It was always there within me– the want to heal, to help other people heal–calling me forth, making me look to the moon, asking it for answers to my yearning, my desire to be connected and my want to eradicate suffering in others, but I ignored it. Instead of embracing my healing nature, I ran towards the illusion of cool.
I had always longed to be the vacant girl who dresses perfectly and is admired purely for her beauty and her too cool for school air, but that wasn’t me.
I was a girl who felt deeply and openly and wanted others to feel too. Instead of becoming a cigarette smoking, cocaine doing shell of a girl, I spent my days seeking my purpose rather than my next high. I didn’t want a fix from the outside I wanted one that made my soul sing and my heart soar.
Yet, still, I fought the call. I feared it. I wrote fiction, creating characters like the girls I longed to be. All while practicing yoga, spending time healing myself, and helping others do the same, but I hadn’t truly committed. And as a result my life was stagnant.
And then one summer day last year, after over a decade of yoga practice and nearly that in teaching, I finally answered the call.
My friend and I lay on the grass in Central Park staring up at the sky. The beauty of world overcame me. I closed my eyes and felt layers of pain shed from my body while tears flowed down my face. In my quietest voice I said, “I’m free.”
It was that moment of freedom that allowed me to let go of my desire to live in the darkness of my tortured soul. I shed its pain, and I stepped fully into my light.
I fought this call as a healer for many years. It wasn’t who I wanted to be. I thought about it too much and related to the darkness too deeply, but it was when I embraced my darkness and my pain that I realized it had actually created my light.
If I hadn’t been in pain I wouldn’t know how to alchemize that pain into light, into love. If I hadn’t been in pain and practiced healing myself then I wouldn’t know how to help others heal too.
Photo Credit: Melissa LaVoie
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