan and I had to work myself up to venture out unless someone was with me. I now know that anxiety, hypervigilance, feeling unsafe, fear, cloudy brain feels, etc are typical trauma responses but I knew nothing about them at that time.

After a few days of following through with my new high alert protocols I began my 1 month 200hr intensive yoga teacher training, titled, Self Awakening Yoga at the Nosara Yoga Institute (the glowing sign from the previous January). I wonder what my understanding of self awakening was back then? I doubt I even thought about what it meant. I had gotten really into yoga a year and a half before, starting with a gentle at home practice with Youtube videos and then nervously attending hot power yoga classes in person. Interestingly enough, my favourite teacher on Youtube was based in Costa Rica and I would listen to the waves crashing onto the beach and the birds in the trees as I lay in savasana on the floor of my basement apartment imagining myself there living the healthy active life of my dreams. This was how I manifested my yoga teacher training and life in CR but I didn’t know anything about manifestation back then.

Things happened to me down to a cellular level in that month of my yoga teacher training. I now truly believe in fate and that winning the contest, finding Nosara by “mistake”, the earthquake and the yoga training were such blessings and intricate initial parts of my journey. The yoga training cracked me open and I was able to begin accessing my emotional body that had been so closed off and was able to start peeling back some layers of protection and poking into areas that had been desensitized. What I thought was going to be the month that got me in the best shape of my life had instead left me in serious sciatic nerve pain and gorging on healthy foods to attempt to numb uncomfortable emotions that I had unleashed. I gained 10 plus pounds in 2 weeks which within 2 months turned into a 20 pound weight gain in total. Now I will admit I was slim when my training began but 20 lbs on a 5 ft 2 frame is VERY noticeable and most of my clothes stopped fitting and I felt uncomfortable and bloated. I hated the bloated feeling the most because it reminded me of the years I had been ill with crohn’s disease in my mid twenties. I also didn't know who the eff I was anymore. I thought I had known me but I was different now and where did I fit in with all these yogis, surfers, young families and Costa Ricans? Some might call it a midlife crisis at age 35 but I know it was all part of my spiritual awakening and journey back to my true self. I would soon become aware that my former self and inner child had been lost or hidden away due to traumatic events in my childhood that had been fully blocked and repressed. Oh that is what the Self Awakening Yoga thing was all about!!! To help to figure out who we really are. *Smacks forehead. Why would my soul ever sign up for this human stuff?

My friend once coined Nosara the “meat grinder” as it sucks you in whole and then grinds you up and spits you out to be re-formed into a new you. Another used to say, “Nosara may not give you what you want but it will always give you what you need.” All this trauma stuff had been buried deep down in the corners of my subconscious mind and in my muscle fibers and had caused my nervous system to be on high alert ALL THE TIME. I learned that as a tween I had created a persona to protect myself. A persona??!? Well Nosara gave me EXACTLY what I needed in order to find clarity and healing and definitely sent me into a long period of the darkest night of the soul. I thank god for the beach. Some say you have to lose yourself to find the real you and I guess that is what I did. This has been the hardest work I have ever committed to in my life and has caused me to go through a multitude of death and rebirth cycles as I gain awareness and find forgiveness. I have learned that there is no right way to do this kind of healing work and what has worked best for me has been to allow what I need to present itself and then to follow the necessary steps involved. Hence, to trust the effing process and my intuition. I have done my best with what showed up step by step over the past 9 years. In a healing vortex such as Nosara that has included several types of yoga and meditation, deep breathwork, prayer, mantras, affirmations, journaling, spiritual lessons, diet cleanses, 5 Rhythms dance, acupuncture, bodywork, watsu, a zillion long solo beach walks and tide pool floats, cacao ceremonies, plant medicine micro dosing, EFT, astrology, numerology, tarot, crystals, sound healing, energy healing and realizing I was suffering with PTSD and was disassociating and the intense EMDR and psychotherapy that followed. There may have been more but you get the picture. Each step was necessary, helped me, taught me and freed me.

I am now at the stage of being ready to share some of what I learned with the intention of helping to guide others to self heal and to follow their own unique path and hopefully live their best lives. I am still not all the way there but looking back feels truly incredulous and inconceivable. By the way, I lost all that emotional weight I had gained in my first few months here and I lost it very suddenly. For almost 2 years I had worked my ass off trying to lose the weight and ate very mindfully, exercised everyday and even had parasites at one point but still could not lose the weight. Then it magically melted off of me almost the moment I met my love, who is now my husband. I am now thankful for gaining the extra pounds or I would have basically withered down to skin and bones but that is a whole other chapter for another day that dives a lot deeper into my trauma healing and spiritual transformation.

Moral of this story: To realize that we are all on our own unique journeys and to be open to wherever yours may take you. Your soul has a plan so try to keep your hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times and enjoy the ride...as best you can. Wow this kind of sounds like a movie ..you can’t make this sh*t up!