Journey Back To My Soul
Part 1
The spring of 2021 was my dark night of the soul.
In case you aren't familiar with that term, the dark night of the soul “is a stage in personal development when a person endures a difficult and significant transition to a deeper perception of life and their role/place in it. It is a spiritual soul transformation that will leave you changed forever.”
It felt like everything and everyone around me was falling apart… An unshakable feeling warning me of what was to come. My body knew enough is enough, something had to change but my mind was taking some time to catch up. I had no idea then, that the universe was strategically placing lessons in my life that would wind up being my blessings. My life would change forever. Or even more shockingly, just how much I would be willing to change in order to shed the pieces of myself that were blocking me from unlocking my fullest potential.
I’m sharing this personal story because I have the privilege of working with so many incredible women as a Life + Mindset Coach, and you may resonate with some of the comments that my clients mention during our sessions,
“Am I the only one?”
“I feel like I’m going crazy.”
“Is this normal?”
“I’ve never felt this way, I can’t even control my emotions”
Let me share my thoughts on these really quickly. There is no such thing as normal when it comes to unraveling your subconscious and wanting to make your life better than what it is right now. Wanting to have pure joy and authenticity in your life does not classify you as crazy. Some days you’ll feel like you can conquer it all and other days you want to just lay in bed and cry. All of that is OK and it’s meant to teach and bring awareness to things that perhaps your body may have been storing.
Everyone has a journey to embark on that will alter their life in some way, whether they are aware of it or not.
Mine, led me to the discovery that I was living a life that wasn’t truly aligned with my soul calling. Sometimes we deny ourselves of the gifts we know we have for fears that don’t truly belong to us. There was an inner voice, yearning for more but I buried those thoughts and feeling and instead of nurturing my gifts, I became a professional at putting everyone else’s needs before my own.
For much of my life I held on to the trauma from my childhood as a crutch and a safety blanket. It was there to offer excuses for when things didn’t go my way and also there to keep me trapped in the prison of my own thoughts. Taking the first step in a self-healing journey is the hardest, but once you do, it’s just a matter of continuing to take those tiny steps. I will tell you this based on my experience, there will be moments of doubt. Moment where you may stumble, but trust me when I say, you will not fall. The conflict happening within is there to make you aware of what needs to change.
My self-discovery and what later transitioned to my self-healing journey began 7 years ago in the fall of 2015, when for the first time in my life I listened to my soul and made the decision to end my first marriage. It went against every behavior I knew and against what everyone else wanted. If I tell you who I can credit for this, you’ll chuckle but here it goes. It was Adele’s album 25, the song, Love In The Dark. Ok, the song is not entirely responsible, but the mind space I was in at the time, sitting on the floor of my living room, listening to those words, it’s as if someone peered into my heart, gathered the data, then took the express train to my brain and moved it to next station. The next station was called, for the first time in your damn life woman, do what your heart yearns for.
That began my quest for trying to rationalize why my heart and brain were often at odds. That quest led me to my summer of expression, a divorce, and surveying the world and people around me with fresh eyes, with a greater sense of self-awareness. In order to have the freedom and release I craved, I had to blow up certain parts of my life, and growing up in chaotic environments, blowing up my life didn’t scare me at all. I didn’t yet experience the ascendance transformation that I enjoy today. I had to rack up a few more life-altering lessons in order to truly blow up my world and start anew.
Sometimes you have to lose your mind to discover your mindset.
If blowing up my personal and close relationships wasn’t enough, sitting next to a busted radiator in my NYC apartment, I realized I also wanted more for my career. To keep with the trend of going completely left, I made an entirely new career switch in a field I had little experience in. Storytelling has powers beyond just captivating an audience, it got me a job in a highly-competitive tech field.
During this time of transition, I also discovered the beauty of the deep connection you can have with oneself and the happiness you can experience that wasn’t entirely dependent on someone else giving it to you. That also fueled the confidence in me to speak up in other areas of my life that didn’t feel right to me. I asked for a promotion within 6 months of working at this company, not just because I felt like it, because I knew I sold myself short in the desperation of wanting this new job. It was also then when I discovered the term “pay parity”. (That’s certainly a story for another chapter). I got the promotion and then became the first Latina in that level in that division.
The feeling of getting what I actually wanted by advocating for myself provided sensations I was not familiar with. My brain was shocked as well, all it took was for me to use my voice? Something I had all along but chose to ignore because my rational brain would shush me. I became even more interested in exploring the mind + heart connection and why they're often at odds. Using newly adopted skills I picked up while managing a product and engineering team, I decided to reverse engineer my trauma, inner-conflict and hurt. If I’m going to tackle some, I might as well tackle them all. I also wanted to reverse engineer my fears and views of self-worth. This self-exploration would lead me to meet people and put me in environments that would certainly give me a lot of material (data) to work with!
Fast forward to the start of 2020, when it all began to spiral out of my control.
What good is a computer full of data without source code to decipher it? Add a worldwide pandemic and a desire to rescue others because I wanted to save them from their hurt. That is the formula for world-class burn out, mental exhaustion, and friction in all aspects of your life. For a while, I was focused on helping everyone and everything else, that it saved me from having to code the data of my own life. The Universe knew I was doing the most. The Universe knew I had the capability and awareness to find the path back to myself but after 7 years of conducting various life experiments, I took a few detours.
So, the Universe being as wise as she is, brought me the lessons I needed to learn, and it forced me to confront various truths about myself and the world around me. It also forced me to realize that trying to resolve all of my inner struggles while deceptively presenting a completely different version of myself to the world was code I could not decipher.
In true Vanessa fashion, the only way I knew how to get out is to blow it all up, again. While living in Nashville, I made the decision to seek guidance, through a medium that is not very common in Latino families, therapy. To say that was the beginning of the unraveling is an understatement. I wasn’t sure what I’d be walking into by going to therapy, but I knew that the ultimate experiment in my quest of understanding the mind and heart connection was to decipher myself. To begin the reverse engineering process of deciphering one-self starts by unraveling and unpacking things you didn’t even realize you were storing. In fact, these very feelings and thoughts can hold many people hostage. This spiritual self-healing journey was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced or felt in my life. For one, I didn’t realize how easily I would be triggered. I also didn’t realize how deeply I hurt myself by not allowing myself to shine the way that I allowed and supported others to shine. After the unpacking comes the organizing. What to do with all that you’ve uncovered, unlocked, unearthed?
“It takes courage to go against what everyone has planned for you. Don’t settle for living a life that belongs to someone else’s dream.”
When the student is ready, the teacher appears. The teacher can come in any form. Be it a friend, a partner, spirituality, a life coach, therapist, an environment, and even just a feeling. In my case, it was all of the above. Many people choose to ignore those gut feelings and soul whispers for fear of disrupting their routines and continue on with their lives despite the conflict in their mind and heart. I was at a point where the whispers became shouts and my hard drive was at capacity. I decided to choose the power of choice and embark on a self-healing journey that changed the course of my life and brought me in alignment to my soul. I deter from saying my true self because something this journey has taught me is that your true self evolves and is not something that can be coded like a program. It’s fluid.
When I stepped into my first therapy session, in an instant everything changed. It’s as if the Universe began to place situations that would take me places I never intended on visiting. Those intense therapy sessions led to a medically approved mental health leave and a departure from the seemingly “perfect” life I had created for myself. I shed many layers in Nashville and almost ended my second marriage. Leaving everything behind, I retreated to prioritizing myself and together with my husband and our two boys, we took a long drive west, to the desert. My heart knew that change was underway, my brain was slowly beginning to understand and it had no other choice than to surrender to the flow of the Universe. Choosing to heal myself, was merely the first phase in a domino effect of events that would take months to unravel and would inevitably turn my life, right side up. Those transformative lessons delivered gifts that support me in sharing my wisdom and gifts with the women I serve today.
Wherever you are in your soul journey, don’t ignore the whispers. You owe it to yourself to live the life your heart yearns for. It takes courage to prioritize yourself, and it takes courage to choose the path of surrendering to your soul journey.
Part 1.
Xo,
Vanessa
