Blog - Michelle Wiegers Coaching

Mothering Ourselves in Mind-Body Healing

Happy Mother’s Day to each one of you! I’m so grateful for you and all the many roles you play in showing compassion and kindness to yourself and those you love.

Though not all countries celebrate Mother’s Day, here in the US we consider it a national holiday where we pause regular life to take time to appreciate the mothers and women who raised us, as well as mentors and mother-figures in our lives. Of course we also receive appreciation, cards or small gifts from those we mother, whether our own children, nieces and nephews, neighbors or friends.

I believe we are all called to show love, compassion and kindness to others, whether or not we have our own children. We’ve all been children at one point, but the truth is, that none of us were cared for perfectly, (Trust me, I know, I have four kids!). And sadly, many of us were neglected or mistreated by the ones who were supposed to be taking care of us.

I bring this up, not to be a downer on an upbeat day, but to acknowledge that when we’re working towards healing anxiety, depression, or chronic mind-body symptoms, we often need to learn how to mother ourselves. Sometimes we’re suffering with symptoms because the little one within us is still carrying hurt.

Healing Exercise
One healing exercise I give clients is to imagine our 5, 8, 10, 15, or 21 (you get the idea) year old self and consider what she’s afraid of, or what she might need. What might she say, if we gave her the chance to speak? We can have a dialogue with her on paper, write her a letter of understanding and acceptance or just sit in silence to listen to her share things she’s never been allowed to vocalize before–maybe because no one was listening.

When there are gaps in the care we should have received, we do not have to stay stuck. We can move towards our inner selves with deep listening, kindness and acceptance, to be willing to take the time to love and mother ourselves. Maybe at times it doesn’t feel fair we have to do this work, that we should have been better taken care of, and often this is true. So it makes sense we may need to work through anger, resentment or grief about the way our own mothers may have treated us. Even mothers we love dearly fall short, no one is perfect! But eventually we can begin to let go of those hurts as we learn how to more actively care for our inner selves.

As you reflect on the ways you are grateful for or maybe even disappointed in the ways your own mother cared for you, I wonder if you also might consider how to nurture or mother your inner self. Taking a few moments to slow down, listen and love ourselves, can move us forward into deeper healing.

And no matter how you are or aren’t celebrating Mother’s Day this weekend, I hope that you create a few moments for self-care, light and joy in your day. Here’s to nurturing ourselves as we heal!

Becoming a Fool for Mind-Body Healing

Sixth Anniversary of Healing and a Medical Whirlwind

Every year my mind-body healing anniversary comes up in April, I am again filled with gratitude at the miraculous gift that mind-body healing has been in my life. But this year when I passed my sixth anniversary, I forgot to notice. I have been dealing with some extreme symptoms that I’ve since discovered are due to perimenopause. These months of heavy bleeding and pain, with the fears and unknowns to why it was happening, has reminded me a little too much of my years of struggle with chronic symptoms before discovering the mind-body connection link.

These last three months have been filled with doctor’s visits, bloodwork, ultrasounds, new medication, a medical procedure and waiting–so much waiting. As my doctor and I tried to understand what was really going on, old fears rose up in me, as if they’d been just under the surface, in case I needed them. I’ve dealt with days of anxiety where I feared there might be a life-threatening cause to my symptoms.

Thankfully the scary diagnosis has been ruled out, the symptoms are now under control and I’m gaining my energy back. But being thrust into such a medical whirlwind has been eerily similar to what life was like for me before the spring of 2017. Though there’s a medical cause to what I’ve been going through recently, this experience has still been difficult for me emotionally. My brain remembers the decades I spent in constant search of a cause and cure, not finding answers, fearing there must be a hidden medical issue under all of my chronic symptoms. In short, I’ve been majorly triggered by these last few months.

Because of these distractions, I didn’t remember until mid-April that I’d missed celebrating my sixth anniversary of mind-body healing. When I checked my calendar, I realized for the first time that I began learning about mind-body science and recovery on April 1, 2017. How appropriately strange that the day I started this journey is one often celebrated as “April Fool’s Day,” a day to play tricks and jokes on others.

How I Wrestled with Accepting the Mind-Body Cause

There were quite a number of reasons to feel foolish six years ago, while I wrestled with believing that my chronic symptoms could be due to the mind-body connection. I knew that my symptoms were very real, but hadn’t understood that physically real symptoms can have a psychological root cause. As I moved towards accepting this new mind-body diagnosis, I began to hope that I might be able to recover. But I also felt a little embarrassed, or that somehow I had done this to myself. I felt tricked by my mind and body, and wanted to instantly get over this nasty prank my subconscious had played on me.

“How could this have happened?” I wondered. I’d gone through years of therapy, met with a spiritual director, and had a strong support network in family and friends. I couldn’t believe that my symptoms could be due to unprocessed trauma, repressed emotions, and life stress. “Haven’t I worked hard on emotional healing already?” I’d asked myself. I felt emotionally aware and healthy when I discovered mind-body healing, so I thought surely this couldn’t apply to me.

But it did. I had worked hard to heal emotionally, but no one had told me how raw and incredibly strong emotions, like anger, can be hard to access or be present to, and that these emotions get repressed and stuck in our bodies. All of the talk therapy work I’d done had stayed on the conscious level, and it did help me process difficult experiences. But my therapists didn’t know how to assist me in accessing and releasing the deeply held rage, shame, and fear I’d repressed because of childhood wounds. I’m not sure either of us knew those repressed emotions were there because they were safely tucked away in my chronic symptoms. Though I quickly learned that repressed emotions can cause symptoms, and then I had to let go of blaming myself for not getting therapy “right” and instead recognize I lacked the correct information, and so did my therapists.

How Chronic Symptoms, Medical Diagnoses and Emotions Relate to Mind-Body Healing

Perpetually repressing strong emotions created such an inner conflict within my mind and body, that my brain produced many different chronic symptoms over the years, such as: nausea, constipation and loose stools, back pain, fatigue, brain fog, shooting pain down my leg and up my back, wrist and hand pain, neck pain, jaw pain with headaches, foot pain and swelling, dizziness and shortness of breath, among others.

And because of these many symptoms I experienced for nearly three decades, I saw more medical practitioners than I can count. They ordered medical tests that usually came back finding there was nothing wrong with me. Then they proceeded to diagnose me with TMJ, whiplash injury, fibromyalgia, CFS, sciatica, IBS, POTS, and Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (EDS). EDS is a genetic connective tissue disorder that causes hypermobility and other medical issues in the body. When I received this diagnosis my practitioner thought it was causing my sciatica and chronic pain. But now that I no longer experience either, I know my EDS diagnosis and my hypermobility, was not causing my pain, but that the mind-body connection was to blame.

I initially used my long list of diagnoses as a way to argue against the mind-body cause. I had very real symptoms and the diagnoses to explain them, so how could my symptoms be due to the mind-body connection? And I knew I wasn’t making up these symptoms, they were real, and my diagnoses were proof.

What I didn’t understand at first was the difference between psychosomatic and psychophysiologic symptoms. Mind-body symptoms are not psychosomatic, they are not made up or imagined. They are not just in our heads, despite what many medical practitioners have often told us. As we learn from the mind-body practitioner guide, Hidden From View, by Dr. Howard Schubiner and Dr. Alan Abbass, mind-body symptoms are psychophysiologic, meaning they are physically real symptoms, like back pain, headaches, nausea, dizziness or fatigue, but they are caused by the danger response in the subconscious. In his Ted Talk, “Why Things Hurt,” Professor Lorimer Mosely tells us the brain is the source of all pain in the body, and it creates chronic symptoms due to psychological stressors. One simple example is blushing, which causes a physical change in our cheeks due to adrenaline activated by an emotion. We feel embarrassed, we experience a physical reaction. Mind-body symptoms are the same, they are physically real but have a psychological root cause.

When I was first learning about this healing approach, I wondered how I could have been deceived by my brain as I struggled through decades of symptoms. Why didn’t I find out the true cause sooner? I could have saved myself, my husband and my kids from years of struggle and so much money we invested in trying to get better. I felt like my mind had betrayed me, that I had let myself be a fool, duped by my own nervous system.

But the truth is that when the brain creates pain and other chronic symptoms, the subconscious is protecting us from what feels dangerous: difficult memories, past trauma, current life stressors and strong emotions. So instead of feeling grief, sadness, regret, or even deep anger or rage, our subconscious decides we must avoid these emotions. They feel threatening based on our past experiences, so we push them down inside our bodies.

We can’t hold in the powerful force of emotions without consequences. In a way, the brain decides it is safer to have back pain, migraines, dizziness, anxiety, insomnia, depression or other mind-body symptoms, than it is to feel and process difficult emotions. So in a sense, our deeper selves are perpetuating our symptoms, but with the best of intentions.

And when we experience these difficult symptoms over time, we learn to expect them to come, solidifying the neural pathway links between our minds and bodies. We fear, worry and sometimes excessively focus on our symptoms, which creates a powerful fear spiral that keeps us locked in symptoms that are often fluctuating and increasing. The hope we have in mind-body healing is that we have the power to break this fear cycle and take our lives back.

How We Heal

But how do we heal from mind-body symptoms?

We rule out major medical causes, and learn how to rule in the mind-body cause.
We learn that Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS), or Mind-Body Syndrome (MBS), (discovered by Dr. John Sarno, and continued by Dr. Howard Schubiner, Alan Gordon, and others) creates very real symptoms that we can recover from. Mind-body knowledge and education is the foundation to recovering from chronic symptoms.
We take steps to change our relationship to symptoms by understanding we are medically safe. Then we incorporate mind-body practices and pain reprocessing therapy to reduce fear, increase safety, restore a sense of calm, and express our emotions. This includes somatic meditations, writing practices, reflection exercises, utilizing embodied affirmations, listening to healing stories, returning to body movement and so much more, depending on each individual’s needs.
We also look at our stories, when symptoms started, what was happening in our lives, which helps us understand what we’re holding onto that might need to be processed and released in order to recover. This is often where I start with my clients, which helps them see the links between their lives, minds and symptoms, often uncovering an emotional root cause. These links can sometimes be hard to find on our own.

There are some who read a mind-body science book, like The Mind-Body Prescription by Dr. John Sarno, for example, and then they instantly recover. But for others of us, myself included, it’s a much more winding path to healing. And doesn’t it make sense that it might take longer to recover when we know the root cause of our symptoms are due to subconscious processes we aren’t aware of?

This has been true for me. I no longer live a life dominated by chronic symptoms but I do have times when symptoms pop up, and then I know I have more emotional work to do. Sometimes I simply need to name how I’m feeling, or what I need and the symptoms dissolve. Other times life is touching on old fear or shame patterns, and I need to remember what is true and not slip back into limiting beliefs. Mind-body healing has led me to emotional work I didn’t know I still needed to work on when I discovered this approach six years ago.

But I needed to learn how to set boundaries, to make space for myself and my needs. I needed to stop pressuring myself and working hard to please others and instead develop more self-compassionate ways of being. I’m learning how to fully love and accept myself, to finally allow myself to live from my center, from who I really am. I used to let fear, anger and hurt keep me on the run from my deeper self. But I’ve worked hard to heal from past hurts and to live a more authentic life, a journey I am still on!

Healing Can Take Longer Than We Expect

And as I’ve reflected on this six year anniversary, I’ve realized that this healing path and finding my way in life after chronic symptoms dominated so much of it, has been so much harder than I ever thought it might be. I lived most of my life disconnected from my deeper self and creative gifts. So it has taken time to become comfortable being fully who I am. Maybe others do not struggle as much as I have to give myself the permission and freedom to pursue what I love and feel called to as a creative writer, coach and teacher.

Because it has been a hard emotional, creative and spiritual healing path, I have gained so much more than if I’d just read a book in one weekend and had my symptoms permanently fade away. At the time, I would have wanted that, don’t get me wrong, and some of my symptoms did resolve rather quickly. But the emotional healing has taken so much longer and that’s because it had so much more to teach me.

And I’m still learning and growing, like all of us. If you’re like me, and recovering from chronic mind-body symptoms and the emotions underneath them has been hard, be encouraged, don’t give up, healing is coming. You are not the exception. You are not the one person mind-body healing can’t help. And if you feel this way, you’re not alone in thinking this might not work for you. Sometimes when healing takes longer, the journey has so much more to give to us than we could receive if we experienced a quick fix.

And if the process is taking longer than you’d like, I encourage you to get all the support and help you need. I wouldn’t be where I am today without my many helpers along the way in therapists, spiritual directors, coaches and friends helping me see what I couldn’t find alone. They’ve made such a huge impact on my healing journey and life.

Looking back, I’m so glad that I didn’t let that initial feeling of embarrassment about the true cause of my symptoms keep me from mind-body healing. I know now that this approach led me to the truth of what was going on in my mind and body. And when it comes down to it, that’s what I’d been after for most of my life. Truth, freedom and healing came in an unexpected way, with a life saving message, and I am so thankful that after 27 years of symptoms, I was finally ready to hear it.

I didn’t receive an instant physical and emotional cure, and becoming who I really am, learning to set myself free from old trauma patterns of fear, shame, and repression, has been harder and taken so much longer than I thought it might. But one step at a time, I continue to access emotional healing and freedom for myself.

And I hope you will do the same, because all the gifts we gain along the way are more than worth it. Like a recent client of mine said to me, “this work has forever changed my life, you’re literally changing people’s lives!” But I assured her that I’m not the one who changed her life, she is! And this is true for you too, you have the power to heal your symptoms and take your life back. Mind-body healing helps us recover from symptoms, heal emotionally, and live the life we’re made for. And if all of that takes six years or even more, that’s ok with me. This work has given me physical, emotional and creative healing, and has led me to the work that I love with my clients and students. Though I did begin this journey on April Fool’s Day, the truth is, the joke isn’t on me, this healing path is real. And I would have been a fool to not pursue it.

Five Keys to How We Heal

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“Five Keys to How We Heal”

In this taste of our How We Heal course and short companion workbook, Michelle introduces you to the five keys that unlocked her healing after decades of debilitating symptoms. Becoming aware of these can help you break free from mind-body symptoms. To get immediate access to these free resources, subscribe to her email list at the bottom of her contact page and you’ll also receive her mind-body writing, encouragement for your healing and updates.

If you find this teaching helpful, you will love our How We Heal course!

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Poem and Reflection: Slowing Down on our Mind-Body Healing Journey

In this video I read a poem of mine called “Slow Down.” Before I read it for you, I share some reflections on how pushing too hard and fast to heal can keep us from making progress. Slowing down can be key for recovering from mind-body symptoms. To take this topic deeper, please use the reflection questions and writing prompts in my “Slowing Down” PDF below.

Download “Slowing Down”

Download my free PDF which includes reflection questions, writing prompts and my poem “Slow Down”.

Slowing Down PDF Download

Slow Down

This morning I’m so tired
from pushing myself hard,
that as I drive down this country road
I can’t bring myself to go

anywhere close to the speed limit.
I feel like a silver haired lady
peeking over my steering wheel
as I creep along, letting

the cars whiz by me.
I always assume the elderly
go slowly because they’re cautious,
not wanting to hit anyone

or miss the ambulance
racing down the road with siren blaring.
But maybe they’ve figured out
a secret that I’m still trying to learn.

What if driving slowly
is the only way
to live my best life,
to keep from running so fast

that I go right past myself?
Running by the small child inside
who seeks to fill herself with wonder,
passing up the chance for rest,

for play, to slow myself
long enough to notice
how pleasant the rain sounds
dripping onto the roof

of the house next door,
tiny wet whispers tapping
those few remaining leaves
clinging to the maple

in my backyard,
an almost silent thrumming
slowing down my weary soul.
The steady slow chime

of church bells ringing
in the distance, in this moment,
reminding me, I’ve already
been given all that I need.

Ready to go deeper in your mind-body healing? Join us for the mind-body deep dive in September by taking How We Heal Chronic Pain and Fatigue. Get on the waiting list today, registration opens in June! Reach out to us with any questions at howweheal@michellewiegers.com

Five Years of Mind-Body Healing

Five years ago I was newly free of chronic symptoms and went on a hike in the woods with my husband. It was the first time in years I was able to walk that far. When my symptoms were at their worst, I was often homebound, hardly going anywhere except to church or my friend’s house for tea.

I desperately missed the woods so we began to discuss how to get back outdoors. My husband looked up handicap accessible trails in nearby state parks and I followed up with my practitioner’s suggestion that I consider getting a wheelchair to increase mobility.

For my birthday, my husband gave me a mural of a wooded scene that we hung at the head of our bed. “If you can’t get to the woods,” he’d said, “I’ll bring the woods to you.” I spent so much time resting in my bedroom because of chronic fatigue, dizziness and body pain and that tree-filled wall brought me such comfort. (photos in gallery above)

I feel most relaxed and myself when I’m outdoors. Being in the woods awakens my senses with the crisp scent of earth and growing green, chickadees echoing back and forth to each other, the crunch of fallen leaves on the path. All of it helps me feel present and alive, a feeling that felt so distant when I was overcome by symptoms and trapped inside.

This walk in the woods was dreamlike for me. These pictures above can’t fully capture how surreal it felt to be able to use my body again, to go where my body wanted to take me. I was living inside a real life miracle. Neither my husband nor I had believed I could ever be free of the debilitating chronic fatigue, the dizziness of POTS, the swollen and painful feet of CRPS, and the shooting sciatic back pain. During those hardest years, I wasn’t able to walk very far due to full body pain I thought was caused by hEDS or Fibromyalgia. These very physical symptoms and diagnoses felt permanent, and I was a slave to all they demanded because they ruled over me.

But mind-body science, based on Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS) taught by Dr. John Sarno and Dr. Howard Schubiner, among many others, taught me that I had a choice in the matter. There’s a little more to it than that, but the mind-body approach isn’t just another modality that can relieve a few symptoms. Mind-body healing based on cutting edge neuroscience is the pathway forward to fully recovering from very real and debilitating symptoms we are often told are permanent. Stress and repressed emotions affect the body, they are experienced and felt in very real symptoms. But when emotions are repressed, we don’t know they are there, nor do we have a way to process or release them. Emotions get trapped within our bodies, creating a host of chronic symptoms.

There was a time I thought my symptoms would never leave, but I am incredibly thankful to be celebrating five years of freedom! I’m still taking hikes and am amazed at this “second life” I get to live. I can say yes to what I want to be and do and leave the constant worry of symptoms and diagnoses behind. This approach helps me be present to myself, my family and my community. And as I have healed and keep on healing (we’re always on that path!), my creative voice rises up and gets stronger within me. I know this approach works, not just because it has utterly transformed my life, but because I see my brave students and clients healing and transforming as well.

It feels important to pause here today and reflect on how far I’ve come. I am grateful for my long and winding health journey that has brought me to this moment. This healing path that keeps asking me to go deeper and step out to take bigger risks. That’s really what mind-body healing felt like to me at the start– a huge leap of faith. I’m so glad I jumped. I hope you might too.

Are you thinking about taking the mind-body leap?
Get on my September 2022 How We Heal Chronic Pain and Fatigue course waiting list.

Writing Helps Us Heal

I have a friend who is a creative nonfiction writer and professor who says that when she’s writing a new chapter she can’t usually come at it through the front door, but instead she looks for another way in. She recognizes that her creative voice is shy and that approaching it directly doesn’t usually work. In order to access her creativity, my friend tries to find more subtle ways in, as if she’s coming in through the back door, or climbing through an open window. She doesn’t want to scare off creativity before she’s begun.

This gentle approach can be even more important for our emotional selves, especially the deeper parts of us that hold hurt. If we’re alive on this earth, we have gone through trauma. No matter what life was like growing up, there were times when we felt afraid or unsafe. Memories from these experiences stay with us inside of strong emotions we tend to avoid like anger, fear or shame.

As described by the pioneering physician Dr. John Sarno, repressed emotions are usually the reason we struggle with chronic symptoms. Our subconscious brains have determined that difficult emotions are dangerous and that we need to keep them locked away. Emotions get perpetually trapped in our bodies when our brains, set on protecting us, stuff them deep inside.

One way to reduce our symptoms is to release these strong emotions. Similar to my friend’s approach to accessing her creativity, we can think about our emotions like a house within us. Sometimes we’ve already dealt with a traumatic experience through counseling or supportive friends. But talking directly about it can be like going right up to the front door and demanding to be let in. Our subconscious may have allowed us into the living room of this particular wound, but we don’t yet have access to the entire house.

When we have not fully processed our hurt, we are more likely to develop chronic pain. Maybe we live with recurrent migraines or back spasms that always flare when we’re stressed. We can’t imagine what’s causing these symptoms. It could be that we haven’t yet ventured into the upstairs bedroom where deep emotional wounds hide. Or maybe we’ve not been willing to go down into the basement, push through the cobwebs of our memories, in order to reach the whimpering child within.

The truth is, we can access mind-body healing by simply addressing how we handle everyday stress in our lives. But for some of us, including me, we have to take it deeper. By knowing that these old wounds are camped out in our bodies, we can address them with the same kind of gentleness my friend uses when she sits down to write.

Direct force feels unsafe to our tender inner-selves and it triggers our danger signals. So instead, we can knock quietly on the back door of our emotional selves, asking to be let in. This more subtle approach is what I needed in order to continue to heal my physical symptoms. Practicing regular silence and prayer helped me listen for what my body and emotions had to say. Ultimately though, accessing my imagination and intuitive self through writing opened the way into deeper emotional and physical healing.

Showing up regularly to write a few pages about whatever wanted to come out helped me go deeper. It was through Julia Cameron’s simple practice of Morning Pages, taught in her book The Artist’s Way, that I began to access emotions under my conscious awareness. This easy writing practice taught me how to finally stop running away and to deeply listen.

The only rules are to write by hand for three straight pages (or twenty minutes), allowing anything onto the page. Starting early in the day, before checklists and emails dominate our minds, can help us attune to what’s under the surface of our busyness. Editing, correct spelling or grammar isn’t allowed. Neither is writing for anyone else’s eyes.

Through this approach, my spiral notebook became the safest place for my subconscious to show up. On these pages, I learned what life experiences and difficult emotions (like anger and fear) were causing my decades of chronic symptoms. I finally began to glimpse what had felt so threatening to my brain. I didn’t force myself to write about hard topics, but instead I just showed up, listened to my inner-self and refused to censor anything that wanted or needed to be said.

Morning Pages taught me the importance of voicing the unspeakable. To finally listen to and receive the wounded little one within me. It makes sense why these wounded parts of us are so shy. Our subconscious minds are masters of protection, thinking that emotions like anger, fear, shame or grief are the enemies. But if we can begin to use a simple writing exercise to sooth our subconscious minds and unlock the repressed emotions they hold, we can truly help ourselves heal.

Invitations to Write or Reflect:

What might you hear if you were to slow down and listen to your physical or emotional symptoms?
What subtle approaches help you unlock difficult experiences or emotions? (silence, meditation, prayer, writing Morning Pages, movement, journaling)
Is there an image or metaphor that describes what life is like for you inside of chronic symptoms or unhealed wounds?

Instructions for writing Morning Pages:

First thing in the morning, before opening your phone, checking email or speaking to others, find a quiet place where you can be alone to write.
Use a pen and notebook to hand write three pages of stream of conscious writing. Write whatever comes to mind for twenty minutes.
- Writing by hand is a physical movement that helps your body release what you are holding onto. You can type morning pages, but it can be more beneficial to write them out by hand.
Allow whatever comes to your mind out onto the page without censoring or editing.
If you’re fearful of others finding your writing, find a safe place to hide your journal or rip up what you write and throw it away.

If you’re feeling stuck inside of TMS symptoms, I’d love to have you in my next How We Heal Chronic Pain & Fatigue course (starts next week, May 4th)! It is powerful mind-body deep dive and can really help you launch forward in your healing journey. Check out the course details here at this link.

Poetry Helps Me Heal

Poetry helps us heal, especially in a time where we live with such deep unknowns for our lives and for this world. Emily P. Freeman encourages us in a section of her book, A Million Little Ways, to “show up as a poet,” in our lives. In that section, she quotes G. K. Chesterton’s book Orthodoxy:

“Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion….To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”

The practice of accepting everything instead of striving to understand it all can truly be freeing–and much less exhausting! So it is okay to not know, to surrender all we cannot fit inside of our reason and our plans, to instead stretch ourselves out into the unknowns, to surrender and to trust, even to learn to float for a while.

I believe this is also what it takes to step into the unknowns of our stories in order to heal our pain, be it emotional or physical. But fear keeps us on the run. Fear kept me away from so much of myself for over two decades!

What was I so afraid of? I was terrified of finding dark things that I couldn’t handle tucked way back in the closed off, locked up rooms of my story. But that is because I thought I had to understand everything in my mind or even worse, that I might have to relive it all in order to heal. But the truth is I can show up as a poet and accept these areas of my life without needing to work out every detail, knowing it will never be able to fit inside my head anyway. Healing doesn’t require me to relive it all or to fully understand every nook and cranny–what a relief.

As I learned to reverse my pain, I also learned I wanted and needed to create through writing. It was right inside of poetry (and other creative efforts) that I finally allowed myself to walk into that which I feared. Those fears held my body captive for far too long and now I know that my fear was bigger than anything I was actually afraid of.

In healing, we need to find a place to process and even accept our deep emotions. Poetry is one place I do this. So instead of hiding strong emotions in my debilitating sciatica or in any other symptom in my mind or body, they live inside of my writing, which is much better for me!

Are you listening?

Imagine this. You meet a friend for lunch because you want to get her advice about a possible promotion at work. You aren’t sure what to do or even if your work is still a good fit for you. So you start to tell her all about it, but your friend has just checked her phone for the third time and quickly says, “I’m sorry, I’ve just got to respond to this text, it’ll only take a second.” You know she’s not paying attention. All you wanted was for her to listen, to ask a few helpful questions, but instead you end up frustrated.

Now consider this: What if that distracted friend who isn’t really paying attention is you? What if your life, your purpose, your true self has been begging you to listen to all of the possibilities within, but you’re too busy and distracted to notice?

Aren’t you tired of trusting in old patterns that lead you to the same road you’ve been down a hundred times before? Are you feeling like there’s got to be more than this, like you’re missing something that you’ve been looking for? Isn’t it time to break these cycles, time to be set free?

This is where I come in. I can help you get in sync with your true self and purpose in this world. As you listen to your life, you will uncover more than you can imagine. You already have all that you need to move forward right inside of you!

Contact me today to set up a free initial appointment where we can begin to discover your new path to transformation.