What Happens When You Finally Listen

This blog is nothing more than an exercise in following my intuition.

For the past few years, my soul has been begging me to carve out a space where I can share my thoughts, a living journal to help me get out of my own head and into my heart…

 I’ve been keeping a personal journal since 2021, and that practice has truly helped to free my insanely busy monkey mind - those moments when it feels like I have a million thoughts fighting at once, I sit down, I write and I let them all pour out of me - and through this process, I’ve come to some deeply powerful insights. The action of typing them out, gets the words out of my head and onto the paper, where I can easily view them with a new perspective…an ability to review & respond vs. feeling so overwhelmed that I felt in survival, forced to react. 

In 2019, I spent 6 months living in Residential Treatment in downtown Chicago through Hazelden Betty Ford. The center offered an outpatient treatment program that ran on a 6 week cycle…I repeated the cycle 4 times. During my time there, I felt broken, frozen in place. While I was there, as I worked through my earliest stages of recovery, I was diagnosed with PAWS or Post Acute Withdrawal Syndrome. The most aggravating symptom for me was the complete brain fog…I struggled to hold conversations because my mind would constantly just go blank halfway through a sentence or thought. It was terrifying & humiliating & I truly thought I was broken from the inside out.

I’m really lucky because while in treatment, I had an incredible doctor named Dr. Zach, who specialized in addiction neurology - he’s the person who first shared with me a line that has become an internal mantra “it’s a thinking disease, not a drinking disease”. He helped to clue me in early on that I had to get to the root of the problem if I was ever going to fix the symptom - a lesson I continue to help spread. And as someone who has been emotionally mistreated, my mind was very, very sick. This clued me into a principle I continue to live by, our mindset shapes our world and I had to heal my mindset if I was going to save my life. 

I love to learn by studying patterns - I picked up this skill at a young age by studying those around me, their likes & their dislikes, to best inform how to present during our interactions. I saw school far more as a series of strategies & patterns that I just had to understand in order to succeed, as opposed to ever really learning the material itself. In recovery, they teach you to look for the similarities instead of the differences, and when you head that advice, the common threads soon appear. 

Take that innate skill and combine it with the practice of meditation - a mindfulness tool I was hesitant to try, but learned to love - and I was given a front row seat to the patterned thinking of my inner mind. 

90-95% of our thoughts are repetitive…this number is so high because repetitive thoughts can serve an important role in our increasingly complex world…they allow us to operate efficiently, allowing us to survive. But repetitive thoughts can also keep us stuck…and I was so desperate to get unstuck…so I started to pay attention to the ones that I could actually do something about…

My Yoga Teacher Training is the perfect example - one day, the thought entered my head…a teacher announced an upcoming training at the end of the class, as she had previous times before, but this time it just stuck, and I found myself thinking about it again and again…until I booked the training and freed my mind. 

But be warned, this is also a practice of listening to your gut…because some patterned thoughts are negative conditioning…your head can convince you of any story, but if you get really honest with yourself, and learn to connect your head to your heart, I don’t believe it will steer you wrong. 

As I stated at the opening: This blog is nothing more than an exercise in following my intuition. 

I believe my intuition speaks to me through my repetitive thoughts…these ideas that just pop into my head and then I find my mind wandering back to them time and time again. And the idea to carve out this sacred space has come to me night after night since 2021.

So here we are. 

It has taken so much work to even get to this point, and I’m just so grateful to have this opportunity to answer a call that I no longer can ignore. 

I can’t wait to see where this space goes….

                With love & light,

Journal Prompt

What repetitive thoughts have been quietly (or loudly) tugging at your attention lately?

Take a moment to slow down and notice what keeps resurfacing in your mind — not the anxious loops or fear-driven noise, but the quiet nudges that return again and again. Do these thoughts feel like invitations or warnings? Where do you feel them in your body — your gut, your chest, your throat?

Write freely about:

A thought you can’t seem to shake.

What you think it might be trying to tell you.

What action, if any, it might be calling you to take.