Another girl’s life changed at 11, I just learned, in an even more traumatic way than my life changed at 10. Both of us were hurt around our womanhood.

She became a fierce woman fighter.

Around the time I hit puberty, everything I knew ended. I left behind giant swaths of myself and went forward with a fraction of a fractured self as captain.

I have also trained as a warrior, but in a softer light. I beg for fierceness like a totem. I flex my muscles and face my fear. Eventually the fear parts and I walk through. I cling to those moments like God clouds.

Everyone needs to learn to be brave. Our new gentle brown pit bull teaches us to play, pulling us for hikes that veer in unexpected ways into the wild foothills teaming with people and other dogs. I shudder when we encounter others still, because our last dog would lunge and snarl and I’d hold him back and apologize. “He had a rough childhood,” I’d sometimes get to say. “He was neglected, so he wasn’t socialized well.”

At first, my daughter and I rescued him each day (with permission) from his concrete garage den (filled with his own poop and pee). A gaggle of wild, freckled and ebony South Carolina children would whoop and run with Kipper around the neighborhood, his floppy Basset Hound’s soft ears flying back as the Jack Russell in him scampered forward smiling with all the joy of liberty.

We’d clean up the poop and then lure him back into his dungeon with treats.

We learn survival under once set of circumstances, but then everything shifts: New dog, new day. Which of our life lessons are worth taking? The litmus test for me is whether they dance with the swirling changing river of life or if they hold us back or weigh us down. If our “lessons” hold us back, we’ve misinterpreted something along the way.

In its most true and purest form, no life lesson hinders us. What hobbles are lies we told ourselves that aren’t lies: They were our best understanding of what happened at the time. A gifted healer I worked with in my 20s taught me how to tell the difference.

“Elise” as she’s called my book, “Awe” began to heal my fractured heart by helping me to connect with the Earth via the bottoms of my feet and my root chakra. “I want you to feel what pure feminine energy is when it’s not filtered through a person,” she said. I’d sit cross legged, breathe and open my pelvic floor. Then I’d feel this vast, warm, nourishing energy flow up inside my body until it reached my heart. Later, Elise taught me to stream heaven energy in through my crown chakra and earth energy through my root and allow them to meet like lovers in my heart: The Chapel Meditation. Inside my chest the divine masculine and feminine swirl, in love, completing and nourishing one another, and me.

Through turbulent teen and college years I’d often felt the wild light of God. It was the connection with the Earth and learning to trust the feminine inside me that was so new. What was new was the dance.

“This is also great truth serum,” Elise said of being the Chapel. “If you sit with everything that’s up for you in this meditation, you’ll soon be able to tell what’s true and what’s your false beliefs.”

The big yonder fills my brain as I count backward from age 12. By 9 I am incandescent. I create vast vistas all the time, with friends, where we invent games for hours. There are no secrets for us, no shame. We trust that we are treasures. Our thoughts, minds and hearts contain the world. We trust this, we know this. And when the rupture came, I lost this.

For this buried treasure, I return. Elise filled my satchel with the tools I’d need to go digging on my own, taught me how to search and replace any misunderstanding with truth and lost light.

I claim you now, magic child of 9. I battle waves of public opinion, shake off collective hatred and fear and keep going. This will happen. There is no one in sight. I would fight them all if needed. I take a step and we stand together at last, she and I. I hook my arm through hers. I’m back, I whisper, hoping she won’t start away. She does start. But then she relaxes.

“I knew you would come,” she says.