The Healing Never Stops. It Only Deepens.
Healing is nonlinear. It spirals inward toward the self and outward toward the people and communities we’re in relationship with. And it is marked by thresholds that invite us to deepen into the wisdom we already carry to begin living in alignment with it. This is what those thresholds have looked like so far on my own journey. Because what I have come to understand is this: The healing never stops. It only deepens.
All it asks of us is devotion to ourselves as a sacred act of becoming.
Threshold 1: The Reckoning
I knew I was feeling burned out long before it brought me to my knees. I did the research, sought out medical advice (“your labs look fine”), focused on “self-care”, took courses, read books – all in a desperate attempt to return to “normal.”
All the while, my emotional overwhelm was growing (anxiety and depression showing up as irritability, despair, compassion fatigue, exhaustion). My body was sending me messages that something was wrong long before I learned to read its language (insomnia, brain fog, muscle spasms, hair loss). But I kept treating the symptoms and pushing through, convinced that I was the problem. That my struggles were the result of my own shortcomings and inadequacies.
The moment of reckoning came as explosive rage when my professional responsibilities came into direct conflict with my values. Everything came to a screeching halt and the only thing I knew was that there was no longer any possibility of returning to the way things were. What I had come to accept as normal was a deep dissatisfaction with the life I had worked so hard to build and which looked great from the outside, but left me feeling profoundly disconnected from joy, peace, ease, the people in my life, and the sense that my work in the world wasn’t just about helping others, but was feeding me, too. I was living a life of service and sacrificing myself – my peace, my health, my happiness – in the process.
At the same time I was experiencing physical changes that made me feel like a stranger in my body. Rapid weight gain, night sweats, muscle stiffness, even my body odor changed. I was deep in the throes of it long before I knew it had a name: perimenopause. And the more I learned about it, the more overlapping symptoms I realized there were between burnout and perimenopause. I grieved what felt like my body’s betrayal. But it also hit home in a way I wasn’t expecting. Suddenly I felt somehow “less than” as a woman. Like I was crossing over into a place where my social capital was diminishing because I was no longer young and fertile. Like the hair loss and fine lines were robbing me of my right to shine.
I didn’t know where the path was going to lead, but I knew there was no going back. And that was simply terrifying. My entire identity was shifting beneath my feet. I had the degrees, the career, the professional accomplishments, the family and friends, a committed romantic partnership, a stable financial situation – all of the things I had struggled my whole life to achieve. And I was living in fear that one false step would cause the whole system to collapse. I was white-knuckling it through life. Like walking a tight-rope with no safety net below. That state of constant vigilance felt like the only thing keeping me safe. And it was slowly killing me.
Stepping away from my career, suddenly and without a plan, felt like jumping off a cliff. But it didn’t feel like a choice. It felt like the only way to escape from the pack of wolves behind me. It required me to quiet the part of myself that had never jumped before without knowing exactly where she was going to land. And it asked me to trust that I was going to land somewhere softer, instead of falling to my death.
It was disorienting. I knew that all of my solutions-based thinking hadn’t worked. It had just added to the confusion and feelings that there was something wrong with me and it was my fault I hadn’t managed to cope. If anything, realizing that none of the “fixes” had worked deepened my feelings of helplessness. What was required of me was complete surrender to the unknown path ahead when all I saw was darkness.
Threshold 2: Rest
I kept pressing my burnout specialist for answers, for direction, for a plan. She encouraged me to focus on the things that bring me pleasure, and I couldn’t even remember what those were. She told me to rest, and I realized I didn’t even know how. I knew how to keep myself busy or distracted, and I knew how to collapse in exhaustion. But true rest felt like a skill I’d never honed. Eventually, out of desperation, I signed up for a half-day restorative yoga retreat. Hours of supportive postures using pillows, bolsters, and blankets, all designed to bring me into a state of deep relaxation. It was in that retreat that I heard my inner voice for the first time in as long as I can remember. It was clear and calm, and it resonated through my entire body. “You’re not going to think your way through this.” I knew it in my bones to be true, and yet it went against all my training – all of the ways my intelligence, my capacity for complex problem solving and deep thinking had been celebrated, encouraged, and rewarded ever since I was a little girl. But at the same time, I knew it was true with a clarity I had never known.
At the time, my dog Chopper, who was, in many ways, my soulmate (souldog?), was nearing the end of his life. He had gotten to the point where he could barely walk. So instead of walking, everyday I would take him to a small park in my neighborhood, spread out a little blanket, and lay him down on the grass next to me so he could just bask in the sun. Eventually I began taking my shoes off and walking on the grass, journaling beside him, or laying next to him – soaking up our precious time together. Without realizing it, I was literally grounding myself into the earth and, slowly, I started carrying that grounded and calm energy back into the rest of my day.
While the rest of the world continued spinning, I retreated into silence and solitude. My days slowed, and so did my tempo.
I decided to reclaim my home office, which had been too reactivating to spend time in after leaving my job. I started cleaning, organizing, and putting away the detritus of work. I built a small altar where I lit candles and incense. And I brought out the meditation cushion that had sat ignored in the corner for so long. (One of the “should do’s” that I hadn’t had the capacity to incorporate into my busy schedule with any regularity.)
What I didn’t realize until later was that this was where the healing began. Where my nervous system started to find its way to calm. Where my body began metabolizing the stress of what I had been living through. Not through a fancy program or protocol. My healing literally started when I slowed down enough to “touch grass.”
Threshold 3: The Descent
One of the warnings my burnout specialist issued to me was that I had to address the root causes of my burnout – my unprocessed trauma – and not just treat the symptoms. Otherwise, according to her, I ran the risk of repeating the same cycle of burnout in my next chapter, wherever that may be. I was no stranger to psychotherapy. I’d spent years working with different mental health providers, talking about life’s challenges, my childhood, and mindset. I knew the language of trauma and how to heal from it, but it was all cognitive. I had talked and cried, and talked, and cried. None of it seemed to result in actual healing. I knew that I needed something different. Something that included my body in the process.
For me, Reiki, somatic practice, and shadow work opened a door that nothing else had. They allowed me to access parts of myself and heal in a profound and embodied way. Parts work and inner-child work became possible as a felt experience — not just as a cognitive exercise, but something I could inhabit in my body. I met parts of myself I had learned to hide and, instead of managing them or pushing them away, I could simply witness them, accept them, and meet them with the compassion and love they had always deserved.
I recognized the deep wounds that I’ve carried, and the survival strategies I developed to compensate for them by being high-achieving, self-sufficient, and centering the needs and expectations of others while denying my own. By exerting control over everything in my life and never missing a beat. By being a “good girl.” I realized I’d been living my life from that wounding, seeking external validation and acceptance as a salve rather than living from a place of knowing that centering my own needs, desires, and worth are my birthright. And I realized how many of the extractive systems I live in have benefited from that disconnection from myself.
As I peeled back the layers, certain practices became lifelines — a foundation that made it possible to face the darkest places within myself without turning away. Meditation and journaling helped quiet the noise enough to hear myself think; breath work and body awareness gave me a language for what I was feeling and a direct connection to my felt experience; movement practices like qigong and yoga helped me deeply reinhabit my body on a physical and energetic level; time in nature and earthing literally reconnected me to the rhythms of nature and my place in it. These practices, whichever felt available to me in the moment, drew me back to myself again and again with presence, kindness and compassion.
They supported me in drawing the connections between the wounds and my survival strategies, and how they eventually created the conditions that led to burn out. And, somewhere in the process, I reconnected with my own wisdom that’s carried in every cell of my body. It didn’t happen all at once, but in subtle and quiet ways, an inner knowing, a sensation, a mental image, a voice heard clearly while resting on a yoga mat. A channel to my own intuition slowly reopening.
Threshold 4: Re-Connection
Before the rupture, everything looked great from the outside. But the quality of my relationships to my close friends and family had lost their luster. Duty over devotion. My frazzled system could barely manage my daily responsibilities, much less maintain deep connections. My partner became the unwitting collateral damage of my swinging moods, catastrophic thinking, and discharges of pent up irritation. Regardless of who it was, I was distracted, performative, and managing. Constantly scanning for what they needed from me and slowly withdrawing as my resources dwindled.
The more my healing deepened though, the more my world began to shift and the answers I was seeking started to emerge. I was no longer willing to sacrifice myself in the service of others. To give from depletion rather than fullness. I realized that the greatest gift I can give anyone else is to offer kindness and compassion, first to myself, and then to others from a place of fullness. What emerged from that place was a feeling of genuine connection and relatedness in my relationships, not just those closest to me, but rippling out into my everyday interactions with neighbors and strangers. Giving from a place of my own fullness created the opening for a profound feeling of belonging to all of humanity and to life itself.
The reconnection to belonging extended even further than I ever expected — back through my ancestral line, to the women who came before me and those who will follow. Finding my place in that longer story was its own form of reclamation even when – especially when – it wasn’t easy.
Presence over production. Authenticity over accommodation. Sovereignty over service. Regulation over reactivity.
This is what it means to tend the source.
Threshold 5: Integration
I realized that my well-being is central to what I create in the world through my relationships, my work, my actions – not just as an afterthought or something to add to my to do list (“self-care”). Somatic work has been fundamental to integrating those deep shifts into my daily life because, while I have gained so many insights and a deeper connection to myself through my healing process, my nervous system is still catching up.
There are deeply ingrained patterns that still want to show up because I haven’t formed the new ones quite yet. Sometimes my old patterns, beliefs, and ways of being show up and will start running things until I catch myself. The gap between insight and integration can be its own kind of disorientation. And what I’ve learned is that tending to myself in those in between spaces expands my capacity for being with what is and is an access point back to that grounded place of fullness.
On the outside, my life doesn’t look completely different now. I’m not living on a mountaintop as an enlightened being who is undisturbed by life’s challenges and responsibilities. But the way I show up for myself and others has shifted, and I’m living from a place more of alignment than depletion for the first time in years, maybe longer.
I return to these practices now as an act of devotion — to myself, and to the women I am called to accompany on their own paths back to themselves. As a sacred witness, somatic facilitator, and reiki guide. What I’ve had the privilege to witness is that no two journeys look alike. The path is nonlinear and unique to each woman, each body, each nervous system. But the conditions that lead a woman to her first threshold are all echoes of one another. Wherever you are on your own path, I hope you see yourself reflected here and that you find some support to help you along your way.
