The wound is where the light enters you - Rumi
From outside my marriage, I now see that, in many insidious ways, it was a dynamic where I wasn’t 'allowed' to shine. I was held within the tight grip of someone who felt threatened by my potential for expansion and visibility in the world, which ultimately led me to seek refuge in the divine. With the confines in place, I chose to go within.
Shadow work and self-inquiry became the keys to unlocking the cage I found myself in—a cage that, as it turns out, was an illusion all along. The bars of this cage were formed by victim consciousness, shaped by the ego’s influence on my nervous system. To perceive myself and the world beyond this illusion required a balancing of the lower three chakra centers. I needed to release the blockages preventing the activation of the upper chakras, through which I could access self-love, wisdom, and intuition. My intuition had been telling me all along that I needed to free myself, but the power of the ego’s beliefs, when we are unaware of them, is immense.
I was led intuitively to practices that I later realized were forms of gross, subtle, and karmic purification.
In 2017, I wrote a book capturing what I was experiencing, but I still couldn’t fully see that I was bound by trauma to someone who didn’t see, value, or love me. I would oscillate between profound insights about the universe, the divine, and the human psyche, only to return to the self-constriction of self-hatred, as I internalized the perceptions of this other. This oscillation showed up in my writing—a mix of insight, purging, and confusion as I would get lost in obsessive bouts of writing triggered by PTSD. With harsh judgment of what I had written, I’d revise and revise to the point where the original thought was lost.
Eventually, I realized that my childhood conditioning had set the stage for this karmic relationship to unfold. I believed I was worthy of suffering, punishment, and had little value to others. This is what conditioning can do—our original pure, heart-centered self, along with its natural thoughts and beliefs, gets lost as we accumulate false perceptions about ourselves and experience unresolved traumas.
I invite you to explore this thought experiment: what if we choose dynamics that lead to the exact wounds allowing the light of our highest purpose to enter? My greatest lesson was self-love and the permission to let myself shine in the world—to be seen. For some of us, this requires releasing fear, dissolving self-judgment, and integrating love and surrender.
Our purpose in this three-dimensional reality is to clear these blockages. We must not allow our ego’s beliefs in lack, attachment, and control to manifest unchecked. Instead, we must recalibrate these patterns and process them so we don’t add to negative karma. Rather, we consciously choose the polarity of love, with conviction.
This takes unmatched dedication, but it’s the key to liberation from restrictive and confusing dynamics. The realization that we can manifest our desired life depends on healing—through gross, subtle, and karmic purification. Imbalances in the lower three chakra centers keep us in cycles of disempowerment, anger, fear, and sadness.
This is why any truly transformative therapeutic intervention must address the body, mind, and spirit. Lasting, meaningful change can only occur when we attend to all aspects of our multidimensional selves—the emotional body, the mental body (thoughts and beliefs), and the energetic body, where our life’s catalysts originate. When you notice recurring patterns in your life, recognize that a profound lesson is being asked of you. By releasing and resolving these catalysts in this lifetime, we find peace in our hearts and minds.
In my work with clients who face uniquely challenging relationship dynamics—whether with an Autism Spectrum partner or someone with narcissistic personality disorder, where trauma bonding or ongoing traumatic relationship syndrome is at play—we tap into our strength through holistic interventions. This includes somatic release, shadow work, and recalibrating core beliefs.
