Life as a siren

Trinidad is a sirena on the spectrum. She is an Autistic ADHD heart savant. This means that she has ultra-sensitive senses and a unique eidetic memory. For Trinidad these traits are not mystical or mysterious. They are ordinary but rare, and misunderstood. With her sensitivities, Trinidad can sense a wider part of the electromagnetic spectrum like many other Autistic people. As a person with mermaid origins Trinidad lives with chronic pain (hEDS, POTS, MCAS). She was a nonverbal child who later developed hyperlexia and situational mutism. She also experienced periodic Autistic catatonia. As an adult Autistic she still deals with these traits and other physical limitations. She hopes to dismantle misconceptions about Autism, especially modern, materialist re-tellings of the ancient Autistic experience.

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Trinidad was born during a powerful storm, like Nikola Tesla. In fact, they share the same birthday. Typhoon Gading flooded her parent’s home on July 10th, 1986, the morning that Trinidad was to be born. A katao, or sirena (mermaid), came to bless her birth underwater. Trinidad’s birth mother, who is also her namesake, is known locally in her seaside neighborhood in the Philippines as la sirena due to her own birth story. Her family believes that this sirena showed up to help their fellow mermaid who was in labor. The sirena helped move debris with her father and this allowed the flooded home to drain. Then, Trinidad was born.

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Trinidad’s birth parents gave her to migrant Filipino family in California so that she could go to school and live a better life away from the detrimental poverty of her imperialist-battered motherland. Those who are blessed by dagatnon like the sirena are bound to have difficult but fulfilling lives. One of the consequences of being from the sea is that these people can interact with spirits and other beings from neighboring realms. Trinidad’s mother knew that she would have a hard life abroad, especially due to Trinidad’s destiny as one who venerates and communicates with anitos (the dead, nature spirits), diwata (other nature spirits like demi-gods, gods, goddesses).

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Trinidad renounced the Catholic Church before she reached high school. Over the course of twenty long years she developed her own syncretic dharmic practice called Water Serpent Dharma. Water Serpent Dharma centers Shakti, the feminine energy of the cosmos. Trinidad is a devotee of some of Shakti’s forms: Aditi, the animist goddess Khadiravani (also known as the Tantric Hindu-Buddhist Mahavidya Maa Tara) as well as Maa Kali and Maa Chhinnamasta. The Nagas, Ekapada, and folk witchcraft are also central to Water Serpent Dharma. Her family practices this syncretic folk and mind science that also includes Thai, Laos, Cambodian and Turtle Island elements to honor her partner and son’s mixed roots.

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Trinidad started meditating in early childhood. Her teachers over the years were elder kitchen witches, bone-setters and diviners, curanderas and root workers in Texas, Filipino hilots and herbalists, and Hindu-Buddhist laypeople. As a budding witch, she studied spirit boards, cartomancy using playing cards, and other kinds of divination using an array of tools. Then she moved on to more advanced studies. Trinidad studied with Lama Gyaltsen at a Buddhist contemplative arts school, Naropa Institute. She took her Buddhist Refuge and Bodhisattva vows at Orgyen Dorje Den with her root guru, the Venerable Dhomang Gyatrul Rinpoche. She studied Nyingma Buddhism under Lama Drimed Lodro Rinpoche and Lama Jigme at ODD. She continued her Tantric studies focusing on Dzogchen and Chöd as well as Kum Nye at the Nyingma Institute under teachers like Lama Palzang and Pema Gellek. She briefly studied indigenous energy systems and weapons combat, Didya Mudgara, with Ka Virgil Mayor Apostol at his Kailukuan School of Indigenous Science. She currently learns from other Visayan culture bearers like Khokhoi at Kalami Spirit Arts.

Trinidad has Hindu-Buddhist transmissions and empowerments to worship principal deities including three of the Mahavidyas. Her life as a devout layperson is modeled after the Mahasiddhas and a Thai laywoman, the honorable Upāsikā Kee Nanayon. Some of Trinidad’s most valued spiritual teachers were nonverbal disabled people that she worked with as an independent skills coach and supported living aid.

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After years of disciplined study and practice Trinidad pieced together the savant aspects of her disabilities with her relationship to the spirit world. Her efforts to de-colonize her life naturally included a healthy examination of the spiritual practices that she grew up with and practices that better suited Trinidad’s goals of shaping the world around us because we could, by connecting with the spirits around us and caring for the land. Tantric science and Southeast Asian folk beliefs helped her solve the puzzle of her savant traits— traits that are rarely studied in children and people of color.

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Trinidad has had three Near-Death-Experiences (NDE) and has guided her community as friends and family died over the years. She shares her knowledge of death and the afterlife, communicating with spirits, and consciousness at her art workshops and lectures. Her life as a medium includes assisting her friends, family, and community with difficult life transitions like illness and death, and with difficult emotions like grief.

Her comics and activism are paths of her mediumship.

Trinidad’s favorite mediums and teachers include Angela Angel, Yeshuani, Lolo Lavish, La’Arni Ayuma, Ka Virgil Mayor Apostle, and Kumare Khokhoi de La Vida at Kalami Spirit Arts.