What did I learn today? Lessons on the Journey to Unconditional Self Love

  May has arrived, and with it, an invitation: How will I show up in my power this month? Not the kind of power the world tries to sell us — the grasping, the controlling, the performing, the hierarchy of who is above and who is below. No. My power has never lived there. My power is inward. It is how I breathe, how I move, how I honour myself. For this month, I am choosing  integrity over image, alignment over approval, truth over noise. Real power, the kind I am committed to, is sometimes quiet. It liberates. It uplifts. It moves with love, not force. It doesn’t need to dominate anyone; it simply asks me to show up as who I truly am. This month, I am reminding myself that I don’t have to chase anything or anyone. I don’t have to run behind opportunities, validation, or timelines that were never mine. I don’t have to prove, perform, or pretend. My only work is to show up in remembrance of who I am. To live in integrity. To act from love. To do my best — and leave the rest in t...

  T here are seasons in life when you feel the ground shifting beneath your feet — not in a way that threatens you, but in a way that calls you. A quiet invitation to step into a new way of being. A new way of choosing. A new way of seeing yourself. Lately, I’ve been sitting with this idea of Creating a New Reality — not as a slogan, but as a lived practice. A discipline. A spiritual unfolding. As I prepare for my upcoming conversation with Emily  on Monday for her podcast Coming Home, I’ve been reflecting on the questions she’ll be exploring with me. Questions about intentional choices. About dignity and belonging. About the sacredness of process. Question s that have shaped not just my work, but my becoming. Here are a few of the thoughts that are on my mind: 1. The power of the pause I’ve learned that creating a new reality often begins with a single moment of stillness — that breath between the trigger and the response. That sacred space where truth becomes louder than fea...

There comes a moment — sometimes quiet, sometimes disruptive — when you realise that the life you are living is being shaped by beliefs you never consciously chose. Some of them you crafted from your own experiences. Some of them were handed to you — by parents, teachers, religion, culture, community, media, and the people you loved long before you had the language to question anything. And as Daniel Kahneman once said, “For some of our most important beliefs, we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs.”   When you really sit with that, it shakes something loose. Because if that is true, then how many of the beliefs running your life were never really yours? The Autopilot We Call Survival Most of us don’t stop to examine our core beliefs because the system feels like it’s working. It has kept us alive. It has kept us functioning. It has kept us from too many surprises. So the mind says: Don’t touch this. Don’t question this. Don’t chang...

  There are answers in the stillness. There are questions too. When I sit with myself — truly sit — everything arrives. The self‑awareness, the boredom, the thoughts that loop, the stories that rise like old film reels, the flashbacks that tug at memory, the self‑talk that can be both balm and battle. Stillness is not empty. Stillness is a mirror. And I’ve come to believe that spending time with Self is a kind of worship. A returning. A communion with the Most High. Because in the stillness, the Divine speaks. Sometimes in my own voice. Sometimes in the trees swaying their quiet wisdom. Sometimes in the waves that refuse to stop showing up. Sometimes in the rivers that remember how to move even when the path is unclear. Sometimes in the birds who sing without asking permission. And sometimes — unexpectedly, tenderly — in the voices of my ancestors. My grandmother. My grandfather. Their guidance arriving like a soft breeze across the chest. Anything that nudges me out of comfort, an...

There comes a moment — sometimes quiet, sometimes loud — when your spirit whispers, “Come home.” Home not as a place, but as a way of being. Home as breath. Home as truth. Home as the version of you that existed before the world told you who to be. For many of us, that whisper gets buried under responsibility, expectations, and the endless hum of busyness. We move through our days on autopilot, doing everything for everyone, while the parts of us that need tending go untouched. But the body remembers. The soul remembers. And eventually, the whisper becomes a call. This is the heart of Rooted: A Journey Back to Self — a four‑part online experience for women who are ready to slow down, listen inward, and reconnect with the truth beneath the noise. It’s not a course. It’s not a webinar. It’s a return. A return to clarity. A return to courage. A return to the rhythm your life has been asking for. Over four sessions, we explore what it means to live from the inside out: Session One: Rooted ...

When I asked myself this morning writing in my journal, “What change am I most proud of?” the answer rose up immediately, without hesitation or negotiation. I am most proud of the way I now face challenging conversations — and the way I recognize, much earlier, when I am bargaining away my worth. For years, my default responses to discomfort were predictable: stay quiet, run, cut them off, make a joke. Anything to avoid the heat of conflict. Anything to keep the peace, even if it meant abandoning myself in the process. But something shifted. Slowly at first, then all at once. Now, I make the attempt. Even if my voice shakes. Even if I don’t get it perfectly right. Even if the conversation ends in a way I didn’t expect. The win for me is the attempt itself. It took me years — years of unlearning, years of therapy, years of watching myself repeat the same patterns — to finally choose myself in those moments. To stop bargaining with my worth just to be chosen, to be liked, to be kept, to ...

There’s a quiet fear many of us carry — the fear of seeing clearly. Not because clarity is harsh, but because it is honest. And honesty asks things of us. When we begin to see ourselves without the fog, without the excuses, without the stories we’ve rehearsed for years, something shifts. Clarity invites responsibility. It asks us to make choices that align with what we now know. And once we know, we cannot unknow. Once we see, we cannot unsee. That is where the fear lives. People often avoid clarity not because they don’t want to grow, but because they don’t want to give up the comforts that blur their vision. The familiar patterns. The soothing distractions. The relationships, habits, or identities that feel safe even when they are limiting. Clarity disrupts all of that. It calls us into alignment, and alignment requires courage. I’ve been learning — deeply, personally — that moving toward clarity is an act of bravery. It is a willingness to stand in the truth of who you are becoming,...

  Clarity has a way of humbling us. As human beings, we often move through the world believing—sometimes insisting—that we are in control of everything unfolding in our lives. We cling to action as if it were a lifeline. When discomfort arises, when uncertainty knocks, when life whispers be still, our instinct is to do. To fix. To manage. To take charge. “Be still and know” quietly slips out the back door while we rush into motion. But clarity doesn’t come from frantic doing. It comes from presence. Stillness is not inaction. Stillness is attention. It is the courage to pause long enough to hear what life is actually saying, rather than what the external noise demands of us. It is the discipline to listen inwardly before responding outwardly. When we are out of balance—disconnected from our internal power—we default to doing. We listen to the noise. We chase solutions. We try to outrun discomfort. And in that state, clarity becomes harder to access because clarity requires alignmen...

  Go to the sea. Tell your ancestors all your pain, all your humiliation, all your suffering. Scream if you need to. Fill that ocean with everything you have carried — and let her deal with it. Let her know that you are leaving it all behind. That you are taking with you only the clear, pure, prosperous attitudes of the sea. And so it is. You don’t have to name anyone who betrayed you or wronged you. You don’t have to relive the stories. Just tell her your thoughts. Tell her your feelings. Let the waves take the weight. Then go home free. Go home light. Go home in peace, without ever looking back. I have been doing this ritual for three years now — every Saturday morning at 6 a.m., with the sun rising and the world still quiet. I cannot explain how much it has healed me, changed me, stretched me. The sea has become my witness, my mirror, my release. And every week, I walk away a little clearer, a little braver, a little more myself. Peace and Blessings 

  Affirmation:  I walk through this life with an inner power that cannot be taken, traded, or diminished. Life, for all its twists and turns, is a journey. Yes, it sounds cliché. But clichés only become clichés because they hold a truth we keep circling back to. From the moment we arrive on this earth until the moment we leave it, we are moving—becoming—unfolding. And somewhere along the way, we get tricked into believing that the journey is about accumulating power or accumulating things. But is it? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately: how easily we confuse power with dominance, or success with the size of our possessions. How often we sabotage ourselves and others in the name of “getting ahead,” without ever asking where exactly we’re heading. Growing up, my grandmother had her own way of cutting through the noise. Every evening at 7 p.m., the entire house had to go silent because the news was on. She would sit there, eyes fixed on the screen, talking back to the tele...

“No external gaze, achievement, perception, or success can replace the way we look at and hold ourselves in our quietest, most private moments.” Lisa Olivera  I know this. I’ve known it for years. And yet, somewhere in the background of my mind, there’s still that soft, persistent whisper: Am I doing this life thing right? Am I doing it well enough to be seen? Am I hiding too much? Am I dimming the light I was born with? It’s not loud. It’s not desperate. It’s just… there. A residue of old conditioning, old expectations, old ways of measuring worth. Over the past couple of years, I’ve been digging into my “why” — not the polished version you put on a CV or a proposal, but the one that lives in the quiet. The one that doesn’t need applause. The one that doesn’t need to be marketed or posted or packaged. And in that digging, I’ve had to face a truth that used to make me feel guilty: I like being home. I like stillness. I like doing my work — the work I know I was assigned — without ...

 Affirmation: Nothing outside of me defines my power. There comes a moment — sometimes sudden, sometimes slow like dawn — when you realise that all the things you’ve been collecting, achieving, perfecting, don’t actually give you the power you thought they would. The titles, the applause, the curated image of “having it all together”… they peak, they shimmer, and then they fall away. And what’s left is you. The Self. The one you can’t outrun or decorate or silence forever. That’s when the real journey begins. Going within isn’t dramatic. It’s subtle. It’s in the tiny conversations you have with yourself throughout the day — the ones no one else hears. The moment you catch a familiar spiral and choose a different word. The moment you offer yourself a compliment instead of a criticism. The moment you pause long enough to witness your own truth without flinching. These small choices are the practice. And the practice is what makes it easier. Because deep down, you always know what’s h...

There is a moment—usually small, usually private—when you realise you’ve been playing games with yourself. You say you want something, you talk about it, you circle it, you imagine the version of you who has it… but you haven’t actually decided. That was my biggest lesson. For a long time, I confused interest with commitment. Interest feels warm, inspiring, even exciting. It gives you the illusion of movement without requiring any real shift. Commitment, on the other hand, is not glamorous. It is not loud. It is a quiet, internal contract that says: I will do what it takes. And that difference changes everything. Interest Makes Excuses. Commitment Makes Adjustments. When you’re merely interested in something, you negotiate with yourself. You bargain. You postpone. You say “tomorrow” with a confidence that tomorrow will somehow be different. But when you are committed, you adjust your life around the thing you say you want. You wake up early. You honour the practice. You show up even wh...

  Affirmation : I release the illusions that once defined me. I honor my inner truth with courage and clarity. I choose myself without apology, and I transform from the inside out—deliberately, gently, powerfully. There comes a moment—quiet, almost imperceptible—when you realize that the life you’ve been carrying is heavier than the life you’re meant to live. A moment when the illusions fall away: the illusion that you must save everyone, the illusion that your worth is tied to responsibility that was never yours, the illusion that self-denial is noble. Today, and every day moving forward, is about choosing differently. It’s about choosing diligence over distraction. Presence over performance for likes and validation. Inner truth over outer approval. Transformation is not loud. It is not a spectacle. It is a series of small, sacred choices that no one sees. The prayer whispered before dawn. The fast that clears the fog. The breath that interrupts an old pattern. The decision t...

  Affirmation:  I meet myself honestly, and I meet others with discernment. I wondered today… do people really know me? And more importantly, do they even know what they’re asking when they ask, “How are you?” I paid attention to my responses to the first three people who asked me that question this morning—three people who, in different ways, are “about me.” My answers were one‑word offerings: fine, good, grateful, fabulous… and then I kept it moving. Because for me, that’s the required answer. That’s the social contract. That’s the script. But are they really asking how I am? Or are we all just participating in a ritual of politeness? And yet—here’s the flip side—it might actually be a valid question. They may genuinely want to know. They may be opening a door. This is where discernment comes in. This is where you pause, go inward, and check: • How am I really feeling? • Am I safe enough to share? • Am I willing to reveal my true Self in this moment? These last few day...

Affirmation: I release comparison, doubt, and the need for proof. There is a way of living that I am choosing — not someday, not when everything lines up, not when the world decides to clap for me — but now. Today. A way of living rooted in what I believe is possible, not just what I can see in front of me. Because the truth is, I forget. I forget that I am someone who has walked through the “cannot,” the “will not,” the “not yet,” and still found a way. That this is my DNA As a descendant of those who came through the Door of No Return, and returned. As a Merikin descendant, as the grand daughter of Sheila Gomez Sandy who all found a way. It is undeniable.  I forget that hope is not naïve — it is strategy. I forget that faith is not a feeling — it is a tool. And when I forget, I get pulled into that old trap: waiting for proof, waiting for validation, waiting to be chosen. Scrolling and comparing until my spirit starts whispering, “Why not me? Why isn’t it happening yet?”  It...

  Affirmation:  I am ready, willing, and worthy of every yes—and strong enough for every no.  I release the fear of rejection and welcome the freedom that comes with asking. March is calling me forward. Calling for calculated risks, for less shrinking and more growing, for fewer excuses and more learning from doing, for less trying and more doing. It feels like a month that wants movement—inner and outer. A month that wants me to stretch. People often tell me I’m brave. They see me traveling the world solo, hiking alone, wandering into new places , with my curiosity, and my sense of direction that is sometimes spiritual more than geographical. They see courage in that. But that kind of courage has always come easily to me. I grew up as an only child with an imaginary friend, so solitude never felt like a threat. It felt like home. Adventure felt like a companion. Being on my own felt like a natural state of being. Where courage becomes complicated is in the places where I...

Self‑honesty is not for punks. It is a spiritual discipline, a muscle, a mirror, and a medicine. It is also one of the most essential qualities for living an authentic life. Iyanla Vanzant calls self‑honesty “the sacred courage to witness and tell the truth to oneself without distortion, denial, or shame.” That line has been sitting with me. Because the truth is: I have had many moments where I wanted something to be other than what it was. My friend has a saying: “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, as much as you want it to be a swan… it is a duck.” And whew, have I tried to convince myself otherwise. I have projected my hopes, my fears, my insecurities, my longing onto situations because I wasn’t ready to be honest with myself. And when I do that, I cannot make decisions that honour me, support me, or enrich my life. Distortion is expensive. Self‑honesty requires compassion, clarity, and courage. Compassion to hold myself gently. Clarity to see what is actually in front ...

One of the most revealing lessons I’ve learned — across intimate relationships, friendships, and even work — is this: you cannot love someone into wanting to grow, change, or show up in the ways you hope they will. Believe me, I tried. I made it a mission, a calling almost. If I just loved harder, showed up more, held space longer, maybe they would meet me where I stood. Maybe they would rise. Maybe they would choose themselves. Maybe they would choose us. But that path is a slow erosion. A quiet draining. A complete waste of time and energy in the end. And not because people are bad or unworthy. Often, they are carrying things you cannot see and cannot fix — emotional weight, mental battles, old wounds, patterns that predate you. Sometimes it’s emotional immaturity. Sometimes it’s fear. Sometimes it’s simply a lack of willingness or readiness. And sometimes, the lesson is yours: letting go, surrender, boundaries, and the release of guilt. What I’ve come to understand is this: When yo...

  One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was this: “Even when a situation feels out of your control, it doesn’t mean that it is out of control.” For a long time, I didn’t understand that. I equated me being in control with me being safe. Control became my shield, my strategy, my habit. And like all habits—especially the ones that feel familiar—it became comfortable, even when it wasn’t serving me. What I’ve learned is that control is often an illusion. The real challenge isn’t the situation itself; it’s the moment when I am safe but my mind insists that I’m not. That’s when I make decisions that don’t serve me or anyone else. That’s when I react instead of respond. That’s when I try to win, prove, shrink, judge, or force an outcome. So I’ve been learning to find the balance. Lately, I’ve started asking myself a simple set of questions: • Am I safe? • Am I present? • Am I making this decision from the moment I’m in—or from fear, ego, habit, or old stories? With pract...