In this episode of Waking Up with Melissa, I talk about my one-year sabbatical and 10 things that transformed my life. I also share about how I went sober and became a full-time devotee of yoga, meditation, and plant-based wellness, which ultimately changed my life. Tune in to this episode and explore the power of self-awareness and personal transformation.

A BREAKDOWN OF THIS EPISODE

[04:01] Prioritizing healing over everything else, using parts work
[12:20] Self-compassion that leads to self-acceptance
[05:32] Sound healing and affirmations
[08:40] Becoming a true student of life
[17:21] Getting to know ourselves deeply

10 Things that changed my life. 

1. I became a devoted yogi and a student of observing the mind
2. I started to connect with my abandoned parts.
3. I barely talked to people, including my own family so that I can hear myself better
4. I didn’t force myself to do anything that felt like an obligation
5. I became a student of life and started reading monthly 
6. I was open to everything and anything. 
7. I gave myself grace to be exactly where I was 
8. I gave myself forgiveness & compassion for the past
9. I decided to not only go sober but plant base as well
10. I stopped everything I was doing including work to start healing

Nothing is more important than us being healthy and alive and well. 

When you feel like your life depends on your healing, then ultimately, nothing else is more important. That’s how I saw myself. I had to stop everything I was doing to find the joy and the happiness again, or maybe for the first time. I didn’t even know if I was ever happy. But I gave myself the opportunity to really sit with all of those questions and the most profound work that I did was working with my parts. This is now something very popular that you can find on the internet. It’s called parts work but I didn’t know I was doing this at the time. It’s basically the fact that we’re not just one human being, we’re not just one thing. We have many different parts, and many of our parts are in exile. They’re in these traumatic stages. It’s almost like they’re in an energetic prison and until we go into our system and rewire, reparent or just connect to this energy, this energy lives within our body and is usually running the show.

I became my own best friend.

We need to be in our darkness when we’re growing. We need to be in our seclusion and that’s just part of it. I think often we get confused and we think that it’s only learning on social media or that we have to show the highlight reel to prove we did the work. But during my one year sabbatical, there were lot’s of tears and lots of facing my shadows, so I needed time. I think this ultimately boils down to the next thing, which is I gave myself time, forgiveness, and most importantly, I gave myself compassion. I never realized how hard I was on myself, how I forced myself to do things that I didn’t want to do and instead I gave myself the gift of grace. I gave myself the opportunity to just be, without any judgment or worry of doing something right or wrong. I was just really giving myself everything that I always wanted other people to give me. I gave myself the gift of my own love.

Getting to know ourselves deeply.

I was very curious of who I really was, and I was in it for the ride. I wanted to see how life was going to unfold. I was prepared to see magic. I had lived such a rigid life with schedules and predicting outcomes that I was so curious on what the opposite looked like? What does it really mean to live an aligned life? What does it mean to surrender? How do you trust yourself deeply? How do you activate your intuition? It’s in the darkness that you actually stop looking to the outside to tell you who you are on the inside.

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