What Do Drugs and Full Moon Circles Have in Common?
My healing journey began in earnest when I was 40. Older versions of me would say it started in my late 20s when I found myself in the metaphysical section of a small bookstore in Chicago and picked up a copy of Ask and It Is Given. I had heard about manifesting, but didn’t know much about it. The energetic pull to the book was too strong to ignore, and I devoured the entire book within days. This was 2007, when spirituality was still relatively woo-woo, but it spoke to my soul, and it was the beginning of a well-intentioned, yet misguided healing journey.
I feel like something is wrong with me. Maybe following this path is how I can fix myself.
Over the next year, I started practicing yoga. I had a highly anxious personality and chronically overachieved at work, so yoga was a safe space to slow down and breathe. I started out in an advanced class because it was the one my friend Shelly went to, and I was too scared to go to the beginner’s class alone. It was a 90-minute hot vinyasa class that, despite regulating my breathing, felt like torture because it was so damn hot and almost every single pose was too hard and painful for me. But I went week after week because overachieving felt safer than slowing down, and, hey, I was definitely not a quitter.
I don’t really like hot yoga, but I enjoy actually taking time to breathe since my anxiety usually sucks the wind out of me. If I do more of it, maybe then I will heal.
In the summers, I would practice beach yoga on North Avenue Beach along Lake Michigan. Being aligned in nature was soothing to the point where it was addicting, and I went as much as possible, reaching for the feeling of peace and serenity that I felt in the sand of North Avenue Beach as I watched the sun rise over Lake Michigan in a much easier, way less sweaty yoga practice.
I feel at peace in nature. This is my escape.
Yet, despite my life looking successful on paper on the outside, I still felt empty and unfulfilled on the inside, so I doubled down on “fixing” myself and escaping the painful feelings. I read countless self-help books. I learned about the healing properties of crystals. I learned how to manifest and release with the cycles of the moon. I tried other types of yoga classes that incorporated meditation and healing modalities. They all provided short-term feelings of happiness and fulfillment I was craving, but nothing was long-lasting, and, like a junkie, I would quickly move on to the next thing to get a hit of spiritual dopamine.
At one point during a difficult time with a toxic relationship, I was desperate for fast healing. I had heard about a Buddhist temple in the city, so I immediately went to the next available service. There was a lot of sitting cross-legged on a cushion, which would cause my legs to fall asleep and be in excruciating pain. There was a lot of chanting that I knew nothing about, which caused a lot of shame. It felt like the service was never going to end.
After this failed attempt at emotional pain relief finally ended, I walked back to my car that was parked on the street in front of a meat market, feeling defeated and broken. But I didn’t know what to do about it, so I continued with the dysfunctional relationship because I was too afraid to be alone, and went to yoga and talked to the moon to cope with the emotional distress. The more I tried to “do” and “fix” the more my life felt like a hamster wheel. I was chasing happiness and fulfillment, but it always seemed elusive.
What is wrong with me?
This cycle of reaching for things outside of myself to make me feel better continued until I was 40 years old and hit a total emotional rock bottom two years after moving to Hawaii, which I go into candid detail in my book Running in Slippers.
At that point, I realized that what I had been doing wasn’t working and I needed help. I decided to invest in myself and hire a coach. This is how I learned how to do the inner work. I learned to question everything I do and why I do it, how to regulate my emotions, and, over time, how to change my internal beliefs. I learned how to feel my seemingly negative feelings like shame, sadness, and anger, which my previous healing practices were helping me bypass.
Drugs, alcohol, porn, and social media addicts are quick to be labeled as unhealthy and dysfunctional, but what about overworking, overexercising, and sound baths?
Just to be clear, there is nothing inherently wrong with working, working out, and spiritual healing modalities. The issue is when they are expected to be the things outside of yourself that make you feel good, and you aren’t doing them in conjunction with the inner work like I did for an embarrassing amount of time.
When you do the inner work, you don’t need anything outside of you, and any practice outside of yourself simply enhances what you are already doing. Best of all, by doing the inner work and changing my inner beliefs, I learned that there was nothing wrong with me and I didn’t need to fix anything or do more.
We are all born with a light inside of us, but family systems and society slowly dim our light, and we adjust to fit in. True healing is aligning with your true self and letting your light shine.
Shining from the inside is about simply being instead of doing things to fix yourself or prove your worth. If you’ve been stuck in the loop of fixing, performing, and endlessly seeking the next spiritual tool to finally feel whole, you’re not alone.
You deserve to be happy.
Glow Tip:
Before you reach for something outside of yourself to feel better- pause. Ask yourself: What emotion am I avoiding right now? Instead of bypassing the discomfort, sit with it. Breathe through it. Let it move through you. Your feelings aren’t flaws. They are invitations to question what you do and why you do it.
Craving deeper, softer, truer?
This is exactly the work I guide my clients through inside Shine From the Inside! coaching. Together, we gently unravel the patterns of people-pleasing, perfectionism, and self-abandonment so you can return to your truth, set healthy boundaries, and feel radiant in your skin again. This isn’t about becoming someone else. It’s about remembering who you are beneath the performance and escaping.
The result? You stop looking for happiness outside of yourself, you stop shrinking. You become the woman who walks into a room and doesn’t need anyone’s approval because she already belongs to herself.
If you’re tired of the emotional over-functioning, the spiritual hustle, and the endless loop of “working on yourself,” Shine From the Inside! was made for you.
Apply here to work together.
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