In the wee hours of a June night in 1998, Alissa Lukara decided to write the story of her struggles with childhood sexual abuse and illness. She recorded the moment in her journal, adding that "the pain of not writing has grown bigger than the pain of writing it."
Twelve hours later, she says, in a healing workshop in Ashland, she had a complete remission of the chronic fatigue syndrome that had plagued her for 12 years.
That anecdote leads off "Riding Grace: A Triumph of the Soul," (Silver Light Publications, cloth, 181 pages, $21.95) the Ashland woman's account of a healing journey connected with recovered memories of being sexually abused as a child and struggling with chronic fatigue.
Lukara will present a reading at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 8, at Bloomsbury Books, 290 E. Main St., Ashland, and at 4 p.m. Saturday, March 3, at Barnes & Noble Booksellers, 1400 Biddle Road, Medford.
Her central idea — both in her book and on Lifechallenges.org, a Web site she founded — is that facing the toughest tests life throws at us may be the instrument of our deliverance. She compares the healing quest to mythologist Joseph Campbell's hero's journey.
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"We all at some point face a life challenge, such as illness, relationship/family issues, job loss, death, addiction or abuse, an experience that shatters our world, transforms the way we live and our very self as we have known it, and may even throw us into what many call 'the dark night of the soul,' " she writes.
She says this is a place of great suffering, but also rich potential for growth.
Lukara, 56, grew up near Cleveland, Ohio, and lived in Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City before moving to Ashland in 1993. A freelance writer and editor — she and her husband operate Lukara Blue Communications — she took 51/2 years to write the book and wound up with a draft of 1,000 pages.
"I took a long time to make it shorter," she jokes.
She says she always knew she had an inner part that could not be touched or harmed.
"I didn't feel like a victim," she says. "I always felt there was a larger perspective, some reason beyond what was apparent, whether it was writing this book or whatever.
"An abuse therapist told me a lot of people go crazy, that I had a creativity to go to, and I could somehow use that, go into my own place of imagination."
Lukara in 1986 confronted her father about the abuse. He denied it, and they became estranged.
"To have it come out of my mouth and confront this man who had threatened me with harm, in that moment I was an adult, but also that little girl," she says.
In Campbell's hero's journey, the hero typically refuses the call to adventure before finally accepting it. Lukara says she refused calls many times. Once she accepted, there were tests and helpers and ultimate transformation, just like in Campbell's model. In time she came to see any life crisis as a hero's journey.
"My call wasn't about just getting over an illness," she says. "It was to change my life."
Her first memories of abuse came back in a session with a healer.
"It was a very profound moment," she says. "Life as I'd know it was ripped away."
How does she know the memories are genuine?
She says she'd remembered physical and emotional abuse all along. She thinks she forgot the sexual abuse through a kind of dissociation.
"It was an automatic thing, a protective mechanism: here comes abuse, dissociate, leave your body."
When her father died two years ago, Lukara had not spoken with him in years.
Lukara is the founder and head of Lifechallenges.org, a nonprofit Web site dedicated to helping people overcome adversity. It has more than 500 pages and gets a half-million hits a month. She also hosts the Southern Oregon community television program, "Transcending Life Challenges."
She is a master of Reiki, a spiritual healing discipline which claims to work with ki, or life energy, and which is considered outside the realm of medical science. She is studying the work of the popular and controversial German psychotherapist Bert Hellinger, whose teachings focus on families and organizations and draw widely from various forms of therapy.
Publisher David Wick, of Silver Light, the small Ashland publishing house behind the book, says a publicist is now talking it up with high-profile media, including People magazine.
"We feel it'll be found," Wick says.
Lukara says many people who have been abused don't speak out because of fear, shame, stigma and denial.
"It is my hope 'Riding Grace' inspires people who've had their voices silenced to reclaim them," she says.
