In 2017, despite an everything-is-great facade, discomfort dominated my inner world. Lifelong patterns of care-taking, overachieving, perfectionism, people pleasing, and focusing on other people’s needs led me to feeling burnt out, stressed, and anxious. 

At some point, I also added a hip injury and relationship problems to my list of life stressors. Without the ability to run for exercise, I wasn’t sure how to cope with stress. I gained weight, experienced a low mood, and felt increasingly irritable. After a poignant visit with my naturopath, I finally got the message from my body: it was time to stop running from myself. 

For the next couple of years, I refocused much of my energy onto healing all parts of my being that I could think of to address, including working on my marriage via a healing separation with the goal for reunification.

Overall individually, things improved tremendously. I left a job I didn’t love and enrolled in a health coach certification program. With the help of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and inner child work, I began healing from things I didn’t even know were traumatic. I hired a personal trainer, fixed my hip, and worked with functional medicine to heal from the inside out. I cleaned up my diet, did all kinds of body work, and began mentoring with a business coach. Things seemed to be on the up-and-up in all areas of my life, except for my marriage. Instead of getting better, it only got worse.

After many brutal months of being on the fence with my marriage and feeling at a complete loss for how to make things work, my husband and I decided to end our relationship. I felt heartbroken and scared, and although a divorce wasn’t what I really wanted, it seemed we’d exhausted all options – I didn’t know what else to do. I figured since I’d invested much time and energy into inner work, I’d be able to handle the grief of a divorce and whatever other difficult feelings life might bring my way. 

Then, in March of 2020, I discovered otherwise.

On the same day that I sat in court listening to the judge dissolve my marriage, I came home to my beloved 13-year-old pup, Tatem, very suddenly and very deathly ill. Twelve hours later, I received a one-week prognosis from the emergency vet. When hospice came out the next morning, we scheduled euthanasia for eight hours later.

On the day of the scheduled euthanasia, I felt overwhelmed with the loss of my husband and having to make the decision to euthanize my dog. I wasn’t sure I could do it. I feared that losing Tate might be the thing that would break me. Although my therapy work had essentially come to an end, I booked an emergency phone session for some help.

“When this happens, when my dog dies,” I asked my therapist, “what do I do with all of this emotional intensity? How do I get through this?” 

“You sit with whatever is, knowing that it’s really going to be hard and intense,” she responded. “You’ve done the work. Now, you just be with it and know that you can handle it.”

A part of me believed she was right – that I could handle it, because I had done a lot of work. I knew how I operated, how my brain functioned, and I intellectually understood my emotions. Still, another very strong part of me drew a blank: but how the hell am I going to handle this? 

Miraculously that same day, one hour before the scheduled euthanasia, the universe granted me some time to put this question on hold. When my pup began showing last-minute improvement from the hail-Mary antibiotics he’d been given the night before, we canceled his appointment to be put down. After eventually making a full recovery from pneumonia – not lung cancer as first suspected – we spent every day together for the next five-and-a-half months, quarantining from the coronavirus.

Early on during those five-and-a-half months at home, I made the decision to do another deep dive into healing. I quit my 9-5 job, cashed out my 401K, put most of my business on hold, and invested all my time and energy into healing from my divorce and searching for what I didn’t yet know about myself, my emotions, and what the heck happened in my relationship.

At some point, I turned to the book, Conscious Loving, by Gay Hendricks, PhD., for some answers. His book led me to the work of Dr. Julie Colwell, who then led me deeper into the work of Dr. David Hawkins. 

This trio of teachers all led me in the same direction and to the missing piece of my inner work: that despite 15 plus years of on-and-off therapy, training, seminars, all kinds of holistic healing, books, and even a graduate degree in mental health, at the end of the day, while I could feel the discomfort of my feelings, I didn’t actually know how to be with them or clear their energy from my body. In fact, in all that time, I’d never even once had a conversation about how to do this very basic thing. No wonder I was still so scared of big emotional events – I had no idea what to do with the feelings that came along with them. 

Now, don’t get me wrong. I definitely experienced lots of the really uncomfortable stuff like fear, anger, sadness, guilt, shame, despair, etc. However, even though I could identify these feelings, intellectually understand them, and feel their discomfort, I didn’t know how to actually face into them so that they could expand, deliver their message, and then move on through. Because I didn’t know about the energetics of emotions, I relied solely upon my mind to “process” or talk about them – a coping mechanism that completely disregarded the place where the felt experience actually lives: in the body. 

It dawned on me that all of the anxiety, stress, and relationship problems I had experienced weren’t the cause of my “bad” feelings, they were the result of not allowing myself to actually have (and move) the energy of those feelings. Thus, in an attempt to try and relieve the discomfort of stuck energy in my body, I often unknowingly turned to emotional escape tactics that ultimately only made me feel worse – things like over-working, over-exercising, and over-focusing on my partner and what I thought he needed to do to improve his life (read: demanding that he change so that I could feel better).

Without a way to clear the layers of dense, negative emotions from my body, I knew they would likely continue to wreak havoc on my relationships, my health, and my quality of life – regardless of how much I attempted to talk about or analyze them. I decided that while I had done the best I could up until this point, my method for dealing with my feelings just wasn’t working. It was time for me to embrace a new way of being.

Nearly six months after my divorce, when it came time to once again make the decision to euthanize my dog – this time for real – I was given the opportunity to put this new way of being into practice. Although I still felt really sad and really scared, I wanted to be present with myself, my pup, and the experience. As I laid on the ground with Tate that day, chest-to-chest, feeling his heart slow to a stop, I made the commitment to go on feeling all of my feelings – no matter how painful or hard they might be. 

My therapist was right. For the next few weeks after my dog passed, I felt some of the most intense emotional energy I have ever experienced. I noticed, however, that when I let go of resisting the experience and labeling it with my mind and instead focused on the sensations in my body, the feelings always cleared – sometimes within minutes. Eventually I realized that not only was I clearing emotion from the loss of my pet, but also from the loss of my husband, my marriage, and countless other old unprocessed energetic experiences that had gotten stuck in my body. 

As I continued to be with my sensations and moved through the various energies of grief, I grew even more fascinated with feelings, the lengths we humans go to just to not feel them, and how our ability to presence with our emotional experience is directly related to the quality of our lives and our relationships.

At some point, I began working with Dr. Julie Colwell as a client and trainee, learning all kinds of exciting things about energy, relationships, the mind, the body, the unconscious, and most notably a specific step-by-step process for how to feel my feelings, translate their message, and move their energy on through.

As I continued being with my feelings and tapping into the wisdom of my body, I began to understand how I have unknowingly sabotaged things like my health, my work, and my relationships. I gained further insight into my part in the downfall of my marriage and how my unconscious drive to avoid my feelings ultimately overrode my conscious desire to work things out.  

Eventually I came to see that the problematic patterns I experienced in relationship weren’t so much about the other person or the relationship as they were about my own avoidance of myself and my feelings – especially my deepest fears. At the end of the day, I realized that literally all of my “problems” – including (and especially) in relationship – have always come down to one basic thing: not allowing myself to fully feel (and release) the energy of emotion.

Today, when I choose to move through all of my feelings – even the densest energies of fear, anger, and sadness – I find that I experience much more of the expansive energies like love, joy, acceptance, peace, and flow, with frequency and ease. Ultimately, as I return over and over into presencing with my emotional experience, I am more deeply connected to myself, to others, and to the inner knowing that relationships – regardless of their status or outcome – are my greatest spiritual teachers, here to help guide me back home to my essence, my true power, and my wisdom from within.