Finally Hitting Gold — Discovering Safety and Peace Through My Body and Nervous System

I grew up in a home where I rarely felt safe. Each day carried its own tension. Life always felt difficult to navigate, and to fit in with others. I’ve always been sensitive and wished the world were more loving — yet I also knew I didn’t really know how to receive love. I believed that friendship or romance required me to put my own needs second. Over time, that pattern led to depression, addiction, and difficulty working.

As far back as I can remember, I’ve contemplated the meaning of life. As a child, I felt connected to something spiritual in nature. My greatest peace came from being alone — playing, swimming, or sitting high in the backyard tree, simply being. Over the years, to understand my sensitivity and pain, I threw myself into spirituality and self-help with great intensity, eventually becoming a social worker and psychotherapist in my quest to discover how true healing and living to our full potential could be possible. Despite all this, I still struggled with life and love, and I often felt that the world continued to be harsh and draining.

I discovered “Inner Child Work” which taught me that I could talk to the child part of me — the one who always told the truth about how she felt. I noticed how my adult self often minimized or avoided uncomfortable emotions, yet my child self would reveal her vulnerability, her hurt, and what she truly needed when I took the time to believe she existed and tried to communicate with her. Like most children, she just wanted to be held, loved unconditionally, and seen as the amazing being she is. I began giving her the messages I had needed to receive in childhood.

This process helped me restore the love that had been missing in my early years and even begin to rewrite my life’s story. Yet I still found life difficult and strangely lacking.

And then I discovered, finally, the missing piece: my body did not feel safe. It was holding onto all the fear and anxiety I had accumulated through the years — and continued to accumulate each day. I began to understand my body as a communication device for who I really am — the vehicle that could show me how to feel safe and loved from the inside out. I realized that the body is the primary part of the self that holds our sense of safety in this world. It is always working to preserve our life, and emotional safety is part of that mission. It took great sensitivity to begin listening to my nervous system — to discover what it had been holding, and to realize that simply becoming more aware of it allowed me to connect with everything I had once resisted to finally feel unafraid and become whole.

I’ve come to know, first hand, that true healing and true living can’t happen in the mind alone. They happen in the breath, in the skin, in the slow return to your own rhythm.

When you check in and come back to your body — especially when you feel out of rhythm — you re-establish safety.

From that safety, everything else begins to realign.

I don’t offer steps to enlightenment or systems to follow.

I share what I’ve learned through experience — that the body itself is the doorway.

When we stop managing and start listening, the nervous system becomes our greatest teacher.

It knows how to bring us back to wholeness, fulfillment, and the quiet joy of simply being alive.

Embodiment, to me, is not a practice to master; it’s the end of striving.

It’s what remains when you finally feel safe to live inside yourself–

fulfilled in the moment.

From that safety, love and clarity begin to move on their own.

This is where I live now. Not in a perfected version of myself. Just in the realness of the moment. I’m not trying to escape it anymore.

After years of consuming insights from countless teachers and traditions, I finally found what I had been searching for when I connected with my body. I discovered that you can’t truly find your soul until you find your body first — because the body brings you into the present moment, and the present moment is the only place where Presence actually lives.

My writings, on this site, are one way I meet myself—and maybe it helps others do the same. Some of my poems and reflections may question the systems we come from—family, religion, work, success. That doesn’t mean I don’t love parts of what I came from. But I’m also willing to look at how those systems shaped me, and where they asked me to go quiet or be smaller than I am. That’s the part I’m most interested in now—what happens when we stop shrinking.