A Serpent Encounter Brings Expansion.

I found a six foot, fully intact snakeskin the weekend of Summer Solstice. 

Any story that starts like that, you already know, is going to weave a soul’s tale. 

My dog Holiday found it, actually. Holiday is a big, eighty pound mix of guard dog and heart. When I told him I was going to bring my dog to our farmer’s market date, the man I was just briefly dating said, “Good, bring her along. I have a theory that dogs mirror their owners.” 

“Yep,” I’d said, “That’s no secret. We have a little residual guardedness from some early life trauma we’ve worked through pretty well, and we're nothing but love as soon as we feel safe.” He liked Holiday a lot. 

And just a few days after they’d met, Holiday found a snakeskin for me - well, for us.

She is the first to act guarded, but Holiday in discovery mode is the most innocent thing ever. She will play with a beetle, lovingly, for a half hour before accidentally killing it. She wasn’t altogether sure what to make of a snakeskin - it made her a little nervous and her hair stood up. Since we walk the trail twice a day, I knew that snake had left its old skin within a few hours of our discovery. As I bent down over it, I was thoroughly impressed that I could see her mouth, wide open, where she’d slithered out of that old skin. I found it wasn’t yet dry and crispy, because you know what I did next was to pick that thing up. 

I googled whether or not you could rewet a snake skin to stretch it out and as a matter of fact you can, in warm soapy water. I carried the tumble of snakeskin home and excitedly fed my cats to distract them so they wouldn’t bother me while I filled the kitchen sink with warm soapy water to soak this gal. When I stretched it out, it was over six feet long, fully intact, nose to tail. 

I recognized this as a generous gift from Nature and my deeper psyche began scanning all of the previous encounters I’d had with the Serpent, recognizing that this was no doubt connected, as this animal has shown up at very significant times in my life. 

I texted a few photos and videos to the man with very little explanation, just that we’d found it. He had no idea what kind of mystic I actually am, but I like that at forty-five, I no longer even considered hiding this significant aspect of my true self from him. 

I liked the progress in me that this brief encounter with him reflected. More than ever before, I held myself so authentically, so steadily, so integrated - abandoning nothing. I used my feminine ways of knowing, cited body sensations, did not allow his eagerness to rush my decisions, paced myself with my nervous system, spoke what was true for me unapologetically, and honored my own energy. I did not make unhealthy accommodations and it was so clear to me that I would sacrifice nothing in order to be in relationship. And, my heart remained open and willing to love. 

I truly found myself in a place where I could see I was truly ready for reciprocal, healthy love. 

And with all the new breath and space in my body from the work I've done this year, Serpent, showing up from nose tip to tail, was also hinting that it was time to stretch out, to feel more pleasure, to feel the fullness of my capacity.

THE FIRST TIME SERPENT CAME TO ME:

There was another time when Serpent came to me so vividly that I ended up getting a large tattoo of a snake on my left arm. I’ve told a version of this story many times, but it was the beginning of my journey as an entrepreneur in early 2018. But more so, it was when I really had stepped onto this soul path. 

I had just left my job as a school principal and I was headed to Portland, Oregon for a Corporeal Writing and yoga retreat held by two truth-telling women, and boy did I have some hidden truths to tell. I knew then that being a writer was my ultimate plan, and I had just recently been so wronged by three men: my then-partner, my boss, and my father. It felt as though a trifecta of male fuckery had chased me through that transition. The more I stood in my strength at that time, the more it pissed off the boss, scared the boyfriend, and infuriated my father. 

Sitting wedged between retreat host and authors Lidia Yuknavitch and Jen Pastiloff, so close their shoulders were on either side of my shoulders and their arms wrapped around my back, corporeally steadying me, I read a story out loud to a group of about fifty women about how this man and come into my home and fucked me well, loved me, opened me in ways I'd never been opened, only to later find out that it had been an affair. When he’d left, I felt so extracted from. I didn’t have that word then, but that was what it was. He'd opened me, taken what he'd wanted, and disappeared.

I told a beautifully written, sensory story about the love that had taken place in that space, and how much he’d silently taken. I held the story inside of my body, silently, because he had threatened me with his father’s legal team if I continued to write about it publicly, until that day that I was held by other women and could share it. And there’s not one woman in that room who didn’t understand why it needed to be spoken out loud.

There’s something so odd about our world that I (and Serpent, apparently) are very determined to change - that when a man behaves like that, somehow the woman is supposed to keep that truth locked down inside of her, feel shame for being the other woman, the bitch or the whore, and move forward harboring the wrongdoings of men while the men get to galavant in the direction of their next impressive, egoic expression of small-s selfhood, and the woman that tries to speak about what happened is gaslit, shamed, silenced, threatened, and seeking rooms full of women where it’s safe to actually share a true story. (I’ll make a whole paragraph with one sentence if I want to, thank you very much. Because I’ll write what and how I want to, thank you very much.) 

On that trip to Portland in early 2018, just days after being wrongly ejected from my Academic Director position too early because of a man’s insecurities and now needing to embrace my soul-led business fully, ready or not!, Serpent started to show up. First on the airplane in something I was reading, then a woman I made an immediate soul connection with at the event started talking about serpent energy, she “pulled a card” for me and of course, it was the Serpent. 

I had entertained the idea of getting a tattoo while in Portland during this significant transition in my life, but it hadn’t been falling into place. I was in town a few days early and had visited a few shops. Then, in the grocery store on Friday evening, I saw a woman with a tattoo nearly identical to a rose tattoo I have. I asked her who did it, told her I was looking for an artist, it happened to be her good friend who happened to be a very popular tattoo artist in Portland and he happened to have a cancellation and an opening the following day inside of his six month waiting list and it happened to be just after the writing workshop concluded. 

But I wasn’t going to get a snake tattoo. The thought had crossed my mind since the airplane ride, but I was going to get something that represented the feminine but was not so… obvious. I had just been a school principal less than a few weeks before, a snake tattoo would be quite an extreme leap. I had a lotus pod and crescent moon planned instead. Nice and symbolically feminine, without the… deeply erotic and deeply misunderstood symbol of Serpent. 

Saturday morning, I was up early because my body was on east coast time, and my then-coach and I had a session, which turned out to be about my mother. I don’t remember all the details, but it had something to do with how my mother suppressed my first pregnancy and forced adoption. So it was about the lived suppression of the feminine. 

And when I hung up the phone, I had what will always feel to me like the most obvious, screaming and scolding encounter with the Divine Feminine that I’ve ever experienced. I heard the words streaming through clairvoyantly, with the tone of a very angry and fervent mother defending all that has the right to be defended, and she said, “If you do not get a serpent tattoo, then you continue to repress the feminine. Not them, you. If you do not put a serpent on your arm, then you continue to deny eros, deny creativity, deny the feminine and everything you say you stand for.” She went on. And I heard her, and I listened. I texted the tattoo artist and said, “Okay, change of plan, we actually need to find a way to add a snake to this tattoo.” 

That evening, I laid there for hours while he placed a very sacred, very beautiful and strong Serpent, lotus and moon on my left arm. (I've never regretted the snake. The moon, yes, because the feminine is not lunar, my friends. But I hadn't woken up to that yet.)

After that, for months, Serpent would wake me up in the middle of the night to make sure I was hearing her messages. It was an invocation and we now had a relationship. Looking back over the last eight years, I don’t know if I was always a good and worthy student of Her. I don’t know if I’ve made the Feminine Divine fully happy with what and how I’ve been able to show up at all times. 

Good thing she hasn’t given up on me yet.

PLEASE REMIND ME WHY I SPEAK THRUTH: 

My very trusted and skilled energy healer and I have been working through some energetic remnants of having come through a lineage that included Satanic Ritual Abuse. I would say that while Serpent, the feminine, and this path originally gave me inspiration, I had no idea the kind of grit that was going to be required to actually walk the path, or what I’d find. 

In the beginning, it was all about owning truth: speaking the truth about my own sexual abuse, owning my voice, and regaining my energy from my father. I was a fighter because I’d had to be, and I went into entrepreneurship as that scrappy fighter. What I was fighting for was my voice and the right to be myself and tell my story. And I did that. I did that in Sacred Truth Mastermind groups, on the Sacred Remembering podcast and in the community. I took my voice and the right to tell my story back, and I’ve helped other women do the same. 

But then I encountered layers upon layers of material I hadn’t known existed, and with each layer of discovery had had to come a new skill set to get through it. Finding out that it hadn’t just been sexual abuse, and that it had been linked to ritual abuse, the Satanic cult, and lineage curses all required a many-years long curriculum that reminded me of the Harry Potter term, “Defense Against the Dark Arts.” There are not classes and curricula for that in our world, actually, and so I had to discover it and piece it together myself. Because it is, I assure you, very real.

(Serpent is not evil, don’t even get me started. She’s the primordial force of Creation and what religious agenda tried to cast out.) 

Over the years, honestly, the weight and the loss of it all beat me down. At the worst of it, when I told the Big Truths and exposed my father, then backlash both within my own system and externally/energetically hit hard.  Ritual mind control to not tell these secrets is extreme, and telling, I would later say, “broke my brain” because that’s what it felt like, even as a woman with a very large tool kit for everything from trauma healing to shadow work, from neuroplasticity to energy architecture.  By then I had enough experience as a multidimensional channel and enough soul remembrance to know that these energies really truly were interfering with me and particularly with my financial resources. It felt like something wanted to choke me out - for good. And I felt like an under-resourced female human with not enough support, a child to take care of, and a business to try to keep afloat.

So I eventually did get quieter. The truth teller didn’t have much fight left in her. 

And this past year, when I was still recovering from the hardest years of my life, trying to keep a business alive and raise my son well, something that I always thought would take me down for good if it happened, happened. 

My son left my home two years before I'd ever planned. His father, I believe and will say even though he paid a lawyer to convince a judge otherwise in a court of law, withheld my son and prevented us from making amends. He co-opted and confused my child. And my son never came home. 

When this was happening, a year ago this week (July 2026), I did what my life had taught me to do. I spoke about it - publicly. I had exercised my voice and by this point, I knew how to say hard but true things. I knew how to call out abuses. 

And so, I named it. On my Instagram stories and on Facebook posts. I said his name, Kurt Shoemaker, and I said that he was withholding my child. I said that he was an alcoholic, and in one post I said that he had, “effectively kidnapped” my son because he was refusing to return him during my scheduled custodial time per our legal parenting agreement. 

And by the time we finally got to court - that is how Kurt won. Because his lawyer took screenshots of my posts and showed the judge, and the judge said with punishing disgust in his tone, “Why would you write this?!” 

Why would you write this. 

That line has stuck with me all year. I was already writing a book about what was happening, but him saying that and using my words, my voice, my naming abuses as justification to actually give full custody to the parent who was actually manipulating the situation like a puppet master pulling invisible strings - well that was enough to light a fire in me. 

Why would I write this? Because it’s the truth. 

Because he took my son. Because I am a woman who has experienced abuses and I was naming abusive behavior. Because I know that abuses like that hide in the dark and I was exposing it. 

I’m sorry, have I offended another man? 

Have I offended another man who was in the process of taking something immense from me? 

Why would I write this. For fuck’s sake. 

Thank you for giving me every reminder of why a woman must write, why it calls to my soul to write. Thank you for the reminder to ask myself the question, “What if women had never written down the truth?” and to be a woman that continues to do so. 

These men taking my son under their broken wings wasn’t the thing that would kill me after all. It was the thing that got me writing and truth-telling again. 

Maybe not loudly, maybe not every day - but in a new way. Steadily. Well.

At first, with the injustices taking place, writing was an act of telling my truth in the only way I could have any control over. It was documenting the process because there was so much falseness and fuckery happening in the situation and I needed to just write it down. And over the year, it finally evolved from feeling like a fight to be heard to something much more beautiful. Sacred truth, heart, art. With a presence like an ember burning inside of myself, lighting a fire that I find myself wanting to return to. The place that feels like sitting inside my soul.

I DO NOT WRITE FOR MEN. AND I DO NOT NOT WRITE FOR MEN. 

And sure enough, when this man who I was just dating showed up, and then looked at my social media, he said, “You must be mad at men.” I may have actually rolled my eyes.

I honestly couldn’t even tell what caused him to say this because I was launching Re*Source at the time which is all about feminine resources. Which yes, we do need to name because takers be taking, but I was speaking to women, about women, for women. 

And a man even took that personally. 

I look back at all the teachable stories I’ve lived in relation to men, all the things I’ve lost because I’ve spoken out, and all the things I’ve kept to myself and not said, and I get this feeling of… a girl just can’t win.  (Stay with me, I’m not despairing and the story is not done yet.) 

It feels like being in a too-tight skin. Being inside of restriction. Which is, not surprisingly, the theme that the energy healer was picking up on. Well, she called it resistance, but when I felt into it, to me it felt like restriction, because when I had felt unsafe due to all that had happened in my life, it had stayed inside my soma and energy body as a certain limitation, impacting my ability to expand safely and the space I could take up. Impacting what I could do and how I could respond. 

Eight years ago now, when I left / was kicked out of that job, when the man I loved abruptly abandoned me, when my father acted out dangerously and when I was tattooing a snake on my arm, I was a certain size. A certain architecture. Inside a certain skin. 

Inside of that skin, I knew how to use my voice to claim my truth at any cost and how to yield a sword, but I didn’t know how to be a woman who took up space and lived with my truth without the need to defend it. 

Without the resistance to what consequences might come, to what a man might take from me, to the invisible smack-down that liked to torment me - without all that, I find now, I need to take up more space. I need a new skin, because I am bigger now without the restriction. And that is exactly how I have felt since finding that snakeskin. I have had a felt-sense that the restriction is gone. 

But not without the alchemy involving a man - of course of course. 

Serpent purification.

I found the snakeskin on a Friday. On Saturday, this man I was dating spiked a high fever. On Tuesday morning I woke up and in those first liminal moments, I was very aware that, for whatever reason, his fever and the snakeskin were linked. 

I texted him, “I sense that your fever and the snakeskin are connected.” 

He didn’t question this mystical statement and replied, “I had a really strange feeling when you sent me that picture.” 

Where was he sick? In his throat. 

What was our biggest block? Communication. He interrupted constantly and when I expressed needs about communication, he reacted harshly and on the last day, was even mean.  

What had he criticized me for? Speaking out about men. 

In our final conversation, I tried to say, “I see you really want to be heard.” And before the sentence could even land in the space between us, he was interrupting, rapid fire over a scratchy voice, about how I did too and clearly that was the reason why I write what I write and say what I say. 

It was like he was talking to the old version of me and didn't see who was actually in front of him, and I realized that this would be the last man that I ever attracted in this pattern again.

I didn’t engage in the argument he was trying to stoke. I smiled lovingly, told him that I do not choose this, and got up and walked away. As I walked across the grassy park, my body let down her guard and whispered, “Thank you.” 

I can’t know everything that Serpent has been up to, and I’ve only told you a bit of what I have realized. 

She came to show me that I’m at a new beginning. She came with similar magnitude as she did eight years ago, which reminds me of my Why. She came to show me that I am less restricted now than ever before, with space to move around. 

That I get to choose where to stay, when to leave, and what I say. She's showing me how to live into that new skin.

And she came to purify something from this masculine lineage that I had come up against my entire life. These men, all with kind, Christed hearts but deep inner distress, some carrying an evil they don’t realize that they are carrying, ready to deplete and destroy the feminine that it so wishes would love them. Serpent energy has now purified this pattern.

What’s pleasant to me is that his retort, “You do too and that’s why you write,” may have stung before Serpent came, because it may have felt true. It was true that I needed to write at one point to defend my truth. But that’s no longer true. I don’t know exactly what is true about “Why did you write this” but the way that I know that something has changed is because I don’t feel a tightness in my body as I craft and spread the words anymore. They just are. This is new. 

I wasn’t going to ever stop writing for this man. And I won’t ever stop writing for any man. 

I didn’t have a need to argue with that man as many times as he tried to engage me in argument. I didn’t desire to try to prove anything. Just to share, listen, hear and understand one another if we chose to - as man and woman. To evolve, and to have a new story to write.

He and I could not get there, but I think we weren’t meant to. I actually think we were likely partners in a past life and met one another again now on this path to come to the exact impasse and opportunity that we did. I am taking advantage of my opportunity. His is up to him. 

I check in with my belly now, as I finish this. Still soft. Not clenched, not defensive, not needing to prove anything at all. 

I think of the serpent, with her belly to the earth, using the power of her body to glide over each patch of earth, each rock, each tree, each leaf, feeling each and every sensation, and I want to be more like her. I want to feel and notice it all. 

And then, I want to write about it. 

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Devotion.