From a young age, I learned to pay close attention to what was happening around me—to adapt, anticipate and find ways of keeping myself steady and protected. There were experiences and emotions I did not yet have the language or support to process, so I learned to contain them and carry on.

By my teenage years, that pain had begun to find expression through self-destructive ways of coping. I fell apart and reached a point of profound despair.

By early adulthood, survival had taken on a different form: competence. I found refuge in my mind—thinking, analysing, achieving and managing life from the outside. I became capable and self-reliant but increasingly disconnected from what was happening within me.

Beneath it all, my body carried a quiet language I hadn’t yet learned to hear: tensions that never fully softened, breath that remained shallow and constricted and emotions that remained just out of reach because they felt too painful to fully face.

Without consciously realising it, I had learned to survive by leaving myself— escaping the very place I would one day need to return to in order to heal.

Coming back was not a single breakthrough. It happened slowly, over time. I first had to meet the pain, grief, fear and sense of loss I had carried for as long as I could remember.

During my Grof® Breathwork facilitator training in Holotropic group sessions, one particular journey took me beneath worlds and into the earliest layers of my experience. There, I encountered what felt like pre-verbal imprints connected to my earliest experiences in my mother’s womb. Long before my conscious mind could form memories, my body had learned to hold a tension that wasn’t mine.

A mushroom ceremony in Bali marked an important turning point. I was confronted with the chaos within me and the ways it was shaping and breaking my relationships. I saw that the path ahead was not about escaping to somewhere else, but about returning to myself—re-entering my own temple, opening the rooms I had kept closed, stepping into the shadows and meeting what had been hidden there. Through patience, compassion and love, I began to bring the light to what I found there.

Yet coming home was never a purely inward or solitary journey. It was supported by years of therapy, ceremony and embodied practices, and it unfolded through the life I was building around me: finding community, experiencing love that felt both deep and safe, giving myself the home I had yearned for, deepening into my spiritual path and earning enough to create greater freedom and stability. Together, these helped create the conditions in which healing could gradually unfold.

Over time, I realised healing wasn’t about becoming someone new.

It was about building enough safety— within me and around me—so that I no longer had to leave myself in order to survive—

It was about remembering who I was beneath the fear and finally feeling safe enough to stay—at home within myself.

It was a gradual return to the wisdom of my body and to an inherent faith in life—not through force of will or by thinking my way there, but through trust, surrender and a growing willingness to stay present—in my body, in my choices and in the life wanting to unfold before me.

That return changed not only the way I live, but the way I sit alongside the inner worlds of others.