I am excited to announce the release of my signature course: Going Within: A five-module embodied course for cultivating deep healing, self-love and acceptance. This is a self-study, self-paced course available on my Substack Within. You will receive each module between 4 December and 18th December and there will be a live zoom call on 22nd December to wrap it up, have a meditation, and reflect on the content.

The feeling of completeness arrives when you surrender to the truest version of you: the deepest part that was crushed in the early years. The part you didn’t show to the world. The part that came here with a life to live.

Dear Readers, Within is my new weekly (news) letter to help you find the answers to the things you don’t always understand about yourself. From processing your core wounds, letting go, mindfulness, self-love, to learning techniques for connecting with and healing your inner child – I hope you’ll join me!

Whenever life feels dark and heavy, you might forget how to breathe. You might forget how to open your eyes a little bit wider, or forget the scent of earth — the comfort of remembering you are never truly alone.

Setting the intention to heal whatever is unconscious within you; whatever is causing you to feel disconnected from yourself, and your life, creates deeply positive results. But what makes this step even more transformative, is when you create a sacred space of ritual to honour yourself, your helping spirits, and the elements. In this way, you are building a container in which you remember what you are a part of, what supports you, and what lifts your senses and reconnects you to your innate source of power – Earth.

When we rely on mindset work to heal our core wounds, it can actually perpetuate them. The sense of “I’m not good enough”, and “I don’t trust myself” or “I’m doing this wrong” starts to take over because our subconscious mind doesn’t feel what we’re saying to be true. We therefore end up bypassing the root cause of how we feel. So, if you have core wounds, mindset work doesn’t really have any lasting effect; it just ends up being another form of seeking relief from feelings of insecurity and dissatisfaction.

Too many women—having experienced the sting of betrayal after bravely opening up and sharing their vulnerability—unconsciously close themselves off from deep, authentic love.  This is a topic very close to my heart; and one that I believe many of you beautiful souls can relate to. What helped me get through the feeling of betrayal was a deep insight I received during meditation: “you have NOT betrayed yourself. By opening yourself up, you have created a sacred space within your own journey of inner transformation. You have shown yourself that you are willing to be authentic, even in the face of potential pain. And this is an act of incredible bravery.”

When your inner and outer environment includes safety, patience, acceptance, curiosity, nurturing, resourcing, compassion, support, and presence, the innate intelligence that resides within you becomes empowered, and your life starts to flow naturally and effortlessly. And then each time you tap into this empowered place inside you, your intuition gets stronger and clearer. Action becomes inspired, and arrives in a very precise and perfect order.

Change can’t take place without these cycles: the pain, adversity, joy, growth and seeming falling apart. The chaos, confusion, despair – the intensity of it all.  Something eventually gives – like a breaking open of something you fear is going to be hard, but is in fact soft.  And, no matter how many times you forget; no matter how many times you unconsciously build another wall, block out the light, the softness never changes – she waits.  She shows you a new way of relating to life, a new way of relating to challenges, and most importantly, a new way of relating to yourself. 

When you meet your emotions somatically – inside your body – and place a hand where the energy of those emotions is most felt; when you welcome them, reassure them that they are safe here, accept them for how they feel now, (without any dualistic right or wrong, good or bad judgement)—this is healing at the innermost level. And it is only at this deeper place that you will directly experience your true nature of love.

I also learned very quickly to treat my recovery holistically – if you are not nourishing your nervous system and replenishing your neurotransmitters in a natural way, you will be less likely to succeed. And a healthy and balanced nervous system enables you stop returning to old patterns, and start growing in ways you truly deserve.

If there is any part of you that is discordant with life—that is pushing against life, avoiding, or denying life—then you will never be able to truly experience the feeling of wholeness. You will always feel as though something needs to be found, or fixed, or searched for.

We all have within our reach an opportunity to really show up in our lives; to embrace the moment without feeling afraid and wishing instead for the moment to pass. We all have the power to radically transform our lives by sitting with fear instead of running from it.

Nearly eight years ago, I attended weekly coaching sessions at an addiction recovery centre, and my therapist and I prepared an action plan for my recovery together. We spoke about my goals, not just for recovery from substance abuse, but for recovering my overall health and well-being.

…giving yourself permission to just be Days when my soul yearns to be closerto the heart of the things I

Once you anchor yourself into the centre, all it takes is a tiny shift in the direction of the light for your life to start becoming easier, softer, and more aligned. My dark season came, and I clung to it and identified with it for a little longer than I would have chosen to. But I can now see that I needed it to break something open and take me to a higher place.

My life took me on a profound and, at times, traumatic journey, but the study of spirituality taught me a very valuable lesson: if you only think you’re going to feel better in the future, you are sending a strong signal to the Universe that you’re not feeling good now. This alerts the survival instinct to take you away from the present moment, which starts another loop of seeking something else.

I believe lessons return for a reason, and those reasons become clear once you take the first step towards changing something. I have witnessed many, many incredible shifts in my life when I have intentionally taken just one small step towards a new ray of light. But I have also come to see that in grasping the new light, we must also forgive ourselves for not seeing the old pattern we have fallen into. In grasping the new light, we must reach with one hand in the air and the other hand on our hearts – we must stop punishing ourselves for taking a wrong turn.

When you see the blessings that show up when you are living in the present moment – stop, pause, and honor these moments. The mind will start softening back into its true nature. The things that once felt heavy will start to lose their power over you as the mind starts serving you, and not the thought system.

Healing for me began when I was able to see my patterns. It began when I felt compassion for the confused and reckless person I used to identify with. And it continues each day as I forgive myself for not having the necessary mechanisms to change the way I used to feel about myself. Radical self-acceptance is necessary to be able to fully embrace and enjoy everything life is giving you.

I think we go over a situation in our heads again and again to try and seek relief from it; we are looking for a clue, an answer, a resolution; the final piece that will give us freedom from the pain of that situation.  But the relief can never be found in the thought, or the mental images that are created by the thought. The relief can only be found in the background of the thought. In the stillness, and the silence of the moment that is. And it was in stillness that I was able to start processing the pain. It was with self-compassion that I was able to start releasing the pain.  

In my experience, when you encounter depression, illness, addiction, or anything else that threatens to pull you away from yourself, you have to find something that gives you a purpose, and meaning. You have to find something to get out of bed for. And even during the most difficult times of my life – losing both parents in quick succession, losing a breast to cancer, and losing more than I can even bear to think about to addiction, I always had something to get out of bed for. I always had a purpose. Yet, for the last year or so, I found myself sitting with a strikingly obvious contradiction, an empty page. I had completely misplaced my reason for writing in the first place: to help others move on from unhealthy patterns and behaviours. To help others heal, and evolve, and become who they were always designed to be.