What a Decade in Wellness Didn’t Prepare Me For
I have spent over ten years in the wellness and healing space speaking on manifestation, shadow work, trauma integration, and daily practice. I built my life around these frameworks, I believed in them deeply, and truthfully, they served me at the time… until they didn’t.
When I got long covid, it didn’t just take my physical capacity—it took my relationship to every tool I thought I had and maybe took for granted.
One of the first things I lost was my connection to spirit. Not in a dramatic, severed way… more like a signal going quiet. She is still there, I know that. But the way I used to feel her, sense her, commune with her—that disappeared. For a while, every time I sat down to meditate or tried to open to something larger than myself, I would just cry, grieving the absence of something I couldn’t even fully explain.
I brought this to one of my mentors, and she said something I’ve carried with me ever since: “Maybe your practice right now is to have no practice, and to become okay with that.”
So I let go. Ten years of cultivated daily ritual, released. And strangely, what I found on the other side wasn’t emptiness, it was a kind of freedom; permission to exist in the liminal, to not know, to just see what each day brought without the pressure of doing it right.
The harder unlearning has been this one: releasing the story that I haven’t healed yet because I haven’t found the lesson. For most of my career, I operated from the belief that symptoms— physical, emotional, energetic—were signposts toward something unresolved, and that the body was always trying to teach us something. While there’s truth in that, what I’ve had to reckon with is the limit of that framework when applied to a body that may simply be physiologically divergent.
What if it’s not a lesson? What if my nervous system and immune system are just built differently than we previously understood? What if some of this isn’t metaphor?
Holding tightly to the idea that illness is always a teacher can quietly become another form of self-blame. I am only beginning to see how much energy I spent searching for the wound that would explain everything. Maybe the more honest thing was to just let my body be complicated without making it mean something about my healing work.
Embodiment has been another place where the script flipped entirely. I spent years learning to be fully present in my body with somatic work, nervous system regulation, all of it. And now I have an illness where full embodiment sometimes feels unbearable. The last thing I want is to be more in this body that is in constant pain!
A current teacher of mine, Nkem Ndefo, recently offered a practice that changed something in me. She invited us (if we wanted) to disembody, and to consciously opt out of presence in the body for a time.
It sounds counterintuitive, because often in wellness circles, disassociation is almost always framed as something to move through, not something to choose. But that invitation gave me permission I didn’t know I was waiting for: to step back from the pain. To not be present to it every single moment. And in doing that, my nervous system actually settled. It turns out that having a real, conscious, sanctioned exit made it easier to tolerate being in my body at all.
This journey has quietly dismantled a lot of what I used to hold as true about healing, psychology, energy work, medicine. Not because those things are wrong, but because they were never meant to be universal. Every body, every illness, every person’s path is genuinely its own.
The biggest shift has come this past year, and it’s the one that gets the most pushback when I share it: I have had to move from I need to heal to I may never heal. People hear that and want to offer encouragement. They tell me not to give up hope, to stay optimistic. I understand the impulse. But holding onto the hope that kept not arriving was making me depressed. Every time I hoped for a return to the body I had before, and that didn’t come, I lost a little more ground.
What I’ve found instead, in accepting that this might be my new normal, is something that actually feels like peace. Not resignation or defeat, just realism. And with that realism has come a different question, one that feels much more livable: Okay. If this is my life—how do I build it to actually be worth living?
Not waiting to live until I’m healed. Living now, in whatever form that takes.
That question is still unfolding. I don’t have tidy answers, but I find I trust myself more now than I ever did when I had a protocol for everything. Maybe that’s what I can stand on right now.
***Nkem Ndefo’s teachings have supported me immensely on my journey. Check out her work at Lumos Transforms