Looking back further…

I spent my teenage and young adult years desperately dimming my light and avoiding being seen, while at the same time “achieving” in the best way I knew how. I scrambled, I did the dance, the dog and pony show – good grades, college, respectable job in the big city of Manhattan.

BUT every now and then, I turned toward the voice I had known all my life and LISTENED. And sometimes, I followed the breadcrumbs. And sometimes I really had no choice, the voice was so loud and definitive – DO THIS. This voice led me to all the exquisite gifts in my life – a career and life change in my mid-twenties, which led to finding my soulmate, a world-traveling adventure, a passion career and my precious children.

However, most of the time, I feared this voice with a visceral discomfort. I dismissed it, pulled away, suppressed. I ignored the messages I received, and moved through my life by sheer force of will, my divine spirit in tatters dragged along behind me like an abandoned and once-beloved childhood blanket. I avoided my internal world at all costs. While so many things in my life fell into place during this time, there was this simmering of soul-sucking numbness. My body responded and the cascade of physical symptoms piled on – chronic fatigue, hormonal imbalances and neurological dysfunctions. Using my innate stubbornness – otherwise known as sheer force of will – I found healing for my body that restored me to functionality.

In 2013, my life as I knew it ended.

It ended in a paradoxical twist of a spontaneous, mind-blowingly beautiful metaphysical experience, followed a few months later by my young son’s descent into a world of debilitating and mysterious illness. Life for our family became surreal — it was as though we had departed “Planet Earth” and lived on “Planet Fear.” Everything fell away, there was only desperation, survival and a crushing mourning for a life that no longer existed.

My family journeyed through this no-man’s-land for over three years. Together, and separate. My son had his own journey, as did my husband, my daughter and myself.

For me, I existed in terror for my son’s crumbling health. With a vice-like grip, I tried to hold on to a life that slipped through my fists like water. I lived in a near constant sensation of desperation to GET OUT of my body. For a long time, I could not see a path forward, I could not bear another second of the living we were experiencing.

And then, two years into my son’s illness, my beautiful boy confessed he was losing the desire to live. In that moment, I felt as though I stood at the edge of a great precipice. Deep within, I felt a loosening and an unclenching. The softness and whispers of surrender seeded and bloomed as I relinquished control. And under this strange new acceptance, our family began to knit together again, the pain of my son’s illness woven into our new state of being. I turned toward my inner world and engaged in a delicate and tentative dialog with the voice I had muted for so long.

Within a year, the voice I had so often shunned offered an answer, a blessed gift of the possibility of recovery for my son. I said YES — and pieces of the puzzle dropped into place. Together, our family discovered miraculous healing for my son that shocked not only us, but his long list of doctors. Many years later, I am still mining the lessons, and as I continue to move through renewal, I am still extracting the gifts from this dark night of the soul. I witnessed the embodiment of self empowerment bloom in my son, and in myself, through the power of neural retraining systems. I became exquisitely aware of the boundless gifts of life, and what it means to make choice after choice, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute.

I’ve discovered there’s a powerful alchemy - a beautiful duality - in making intentional choices to step outside self-imposed and societal boundaries to look deep within ourselves, while at the same time utilizing and harnessing structures and tools that are aligned with a deeper sense of meaning and purpose. I’ve used this powerhouse duality to empower profound shifts in my life and in my career, and have discovered a deep clarity of purpose that supports me in courageous, clear-headed, laser-focused decisive action.

I WANT THIS FOR YOU, TOO!