Did I always meditate? No, I did not. Au contraire, dear reader.
I was a busy body who could not sit still. Sometimes I still am, honestly. But I’ve learned how to sit still and embrace the benefits of meditative moments.
How did I get there?
Well, it started with a life on the total opposite side of the spectrum.
I always had ambition. After studying business in the Netherlands and internationally, I launched my career in business marketing and marketing communications. I loved it at the time, it felt exciting. Bringing concepts and products into the market, organising events, writing and executing plans, working in teams, my days were packed. Long days, tons of overtime, all to meet the deadlines (now I understand why they call them that). On top of it, I worked in male dominated environments, so as a woman of colour I felt even more pressure to keep up with the boys and perform accordingly, or even better. Looking back at that time, I was quite a cocky lady… no comparison to how I act now.
As you can probably sense, there’s a turning point coming in this story. It started with a feeling of boredom. Bored with the repetition of the work, the pressure, and honestly the whole story of the world I was moving in. It felt like we were mega important, like what we as a team were doing was essential for life on earth… to exaggerate it a bit. Plenty of times in meetings I felt overwhelmed and started doubting my own words and ideas. The meeting rooms and the workspace were always charged with so much expectation.
My self doubt kept growing, and I realised I had no reason to act so sure of myself at all. I felt invisible, but even more than that, I felt like I was carrying invisible stories inside me that wanted to surface. The workspace was not the environment to safely explore these feelings. So I started looking for a way to understand those undercover sentiments, the repressed emotions that didn’t have words yet.
I’d always believed everything is energy. I thought of it as simply as that sentence sounds. So it made sense that if something in me needed to shift, energy was where I’d go looking. My search led me to a Reiki I course. This was my first real, deliberate introduction to using energy and connecting to energy fields. Something shifted in how I felt, a real calmness came over me. It got easier to move through those high pressure environments. That course opened some paths in me, but I still felt like I was just scraping the surface of what was out there to discover, and moreover, what was inside of me to uncover.
Meditation, though, had become a habit by then. I made a real effort to meditate every day. Yes, in the beginning it took effort. Now it’s just part of my daily life. For me meditation isn’t just an act of stillness, it’s also a way to see what’s going on beneath the surface. A way to get more understanding and clarity on certain themes. A way to unlock energies that seem dormant. It’s a practice I love doing on my own, and also love guiding others through, whether groups or individuals, on their own journey to uncover what’s under the skin.
That was just the beginning, though. Not long after, a friend of mine introduced me to an institute where you could learn more about energy fields, while also looking at my underlying stories that limited my full inner potential. Now we were talking. This is exactly what I’d been looking for. Over the next three to four years I went on a deep dive into myself, turning over the stones on my limiting beliefs and underlying traumas through several intuition enhancing courses. I remember the first time a teacher asked me to breathe in deeply, I felt like I couldn’t breathe past a certain point. It literally hurt in my diaphragm, so many blocked emotions I encountered. That moment confirmed I’d made the right choice to go on this deep dive into myself. My body was emotionally exhausted from everything I’d been carrying inside, like an overstuffed bag.
From there I went deeper. Bit by bit, and over time, I was able to unravel the pain and sense of unsafety I felt in my body. I had to admit to myself that regardless of my strong personality, there’s a wounded part deep inside, stemming from childhood, that wished to be recognised and healed. Honouring the emotions in my body became as vital as breathing itself.
I was given tools and teachings about energy and energy fields, things that had always felt far removed from my daily life, but turned out to be more down to earth than I realised. That included learning about chakras and other energy fields, both inside and outside the human body, and understanding how we as humans relate to our environment and the larger spectrum of life. Slowly I started to recognise which feelings in a room were actually mine, and which ones I’d just picked up and carried like they were. I started to recognise my coping mechanisms and dared to look at them to change my emotional patterns. That school really changed my life and the way I looked at life in general. I started listening to my intuition as a trustworthy compass and barometer. It’s so liberating to move through life without doubting the wisdom that lives inside you. To be able to face challenging situations with clarity and calm. Those are just a few things the experience and the courses left me with.
And this whole personal and spiritual growth journey gave me the courage to make some significant changes in my life. My long held wish to leave my home country and settle somewhere new finally became reality.
Before moving to Ibiza I finished the institute with a certificate in energy field healing and reading. I felt more at home in myself and found a newfound clarity about the path of my life.
Moving to Ibiza was one of the results of the courses I’d done and the energy I’d unlocked inside myself. No need to be “cocky” anymore, just more grounded in my body, peaceful, less judgemental, and confident in myself and in life.
These days that grounding is what I get to share through my practice in Intuition Mentoring and Meditation coaching. Wherever you are in your own story, busy body or not, I hope something in mine gives you permission to slow down and listen to what’s underneath.