I would love to tell you I’ve cracked the code to a stress-free life. I haven’t. Yet. What I have realized is that there are ways of handling what life throws at us that are not as scary as we’ve been led to believe.
For a long time, I did what a lot of us do – I sought the magic bullet: fasting cleanses, yoga retreats, talk therapy, past life regression, and energy medicine, just to name a few. All different tools and different methods of releasing the things that felt stuck and each valuable in their own way. But something was still missing. Letting go of a fear, while a good step, didn’t actually shift anything. I’d find myself back in the same patterns – overthinking, pushing too hard, wondering why I kept showing up the same way in my relationships no matter how much healing I did.
But eventually, something did change. I never had that one big moment that we all hope for. It was more like a slow light coming on. I gradually began to understand the “why” behind how I’m designed – my gifts, my shadows, the places I shine and the places I stumble – and I stopped searching for what was wrong with me and I started getting curious about who I actually am.
That’s not just a different feeling- it’s a different way of looking at the world and my relationship to it.
These days when a difficult challenge arises – as it tends to do – I don’t try to push through it or wish it away. Instead, I sit with it. I give it space to breathe, and I let it be there without trying to fix it. That’s because I have learned that emotions aren’t problems to solve, they’re states of being – each one valid in its own right and worthy of a place. Which is not to say that you are stuck with them indefinitely – they will move with you and through you if you let them. But doing so takes presence, a conscious awareness, and a quiet kind of courage that doesn’t always look like courage from the outside.
In my work, I focus on relationships because that’s where the real magic happens. And here’s one secret that I do know: the relationships you share with those around you – your family, your friends, your significant others – are where you discover the most about who you really are. They are your greatest mirror and the key to your success in strengthening and maintaining the most important relationship that you’ll ever have – the one you have with yourself.
That’s what I’m here to explore with you.
Some mornings I look out my window at the mountains, singing a tune that I make up as I go, and I think: how lucky am I to have found my happy place.
That place took a while to find. And it was absolutely worth the effort.
