Shawna Baca

Fear Less Shawna Baca

"Fear Less: Conquering the Demons of Mental Purgatory" intimately chronicles a downward spiral into debilitating panic attacks and agoraphobia that began on Shawna's twenty-first birthday; a mental illness that sequestered her inside of her home for over a year. When Western medicine failed, her Apache/Yaqui mother took her to the Pala Indian reservation to see a Medicine Man, who cured her that night in a sweatlodge ceremony, which was nothing short of a modern day exorcism. That was the last day she suffered from panic attacks and agoraphobia, but the aftermath left her in contemplation of what happened to her... and to her mind? How did that young woman who could do normal things - go to work, go to the gym, have lunch with friends - become the woman who could not leave her home for a year except to be driven to a weekly therapist visit, then be cured inside a sweatlodge by a Medicine Man, and POOF, magically have her anxiety and panic disappear? Fear Less: Conquering the Demons of Mental Purgatory goes on to detail a labyrinthine journey that explores her road to healing using various Western and Eastern modalities, conventional therapists, twelve-step programs, and spiritual healers, all of whom helped her learn how to deprogram the emotional conditioning that resulted from childhood trauma and a series of losses, and instilled tools to reprogram new life conditions and achieve breakthroughs that re-awakened her true self. It is a gritty inner exploration into the darkness that lived inside her, and how she challenged herself to re-frame her mind to face those inner demons to cultivate new life conditions.