Or: how I got here...

I did what many of us were told to do - succeed in school, graduate from a good university and get a well-paid corporate job. I received an incredible promotion early on and all seemed well on the outside… So, what was the problem?

My first wake up call was during my teens and similar to many other women’s. I hated how my body looked and was stuck in dieting cycles. Stressed about what I ate and how much I exercised, nothing seemed to work and I never felt enough. When I neared breaking point, I heard the internal whispers to heal. I realised what true health and radiance means: inner peace, self-belief and, simply, happiness. Being enough came from how I felt not how I looked. I needed to accept the person in the mirror and to take care of her. This was the beginning of my healing journey.

Some years later, a month into my corporate job, life offered me another opportunity for healing. The high-paced, high-achieving, stressful life I was leading led to a back injury. Then, to chronic back pain. Movement and exercise were central to how I coped with life’s challenges and, now, just sitting was painful. I didn’t know what to do. But I did need to find a way through somehow. My search led me to gentler forms of exercise and enlightened me to how stress affected our wellbeing. Through yoga, pilates and self-care, the pain dissipated. I became more conscious of how I overworked myself and how often I ignored my body’s needs. I understood in new ways what it meant to love and take care of myself. But I wasn’t done yet.

I hit rock bottom about 3 years ago. This was the most painful and difficult period of my life and, as with all hard times, it was deeply confusing. In simple terms, I was burned out from my corporate job but it was about much more than that. It awoke me to ask for the first time ever What do I want from life? and What’s actually important to me? I realised that so many of the things I “had” and was committed to weren’t aligned with who I truly was. I had to dig deeper than ever before as I sought answers. I had to, I realised, integrate a part of myself I’d missed before: my soul, my ‘Self’, my Spirit, the intangible part of us that we often forget about. The modern world is very outer-focused, meaning it doesn’t encourage us to look within. The external seems more important than the internal but it’s this inner part of us that holds our truth. It’s this part that can give us the most important answers we seek, the ones that help us to find our true path and fulfilment.

It was this part of me that was unaffected by my outer successes and early promotion. This is why I found myself looking at my life and realising that, despite how I “should” have been happy, I wasn’t. Something needed to change. It seemed the Universe had pre-booked this burnout for me so that it would.

I revisited my past health struggles around food and exercise and created an even better relationship to both. I worked through my addictions to stress, people-pleasing, boundaries and unhealthy relationships. I started therapy and realised: I need to quit my job! Through a lot of inner work, I completely changed my life. I left my corporate job, strengthened the relationships that were important to me (and let the unaligned ones go), put my passions first and began to live guided by my intuition. The more I allowed all of me to be healed, the better I showed up for both myself and others.

I began to understand that, when done holistically, healing is a natural process that allows us to go from where we are to where we want to be. Rather, where we need to be.

I now aim to live from a place of deep connection to myself and my intuition. This is an ongoing process - a consistent, daily checking in, reflecting, re-adjusting. It is a way of life that feels true, fulfilling and conscious to me, and I would like to live in a world where everyone can experience this. We’re all born connected to our true self, intuition and path but, somewhere along the way, we get lost. Healing is our journey back.

When we awaken to the truth of who we are and heal from within, the niggling feeling that we’re always forgetting something, or need to be elsewhere, goes away - because we’ve finally returned to ourselves.