My Healing Journey

I have been on a long and difficult healing journey (that continues every day) which led me to reconnect to my body and soul after being deeply disconnected from it for many years without realizing it. I had three physical wake up calls in 2017 that kicked off a spiritual awakening and healing journey for me: One day being in the most excruciating pain I had ever felt, unable to walk, curled up in the fetal position on my bed, my entire body shaking. I found out that I had endometriosis throughout my entire abdominal cavity along with large cysts in both of my ovaries, and polyps and fibroids in my uterus. When I came out of surgery, the surgeon said the endometriosis was “everywhere.” I had lived with painful periods for many years and took many painkillers every month to numb the pain, thinking it was normal and encouraged by multiple doctors to do that.

Around the same time, I found out that my thyroid had shut down and when the doctor looked at my bloodwork numbers, he said that they were the worst he had ever seen and that people with numbers that high can go into a coma. I didn’t know what to do with that information at the time, it felt confusing and overwhelming to receive that news. I was told to start taking medication that I would need to take for the rest of my life and that it was going to be fine as long as I didn’t stop taking the meds.

Then I found out that I had hearing loss bad enough that I needed hearing aids. All of this happened within the span of a few months. With each piece of news, I felt so confused because “I felt fine.” I was so disconnected from what was actually happening inside of me. After all of this happened, I started to wonder, if those things were actually happening inside my body and I had no idea, what else was going on inside of me that I wasn’t aware? How can I be so detached from parts of myself and not know it?

I was also beginning to slowly wake up to other parts of myself that needed healing thanks to my partner at the time who became a mirror for me that I didn’t want to look into but knew I needed to. I started doing intense therapy with various therapists and researching and learning on my own about many aspects of human psychology to try to understand what was going on inside of me and why I was behaving the way I was. I began to very, very slowly realize so many things about myself including an almost 20 year addiction to alcohol, obsessive compulsive behaviors I had been doing since childhood but never had a name for, attachment wounds, childhood trauma, an eating disorder I had when I was younger and never fully healed from, self-hate, intense anxiety, depression, and deep disconnection from my emotions. I also discovered during that time what a Highly Sensitive Person was and that I am one, which put so many puzzle pieces together for me about my life.

After years of messy and very overwhelming inner work, in 2020 a big life rupture happened and forced me into solitude and stillness in a way I had never experienced before. At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic that year, my partner at the time told me she wanted to get divorced, I had to close down multiple businesses I was running, moved out of my home in Minnesota and moved back home with my parents in Wisconsin. All of a sudden, I had nowhere to run off to, nothing to keep me busy like before.

So, every day for two years, I sat down at a table in my bedroom that I had as a teenager, looked out at the trees and just…sat…and sat and sat. I had deep grief and overwhelm swirling through my body that I didn’t know what to do with. I felt confused and in shock because of everything that was happening inside of me and outside in the world around me.

During that time, I discovered Buddhist teachings and began practicing meditation and mindfulness. I started using stitching as a healing practice and discovered therapeutic writing thanks to serendipity bringing Daphne Cohn onto my path who was doing that kind of writing and holding space for others to do the same through an online community she facilitated. Her and her community changed my life. In the warm safety of the spaces she and others held in that community, I found that deep, raw, emotional writing was emerging from me. At the time, I didn’t know what to call it but there was this energy that needed to move up and out of my body through the pen. It was at that time that “Poetry arrived in search of me” as Pablo Neruda wrote.

Others also began to cross my path at just the right moments-spiritual teachers, wise friends, guides. It’s amazing how that happens. I started to explore more aspects of spirituality for the first time and studied with Myree Morsi , a trauma therapist and spiritual healer in Australia, which was also life changing. I read countless books on art therapy, shamanism, psychology, Buddhism, therapeutic writing, deep ecology, poetry therapy and energy healing techniques.

My intuition has been my guide through all of this, nudging me to explore things like slow stitching and to bury fabric books I made to process my grief, to explore poetry to help me heal, to buy a massage table and go to massage school, to study and train in Reiki…I never know where these nudges will lead me but when I follow them, I discover that they were exactly what I needed to follow.

Looking back, I can see that my healing journey has been and continues to be my spiritual journey. All of the steps along the way have brought me back home to myself and continue to as I keep practicing every day. I am now devoted to sharing vulnerably and courageously to help others on their healing journeys find their way back home to their truest, deepest, most loving selves.