Jaycee Lee Dugard

If you watched the ABC interview with Jaycee Dugard a few days ago, perhaps like me, you’ve been thinking about this remarkable woman. Specifically, I find myself pondering the North Star she held in sight during her eighteen years of captivity—hope in seeing her mother again. As the interview began, Jaycee touched a delicate silver pinecone necklace that hung around her neck, saying it represented two vivid reminders. Physically, the pinecone was the last object she remembered touching before she was lifted bodily into her captor’s car, and metaphorically, that “there is hope after something tragic.” Her life gives witness to one of my favorite processes—energy changing form or transformation.

Jaycee spoke of another anchor to her North Star of hope, the moon. While in captivity, she looked out her tiny barred window at the moon and thought of the conversations with her mom. They used to debate which stage was most beautiful, full or crescent. Days before she was reunited with her mother, both women recalled looking at the moon and thinking of each another.

Holding onto hope was Jaycee’s mother’s North Star as well. She relentlessly believed in her daughter’s return and upon its arrival eighteen long-years later, embraced her and the two children fathered by her abductor. I was glued to the interview, wondering how on earth they survived such tragedy. Jaycee spoke candidly when she was asked about the shame of what she suffered, “Why not look at it, stare it down.” This brave, brave woman knows the wisdom of not turning away from suffering. I thought of the gift of energy therapy and the physical techniques used to release stored trauma from the body. I wondered what she did to move such energy through and foster healing. About this time, the film crew filmed Jaycee riding a horse, with spine straight and a joyful smile on her face.

Jaycee spoke another clue to surviving her ordeal—remembering her identity. Her abductors blotted out her given name and had called her Alyssa. On August 27, 2009, when two police women followed their intuition and asked an estranged-looking girl her name, she said she could not speak it but could write it down—Jaycee Lee Dugard. At the end of the interview, Jaycee’s clear, arresting blue eyes communicated beyond words the significance of acknowledging her true identity, “...it was like breaking an evil spell.”

We are celestial, boundless, an entire universe. Remember this in darkest night; nay, shine in spite of it! Thank you, Jaycee Lee Dugard, for embodying the ideals of Inner Constellation; you are a shining star.