Sister Jaguar’s Journey
Sister Jaguar’s Journey is the story of Sister Judy Bisignano who searched sixty-eight years before finally finding God in an ayahuasca plant in the Amazon jungle.
Sister Jaguar’s Journey – The Story of Sister Judy Bisignano
I searched sixty-eight years before finally finding God in an ayahuasca plant in the Amazon jungle. What’s the big deal?
I’m a nun!
I know. I know. You want me to tell you what happened when I ingested ayahuasca during a plant ceremony in the Amazon jungle. Before I describe WHAT happened, you need to know WHY I sought to heal through this ancient shamanic ritual.
Sister Jaguar’s Journey – The Early Days Abuse
Without question, I grew up in a verbally toxic, physically abusive home. My mother beat me regularly from the time I was four until I was sixteen. I got to pick which of my Dad’s belts would be used as if I had some sort of power over the inevitable. I would undress and lay face down across my bed. I braced myself for the stinging blows while vowing not to cry.
I didn’t know why the abuse started and I didn’t know how to stop it. My Mother simply chose to fight with me rather than battle her demons from within. It was years before I suspected her anger was really meant for my alcoholic Father. The more she hit me, the more I retaliated with anger and resentment toward her, my Dad and my siblings. As a child, I spent a lot of time fantasizing that only death would bring relief.
The tremendous shame I felt for the place of dishonor I occupied within my family was compounded by the avalanche of guilt perpetuated by growing up Catholic-to-a-fault. As I received profoundly toxic messages delivered in the name of God, I rejected the Church’s prosecutorial morality. I didn’t buy it then, and I certainly don’t buy it now. It took years to recover from the belief that I was personally responsible for Adam and Eve acting like humans in that apple orchard!
Ironically, as a child, the Catholic school down the street became my place of refuge. If I wasn’t home, I was at school with the nuns. I did everything possible to never be home.
Sister Jaguar’s Journey – The Sisterhood and The Transition to a Healing Path
The nuns offered me shelter from the pain of a brutal upbringing. When I was with them, I was safe. I belonged someplace. But eventually, I would have to go home.
After graduating from high school, I chose a very reasonable transition to adulthood. I joined the convent.
Becoming a nun gave me the only thing I ever wanted in life: membership in a community with women who stood together on a platform of eco-justice as we gave voice to the marginalized—especially women and children—and the economically poor yet culturally rich.
I wasn’t in the convent forty-eight hours before I realized it was clearly a cold, rigid, unsociable institution. Since I had been immersed in criticism and antagonism throughout my childhood, the oppression and condemnation in the name of God seemed normal. I felt quite at home with all the screaming!
Individual candidates were publicly singled out, rebuffed, and deliberately humiliated. This hazing seemed contrived and disingenuous as if the hardships of religious life were exaggerated to test the sincerity of our intentions. It all seemed so silly.
One day I woke with double vision. My Superior sent me to an eye doctor in the neighboring town. I was told to wait in the car for business related to another Sister. A few minutes later, I was pulled from the vehicle, forced up the stairs of the hospital, and admitted into an insane asylum! No intake conversation, no paperwork, no signature, no diagnosis, and no explanation. I had no idea what was happening. I was paralyzed with fear and instinctively knew that I was in for the fight of my life, while entirely on my own.
Sister Jaguar’s Journey – The Institutional Abuse
The worst of that insane experience occurred when I decided to check on an elderly patient. It appeared she had tried to swallow her fist to commit suicide. I worked feverishly to pull her hand from her mouth. She died in my arms.
I was forced into that mental institution as a bewildered, terrified teenager. I exited that hell hole as an enraged young woman determined never again to be abused by another person or institution. Never! Even today, after all my healing, I stand guard against that possibility. I just have not been able to erase that horrifying experience tattooed on my soul.
Years passed, all five decades! I used my doctor’s degree to become a national authority on progressive education. The abuse I encountered in my formative years greatly influenced the private and public charter schools I founded in Tucson, Arizona. These schools were my personal protest against the abuses experienced by children, teens and young adults as they struggled to find their place in the world.
As a nun, I spent sixty-eight years looking for God in all the wrong places. A lifetime of prayer and public service as a radical, alternative school administrator failed to bring me the peace and divine connection I had always sought.
Sister Jaguar’s Journey – Finding a Path to the Divine Through Ayahuasca
Throughout my life, I slowly lost my soul and allowed events and circumstances to move me to a place of profound sadness. Anger and depression controlled my thoughts, feelings, and actions. Lacking the skills to cope with dignity and grace, I slipped farther and farther away from my center. I lost what the Achuar people of the Amazon call arutum—the energy of life itself—the force that creates communion and hope, the vigor that allows one to move forward into an optimistic future. My connection with nature, life, and God disintegrated to dust.
At the perfect time in my miserable life, Sandra Morse, my friend, mentor, and therapist-of-sorts had the wisdom, experience, and grace to drag my suicidal self to a shamanic, soul retrieval ceremony in Ecuador’s Amazon jungle. On my first of five trips to the jungle, I saw a black jaguar prowling river’s edge. Since I’m the only person from the North to ever see a black jaguar in the Achuar Territory, my new friends began calling me Hermana Otorongo—Sister Jaguar. The name was a perfect fit.
The Jaguar holds a commanding position within the Achuar tribe. The jaguar guards the portal between their everyday and spiritual worlds, where it facilitates communication between those living on earth and those living in other realities. According to the Achuar, seeing a jaguar was a good omen that empowered me to experience a series of cultural, environmental and spiritual events that would eventually transform my life.
When I drank ayahuasca, I saw the black jaguar in a new reality. Shazam! THERE REALLY IS A GOD!
Sister Jaguar’s Journey – Grandmother–The Energy of life itself
There in the jungle, ayahuasca—lovingly referred to as “Grandmother”—sent me her spirit of the Jaguar where I experienced the recklessness of my anger. The river ran with blood, the plants and bushes turned to skulls. Giant trees morphed into metallic, mechanical insects of colossal size.
But Grandmother also offered her tender embrace. Vibrating lines of energy shimmered like the Northern Lights, candlelight shot outward in all directions in an attempt to recreate the Big Bang, colorful spider webs held planets and people in place, and shooting stars became the faces of every student I ever taught. Fifty years of faces flashed before me. As I took it in, I knew I had given the kids more than my anger and hostility. I knew they accepted me for who I was. I knew they had forgiven me. I knew they understood.
It took traveling 3,000 miles away from home and 4,000 years back in time for a tired, old nun to find peace in the here and now. There, in the Amazon jungle, among the Achuar and their sacred plant rituals, I saw God in their ancestral sacrament of ayahuasca. At that moment, my lack of place within an organized religion was “redeemed” through an Achuar rite of passage into ancient, tribal spirituality.
There, in a single, simple, life-changing moment, Grandmother suspended the clutter of my judging mind. The anger and depression of my past collided with the worry and anxiety of my future. There I was, immersed in the forgiveness and peace of the present moment—forever changed.
Grandmother pushed my tormented humanness to the truth. As I surrendered in silence, benevolence replaced all the malevolence I ever generated on Earth. Grace diluted my anger and replaced my grief with peace. Pachamama whispered without words, “Welcome home, Sister Jaguar, welcome home.” While resting on the sacred ground under the canopy of a star-filled universe, Pachamama (Mother Earth) invited me to take my place within her web of life that began with the first crack of the Big Bang. I knew I was called to blend my story of forgiveness into a New Creation Story. I knew I had to live and tell my sacred truth.
Okay. Here’s the place where I humbly announce that today I’m a holy mystic who only emerges from meditative trances to enjoy Arizona sunsets! Not so. Did you know jaguars prowl the Amazon jungle and the Arizona desert? Pachamama has a wicked sense of humor.
Sister Jaguar’s Journey – The inner Lifelong Inner Journey
Seven years ago, while star-gazing and discussing cosmology with my friend, Orion, I missed a two-inch drop in terrain, fell, and shattered my right femur. It was the last free, unassisted step I ever took. I’m basically crippled—a three-legged jaguar with a profound limp.
In forced retirement, I spend my days praying, meditating, reading, writing books, watching CNN, and whining about my constant pain. I spend my nights crying louder, feeling sorrier for myself and wishing things were different by morning. But they aren’t.
I am still a nun. While I live in a religious community and love my Sisters deeply, Pachamama has given me another gift of a local, heart-opening community with indigenous roots and values. This unique community resides in the hearts of its members while it accepts everyone as equal individuals. This group is not designed for regimentation, but rather for transformation and relaxation. In this community, we trust each other and suspend our defenses to be with each other in loving, appropriate ways. I have no need to protect myself within this group; we safeguard each other. My hope for this fledgling community is that we grow into a global network that includes diverse people, especially my Sisters and the poor, as we serve Pachamama and her people.
In many ways, my story is not unique. After all, most hearts search for happiness, most souls yearn for peace, and most folks choose to take the shortcut home.
I am grateful for my life. Very few people get to be a rebel nun with a place and purpose of service in both the ancient and modern world. Very few people get to add to and take from a common fund to be free to fight relentlessly for justice for the poor and emarginated.
As I share my story with you, I hope you, too, choose to develop a daily spiritual practice whereby you know personal peace profoundly. I hope you dismiss all negative family, childhood, religious and cultural conditioning as well as all perceived negative notions of yourself and the world. I hope your best friend pushes you off your comfortable ledge and rarely tells you what you want to hear. I hope you often go to a safe place in your mind or nature to surrender all that torments you as Pachamama draws you into the present moment. I hope you rest in Pachamama’s loving embrace—heartbeat to the heartbeat with her and all creation. As you forgive and accept yourself and others at that moment, I hope you experience Pachamama’s peace on a personal, primal, pristine level.
My prayer is that your journey through life takes you to the center of your soul and the outermost edges of the cosmos. In your travels, may you realize you are finally headed home? Shazam! THERE REALLY IS A GOD!
You will also enjoy Honoring the Darkness on the Healer’s Journey and 4 Awakening Tips for Your Spiritual Journey
About the Author
Sister Judy Bisignano and Sandra Morse live in Tucson, Arizona. They are co-authors of Sister Jaguar’s Journey, an Amazon Best Seller and winner of the Readers’ Favorite Book Award. Order the book on Amazon.com.
View the 20-minute documentary for free by clicking this link: https://www.sisterjaguarsjourney.com/filmviewer2/
Contact Sister Jaguar at judybisignano@gmail.com and Sandra Morse at sandritamorse11@gmail.com.
