Zenfull Heart | September 2, 2026
There was a time in my life when I thought being strong meant figuring everything out by myself. Survive it, fix it, push through it, pick myself back up and keep going. For most of my life, that was how I lived.
Two years ago, my life looked completely different. I had reached a point where the external struggle was taking over my life and body. Inside of me knew I couldn't continue living that. I knew I had to leave to save myself, I had absolutely no idea what I would do. I did something radically different I listened to my soul.
Come sit with me for a few minutes.
By September of 2024, I was still untangling a life I had built with someone for almost 17 years. There was a house to sell, business matters to deal with and years of belongings to go through. Many of the decisions I had to make I wasn’t prepared to but had to, and one enormous question hanging over everything.
What the Hell am I doing?
At the time, I didn't understand what I now know today. I was still looking outside of myself for the reasons I felt the way I did. I carried great shame I could not see. I blamed, I reacted, I desperately wanted other people to understand why I hurt! Most of my life I wanted someone outside of me to change so I could finally feel better inside. I don't judge myself for that now. I understand why I was where I was. I was surviving with the awareness and the tools I had at the time. Learning to have compassion for who I was, has changed the way I see other people now.
There are people I deeply love who see life very differently than I do today. Many friends who knew me long before this Soul Journey started. Many people supported me and loved me throughout different parts of my childhood and adulthood. They stayed with me when life got hard! Many people I knew before I took this path, don't necessarily meditate or talk about manifestation, energy, consciousness, healing old patterns, or intentionally creating a different future. Some simply see life through a different lens, and I understand that lens because I lived there too. I never want to look at another person and decide that I am somehow more evolved because my beliefs have changed or because my life looks different now. There isn't a hierarchy here. There are simply different experiences, different levels of awareness, different seasons of life, and different ways of making sense of being human.
But I have learned something incredibly important along the way. Love and alignment are not always the same thing.
I can deeply love someone and still recognize that I need people around me who understand the person I am becoming. Over the last couple of years, I have met people through meditation, retreats, travel, healing work, and some completely unexpected experiences. These are the people I come to because we can talk about things that might make somebody else raise an eyebrow. What matters is what happens when you find people who understand the language your soul seems to speak now.
There is something incredibly healing about not having to constantly explain yourself. You can say, “Something inside me is shifting,” and someone understands what you mean. You can share an experience that sounds completely impossible and hear, “I get it.” You can have people who challenge you with love instead of pulling you back into an old story. That to me is community and I'm beginning to understand that community doesn't mean surrounding ourselves only with people who think exactly like we do. That wouldn't be growth either. Real community gives us room to question, expand, stumble, change our minds, tell the truth, and become someone new. It reminds us who we are when we temporarily forget. It doesn't rescue us from doing our own work. It simply reminds us that we don't have to do all of that work alone.
That distinction has become especially important to me because healing can sometimes be incredibly lonely. There is a strange space that happens when you decide you aren't going backward anymore. Your old life doesn't fit, but your new life isn't completely built yet. You can't return to who you were, and you don't want to, but you're still discovering who you're becoming. That space requires courage, and I am learning that it also requires connection.
For a while, I think part of me believed that if I healed enough, became strong enough, and learned to love myself enough, eventually I wouldn't need many people. I don't believe that anymore. Self-love was never supposed to eliminate our need for human connection. Wholeness doesn't mean isolation, and being responsible for my own life doesn't mean pretending I don't need people. It means I no longer expect another person to rescue me from myself. There is a huge difference.
Today, I want people in my life who remind me of all possibilities life has to offer. I want people who are willing to look inside themselves, who can sit with uncomfortable questions instead of immediately running from them, who celebrate growth, and who can talk about dreams that haven't happened yet while still believing they are possible.
There is another part of this that matters deeply to me. I don't want becoming someone new to mean discarding the people who loved me when I was in survival. I deeply love, admire, and care for my people who knew me before. They held space for me before I even understood what holding space meant. They loved me when I was hurt, reactive, confused, blaming, afraid, broken or simply trying to make it through another day without suicidal thoughts. Some supported me during chapters of my life when I didn't yet know how to support myself especially after I left my relationship. Their lives don't have to look like mine for their love to truly matter. They don't have to believe what I believe now. I can love them exactly where they are at while I also allow myself to keep becoming who I am meant to be.
It isn't finding one perfect group of people who fulfills every part of us, it's recognizing the beautiful collection of human beings we encounter throughout our lives. Some remind us where we've been. Some walk beside us exactly where we are. Some introduce us to places inside ourselves we haven't discovered yet. And sometimes, we get to become that person for somebody else.
Maybe that is one of the reasons human connection has become so very important to me. Whether it's through a meditation community, a conversation with someone I just met, traveling somewhere unfamiliar, or standing outside offering Free Hugs to complete strangers, or people wearing my shirts, I keep discovering the same thing. We need each other. Not to complete us, rescue or carry responsibility for our happiness, but to witness one another. To remind each other what might be possible. To create spaces where another human being feels safe enough to be exactly who they are while also discovering who they might become.
Two years ago, I was asking myself, What the hell am I doing?
Sometimes I still ask that question. The difference is that today, I don't need to have the entire answer.
I spent a lot of my life learning how to survive. Now I am learning how to live, and one of the greatest surprises of this journey has been realizing that becoming whole doesn't mean walking alone. I fell that becoming whole means learning how to walk beside people without abandoning yourself.
