Memoir: First Breath
Memoir: First Breath – A Story of Integration and Remembering
A living curriculum for collective liberation—infused with wisdom, science, and tools for transformation.
🌬️ First Breath Methodology - The Seven Portals of Liberation
The integration of these seven portals offers pathways for personal and collective transformation:
1. 🌍 Land & Cosmos
Reconnecting with the Earth, ancestors, and the vast intelligence of the universe.
Restoring belonging through grounded presence and celestial wonder.
2. 💃 Embodiment
Listening to the body as teacher and guide.
Honoring sensation, breath, emotion, and movement as essential wisdom for liberation.
3. 🌀 Quantum Reality & Multidimensionality
Exploring nonlinear time, inner child healing, and ancestral integration.
Engaging the psyche, dreams, and subtle realms as valid sites of transformation.
4. 🎭 Art & Storytelling
Claiming the power of narrative, ritual, creativity, and performance.
Transmuting pain into expression—and expression into collective healing.
5. 🤖 Benevolent Science & Technology
Reimagining our relationship to tech as a tool for connection, creativity, and care.
Integrating innovation with ethics, embodiment, and ecological awareness.
6. 💗 Love
Practicing radical compassion, mutual care, and tenderness as core to liberation.
Healing shame and separation by remembering we are lovable, loving, and already loved.
7. 🌈 Personal & Collective Imagination
Co-dreaming new worlds into being through joy, vision, and shared possibility.
Using imagination as a liberatory force to challenge supremacy and expand what is possible.
Section 1: Intro to Heidi J & Shame
Hi, I’m Heidi J.
I’m a human on a path of transformation, self-discovery, and healing—through the land, the body, imagination, and culture.
I wish to share with my community my story.
I wonder if I should try to make this story funny.
I wonder what would be too much.
I wonder if there are things we do not yet understand about ourselves.
I wonder if the individual is inextricably connected to the collective.
I wonder if nature is an unconditionally loving witness, holding all of our sacred stories for us, waiting until we are ready to listen.
I wonder what your stories are, dear reader. I wonder.
***
All my life, I’ve been in deep inquiry—wanting to understand where suffering comes from, including my own. I never liked fighting. I wanted to understand the source of my rage, and the roots of feelings like shame and scarcity.
I was adopted at four days old. Forty-eight years later, I met my entire biological family on both sides—which is absolutely a Netflix worthy story. I’m a one-time “oops,” and honestly? I turned out great! Both of my biological families are fantastic.
Hey world—aren’t we all just one big, miraculous, dysfunctional family?
I grew up in a typical American dream—Home Depot, casseroles, Pizza Hut, Scooby-Doo, you’re being molested by a family member and nobody knows about it, red #5 Twizzlers, Slip ‘N Slides!
I found solace in the mountains of Montana outside of Drummond. We drove there every summer. I learned to drive a four-wheeler, work a wood stove, pound posts, look for birds of prey, track animal prints, and all sorts of other wonderful skills! I loved life in the mountains in the summertime.
I went to Macalester College in St. Paul, MN, where my mind, sexuality, and concept of reality were blown open: my first sex, my first LSD, garlic hummus, Bob Dylan, modern dance class.
We were a very diverse crew those first years of college, and we went across the Universe together.
I took a class called Contemporary Concepts of Physics—about antimatter, relativity, quantum mechanics, and other fun topics. This BLEW MY MIND. So I moved to Montana to get in-state tuition and studied Physics & Dance at the University of Montana.
We’d spend hours at Charlie’s bar blending physics, philosophy, music, math, dance, love, poetry, biology, revolutionary performance art, and more. I graduated with honors in Physics and a minor in Dance.
After college, in 2000, I moved to Portland, Oregon. I landed a job as the only woman in a branch of a company that manufactured electron guns (yes—tiny weapons for electrons). I also lived in a haunted studio in a 100-year-old building by the river. One night, another tenant offered me meth. I tried it, got addicted, and began using it to cope with my unhappiness—trapped indoors in a physics job that made my spirit wilt.
In a twist of cosmic irony, I began doing yoga while on meth—great for the lungs, I told myself. Six months in, I had a wake-up call in a dance club, when my skin glowed bright pink under a black light. It was chemicals seeping from my pores. That’s when I knew something had to change.
Around that time, I discovered an incredibly courageous and creative collective called La Caravana Arcoiris por la Paz, an international group of artists, visionaries, activists, and earth-lovers traveling throughout Latin America. I decided to take the plunge and apply to join the group. I got in!
Still struggling with addiction, I moved back to Missoula for a few months and produced a multimedia performance called The Body. The proceeds helped fund my trip to Latin America. I haven’t smoked meth since. Nasty stuff.
In 2002, I joined La Caravana Arcoiris por La Paz—The Rainbow Caravan for Peace—a roving, rainbow-colored revolution. We lived, created, studied, and served in communities across South America. It was the beginning of my aspirationally decolonial path.
What is decolonization?
Decolonization means many different things to many different people—and that’s one of its greatest strengths. It can’t be boxed in. It’s adaptive, relational, and always evolving. For some, it’s about land back. For others, it’s about unlearning colonial mindsets, or reclaiming cultural and spiritual sovereignty. It can be:
A political process of dismantling settler systems
A personal journey of healing internalized oppression
A spiritual remembrance of right relationship with land and life
A creative act of culture-making beyond domination
For me, an aspirationally decolonial path has included:
🌿 Reconnecting spiritually to the land and cosmos
💫 Learning to feel, process, and integrate trauma
👂 Listening deeply to Indigenous wisdom—not to take or replicate, but to honor and be changed by
During my four years in South America, I immersed myself in practices that reshaped me from the inside out. I participated in sweat lodges, vision quests, plant medicine ceremonies, and vision councils. I studied permaculture, taught at universities, performed in schools, and made art in the streets. Sometimes I traveled with the Caravan, other times I lived and worked on my own. Everywhere I went, I listened, learned, created, and unlearned.
I developed humility. I remembered my creativity. I fell in love with the land. And I began to return to myself.
***
Back in the U.S. in 2006, I founded Open Field Artists in Missoula—an art and activism collective. Around the age of 30, I noticed a persistent inner voice that shamed others and myself, and I wanted to understand where it was coming from & get rid of it!.
In 2009, after I returned from the World Social Forum in Belém, Brazil, something shifted, and my body spontaneously began to release my unconscious toxic shame.
Toxic Shame is the internalized belief that we are inherently bad. It arises from abuse, oppression, and inherited trauma. It perpetuates oppression & trauma.
Healthy Shame is a natural, relational signal—it tells us when we’ve harmed someone and invites us to repair and reconnect.
Thanks to years of ceremony, body practices, ancestral guidance, and art, I was ready to begin metabolizing this stored shame.
To Metabolize: To consciously digest and integrate emotional, physical, or ancestral material—releasing what no longer serves and making space for new energy to emerge.
In many ways, toxic shame has been institutionalized—woven into religion, schooling, family systems, and cultural norms.
What if concepts like “original sin” are actually unprocessed ancestral trauma?
What if oppression and delusion aren’t “normal,” but inherited patterns we now have the opportunity to transform?
Toxic shame and other forms of unprocessed inherited trauma like fear, are the fuel for supremacy patterning. If you feel bad about yourself, even for a moment, the ego wants to get above that feeling through projection.
Supremacy is the false belief or feeling that one person or one group of people is inherently superior to others—based on race, gender, ability, culture, class, or other identity categories. It’s not rooted in truth or science—it’s a delusion reinforced by historical systems of domination (like colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy) and upheld through violence, fear, shame, and projection.
Supremacy patterns often live unconsciously in the body—as tension, dissociation, judgment, fragility, and control. They distort our perception of self and others, severing connection, empathy, and belonging.
Unwinding supremacy is both an internal process (liberating the nervous system from toxic shame and inherited trauma) and a collective practice of co-creating equitable, accountable, and relationally rooted cultures of care. 🌍💫
Delusion: A fixed false belief—often sustained by social structures, relationships, and our egos—that resists evidence or lived experience.
While our nervous systems hold generations of this unconscious material—they also hold the powerful capacity for release & integration!✨
✨ I am a shame eater.
✨ I have metabolized & released lifetimes of shame.
✨ I believe we can learn to release shame together—as we choose to stop oppressing the land, ourselves, and one another.
Bye-bye, toxic shame monsters!
Hello authenticity, deep worth, innate value, juicy equity, creative empowerment, sexy accountability, and yummy loving connection. 💃💫
My initiation into processing shame through the body began with the uncovering of childhood sexual abuse I experienced between the ages of 4 and 6, perpetrated by a parental figure. These memories had been deeply repressed.
Toxic shame arises when someone violates us and takes our power away. We internalize the harm, believing we are inherently “bad” because we were hurt for no reason.
I often wonder: what took away our power as a species so long ago?
Sections 2-7 available on PDF soon.
For All My Relations.
January 2021 – present
© 2025 Heidi J. – Free System–Sistema Libre. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations used for review, education, or scholarly purposes with proper attribution.
