I used personal growth as a drug⁣

Reading book after book, hoping the next one would fulfill me, hoping the next one would fix me⁣

Except I didn’t need to be fixed, I needed to heal⁣ (although I didn’t know it at the time)

Every workout⁣

Every meditation⁣

Every journal sesh⁣

I did to escape myself⁣

Escape from the pain & hurt I was feeling. Escape from the reality of my miserable 9-5. Escape from being a mom, a wife…from being myself

Hating who I was becoming⁣

Who I already was⁣

Blaming all my “problems” on the world around⁣

Never taking ownership of my actions⁣ or responsibility around the fact that the only reason why I felt the way I did was because of the choices I made.

I thought I needed to find a way to cope⁣, to deal with the stresses of everyday life⁣ that everyone around me seemed to handle so well. Why couldn’t I just be like them? Why couldn’t I just be like everyone else?

Not knowing that what was missing, was me⁣

My dreams⁣

My purpose⁣

My passion⁣

My soul craved something, so I decided to go deeper⁣, beyond just wanting to be happy AF⁣ because at that time, I didn’t even know what happy felt like⁣, I didn’t know what happy looked like⁣. I knew what I didn’t want and yet I wasn’t sure what I DID want⁣

So that’s where I started!⁣

Deciding that I was no longer willing to be a victim. I decided that I was no longer willing to just accept the fact that most people work jobs they don’t like, I decided…what was no longer serving me.

I spent so much time playing in the shadows of my fears, my doubts, limiting beliefs and self sabotaging behaviors, all the things that all the books I read didn’t tell me about. Everything I was reading kept telling me to shift my thoughts, that every time I thought about something bad or negative that I needed to change it to something happy.

Energy goes where energy flows so I thought that if I had a negative thought then only negativity would come to me…it was so fucked and so damn wrong!

⁣I had blocked out all things negative in my life, never allowing myself to truly feel the emotions because I didn’t want to feel pain, I didn’t want to hurt. The whole time I was building up these walls of protection I wasn’t just keeping out pain, I was keeping out love too.

⁣I spent a solid decade consuming books, thinking that I had to do certain things in order to feel fulfilled, in order to be successful in life, in my marriage, in trying to build a business and what I realized was that everything I did like everyone else made me feel more broken and lost than what I really was.

Believing that the answer was in those books, I believed that something was wrong with me because I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t happy. So addicted to making sure I did my morning rituals just like the “experts” told me to and I would beat myself up if I missed a day or skipped a step.

Not trusting myself. I didn’t feel comfortable in my own skin let alone my own thoughts & intuition. I knew I had to do something different, I needed to shift.

One day I decided to take all of my vision boards down, tearing them up and tossing them into the garbage, I was done, I was completely over it, over the whole spiritual, personal growth woo woo shit I was doing. I wanted nothing more to do with it because at that point it wasn’t working. It wasn’t working because I hadn’t made it my own.

Letting go & surrendering was the biggest step after I fully accepted myself. Accepting where I was in my life and knowing that it didn’t have to stay that way, I accepted it. I stopped reading books, stopped listening to podcasts and started meditating on my own, no music, no guide, no agenda except to be present, to be still and allow myself to sit for as little or as long as I felt necessary.

Creating my own morning & evening rituals, things I actually enjoyed doing and not just because some book said so. That’s when everything in my life started to shift. My mood shifted, my energy shifted and the weight of the world no longer felt like it was holding me back or holding me down.

The more I learned to openly accept that everything was happening with me, that I was co-creating my life and showing up as the person I wanted to be, the more I felt alive!

While I’m always going to be a work in progress, I get to do it my way. In a way that’s aligned with my core values, a way that lights me up and gets me exited! My daily rituals are something I get to do not something I have to do in order to get through the day. They set the tone for the day.

I no longer look at growth as this thing to distract me from the realities of the world, to numb out and dream of a life I wish I had, I look at it as something I get to create, something I get to experience. No more taking my anger out on my workouts, no more working out just to compensate for my lack of self esteem & body image issues, no more reading books, looking for the answer because the answers are already inside me, no more doing things like everyone else and doing them in a way that feels really good to me.

I hope this inspires you to take a deeper look within yourself…where are you using things to distract, numb out or avoid because you don’t want to feel?

My advice…journal when you feel like journaling

Meditate when you feel like meditating (I promise, it gets easier!)

Move your body to move your body

Get in alignment with your core values and make decisions from that place.