How to Do the Work: Recognize Your Patterns, Heal from Your Past, and Create Your Self

It is painful not to be heard. It is upsetting to be ignored. It is confusing to learn that we must hide our true Selves in order to be loved. Being acknowledged is one of the deepest human needs. If your childhood thoughts or ideas are not “heard,” your mind feels dismissed. If your childhood Self-expression is not “seen,” your soul feels diminish

I was not willing to admit it to myself for a long time. I would have fought you tooth and nail if you suggested that my childhood was less than perfect. This didn’t come just from an idealization of my past; it also came from a culturally ingrained protection of the family unit. Admitting publicly that everything was not all rosy would have been d

As with most of us, many of the habits I learned in childhood, I repeated and carried with me throughout my life. Many of us never stop to think: Is this really me? How many of us find ourselves celebrating holidays the same way we did in childhood without even imagining doing it a different way? How many aspects of your life have you actually chos

Even though consciousness makes us human, most of us are so immersed in our inner world, so unconscious, even asleep, that we aren’t aware that there’s a script continually running through our minds. We believe that script is the true “us,” the Self. But that chatter is just our thoughts. We practice thoughts all day long. You might have stopped at

We all carry unresolved trauma. As we’ve seen, it’s not necessarily the severity of the event itself but our response to it that determines the imprint it makes. Resilience is learned through conditioning; if we didn’t see it modeled by our parent-figures when we were young, we may have never learned it. When we do the work of resolving trauma, we

Every time we make a choice that is outside of our default programming, our subconscious mind will attempt to pull us back to the familiar by creating mental resistance. Mental resistance can manifest as both mental and physical discomfort. It can take the form of cyclical thoughts, such as I can just do this later or I don’t need to do this at all

Healing is a daily event.

The reality is this: few of us have any real connection to who we really are, yet we want others to see through all of our layers of self-betrayal and into our core selves.

When people hear about my whole-person approach to healing, they want to dive right in and meet their inner child, start the reparenting process, do the ego work, remove the trauma. This desire for the quick fix, emblematic of the Western culture in many ways, comes from an understandable want to end the incredible discomfort of living with these w