Coming back home.

We see how to heal everywhere. The submergence of health and wellness speaks directly from the core of what we as human beings are evolving toward – coming back home to ourselves. Might sound a little rapture-esque, but that’s not what I mean. I actually mean it in the most natural, true essence of us kind of way. From the wonders of nervous system regulation techniques, supplements, guided meditations, to changing lifestyle habits… There's an underlying paradoxical question: Who are you when you’re not healing? My journey of true soul discovery came from a years-long unfolding of this question. From the mental torment and suffocation of navigating “answers,” to the literal bliss and liberation of surrendering to the unfolding, I finally came back home to myself.

For the past couple of months, I’ve contemplated sharing my health journey. I’ve been having that little me 1v1 my ego battle, as one does – “Is this going to just sound narcissistic?”... “Others have experienced worse”... “Who cares?”... “Am I “fully healed” enough to talk about it?” Since you're reading this, I obviously won. Not because I decided that those thoughts weren’t true, but because I let them coexist alongside my remembrance of authenticity and most importantly, vulnerability. Since early elementary school, I started to become hyper aware of my appearance and the way I felt in my body. I noticed things about myself in comparison to others, things like the way I had acne before reaching double digits in age. Something small, yes, but as we know about childhood, our mind is a primed canvas — vulnerable to impressions that will set the foundation of our perceptions and core themes in life. I’m not going to make this just be an in depth description of every single health dilemma I’ve faced, but this one I’m mentioning because it was my starting point of self comparison and over analysis of my health. As for the ulterior info of that time, I grew up with “almond parents.” Organic, zero seed oil,  grass-fed/free-range diet, active lifestyle, supplements day and night, low-tox products, herbal medicine, you get it. 

Fast forward through junior high, high school, and college, that symptom became chronic and followed with others – painful joint inflammation, drastic weight fluctuations, hair loss, chronic swollen lymph nodes, consistently getting sick, reproductive issues. I saw multiple holistic nutritionists, Chinese Medicine hormone specialists, even Western medicine physicians. I had received diagnoses ranging from Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, Lymphedema, PMDD, thyroid imbalance, and autoimmune issues. Physical pain then turned into immense mental and emotional pain – a suffocating spiral of chasing solutions out of desperation, and honestly from a place of resenting myself and body. I felt beyond exhausted, and even envious of others’ health given that I had thought I was doing everything right with my million and one holistic protocols, tinctures, and detoxes. There had then come a point where I started experiencing new symptoms or a worsening of, every time I tried to “fix” myself with something outside of me. This is not to say that remedies and routines are inherently bad or not actually helpful, but everything reflects the state of being in which you're sourcing yourself out from. Health anxiety became what felt like a personality trait, and consumed every effort of me trying to be present. As you could imagine, it kind of just spiraled into other areas of life that reflected depressive habits, pessimistic perspectives, and overall feeling defeated about my little human experience.

There was only one thing I knew for certain, which was that my body was quite literally screaming at me and I wasn’t truly listening. We sometimes get caught in a fine line between thinking we’re actually listening to ourselves; symptoms, desires, even aversions in life, and also thinking our immediate rush to a solution is because we “listened” to ourselves. But listening doesn’t mean fixing or changing. Listening means accepting. Not with judgment, not with urgency or expectation, but with pure patience and understanding.  I promise you, fulfilled, true change comes with listening first. I could not for the life of me accept myself and my experience of life at the time, but I knew that was it, the start of my journey inward. There was a pivotal point with this, where situational circumstances had collectively and quite quickly shaped my life in a way where I was secluded from almost everything I tied my identity to; school, career, friends, family… I quite literally was sat tf down by the universe. There was no clear path or strategic plan to fix my life, but I knew one thing I had really no choice to do. To just be with myself. I sat with myself day in and day out, feeling, crying, breaking down then slowly building back up, over and over. I let go of all timelines, healing expectations, protocols, restrictions, demands… really just everything that felt forced whether it seemed logical or not.

Another relevant piece to this is the divine timing of the knowledge that finds you. You’ve experienced it whether you’ve realized it or not; a perspective-altering conversation, a book, that one inspiring podcast episode that described exactly what you're going through, a Joe Dispenza video that made you feel overwhelming optimism… it all finds you in a predestined sequence throughout the entirety of your life. However, the sequence only begins with these moments, as its true purpose and unfolding is created by you. I started to realize that I had never really done this before – be deeply present with myself and feel everything that I had been shameful about and kept so deeply inside. The knowledge of how suppressed emotions leave an echo in our body that longs to be expressed, found me. It was an insane revelation, imminently life changing honestly. My health and my life experience began to all make sense in the most cosmically orchestrated, yet chaotically human way. This was my soul’s chosen path to finding my way back to myself.

We all have core themes in life that we grow through, and it looks different for everyone. E v e r y t h i n g in life that you experience, including the pain and emotional intensity, is here for you to feel and expand through. It is the transcendence to your desires and even your healing, I promise. The depths in which you understand yourself and your purpose is the journey, and naturally comes from this. Our body speaks through physical symptoms when we deny ourselves of this, of feeling and expressing. But even this is still once again, just another moment for growth and understanding. This realization set me free, connected me with myself in ways beyond what I could articulate, and aligned me with a version of life that succeeded what I could’ve imagined. I surrendered, and that was the “answer” all along.

My health began to match my inner unconditional self love that I had finally felt. I'm not going to sit here and say I always did everything perfectly, controlled every negative thought, and never spiraled, because then I wouldn’t be human. But I listened to my body. Truly. Listened. To the best of my ability, I lived life as if I had nothing to fix and nothing to physically heal, because THAT is what true acceptance and alignment is. I created trust with myself for my emotions to be finally, truly felt and released. With patient consistency, my body began healing. Overtime symptoms were no longer perceived as a threat, and softly vanished. I effortlessly found myself rediscovering parts of myself I thought I’d never get back. Presence, passionate creativity, and a deep feeling of peace and awe with life all flowed through me (still do).

Now more than ever, wellness and woo woo is all around us and our social media (I’m a part of it). If you find yourself being drawn to it — wanting to do things you once loved as a kid, be more creatively expressive, connect with yourself beyond just the physical, and live your life as if there's nothing to fix, it’s your soul calling you back home to yourself.