this is a story
of life and death
For most of my life I lived in the rigidity and anxiety of my mind. I was ruled by shoulds, societal conditioning, logic, and a need to control every single thing I could. I desperately needed external validation and crumbled at even the slightest criticism. I constantly compared myself and felt like I would never measure up.
I didn’t trust life. I didn’t trust my inner knowing, that still small voice that wanted me to live as the wild, weird, wonderful woman I truly was. I was living in fear and making choices from my conditioning, not from the core of who I truly was. I thought who I was conditioned to be WAS my true self. I couldn’t yet see all the layers that were crowding out my connection to mySelf, to Spirit, and what I truly wanted from life.
And yet, every once in a while, I would get little glimpses of that Self and the incredible possibilities that were waiting for me on the other side of fear and control. I would hear a gentle voice giving me clear guidance on how to take the next step forward. And sometimes, just sometimes, even when it made no logical sense, I listened.
And little by little, the more I followed that voice, the more magical, real, and true my life became. The more I was able to dance with life as it unfolded. The more I recognized how I am always supported by life and by Spirit, even in intense pain and struggle, when I couldn’t see how anything made sense. But of course, looking back I could always see that I was being divinely guided.
Over time the voice of my Self got easier for me to hear. In 2018, that voice told me to leave my career in education after just finishing two years in a Masters’ degree program. I knew I was still living a life led by my mind and not led by my true Self.
My Self told me to start writing again, to share everything I had been through on my journey with anxiety and depression after shutting down my creative channel completely due to comparison, paralyzing fear, and criticism. I was terrified, but I finally listened. I was unhappy and unfulfilled in my career and I knew something needed to change.
I began sharing my words online, and began to access new levels of Self than I ever thought possible. Through sharing my writing, I connected with others on similar paths and learned about coaching. My Self immediately said, “YES.” I left my full-time job and started my first coaching business the following year.
Though I was now following the path of my true Self, I was still stuck in lots of fear, scarcity, and control. I pushed and forced, I listened to business coaches and entrepreneurs and bought their blueprints to success. I tirelessly did everything I thought I should so that my business would work - but really I wanted it to bring me validation, money, followers, and finally make me feel whole. I needed all of that - and I needed it quickly.
I wasn’t embodied in what I was sharing or creating. I was saying all the right words without actually living them. And it felt like I tried everything, and yet nothing worked. I did some beautiful work with beautiful clients during those two and a half years of business, and through each triumph and disappointment I continued to peel back the layers and get closer to my core. But it was never enough for me. I always needed more.
Until finally I decided it was time to let the business go entirely. To remember that my business wasn’t responsible for making me happy or fulfilled. I was responsible for that.
So in 2022 I dissolved the business and got a full-time job (something I vowed never to do again). And to my surprise, there was a lot I loved about it. Though I was working for someone else, I felt free. Free of trying so hard to make my business work. Free of the endless pressure to create and share. Free of always hoping the next creation would be the “thing” that brought me the accolades I so desperately desired.
I was content. I gave myself space to grieve my business, and I thought I would never go back.
2022 also brought the most intense personal challenges I’ve ever faced. My mom was diagnosed with cancer. I was met with the lowest of lows and then the highest of highs. I experienced initiation after initiation. I was deep in the underworld, mostly just trying to survive as many external things I’d relied on to feel safe crumbled and transformed.
But in the depths of those fires, a new self was born. One who was no longer afraid. One who found safety not within someone else, not within external validation, followers, money or clients, but deep within herself. And from there, everything began to unfold exactly as it was meant to.
A few months after these initiations, I was laid off from my job. In that moment I was shown just how deep my trust in life, and in myself, had become. I held myself through the grief, I allowed myself space to be angry and disappointed, to feel it all. And though more external safety nets were crumbling around me, I felt truly safe within myself for what felt like the first time.
I spent the fall and winter of 2022 in a deep void space. I had always been so, so scared of the void. But this time, I trusted it. I of course had moments of fear and moments where I fell back into old patterns of control, but I could no longer abandon the direction of my Self. I continued to move back into trust, to make decisions from who I now was instead of who I used to be.
Then, on a powerful retreat in Costa Rica, something in me roared to life. I knew that the fires of the past 3 years, the fires of annihilation were the flames of my rebirth. I was READY.
I was safe. I was supported. I trusted in life. And I was now ready to express that to the world. To birth my new business - one that held codes of spaciousness, trust, depth, light, truth, and power. To flow with life, business, sex, grief, play, joy, discomfort, service and any other initiations life presented me with. To meet my edges. To live as the liberated woman I always knew I could be.
Just a few months later, after 9 months of trying to conceive, I fell pregnant with my son, Jax.
Then, at seven months pregnant, my mom’s cancer returned and this time, it was terminal. She was given six months or less to live. I once again shut down my business to tend to her and the final months of my pregnancy.
A few months later as my Mother straddled the edges of Life and Death, I birthed my son naturally with no medication or interventions. Just a few weeks later, I walked my mother home to her Death.
I went deep into the void. And I am now emerging Anew…
more to come…