How I became a healer

In an instant—everything changed.

It was a Friday afternoon in May 2015 and I was riding my bike from work to an appointment. 

I felt the breeze cool me on an unusually warm afternoon in San Francisco. I had just come back from an amazing personal trip to South Korea and Japan and from a week teaching transformational leadership to a group of 50 college students. 

Five months prior I had graduated from my yoga teacher training and was teaching yoga, which became a new passion of mine. I was feeling uplifted and energized after what felt like a big, transformational year and huge adjustment coming out of a 6.5 year long-term relationship, which ended abruptly and left me with a huge hole in my heart. I finally felt in this moment that I had built my life back up and was so full of life feeling ready to take on a new adventure. 

And then out of nowhere, I car door opened and I was flown off my bike. Before I could realize it, I was in the middle of the street and my belongings and bike were scattered throughout a busy road. 

I had no idea, in that moment, that my life would change forever. 

Or even more shockingly, just how much it would change…This one event changed my approach of how I would live life and what brought me to do what I'm doing now in my life. 

 My injuries were severe and had me out of work for 6 months and with a long recovery process. I searched out all the healing modalities I could to heal my body, mind, and spirit. I had extreme vertigo so any stimulation was too much for me. I would wake up in the mornings and the bed would be spinning. I couldn't read, practice yoga, listen to music, or watch any of my favorite Netflix shows. 

So I did two things. 

The first thing I did is I sat down on my cushion and meditated. First I started with 5 minutes, then it gradually increased to 10, then 20, then 30 minutes a days. I started going to meditation classes and diving deep into the practice of meditation. It helped heal my brain injury and the extreme vertigo that often kept me from social activities and the life I used to lead. 

The second thing I did was I learned how to watercolor paint. And I taught myself. I watched one YouTube video, because that’s about as much stimulation my brain could take, and picked up a brush, dabbed it in water and this beautiful violet color and began to paint. The first thing I painted was a hummingbird. I continued to paint daily and it gave me the healing antidote to carry me through those long 6 months of recovery. 

What I learned about myself through these two healing activities was how resilient we are in the face of life’s obstacles. Now I had already had a number of experiences before this moment, so my resilience muscle was pretty supple and ready. And I did have the choice to throw my hands up in the air and wallow in my own sorrowful state. Instead, I thought of the things I could do that support my healing while also keeping me occupied and stimulated, especially given it was a brain injury. While your brain needs to heal it’s also important for it to stay active, so it needs to right amount of stimulation that doesn’t overwork it. 

This experience of healing allowed me to slow down, to get present, and truly heal from a lifetime of trauma that had been stuffed away. 

I learned the art of going slow and giving myself grace. 

I learned how to be with my pain, how to grieve the life I lost, the body I lost. 

I learned how to ask for support and lean on community to lift me up. 

I learned that while this body is impermanent, the spirit is resilient. 

I learned new ways to be and discover within myself. 

I learned how to adapt my yoga practice and how accessible this practice really is. 

It was during this time that I realized I wanted to support others in their own healing. It became clear to me that I was to support others in their own rising up journey, in their discovering their own resilience, and how they too could rise from the ashes like a Phoenix. 

That experience led me to into healing modalities that I now share and offer to others—energy and sound healing, life coaching, and yoga and mindfulness practices. I’m grateful for that life-changing day, despite the rocky journey I took along the way.