From Sabotage to Empowerment: My Journey to Radical Self-Love

Twelve years ago, I walked the streets of Chicago, commuting to my psychology internship in the middle of a polar vortex, freezing wind biting my face. Though I was finishing my last semester of college and going through the ropes, the number one thing on my mind was how I would get my next drink. Drinking was the only thing I cared about. 

But I knew that there was more to life than this. I felt a painful longing for that life.

There had to be more than getting up in the morning, going to work, enduring loud, incredibly cold commutes and sensory overload, feeling anonymous but hoping not to disappoint anyone, and feeling like no matter what I did, it wasn’t good enough. 

My connection to humanity felt fractured. I knew there was an inherent connection among us, but I just couldn’t see past the veil to the Truth I yearned for. Everything that should have been 3-D felt utterly flat. It was incredibly frustrating. 

So I drank. It became my crutch. 

Several months later, on a day trip to meet a traveling guru, I had a breakthrough experience, during which all the veils covering me were temporarily lifted. The world became extra colorful and I felt Joy. My open heart connected easily with everyone, even those who drove past me as I walked buoyantly back to the train station.

This, I thought, is what life should be. 

This, I thought, is the missing piece. 

But, this revelatory feeling was short-lived. The come-down devastated me. Back to 2-D. Back to blandness, constant anxiety, and self-deprecation. 

But I had a goalpost. Not long after, I quit drinking and determined to work toward making that magical way of being my default state. 

The chance to focus more deeply on this occurred a couple years later. I was working a desk job and again felt the pull that said, “find something more. There has to be more to this existence. There has to be more to me.” I applied to a meditation school, iamHeart, which my job allowed me to pay for, and began a two-year journey of exploring the depths of emotion in deep meditation. I learned about the importance of emotion, how it ties all together. How longing provides the direction that determines our purpose. I stopped craving alcohol. I learned to regulate my emotions, redirect and transmute anxiety and doubt. Though these still existed, they were much more manageable. I felt confident enough to move to Colorado and pursue a degree in counseling, something I had been wanting to do for years. 

However, I still held myself, and life, at arm’s length. I held myself back. I felt deep, unremitting shame, and I didn’t know why. 

Learning iamHeart’s energy work, Hurqalya, toward the end of grad school, was difficult for me. I felt too impure, too tainted to let myself truly enjoy the healing work that felt so natural and fulfilling to me. Though I learned about self-love, talked about it to clients, and tried to practice it myself, it took me several years to realize:

I had no idea what self-love actually meant. 

I didn’t know what it actually felt like. 

In fact, I constantly engaged in self-sabotage. I played small. I dismissed myself as being inherently incapable and unworthy of the things I desired for my life. I held the belief somewhere that life was a cruel joke; that the object of my longing for fulfillment – to live in abundance, to feel and radiate undeniable love, peace, and purpose and help others attain that for themselves – was actually inaccessible to me. 

I still secretly hated myself. After all this time. 

My finances had been suffering, and I was barely making ends meet. I couldn’t work as much as I had intended because every month, I would become incapacitated by intense depression. Each month felt like walking along a knife’s edge, and I would just barely come through it intact. I felt no hope for the future and no point to my existence. Even with the meditation tools I had learned, life was a struggle, and my ability to meditate stagnated because of the intense and mysterious, unresolvable pain I would feel. 

I have immense gratitude for my mom, who learned an intuitive clearing technique that I now use on a regular basis. I worked with her intensely for over a year, clearing energetic block after block, clearing and updating false beliefs, removing ghosts, entities, and gadgets (I’ll talk more about these in future posts). 

The last several months were literally life-changing for me. I know that can be an overused, hyperbolic statement, but I mean every word. 

We explored several of my most relevant past lives in detail. It was intense. It was painful. The unthinkable trauma I had experienced had been stored in my nervous system and needed resolution. I re-experienced much of it viscerally and emotionally, and I couldn’t have processed it without my mom’s enduring support and my implementation of what I practice as a counselor: Internal Family Systems (I’ll explain more about this in another post).

This is how I learned true self-love. 

With this process my mom and I developed from our combined trainings, I was not only able to realize that many of the harmful beliefs I held about myself were actually internalizations of what happened to me, I was also able to feel these truths. 

I felt, on a core level, the sweetness and love that these past selves I had been holding at arm’s length my entire life actually possessed. I could love them. In both my inner and outer world, I could see these selves in their inherent wholeness, after so much processing. 

Some even became my guides, of a sort. They are me, whole and capable. I am me, whole and capable. 

And I can honestly say now: I love myself. Deeply and completely. Radically. Even under stress. Even in utter uncertainty. And it keeps developing, growing, forming something new. I become and live into a new version of myself every day. New behaviors and beliefs I never thought would stick have become more natural. I’ve helped clients achieve some of this. But I never truly believed I could. And I did. 

I have steps to true self-love laid out. They’re clearer to me now. 

And my sense of purpose has never been clearer. 

If I, someone who has habitually played small my entire life and never truly believed I was capable of accomplishing much can move to such a state of self-love and empowerment, I believe anyone can. 

If this is your wish, the desire that wants to move you forward, it would be my honor to walk with you on your journey. 

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