Healing Is a Gateway Drug to Awakening

I wanted to lose weight. I had no idea how much else I was carrying.

I wasn’t looking for a spiritual awakening. If I’m honest, I just wanted to lose some of the weight I had gained.

I had already learned to live with the migraines, panic attacks, random rashes, heartburn and thyroid issues. But once I started gaining weight, that I could not deal with.

I could tolerate a fairly long list of things going wrong in my body, but needing bigger pants was where I drew the line.

I went to doctor after doctor, trying to figure out why I was gaining so much weight so rapidly and how to make it stop. Personal trainers, nutritionists, meal plans, diet pills—you name it, I had done it.

I really just didn’t want to be fat. That’s uncomfortable to admit now, but it’s the truth about where I started. I wasn’t trying to connect with Spirit or discover my gifts. I wanted my body to cooperate.

By that point, I had come to believe that the unhealed trauma I was carrying was showing up in my body. So I figured if I started working through it, I could finally lose the weight. Maybe I’d get rid of some of the other symptoms, too, although those were honestly at the bottom of my list. The migraines could stay. The weight needed to go.

I had no idea that the journey to heal my body would end up changing the way I experienced my entire life.

And, news flash: I never did lose the physical weight.

What I began to lose was the emotional weight I had been carrying since childhood.

The belief that I was alone. That I would always be alone. That no one was ever going to show up for me, take care of me or support me. That I had to do everything on my own.

These weren’t just thoughts that occasionally passed through my head. They were beliefs I had built my life around. Being strong was what I knew how to do. Needing someone, and trusting that they might actually be there, was a different story.

Then there was everything I had been carrying around the death of my son, Connor: anger, shame, guilt, rage, grief and despair.

I knew I had lost my son. Of course I knew that. But knowing what had happened and allowing myself to feel everything that came with it were two very different things.

After Connor died, I didn’t let Noah see me cry. I thought I was protecting him. I wanted him to know that life could go on, that we could still find happiness. I thought seeing me fall apart would scare him.

So I held it together. I was very practiced at that.

Years later, while meditating in my bedroom closet—yes, my closet; it was the darkest, quietest place in the house—a wave of grief hit me so hard I couldn’t sit up straight. I slumped forward and sobbed. The heaviness was physical. I remember being afraid that I might never come out of it.

But I did.

I had finally let myself feel something I had been holding inside for years.

As I started working through those feelings and dismantling those old beliefs, my body began to feel different. I stopped getting migraines and panic attacks. The rashes became occasional rather than something I was constantly dealing with. Now, when one shows up, I tend to take it as a reminder to ask myself what I’m stressed about. Have I actually told anyone how I’m feeling, or have I defaulted to my standard operating mode of holding it all in?

That was a big change for someone whose usual approach had been to keep going and deal with everything herself.

The weight, however, stayed.

Eventually, I began to consider that learning to love myself in this body might be part of my healing, too. I had spent so much time trying to change how I looked. Now I was trying to learn how to love and accept myself the way I was, for who I was.

I’m still learning.

But something funny started happening as I let go of the beliefs I had carried for most of my life. I began to feel lighter. One by one, it was as though I was removing bricks from a wall I had been dragging around with me.

There was room for light in places that had felt dark for so long.

And I started having experiences I couldn’t explain.

I would receive information or have a knowing about people, things and places without understanding where it came from. I had experiences that felt like visitations from my ancestors and Connor. I began having what I understood to be out-of-body experiences. During some of them, I even experienced what felt like healings from unidentified beings.

Some of these things I had never even heard of before. I didn’t know anyone who was having them, and there I was, trying to make sense of what was happening.

This was a fairly significant detour from the meal plan.

I began looking at the world with wonder and awe. I became deeply curious about what was actually happening around us, about what we could feel and experience beyond what we could see.

And I felt connected to myself again. To Spirit. To who I believe I am beneath everything I had been carrying: a divine being of love.

That is why I say healing is a gateway drug to awakening. That’s how it happened for me. I came into this wanting to change my body, and somewhere along the way, my whole understanding of life began to change.

When I was at the Monroe Institute, one of the other participants told me about a dream he and his wife had both had. He said they had dreamed of the same place and had the exact same experience. He wanted me to interpret it.

My feeling was that the significance wasn’t necessarily in interpreting each symbol. Perhaps the experience itself was the message: something to get him to open his eyes and consider a possibility he wouldn’t have considered before.

A little seed of curiosity.

He could have brushed it off. Instead, he leaned in. He told me it was one of the reasons he had come to Monroe.

I understood that. So much of my own journey has come from being curious enough to keep looking.

But curiosity has been easier with some experiences than others. A meaningful dream or a feeling of connection with Connor is something I want to explore. Something that frightens me asks a little more of me.

Recently, a woman I was doing a dream interpretation for had a dream that, in my interpretation, was clearly telling her she was a healer and was meant to do this work. When we talked about it, she told me she had learned Reiki and started working with people, but stopped after having frightening experiences she described as attacks by dark entities.

What fascinated me was that I had started having similar experiences when I began doing healing work with people, too. But we had interpreted them differently. She took them as a reason to stop. To me, they felt like something trying to scare me away from doing something positive.

I know the work I do has brought healing and light into people’s lives. So my feeling is, why would I let something that feels dark keep me from doing that? I took those experiences as an attempt to discourage me. To me, that meant I was on the right path.

They frightened me, and occasionally still do. But I’ve decided I won’t let that fear keep me from doing work I believe I’m meant to do and that I’ve seen help other people.

I grew up doing things scared and trying to be brave. Much of that came from having to cope with my upbringing. It wasn’t something I should have had to learn so young, but being used to doing things scared has sometimes helped me keep going.

I can be afraid and still be curious. I can take time to understand an experience without immediately shutting the whole thing down.

When something unexpected happens now—a synchronicity, a knowing, a dream that stays with me—I try to pay attention. I feel grateful for it. I don’t always know what it means, but I want to leave room to find out.

I would never have expected the experiences I’ve had. I certainly couldn’t have planned them.

I don’t think you have to understand every experience right away. I certainly haven’t. In fact, I often find that my understanding of an experience changes over time as I learn and grow.

If something happens that you can’t explain, maybe give yourself a little time before brushing it off. Be curious. Ask questions. You can explore what it means without having to decide immediately what you believe. And always trust your own intuition over anyone else’s.

For me, leaning in has opened up a way of experiencing life that I didn’t know existed. It has made me wonder what else I’ve missed, what else is possible, and what these experiences might be trying to teach me about this thing called life.

I’m still finding out.

And to think, I just wanted to lose weight.

Instead, I began letting go of the belief that I was alone, that I had to be strong all the time, that no one would ever show up for me. I began allowing myself to feel the grief I had been carrying. And I found a connection to myself and to Spirit that I hadn’t known was possible.

The physical weight is still here. But I don’t feel like I’m carrying everything by myself anymore.

Has healing opened something unexpected for you?

Another thread from my heart to yours.