MY JOURNEY TOWARDS EMOTIONAL HEALING AND SELF-LOVE. 

Pushing or forcing healing to happen will not make it so. Pushing causes more stress, anxiety and self-doubt. Healing and developing self-love is a journey not a destination. On this road we travel there are many intersections and turns. As soon as your path changes course, a new journey begins. This is life’s beauty. This is healing.

The year before I started my yoga teacher training my family was struck by a tragedy that shook my entire being. It forced me to question everything I had believed to be true in the world. The year following the tragedy was a blur of hospital visits and travelling long distances. Between all of the grief and busy-ness my husband and I spent our time reevaluating our life. By the end of the year I had given up my job, we had decided to move back to our hometown, I finished my yoga teacher training and was set to be a part-time yoga teacher and full time mom. Then 5 days after I finished my teacher training and 3 weeks before our move, tragedy struck again. This time it was more devastating.

I spent the first year of my “new” life in a blur of grief, shock and adjusting to massive life change. Despite all of that, I was incredibly grateful that I was in a position where I could create space in my life to continue reevaluating and reacquainting myself with myself. By the end of the year my daughter started school full time and I started my training in Yoga Therapy. I felt like I had found my purpose in life. What a blessing coming out of 2 tragedies. My journey towards finding Inner Peace had just begun.

My first Yoga Therapy training was life changing - this time in an amazing way. I was on a path of knowledge and transformation that I had been yearning for my whole life. With this came an incredible urge to be “transformed”. I knew these practices I was learning were healing and I wanted desperately to share them. But before I could do that I needed to “fix” myself. Within a couple of years I was seeing 2 therapists, working with an energy healer and had a dedicated yoga practice. I was working through the grief of my recent life tragedies, early childhood trauma, anxiety, lifelong depression, a crippling self-doubt and shame, and my broken marriage. I was ready to be transformed! [Insert evangelical voice-over]

Everything about the way I was approaching my healing was pushing, forcing. I was looking for something - a “cure” that would instantly make me feel fixed. On so many levels I knew this approach was not working – and not going to work. I felt incredibly inauthentic, which suited my self-doubt just fine. My therapists and Yogi friends kept telling me that things would get worse before they got better but my anxiety was paralyzing and I was slipping into one of the deepest depressions I can remember.

Have you ever had a moment in your life where you had known something to be true because it is what you have always been told, then one day you had an awakening and you knew it to be true because your heart told you it was so? One of those moment happened for me as I was on the way home from dinner with a dear friend. I was deep in my glass is half-full, self loathing vista when my friend said the simplest thing, “Maybe you don’t need fixing.”

An awakening presented itself . “Maybe you don’t need fixing.” All the therapy and self help in the world yet these simple words shot to my heart like an arrow. In that moment I KNEW what I needed was to show myself compassion and love, forgive, and trust the process.

Realizing that I needed to show myself compassion and self-love didn’t make it easy. It was also not an instant transformation. It was a soft awakening that opened up in my heart and that continues to get brighter, reminding me that to find inner peace I must trust in the process. No, I don’t need fixing – I am not broken but I do need to give myself time to heal.

How are you approaching your self-care? Are you able to trust the process or are you looking for a “cure”?