How my healing journey unfolded -and one key shift that changed everything

Meditation, yoga, therapy, self-awareness tools. You name it, I tried it all. Probably for a good part of 10-15 years even. All of this while building a successful career at one of the world’s top companies, performing confidence I didn’t feel, people-pleasing my way through every room, hiding the part of me that felt anxious, awkward, and fundamentally ill-fitting.

Underneath the polished exterior was depression, trauma, CPTSD and anxiety. And eventually, burnout so bad I wasn’t sure I will get out of it.

Here’s the thing that made it so gutting: I knew so much by then. I had the awareness, all the tools and done all the work. And I still ended up flat out on the floor.

That’s when the real question hit me: What if I’m approaching this completely wrong?

It’s not that nothing really worked. Things were slowly improving. Small insights and gradual shifts. Life getting a little lighter. But there was always this nagging sense, like a splinter I couldn’t quite reach, that something fundamental was still not right.

The burnout made it impossible to ignore it.

I remember sitting with this exhausted, frustrated feeling of: I’m done with this bloody healing. Will I ever get better? Will I ever just be happy?

It’s a particular kind of despair, that one. The dull ache of someone who has tried everything and is quietly running out of hope.

That’s when I stumbled into something I hadn’t tried before: going into my own body.

I started reconnection and listening to my body as an intelligent organism that had something to say. As if it knew things my busy, analytical, overthinking mind had been drowning out for decades.

We’ve been conditioned to think of the mind as the seat of everything and the body just something we haul around. But I started to realise that’s actually backwards. My body wasn’t the problem to be managed, it was the wisdom I’d been ignoring.

So I stopped trying to think my way to healing. And instead I started to feel my way there.

Two years on, I woke up one morning and something was different.

I can’t fully explain it. I was still me, in the same flat, the same life, but something had fundamentally shifted. Like the whole frequency of my existence had changed - that’s the only way I can describe it.

I was doing my PhD at the time, looking for research participants in Facebook groups for people with mental health struggles. I was scrolling through posts and I recognised everything people were describing: shame, confusion, exhaustion. I’d lived all of it.

But I couldn’t identify with it anymore.

And I remember thinking in disbelief: I’m no longer mentally ill.

It’s a strange thing to realise.

What had actually changed wasn’t a thought or a belief or even a behaviour. It was something more fundamental. Deeeeeeeep inside of me.

I started to feel it in my bones, that I deserved to be here. That my needs mattered and that I had every right to take up space, feel happy, and have a good life.

It seems like from that one shift, everything else followed.

Boundaries stopped being something I had to work at. They became instinctive, because my body would simply register when something was wrong and got annoyed at it. That constant second-guessing: am I overreacting? was it my fault? just dissolved all together. Not because I’d talked myself out of it, but because I finally had an internal reference point that I trusted.

For the first time, I knew what was true for me, even when people tried to convince me otherwise.

I gain a lot of confidence. Not in the showy, performative sense I was putting on before. A kind of: I know who I am, I know what I need, I’m not negotiating on that anymore.

Not to mention making myself small for anyone. There was just no way.

After that, it took another year or so, just to find my footing. Waking up transformed is disorienting in its own way. It’s like you’re a new born child that have to learn to walk in the world.

For me that meant leaving behind the career I was good at, well-paid for, and recognised in and to face a complete unknown. Without a plan or next steps, just a very firm message from my body that going back wasn’t an option. I won’t pretend that wasn’t terrifying.

But I said: okay, I trust you body.

And somehow things rearranged around me in ways I couldn’t have engineered.

I made the decision first, and trusted the rest to follow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iou3vc5M6xg

So where are you on this journey?

Maybe in the early stages, just beginning to understand what’s happening for you. Maybe gathering tools and awareness, making slow progress but feeling like something still isn’t shifting.

Or maybe, and this is the one I really want to speak to, you’re fed up with your own healing journey. Done with constantly trying to fix yourself.

If that’s where you are: that’s actually a really good sign.

It might be your body telling you that the old approach has taken you as far as it can and something new is ready to begin.

The next step isn’t more healing, it’s coming home to yourself.Let me know what you think in the comments.

Aleksandra x