Susie Cassaro

My Story

My writing began when I was ten. It started as innocent experimentation, a place where I poured out a childhood that was wild, unsupervised, and largely unseen.I was kidnapped from my mother by her mother and was shuffled between relatives, and in each home, my journals were discovered and read. After that, I was never looked at the same way again.

The adults in my life decided I might need therapy. I didn’t do that—but I did stop writing.

Years later, as a young adult carrying the weight of abuse and emotional confusion, I began writing again. This time it was accompanied by crippling apprehension and shame. Even living alone, I hid my pages, afraid of being discovered and judged the way I had been before. Eventually, the fear became unbearable. I burned everything and stopped writing once more.

On January 1, 2018—after more than forty years of seeking through workshops, retreats, trainings, and deep inner searching—I found myself standing before a great fire on a super full moon. In that fire ceremony, I offered everything I had been holding back: not good enough, not wanting to be seen, relentless self-criticism, and the parts of myself I had learned to disown. I gave it all to the flames.

What came out of that fire is difficult to explain. Something shifted. My heart flooded with compassion and forgiveness for every part of me I had pushed away.

Behind the Veil

Beyond the veil is where the deconstruction happens. Ideas, thoughts, beliefs, conditioning, emotions all start to decompose, deteriorating back into a spiritual mill, honing us in acceptance of our woundedness to be transmuted in a heart of compassion and forgiveness.  What we are left with is a lighter, truer version of ourselves as we were meant to remember. There’s nothing automatic about this process. It takes a ferocious passion, fearlessness, and hungry persistence to look, sometimes claw past what is being presented to us in front of this veil of illusion cloaked as truth. The territory we travel is both past and future all woven and intertwined into the fabric of our very DNA and with every thought, every word, every emotion from us and others ripples through us and returned, fusing in such complexity into our energetic field that it’s no wonder we are confused and find it seemingly unattainable to find our way back to a place inside of us that is still whole, intact and of the source itself.  If we are too close, back up and look again in the mirror at the tapestry of our lives and how it has woven our being from the cosmos through all our experiences to our reflection. See beyond the flesh and bones to the deeper part that animates us all, connecting us to everything.