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.

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.

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.

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.

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.