Dear Reader,

This newsletter documents one of the most life-altering experiences I had this year. I am not sharing this for sympathy or validation; I am sharing it as inspiration for anyone who has gone through something deeply difficult. My hope is that by reading my story, you might find the courage to face any emotion you’ve been suppressing for years, and finally see that you don't have to carry them forever.

Trigger Warning: This email contains emotionally intense descriptions of abuse and trauma recall. It also mentions a personal experience with plant medicine ayahuasca. This is a personal story, not medical advice. If you have a history of abuse, trauma, or PTSD, please check in with yourself and prioritise your emotional safety before proceeding.

“Are you an angry person?”

My Chinese doctor asks me while her fingers read my pulse and her eyes read my body. “Liver qi stagnation,” she says. The words land softly but with absolute certainty. She tells me I have stored anger in my liver: years of it, suppressed and swelling. She points out that the right side of my body is enlarged, which caused my spine to curve.

“Your liver,” she says, “is storing all the things you’ve been fed that you never meant to swallow.”

In Chinese medicine, every organ is a house for an emotion. The liver holds anger. The lungs carry sadness and grief. The spleen holds worry; the heart, joy; the kidneys, fear. If you suppress any of these, they take up residence in the rooms of your body. If you don’t release them, they slowly develop into disease: chronic and insistent, the body keeping its own ledger.

I sought out opinions the way people do when they suspect the truth but don’t want to carry the weight of believing it alone. A second voice. A third. When two voices, then three, say the same thing, you know it is time to dig deeper.

Next, I found a Spinal Energetics practitioner. It’s a somatic technique developed by Dr. Sarah Jane, which I’d stumbled upon during one of those late-night Instagram scrolls where you fall down a rabbit hole. I watched video after video of people on tables, their bodies convulsing, shaking, releasing something they couldn’t name. The practitioner barely touched them, yet they lay there while their bodies did the unblocking for them.

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I had to experience it for myself.

The practitioner looked at my spine the way you might look at a book written in a language you happen to speak fluently. “Liver,” she said, almost immediately. “You’re storing anger there. Look at how the right side of your body sits higher than the left.”

An echo of my Chinese doctor.

But angry? Me? I turned the word over in my mind like a strange coin I’d found in my pocket. Day-to-day, I wasn’t the angry type. Not consciously, anyway. Sure, I’d snap occasionally at employees when standards slipped, or at ex-boyfriends when they become emotionally distant. But I categorised that as frustration, the kind everyone feels when reality refuses to cooperate with expectation.

I tried to trace it back through my childhood and adolescence, but nothing came.

When an emotion gets buried that deep, it doesn’t wait around in your conscious mind hoping you’ll notice it. It hides. It lives in the tissue of your organs, in the tilt of your shoulder. Talk therapy can’t touch it because you can’t talk about what you don’t remember. You can’t name what you’ve spent decades training yourself not to feel.

But the anger eventually came. It arrived like a storm, twice. And neither time looked the way I thought it would.

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The first time was when I signed up for an all-women’s anger somatic release workshop in East London. It was held in a yoga studio with hardwood floors and too many plants. The facilitators—two women with the kind of calm that comes from having screamed their way through their own demons—taught us that anger is a messenger. They explained that women, especially, learn to swallow it whole because the world punishes us for the sound of our rage.

Then they handed us pillows.

“Embody the anger,” they said. Hit something. Scream. Use your voice the way you did before you learned to make yourself small. If there was a memory of anger we wanted to engage with, we were told to start there. If not, start with the body and see what surfaced.

I thought about my boyfriend at the time. God, I was furious with him then. He was emotionally unavailable in that specific way some men perfect: hiding his needs, blaming me for not magically intuiting them, expecting me to be both mind reader and emotional manager. I was critical and cold in return, my own needs unmet, tangled in the exhausting work of being misunderstood.

The facilitators started drumming.

Anger Playlist • Orshi Mantric Melody • Havanna Cha... PREVIEW   ​

The sound pulled us into a threshold space where the ordinary world thins. The circle of women began to move, to hit, to scream. There is something about collective rage, an ancient frequency we have all forgotten we know how to hear.

But when the memories came, they weren’t about him at all.

They were about my mother.

The memories flooded in: weekly, sometimes daily abuse between the ages of eight and fourteen. She would pick flaws—real or imagined, it didn’t matter—and use them to justify what came next. Living with her meant walking on eggshells that never stopped cracking. A bath towel hung wrong, homework completed in the wrong order—small things that became reasons, then excuses, for physical and mental violence. As her mental illness worsened, she started hallucinating about my “crimes.” She would scream that I was watching television when I was writing an essay, and she wouldn’t stop until I cried. It was as if my tears were the proof she needed that she’d been right all along.

And my father, the silent witness to all of it. His nonchalance felt like its own kind of violence. His negligence was a second abandonment.

In that yoga studio, with the drums pounding and women screaming into pillows, the dam broke. The anger I’d suppressed for decades rose up. I cried and screamed until my throat felt raw. The feeling was so massive I wasn’t sure my body could hold it; it felt like I was going to crack open, split apart from the inside.

And here is the complicated part: I didn’t hate my parents anymore.

I understood how my mother became who she was. I knew about the ancestral trauma, how my grandmother had treated her far worse. She had no model for motherhood, just the unconscious reenactment of what had been done to her. I could forgive them with my mind. I’d done the work, read the books, understood the psychology.

But my body? My body hadn’t forgiven a goddamn thing.

My body kept its own accounts, stored its own evidence in my liver and my spine. Intellectual understanding didn’t dissolve the pain; it just made me aware of how much I was still carrying.

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The second time the anger came was on ayahuasca this year.

Deep in an altered state of consciousness, I tried to tap into that anger again. But it didn’t arrive as rage. And it wasn’t just mine.

I saw my mother as a child in Communist China. Poverty wasn’t just present: it was everywhere, thick as air, inescapable. My grandparents spent six hours commuting each day just to survive. There were no presents, no tenderness. She never received love, just the bare minimum required for existence.

I saw my father, too. The second youngest in a family of eight. His mother won a state award—”Mother Heroine”—for producing the most children in their region. But being one of so many meant invisibility. There was never enough attention or love, just the crushing knowledge that there were too many of them for anyone to be seen clearly.

I wept, but not from anger. I wept because I felt their sadness as children. Their loneliness of being small and unwitnessed.

They hurt me unconsciously. Inevitably. Because they’d never learned how to give the kind of love I actually needed.

They gave me the love they thought I needed: what they’d lacked growing up. Best schools. Gifts. Clothes. Material comfort. More attention than they’d ever received.

But they couldn’t give me the love I actually needed because they’d never learned to love themselves. They’d never received enough, and they lacked it desperately. You can’t give what you were never taught. Can’t offer what you never received.

They loved me in the only ways they knew how.

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When I felt their sadness: really felt it, in my body, not just understood it intellectually, my anger disappeared overnight.

In that altered state, I found the child I used to be. I used NLP techniques to re-parent her. I rewrote the story she’d been telling herself about being unlovable, about deserving the pain. I showed her why her parents acted that way: not to justify it, but to help her understand she had never been the problem.

When I came back, the anger was gone, transformed into love and gratitude. It was the complicated kind of gratitude that holds both truth and forgiveness without needing them to cancel each other out.

I finally saw the anger for what it really was: a defence mechanism. It was a wall I’d built to keep my heart safe from being broken by the people who were supposed to protect it. It was a victim story I’d needed to feel entitled to my distance, to not feel love.

Once I really saw the wall, I could finally take it down.

But I know what you’re thinking. “Ginny, you had a breakthrough on the world’s most powerful psychedelic. I’m just sitting at home in my ordinary state of consciousness.”

And you’re right. The plant medicine gave me the vision, but it didn’t give me the daily practice. I needed a way to access that state, where I could see my anger not as “me,” but as a protector trying to keep me safe, without substance.

In the Tibetan tradition, they call these defence mechanisms Inner Demons. And they don’t believe in fighting them; they believe in feeding them.

Next week, I’m going to share the exact 6-step protocol I adapted from Tibetan and shamanic traditions to engage with any emotions or fears you choose to work with without plant medicine. It is how I engage with my own inner demons on a Saturday afternoon. It’s intense, fun when done well, and it works.

Keep an eye on your inbox.

With lots of love,

Ginny

P.S. I definitely underestimated how long it takes to write (and edit!) a book 😂. My plan is to surrender to divine timing instead of imposing a hard deadline like I did last month (which totally didn't go as planned!). It will be ready when it's ready and I'll keep you posted.