The Questions That Shape Us
Where I’m from shapes everything I’m about to share. My childhood was steeped in magic—my mom practiced witchcraft, and for the first fourteen years of my life, it set the stage. She was a formidable woman, full of fire and unresolved traumas, and with her particular brand of magic, she manipulated and gaslit me. Mine was a childhood of smoke and mirrors.
For over a decade, I tried to make sense of it all through writing. In my first novel, The Way of the Saints, I explored the generational traumas that haunted my mother and me. The book is a multi-generational story, grounded in my family and my experiences as the daughter of a Santeria priestess. It took ten years to write—but when it was done, I felt healed. The bitterness, resentment, and grief dissolved, replaced by empathy, clarity, and a sense of a heavy cloud lifting.
Shamans were the original storytellers—they understood the medicine of narrative long before there was therapy. By weaving personal pain into myth, they transformed suffering into symbols and connected the individual to the cosmos. For me, writing works like soul retrieval: by losing myself in a story, I reclaim myself, again and again. Writing may not erase the scars, but it allows me to integrate them, to make sense of the chaos.
There is power in honoring what it means to be alive, to survive, to witness. When we speak aloud, “Once this happened,” with vulnerability and truth, we step onto the path of transformation.
Growing up in a magical world made my memories blur and slip. I often struggled to separate imagination from reality. And as far back as I can remember, I’ve wondered: What lies beyond this veil of perception?
Though my childhood was confusing, difficult, and dark, I wouldn’t entirely change it. Like a mystery I needed to solve, it set me on a sacred trajectory toward personal awakening. Many of my formative experiences were paranormal, and from a young age, a haunting question took root in my consciousness: What is real? That question became a compass, a force propelling my life.
In Sanskrit, the word svadharma means “one’s own path.” Tantra teaches that svadharma is woven into your being, and life is a journey of remembering this true calling. I didn’t know it for forty years, but my early question—What is real?—was exactly the kind of inquiry that sets a seeker on their initiatory path. Across esoteric and indigenous traditions, such a path is a sacred journey, a rite of passage.
In Hindu philosophy, asking “What is ultimate reality?” is not just an intellectual exercise—it is a doorway, initiating the seeker toward liberation, or moksha. The more I asked, the more I felt like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, pulling back the curtain on illusions, or Maya. To seek what is real is to take the first ripple across the surface of dreamtime.
I believe we live in an extraordinary moment in history. Modern quantum physics is asking the same questions I’ve carried my whole life: What is the true nature of reality? The parallels between physics, neuroscience, Eastern philosophy, yoga, and myth are extraordinary. By exploring them, we step, each of us, onto our own path.
If these questions—of reality, perception, and the hidden currents that shape our lives—resonate with you, you might find a deeper journey in my collection of short stories, The Way of the Saints. It’s a multi-generational story born from the magic, trauma, and love that shaped my life. The stories in The Way of the Saints lay the groundwork—they are echoes of the past, threads of memory and magic. My own hero’s journey—the path of healing, self-realization, and embodied awakening—is still unfolding, and I am weaving it into a new work. For those curious to walk that path alongside me, there is more to come.
https://blacklawrencepress.com/books/the-way-of-the-saints/
