Story

Pain. It is one of the few certainties in our human experience. Without it, we would not be able to heal, to strengthen, and to transform.  

We have all experienced pain and trauma whether mental, emotional, or physical, in this life-time and past. Trauma is stored within our body, more so within our cells. Often a difficult and uncomfortable experience to go through, we tend to meet pain with resistance or attempt to avoid it at all costs. 

Eventually, pain may cause you enough suffering and discomfort that it becomes a catalyst to motivate significant change and therefore growth. If we grant ourselves the space to process and understand our pain, confronting it, allowing it to move through us, and releasing it, then we can enable true healing and recovery to occur. In order to be free of something we must first feel it fully. 

As a child I knew that our existence wasn’t without purpose. This is something I knew. What I wondered was if others felt the same. Was I just highly-sensitive because I could feel everything around me? I could sense things before they happened, and my body would react with physiological responses that I could not understand. 

This inability to recognise and discern what I was experiencing led me more often than not to believe that there was something fundamentally wrong with me. Why did I feel so much, so much of other people’s pain? As if empathizing did not suffice, I would invariably feel their pain within myself. Overwhelmed with an inherent notion that I did not belong, my learned responses to trauma experienced throughout my life led me time after time to a place of profound darkness and depression. 

Lost with a deep sense of despair, an inner voice kept calling for me to come home. Not knowing which direction to take, my quest began. And as the currents take you to the depths of the ocean, I was swept across the globe, searching for the river that would carry me home. 

It was only in time that this visceral awareness awakened a consciousness within me about connection, human pain and suffering, and our capacity to heal. 

It was through my journey with water that I was confronted with my own capacity to heal and how to tenderly rewrite the pain of my past.  

It is what is often defined as the human spirit that, regardless of what suffering we face, we are intrinsicaly empowered to endure. You see, we all have it within us. The infinite energy of the Universe. But we have become disconnected from the source and therefore from ourselves. Our true selves. Our Soul. 

If healing is a return to wholeness then we are all being led home, to ourselves and our soul’s path. We all must play our part in the collective ocean of change. 

For everyone is born with a gift - an entrusted virtue which we are called to bestow upon the world. 

For some of us the gift is proclaimed like a storm cloud breaking, unleashing its torrent of water.

For some of us it is offered like a whisper in the wind caressing the crests of waves, carrying the message back to shore. 

And for others of us it is more like the seed of a lotus flower resting in the murky depths, enduring the test of time, impervious to the forces of nature, only to unveil its immaculate beauty once it breaks the surface of the water. 

This whole experience that we’re sharing together, this thing we often refer to as the journey or the road, or simply life, this human experience is not about who or what you want to be - But if you are going to be anything, be Love.

It is not about becoming, but rather remembering who you are, and with that, the gift that you bear.

This, World, is my gift to you.