We’re all on this challenging and wonderful rollercoaster called life. The question is how to stay curious about the benefits and drawbacks of our conditioning. What was once helpful can now be hindering, leaving us feeling isolated, constricted, and seemingly stuck. I am happy to share lessons learned along the way.

An intense period of losses stopped me in my tracks.

In the midst of my mother’s unforeseen and rapid demise from cancer, I faced my own cancer diagnosis/surgeries and divorce.

Then the COVID pandemic added another curveball, bringing my international work travel to a halt. After decades of working as a freelancer, I suddenly found myself grounded and unemployed, wondering how to move forward.

With new found time and space, I was invited to truly listen to what my body was telling me. I needed rest. It was time to drop “business as usual,” so I could revive from the inside out.

In early 2020, I began studying with Dr. Gabor Maté and Sat Dharam Kaur, learning their trauma-informed somatic approach to therapy. Compassionate Inquiry® looks at the benefits of one’s beliefs and behaviors through the lens of compassion and curiosity. By acknowledging how early wounding lives inside my physical, emotional, mental, and subtle bodies, still fueling behavior, I dove into the emotional origins of physical dis-ease as my ultimate form of recovery.

I’m still amazed, with both humor and horror, by how “successful” I was in life while holding an inaccurate and outdated belief system about myself and the world. I’m not new to questioning and excavating from within, but I didn’t know how much my body was storing both implicit and explicit memories that go back to preverbal days, and even before my time in my mother’s womb.

Burying emotions was a smart survival tactic—and it kept me stuck. To heal, I had to unearth and feel these feelings, not just talk about them. Once that pain was acknowledged and liberated, it no longer had its grasp on me. I could hold the wounds and myself in ways I never knew possible. In reparenting myself, I began to become an emotional adult. This practice is by no means an easy task, but it is an empowering and most worthy one.

What issues might you learn from your tissues? What stories are you telling yourself, and how would you like to rewrite them?