My Story

I'm sitting in my car, in an underground parking lot. I feel as though I have nothing left to go on. So I sit there for hours. I can't bring myself to open the door and face the world. I'm burnt out.

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The first time I remember feeling this emptiness, I was about six years old. I didn't have the language to describe it at the time, but it felt like some sort of dread that I was all alone in a box made of glass and nothing mattered. When it came, it would stay for a few minutes before it dissipated and things felt normal again.

I spent my life running away from this feeling. I was competitive and goal-oriented. I loved the feeling of being "the best" and chasing greatness. At the same time, I was very insecure. I spent countless hours reading personal development books, trying to fix and improve myself.

I functioned pretty well in the world until my mid-20s, the day I broke down in my third year of law school. Anxiety attack on a subway train. With that, I was no longer holding it together. A lifetime of chronic anxiety finally spiralled out of control. Achievement lost meaning. Life lost meaning. That emptiness that used to show up from time to time was now with me 24/7.

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Now that I had nothing to lose — or that's how I felt at the time — curiously, I was free at the same time. I didn't need to "make it" or be someone anymore. So I quit law. Being a lawyer brought me the credibility and respect that I used to desperately want, but that didn't matter anymore. The clients I was working with, as a criminal defence lawyer, seemed to need a different kind of help to end their suffering and change their lives. I wanted to help myself too. I went back to school to study counselling psychology.

Practicing psychotherapy was fruitful. Those years also helped me heal and rebuild myself. I learned to acknowledge and feel my emotions instead of trying to reason them away. I realized I had been living in my head all this time. I learned to be in my body and engage with life, letting myself feel both joy and sorrow, even fear, anxiety, and shame.

However, as I practiced, I started to see troubling patterns with talk therapy. People were getting stuck in their narratives on what they believed about themselves, others, and how the world worked. Instead of helping them change, talk therapy was often helping them become more comfortable with their narratives, reducing distress but keeping them below their potential.

So I went "alternative." After helping myself quit antidepressants with self-hypnosis, I learned to practice hypnosis professionally. I went deeper into meditative practices and altered states of consciousness. I studied spirituality. Then quantum principles. At a week-long meditation retreat, I experienced a sudden awakening of energy. My body felt as if struck by lightning, literally. This then led me to study energy healing and practices, and to working with trauma differently, through the release of energy.

As I was having breakthroughs, so were my clients. One client got her dream promotion. Then came the divorce and a total breakdown of her corporate career. Followed by freedom and creation of a new relationship and a career she is in love with. Repeated experience has taught me that to break through and reach our potential, we need to be willing to let go of the old, as scary as it is. Transformation takes courage and inner strength.

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This is my story of integration. The emptiness turned out to be a sign that there was more to what I could see and understand at the time.

Today, I continue to do this work with people who also feel that there is more.