My Healing Journey - Part 1

In 2017 I found myself driving down the road, hoping a tree would jump out in front of my car.  It wasn’t that I wanted to go off the road and hit a tree. It was that I wanted the choice to be taken from me; I just wanted it done for me. 

I was in the shadow of living.  

The shadow was very dark and deep inside me, but I looked like everything was fine on the surface.

I’d been married for nine years to a really good man.  Together we’d built a world-famous bookstore in Los Angeles, and we’d just finished building out another bookstore in Bend, Oregon.  The latter was what finally broke me.

My former husband is a paraplegic (from a moped vs. car incident when he was 21); he was paralyzed from the waist down when we met.  He was handsome, intelligent, loving, and safe for me.  I chose him because he was a man of character and quality, and I found love, security, and safety with him.

We’d gone through IVF to conceive and were abundantly blessed with our daughter and son three years apart.  When I was pregnant with our son, I felt led to move us to Oregon (my birth state) to be close to my family, so I’d have support the second time around with a brand new baby.  We’d been living in the house we’d bought for less than a week when Soren made his entrance ten days early. 

Josh (my ex-husband) spent two weeks of each month in Los Angeles to run the bookstore while I was home with the kids.  We were fortunate enough to be able to hire an incredible nanny to help me with the kids; she was an angel in human form for me. But even with help, I was struggling to get healthy. 

Since our daughter was born, I’d been so depleted that I just kind of ”made it” through the days and weeks (and months and years). I may have been almost manic, just functioning on a cocktail of adrenaline and cortisol.  I was so fucking tired, and both kids got me up every 2-3 hours at night for years.  

Over the years, our marriage became an arrangement.  I had my roles, and he had his. The bookstore took priority.  We cared for each other and loved each other but weren’t “in love” with each other.  Neither of us was harming the other, at least not intentionally.  We just each focused on our babies - his was the bookstore, mine were the children.

One day he told me he’d seen that a bookstore in our small town was for sale, and he was thinking of buying it to open a second store.  My immediate response without hesitation was “NO.”  I intuitively knew it was a hard “no” for me.  But he talks a good game, and we ended up buying it thinking it would be a place he could go to do his full days remotely running the L.A. store while helping the few people who might come into this tiny store. 

I was talked into it because it would be a place where I could have an identity outside of being a mother to two young children.  I longed for something beyond being a mother, homemaker, and my husband’s employee.

I dove into the renovation of this new bookstore with a good friend.  We worked for weeks, often 12-16 hours a day, building this bookstore from scratch.  I felt like I was out of my body. My eyes were glassy, and my pupils were wonky. I couldn’t sleep at night because I was so wired. My body was stressed to the max.  When we finally opened the store, and I had a moment to pause, I said, “I feel like I’m dying,” and immediately called my doctor.

When I saw her and explained what I was feeling, she ordered a bunch of tests to get an idea of what was happening, but at that moment, she knew something was really off.  When the tests came back in, we learned I was halfway to adrenal failure and just shy of being hospitalized.  

I was just dumping cortisol.  I was so jacked up.  I felt like I had no control over myself internally.  I couldn’t do anything to really make myself feel better.  I felt “fritzy,” like I was a live wire that had been cut, and I was lying in a puddle.  And the hard part about adrenal fatigue is that it takes a long-ass time to heal it.  There is no pill to take, and you’re all done.  Adrenal fatigue is so comprehensive in its reach that I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.

There I was with a broken body, a new bookstore to run (turns out it was busy enough that Josh couldn’t get any work done to run the L.A. store, so I was now running it), swinging wildly between anxiety and depression, in a platonic marriage with a “ghost” of a husband (his word, not mine), and two beautiful young children who needed their mom, trying to figure out how to survive.

I was often folded on top of myself weeping on the kitchen floor. My legs would just go out from under me. This was my rock bottom.

I was physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually out of alignment - to the point that I’d wanted a tree to jump in front of my car.  I knew that if I didn’t find my way out, there was a real chance my kids would lose their mother.

I had to go inward, into the dark, to find the light of myself and heal.

I already knew what I’d been running from, and it was finally catching up, and if I didn’t surrender to it - it would take my life.  I needed to allow this thing I knew was there to just simply exist - I knew I needed to end my marriage.

Everything I’d hung my worth on was crumbling because I’d chosen things from my wounds.  

I chose my husband out of deep wounds (that I wasn’t conscious of - they were securely stored in my subconscious where I wasn’t aware of them). I chose him to keep me safe, but that also meant small.

I chose my children because of the societal and religious programming that: you get married and have kids.  Side note - I choose them now because they’re the souls I was meant to steward and I can’t imagine my life without these two teachers.

I chose to push myself far beyond what was healthy for me because I was terrified of being a burden.

I chose to remain in my victimhood because the “whoa is me” story was familiar to me; it was programmed in.

The Healing

I allowed myself to recognize that I needed to end my marriage.  I just let that truth hang out in the air above me for months.  I didn’t fly into action on it.  I just needed to get comfortable with it.  I needed to look at it from all angles. It was a truth that had first come to me just a year into our marriage, and I refused to allow it into my space.  

I had to push myself just to trust this inner voice that was guiding me to end my marriage - this one, huge thing.  I’d been ignoring and silencing my intuition for so long that I wasn’t sure I could trust it, but what choice did I have?  I either trusted that it was leading me to the next right thing or I stayed where I was and faced dying (spiritually, emotionally, and eventually physically).  I chose to trust it.

In trying to wrap my head and heart around getting divorced, I mentioned to my closest friends that I was thinking about it, and even though they loved me, they weren’t fully in support of it.  So I was on my own and needed to pave this way for myself. 

I found a therapist to help me navigate the coming crisis, and she was brilliant. I saw her twice a week for a year before I took any action on my divorce.  We worked on a lot of my wounds through Life Span Integration therapy, which at the time, I thought was incredible.  It felt amazing to have a woman help me go through the depths of this kind of transition. She held space for me, spoke into me, held my vision for me, and genuinely saw me.

Talking to Josh about ending our marriage felt like an out-of-body experience.  It was so energetically powerful that it fried my cellphone, which was about 10 feet away from where we were talking.  There’s a lot to say about how I went about my divorce, which I’ll put into its own post because it’s too precious to try to do here. What I’ve shared here are the broad strokes of what led up to the beginning of my healing journey.

A month or two after I told Josh I was ending our marriage; I was at a conference with two close friends.  We’d gone to hear Liz Gilbert and Martha Beck teach on how to live a creative life.  At one point, Martha had us do a little exercise by pulling up a loving memory and feeling it as though we were reliving it.  

That exercise changed the course of my life.

This energy hack was gifted to me because I needed to connect with love (the actual energy itself), and it couldn’t have anything to do with another person. I needed to connect to divine love, infinite love, and I did right there in that conference room with a few hundred strangers.  And then I did it every day and have done so for over three years. 

This exercise became the cornerstone of the new foundation I was building for the life I was creating out of my wisdom, not my wounds. This was the first baby step I was able to take into my new life (even though it was still early days in my divorce); this was how I anchored into what I wanted going forward.

This Align with Love hypnosis audio is the first one I created because I know how profoundly beautiful life can be as a result of anchoring into Love. It has the power to change your life.  If you’re deeply aligned in your life already, and things are incredible, it’ll just amplify what you’ve already got going on.  If you’re out of alignment like I was, it’ll allow you to align with what your life is meant to feel like.

Aligning myself to love each morning has profoundly impacted my life and I knew I needed to create a way to share it.  This audio is what I initially learned from Martha and how I’ve evolved it through my years of energetic study and training as a hypnotist.

This is just the beginning of my healing journey…