When the Body Becomes A Vessel: A Reflection on Being a Witness

Autumn is the season when the veil begins to thin, asking of us to see at what lies beneath the surface. Sometimes truth doesn’t come as a thought— yet it arrives through the expression of the body. On our recent trip to Israel, my husband, his family and I took a day trip down south to witness the Oct 7th atrocities on Kibbutz Be’eri and where the Nova Festival was. Eran’s father arranged for us to speak to the son of his dear friend who was murdered that morning in his home.

The Remains Of Kibbutz Be’eri

On our drive down south, once we passed the city of Ashkelon, I could feel something start to shift in my body — A heavy dreadful feeling and the beginning of a tightening stabbing pain all across my abdomen that seemed to strangle my intestines the closer we got to those areas. This ache was very different than an upset or anxious stomach, as if my body became a conduit of energy and knew something before my mind did, growing angrier. I did’t know I had crossed an energetic threshold until my body began to speak for me.

We began our way through the thick, dense ghost town of Kibbutz Be’eri in silence, which in itself almost felt hauntingly alive. I remember walking through the deserted neighborhood with tears streaming down my face in disbelief as I ran my hands over my tummy, pulling out the energy that was hurting me physically. The feeling on the Kibbutz is deafening with grief, clinging to your skin, entering your lungs and chilling to the bones. You can sense the energetic memory in its echos of terror, horror and atrocities of what the terrorist had done that destroyed, shattered and took in lives that day.

You can see with your imagination the brutality that took place by the ruins of what remains — bullet holes sprayed everywhere, the walls and interior bulldozed, scorched, burned, everything broken and destroyed, and the air is very heavy, stifling. There’s something you can’t quite name — something primal — and you feel its whispers that the place and land itself remembers. It’s an energetic imprint, suspended in the atmosphere of time there.

The SuperNova Sukkot Massacre

Leaving Kibbutz Be’eri, my stomach began to slightly ease, as if the land itself was loosening its grip on me. When we arrived at the Nova site — the music festival turned massacre — the energy shifted. It was still deeply stifling and heavy, yet it carried something different. This was not someone’s home/ community brutally invaded, but an outdoor place where music and dancing became blindly infiltrated.

The people at the all night music festival were dancing watching the sun come up in full rave/trance music when they realized something really bad was beginning to happen. The celebration of friends, love and inflate freedom that filled the land, space and air, tragically turned into a massacred human grave yard. Walking through the maze of photographs, bios and personal belongings that memorialize the victims, you feel that echo laced in what remains.

There is a saying that has emerged among the Israelis survivors and hostages: “WE WILL DANCE AGAIN” And standing there, you understand — it is now about taking back what was brutally stolen and reclaiming what was ripped away that day.

The Energy of Unseen Leftover Grief

Every place where great loss and unimaginable atrocities have occurred, carries its own emotional resonance. Sensitive people—artists, healers, empaths—often pick up on that charge, while others might not ever realize it or put it together. The body becomes a conduit, channeling the unspeakable into sensation: tingling all over the body, heaviness in the chest, stomach, nausea, headache, fatigue, tears, and sometimes even illness that come from nowhere. I understand now what it means to be full on conduit with the soul. I literally became a container and the energy I experienced that day became a vehicle driving through my body, translating the unspeakable, unfathomable and disbelief into an angry expression my body became a vessel for.

My Unexplained Medical Emergency

Exactly one week later after feeling 100% fine the moment we left the area— to the day and hour—the morning we were preparing to check out of the Airbnb and begin our goodbyes, out of nowhere I began to feel an all-too-familiar tightening in my abdomen. It was the same sharp, radiating pain I’d felt the week before, at our visit to Kibbutz Be’eri. Within minutes, my body felt hijacked, as if something foreign was trying to rip its way through me. My husband ran to the store for a Coca Cola, hoping to settle my stomach, but by the time he returned, I was rolling around, crying, doubled over, vomiting from the soda, and struggling to catch my breath.

Eran immediately called his parents, who ordered an ambulance. Within hours of arriving at the hospital—after CT scans, ultrasounds, and extensive bloodwork—I was admitted with acute pancreatitis. My pancreatic enzymes were at 23,176 which is 150 times over the standard normal range, I had fluid in my abdomen and yet no one could identify a single root cause. I don’t drink alcohol, I don’t have gallbladder issues, and my labs, diet, and lifestyle offered no logical explanation. By day five, my enzyme levels had dropped to 99, and I was discharged without answers or reasons why this occurred.

Even now when I had my follow up, my doctor described it as “idiopathic,” meaning unexplained. But deep down, I believe my body was translating something unspeakable into form—carrying, processing, and purging an energy that didn’t belong to me. It was as if witnessing the horror at Be’eri had moved through me so completely that my body became a vessel for its release.

Alchemy, Light, and the Wounded Healer

Sometimes the body — especially one as sensitive and attuned as mine — becomes the vessel through which collective or residual energy is transmuted. I didn’t just witness trauma that day; I unknowingly absorbed it at a cellular, vibrational level. When energy is that dense, it can’t stay lodged inside a body built for light. So my system did what any alchemists — and healers — do: it burned, purified, and released.

Pancreatitis, in that symbolic sense, is a fire in the center — the solar plexus, where personal power, digestion (of food and emotion), and transformation live. Looking back now, I can see that what happened wasn’t random or meaningless—it was alchemy in motion. I processed something that wasn’t mine to keep, and my body did what my consciousness couldn’t yet: it metabolized the unbearable. It turned energetic darkness into release and light — but it demanded that I witness, purge, and survive it first.

In numerology, my life path carries the vibration of the wounded healer 11/2 which is actually also my date of birth—a soul who transforms pain into wisdom, and wounding into light. This experience reminded me of that truth in a visceral way. Sometimes healing doesn’t arrive as comfort. Sometimes it arrives as a breaking open, a sacred dismantling that reveals what must go.

The Beauty of Bare Branches

Now, as I stand in this October season—where the trees surrender their leaves and bare branches reach toward the sky—I understand what it means to be both emptied and illuminated. The shedding is the medicine. What falls away is not loss; it’s making room for what is truer, lighter, and ready to emerge. I think that’s what healing really is—not gathering more, but shedding what no longer sustains. Standing tall in what remains, unadorned, unmasked, and still alive.