In 2016 I found myself on the banks of the Lago Di Argentina in Patagonia, barefoot, walking into the water, praying to God, BEGGING to feel something, anything. I like to refer to it as my Eat Pray Love moment. Calling out to a power higher than me, asking for guidance, for connection, hoping something would hear my plea and rescue me from the numbness I had been feeling.
I wrote a list of everything I wanted to manifest in a man, my soulmate, my twin flame, and then wrote out a list of ‘the woman I wanted to become’, with the thinking that, since I didn’t know who I was, I could surely create her. (Looking back over these lists recently, I realised that they completely mirrored one another- but that is another story!)
In December 2014, I ended a steady, long term relationship with a lovely man, who loved me deeply. We couldn’t communicate. I felt like I couldn’t express my feelings, and didn’t know how to even articulate my desires through fear my needs wouldn’t be met. I chose to walk away because something inside me was begging for more. What that was, I didn’t know, but I knew there had to be more to life. I had this deep yearning for purpose and adventure and a love that was profound and cosmic and earth-shattering that pushed me to grow beyond my edges. I chose to abandon safety and security in the hopes that I could find what I was looking for. Following this constant knowledge that there was more for me than to be a housewife in the town I grew up in, with two kids, and a longing for more, that would get louder and louder, which is where I feared I was heading.
Honestly, I think I went into shock. After years in a relationship, putting him and his needs and desires first, through my learnt patterns of self-sacrificing for love, to a point where I had totally abandoned myself and didn’t have a clue who I was. If you’d have asked me what I liked, or disliked, I wouldn’t have been able to name one thing. I was lost. I felt like I had no purpose. No passion. I felt disconnected from my body, my soul and my heart.
Realising this scared the hell out of me so I spent the next few years, travelling the world with work, numbing to these feelings that only magnified my unhappiness by partying, drinking, drugs and blowing all my money on clothes and adventures.
What I didn’t realise at the time was that through attempting to numb those feelings, they were only going to get louder. I could only run for so long.
Adding weight to the emotional side of things, through training as a dancer and working in the modelling industry since the age of 18, I had learnt that my body was a tool and my means to money. My self-worth was literally attached to a price tag. I was pitted against other women, constantly compared and comparing myself to others. “I am not beautiful enough/tall enough/skinny enough [insert any other criticism]” Caught in a toxic cycle of trying to be good enough, and learning to scrutinise my body and force it to fit into a standard of beauty that wasn’t my own. Telling my body day in day out that it wasn’t good enough, caused me to disconnect from her, refusing to listen when she needed rest or love. It was my own mental prison.
I was dipping my toe into spirituality since the break-up, learning more about all things mystical and manifestation, but I was missing one crucial point, the embodiment. Numbing myself was blocking me from vibrating at the frequency I needed to call in the things that I REALLY wanted. I became great at surface level manifestation, calling in trips of a lifetime, and wonderful soul sisters, but none of it was MINE. It was always someone outside of me offering me what I wanted, rather than calling in my power and cultivating it for myself!
I bounced from man to man, attaching and projecting my ideas and ideals onto them, hoping that perhaps THEY could make me happy. Each relationship ended, plunging me into varying states of depression and dismay, questioning what I had done wrong.
Always thinking it was something wrong with me, something I had done. And I had. I had neglected myself. I had attached to the stories that were playing out in my physical world, that were trying to encourage me to focus inward, on my inner world, and cultivating everything that I was looking for in my human experience, and embodying it MYSELF.
So that is the foundation of my journey, numb to feeling, disconnected to embodied, self hate to self-love.
