My new amazing therapist has already come and gone. For affordability reasons I found a student therapist and she just graduated! Her new workplace has a specific clientele and I’m unable to follow with her. Though we only met 9 times it was an incredibly rich experience that shifted a lot for me. The real game changer was learning to work with “my lion.”

My lion first came to me as the first visual I saw at my first ayahuasca ceremony. The room was black and then a million dots of light appeared before me like the stars at night. They rearranged and shuffled themselves into the form of a lion and then dispersed as quickly as they came. The lion appeared in every ceremony after that as well.

My old therapist would often ask me if I could “bring anyone into the memory” whenever I recalled a traumatic story. My go-to was my Grammy Velma. Often when I’d imagine her coming into the memory the little me would feel comforted and the memory would shift a bit and become less charged.

Similarly my new therapist asked me, “Is there maybe a person or animal you could bring into the memory?” This addition of “animal” to the question changed everything. Sheepishly I admitted “This is a little weird but I have a lion,” to which she seemed excited. For weeks now, both in and out of therapy, I have been working with my lion.

The moment I imagine this massive full-sized male lion walking into any traumatic memory everything shifts. For example, a traumatic memory of me being frozen in my elementary classroom? Now I imagine a massive lion at my side. It throws the memory upside down. The me in the memory is comforted immediately; the others in the memory are bemused, scared, or excited as needed. The memory’s charge deflates like a balloon. Often I laugh. It’s the wildest trick.

Sometimes I actively imagine the lion doing something. Sometimes the lion has its own agency and I simply observe it as it does its thing.

On the daily now, if I’m feeling anxious at any point, I just imagine the lion is walking at my side like some kind of massive imaginary service animal. Levels of comfort go up immediately.

There doesn’t seem to be limits on the ways I can work with my lion.