My Lessons in Pissing Off a Goddess

Gods/Goddesses don’t really give a fuck if you believe in them or not.

It’s not that I didn’t believe in them. I knew better. I had taken shamanic workshops. I knew they were energies that had wisdom and teachings for us humans.

But I didn’t believe that they were actually vengeful and could actually affect us physically.

I was about to be schooled.

Kauai 2018

Whenever I traveled, I would bring back a small rock from the place, thinking it wasn’t a big deal.

So when we traveled to Kauai in February of 2018, I really loved the black lava rocks and their contrast to the light colored sand on the beach.

I was looking for a unique altar stone and thought the black lava rock would be perfect. So I found one that was close to a pound and I also picked up a smaller palm-sized rock as well.

They came home with me.

I remember telling my massage therapist about my trip and that I brought back the rocks as he too took the same shamanic workshops that I had and more.

He warned me about Pele then.

Local Folklore?

I hadn’t really heard of her before and thought it was just local folklore that bad things happen to people who take from her islands.

So I didn’t think much of it.

Pele is the Polynesian goddess of fire. Her sister led the charge to banish Pele from her homeland , which was a Polynesian island. She took up residence in Hawai’i.

She’s very protective of her land and people.

There’s good reason for that. Just Google the history of Hawai’i. Outsiders just come and take, usually without being good stewards of the land. And usually without its people benefitting from the richness of their own land.

And most of them being outsiders with the same color of skin as mine.

Vengeful Goddess? Or Bad Luck?

We went back to the Islands again in 2019, this time to Maui to get married. It was a wonderful trip and we had no issues.

Our 2020 trip however, was a different story.

This was in January, so right before the pandemic.

The morning we were leaving for the airport, I felt a soreness on my bottom when I sat.

Didn’t think too much of it as I was prone to hemorrhoids.

However, the pain got worse over the course of travel to Maui. It takes almost a full day of travel to get there from Ohio, USA.

By the time we landed, I was really hurting!

Worst Pain Of My Life

Hemorrhoid cream did nothing to help. The pain just got worse and so did the swelling.

Then, on the second full day there, I ran right into the hotel room ottoman, with bare feet. I raged on that ottoman. It has just added MORE pain to what was already a painful situation.

We went to a medi-clinic to have both things looked at.

I had a suspected metatarsal fracture and an abscess that needed to be drained.

I walked away with a boot for my foot and an appointment to see a surgeon.

I had never been in this much pain in my entire life! I couldn’t sit, sleep or even walk at this point.

My witch friends were looking for curses on me as we don’t put a lot of stock in coincidences.

I couldn’t get into the ocean, or swim in a pool. I had to walk around with one of those inflatable doughnut pillows the entire time! I was pretty miserable.

Both the foot and the abscess took a very long time to heal. I was still dealing with the abscess draining well into April.

She Was About Get My Attention…Again

Our next trip to Maui was January 2022 and that was a great trip. No mishaps, no bad luck. So I had no reason to think my misfortune from the last trip was because of a vengeful goddess.

We went back to Maui again in January 2023. On our first full day there, we rented some beach chairs and umbrella and went to a beach in Wailea. Everything was great..until we started to leave.

We packed up and I hadn’t put on my shoes because we had to walk across a lot of sand, so I was carrying them, following my husband.

Then out of nowhere came searing pain. Like I had just been stabbed in the foot.

I screamed and stomped my foot because it felt like something had latched on.

When I looked down, I didn’t see anything at all. Whatever it was, was completely under the sand. But my foot was bleeding on the side and it hurt like hell.

I couldn’t tell if I had been punctured, stung or bitten at that point.

We rinsed it off and it was swollen, like I had been stung but the skin also looked like it had been sliced.

Weird.

So I Googled all the dangerous things on the beach that bite and/or sting.

I narrowed it down to either a scorpion or a centipede. It didn’t really look like the pics I found of scorpion stings but did resemble a centipede bite.

Centipedes live in the wooded, jungle, wet areas. NOT on the beach. Pretty much the same for the scorpions though they might be found in the brush near the beaches.

Ok, so it was not a broken foot OR anal abscess, I could deal.

Except, I seem to be very sensitive to venom. My body overreacts to bee stings and they swell up 3-4x normal size.

My foot started turning purplish red and swelling so I bought some Benadryl.

Third day after the bite I was feeling every step. I was really starting to worry, especially since we had just driven to Hana that day. It’s rural and remote out there.

It’s also incredibly beautiful in Hana and parts around. Untouched for the most part by industry. I imagine it looks about the same as Hawaiians of generations past would have seen the land.

Sunset Magic

Watching the sunset in Hana I imagined what rituals and ceremonies had taken place on those shores by ancient Hawaiians.

And that got me thinking…

About how the islands were stolen by my country.

About how its resources were plundered, worker labor exploited.

All by people who looked…like me.

Simply taken by those that had more power and those that felt they had the right to do whatever they wanted to this land they ‘bought’. No thought given to conservation or consequences.

Kind of like me just coming in feeling entitled to take rocks.

Yea, like that…

I suddenly really GOT what Pele was doing and WHY.

She’s not really mad about the rocks. She’s mad about the entitlement. The hundreds of years of entitlement.

I started to cry as soon as I understood.

Right then there I apologized and I promised that as soon as I got home I would mail her rocks back to Kauai.

Funny thing is, when you Google how to send rocks back to Hawaii, it comes right up. I didn’t have to dig for anything!

There were the addresses to send items back for each island. They get thousands of packages of returned rocks with apology notes every year.

Stop Telling Yourself Coincidences Are Real

Pele’s curse is a real thing. Some areas even have big signs put up warning people (and well, also warning them it’s actually illegal to take sand and rocks too).

And it’s needed. People need to wake up and start being more respectful to places they don’t belong to.

The next morning my foot was no longer red/purple nor swollen. The cut was still there but the swelling gone. What a relief!

Could it have been coincidence? Maybe. I don’t think so though. I don’t put much stock in coincidences anymore.

I can tell you that I felt an energy shift as soon as I really understood what Pele was trying to teach me.

I will never again take a rock from its home, not without asking it first. And never from any Hawaiian island regardless!

I firmly believe in the spirit of place. Those spirits are attached to things in the environment. I even believed that before I took those lava rocks in 2018. So nobody is shaking their head harder at me than I am!

I’m totally ashamed it took me that long to put it all together. And I’m really good at seeing patterns! Apparently just at seeing everyone else’s, lol.

This Is How Us Silly Humans Learn

This isn’t just some fantastical story. When I really stopped to think about it, the way things transpired, that’s exactly how the Universe/God/Source/Spirit teaches us.

Through consequences, failures, sickness, pain. Only far too many of us don’t bother to stop to try to understand why these might be happening. We don’t ask what we can learn from these things. We don’t see them as something from which we can grow.

Unfortunately most of us tend to ask the wrong question:

‘Why is this happening TO me?’

‘Why did that person do this TO me?’

That’s the victim perspective, when you don’t try and understand YOUR part in events.

The better question to ask is ‘why is this happening FOR me?’ Or ‘what can I learn from this?’

Of course humans can also learn from kindness, love and other good things.

But it seems that happens more frequently once you start to shift out of entitlement and victim consciousness. That happens more frequently once you awaken and have a higher level of self-awareness.

But even then, pain and hardship are going to be your main teachers. The more stubborn you are to learning, the harder and more painful it will be for you. I’ve seen this pattern play out again and again to people I know.

If you have a repeating pattern in your life, such as dating the same kind of people over and over, or maybe you keep getting cheated on, or abandoned or not chosen, then you can 100% take that as a sign that you need to take a step back and try to understand what is really going on.

You can, of course, choose to keep looking at it through the lens of ‘why is this happening TO me?’, as you’ve always done.

But I ask you, how’s that working out for you so far?

To get what you DON’T yet have, you have to DO something different.

I invite you to spend some time trying to figure out the lessons. All of those failed relationships were trying to teach you something.

But here’s the thing you need to understand about lessons, they will never be negative.

Your intended lessons will NEVER cause you to close down your heart and build higher walls.

For example, if you determine your lesson from a failed relationship is ‘I should never have trusted him’, or ‘you can’t trust anyone’, that is a sign that that was NOT the intended lesson.

Intended lessons will cause you to RELEASE baggage, not pack more on.

Intended lessons will show you how to get MORE love, not less.

If you cannot seem to figure out your pattern, why it’s occurring or especially, what the lessons are, then this is where working with a good coach can really help.

This is exactly the work I do with my clients.

I help them to see events through a more spiritual lens, to not take the failures so personally, to see the bigger picture so they can move forward.

Then I help them to integrate the lessons. It’s one thing to become aware of them, however, knowledge alone won’t be enough.

Some lessons are easier than others and are integrated pretty quickly.

The harder lessons have to become embodied. To become the new way of operating out in the world. Which can really take some courage and effort.

That is why you hire a coach. To help you to grow FASTER than if you did the work yourself.

I did the work myself back in the day when all I was finding to date were emotionally unavailable men.

But I can honestly say it took me FAR too long with FAR too much suffering to become self-aware enough to change my patterns.

These days I’m all about figuring out the best and fastest way to get from where I am to where I want to be.

And I’ve learned that really the only way to do that is with help – which is a super hard won lesson for me. I’ve never been one to ask for help or support of any kind.

It’s still hard for me to ask, but I’ve found things become so much easier when I swallow that pride and ask because time is really the only commodity we can’t get more of.

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