Something Shifted in Mexico

I’m not sure I have the full language for this yet. And maybe that’s okay.

In February, I traveled to Akumal, Mexico for a five-day Brainspotting intensive. A small group of clinicians, full days of deep work, an immersive container unlike anything I’ve experienced in a training before. I went as a therapist looking to deepen my clinical skills. I came home as someone who had been changed at a level I’m still integrating.

It had been a long time since I’d traveled internationally on my own. Honestly, that part alone felt significant, choosing to go somewhere unfamiliar, by myself, for something that mattered to me. But nothing quite prepared me for the moment I arrived.

Driving through the jungle to reach Akumal, I felt something happen that I don’t have a exact language for. The air was different. The earth felt alive. Getting out of the shuttle, as our feet touched the ground at Balam-Ha I felt something shift. And those shifts kept coming, as we walked in the jungle, navigating the roots and trees. Before we had arrived, I chose to sleep in the tree house. It was as if something told me I needed to be there. So I volunteered to do the climbing up the incredible steps and the walk to the bathroom at night… literally never something I would have been choosing to do even a year ago. One of the many gifts of that space was sharing it with a new friend, who became another sister in the six nights we shared space. I continue to have a replay in my mind of the jungle sounds, fresh and absolutely chilly air we had the first few nights…. and the sound of the geckos, they sound like laughing monkeys. It was otherwordly. And when I swam in a cenote for the first time something in me woke up, took a breath, reverberated….. resonated with it. 

Cenotes are one of the ancient, sacred, cave-like sinkholes that the Yucatán Peninsula is threaded through, where freshwater collects in limestone caverns that open to the sky or descend into breathtaking underground darkness. Cenotes were sacred to the ancient Maya. They were understood as portals, as places where the boundaries between worlds became permeable. I didn’t go in with that knowledge, I went in to immerse, let go and reconnect to something much wiser. Swimming in that crystalline, mineral-cool water, surrounded by cave walls and jungle and light filtering down from above, I felt it. The earth, the air, the water , I connected with all of it in a way that was immediate and cellular, not something I had to work toward or think my way into. It simply was, and I was in it. It imprinted itself on me. I rooted into it in a way I didn’t expect and couldn’t have planned.

That grounding became the container for everything that followed.

The work itself was profound in the way that Brainspotting tends to be, reaching places that words don’t always find first, following the nervous system somewhere quieter and deeper than the thinking mind usually goes. But what I didn’t fully anticipate was the ancestral thread woven through it.

Intergenerational trauma is something I know clinically. I understand that individuals often carry the experience, knowledge and memory of the people before us.  And sometimes that is the unprocessed grief, the survival adaptations, the silences, that can live in our bodies without our conscious awareness. I’ve sat with clients in that space many times. Experiencing it myself, in that place, in those sacred waters, with that group, was something else entirely.

What moved through me in Akumal wasn’t just mine. And feeling that, really feeling it, not just understanding it intellectually, cracked something open that I’m still curious about, still learning from, still sitting with. It has made me want to go deeper into ancestral and intergenerational healing work, both personally and in how I show up for clients. That curiosity feels like one of the clearest things I brought home.

The people were the other unexpected gift.

I arrived not knowing anyone. I left with people who feel like siblings.  We are now a tight-knit group bound together by five days of showing up fully, doing hard things alongside each other, and bearing witness to one another’s processes in a place that had its own kind of ancient witness to offer. There is something about that kind of shared depth that creates a bond unlike most others. I didn’t anticipate that part either. And I’m so grateful it happened.

This post isn’t a clinical explanation or a training update. It’s just me saying: something shifted in that jungle, in those waters, with those people and it’s rippling outward into every part of my life and work right now. Thank you to Mariya Javed Payne and Greg Payne for guiding the ten of us through connection, breath, liberation, responsbility, rooting and awareness. Thank you to the incredible owners of Balam Ha, your tending of the sacred space and care for us while we visited was full of love.

That feels necessary to be naming.

More to come as I find more words for it - Jen