My struggles with body dysmorphia

I was going through photos of myself when I found this one and went to delete it. I disliked this photo for several reasons:
1. Bad angle, makes my arms look fat and my boobs look small
2. Hair looks thin and scraggly
3. You can see my crooked teeth, a huge source of shame growing up
4. Wrinkles

I immediately noticed the insane negative self criticism and decided to take a good look at the photo until I got comfortable with it, and then posted it.

Growing up around women in Brazil with long hair, big boobs and lips, I was constantly bullied for my looks. I was tall, skinny and awkward. Kids would pull out chairs from under me and laugh when I fell, saying it was such a long way down for me to go. They’d tell me “You’re so skinny you can stand sideways behind a broomstick and disappear.”

When I went to my first teen camp in the cult at 16, everyone knew who I was & I thought people wanted to be my friends. At the end of the camp we all received T-shirts and signed our names on everyone's. Some of the girls I thought were my friends wrote things on the back of my shirt like: “Roses are red, violets are black, why is your chest as flat as your back?”

Of course I laughed this all off but deep down I was so hurt. I wasn’t like the others, I didn’t have big boobs and long hair. Guys didn’t look at me like they did my friends, so I decided I would be a tomboy and just be friends with all the boys instead. I hid my body and swam with t-shirts so no one would see my chest.

It took me over a decade of eating disorders, drugs, and body dysmorphia to finally get to a point where I stopped the self destruction and decided to treat my body as something sacred vs something despicable. Even so, I still have these thoughts.

I don’t want to look like everyone else. I don’t want to cut up my body and put things in it to change the outside when I feel awful on the inside. The best I can do is continue using this time to uncover those hidden thoughts about myself in order to grow, be stronger and (obvi) keep being the badass faerie dragon queen I am. I'm much happier that way anyway 👑🧚🏻‍♂️🐉

Stepping out of my familiar comfort zone

“What saved you as a child will suffocate you as an adult.”

When we experience trauma as a child, we develop habits and patterns to protect or soul and brain when our body is in physical distress.

Our ego taught us self preservation, which served us then but now only hold us back with its negative self talk. Things like:
You're not doing it right
People will mock you
You're too old
There's not enough time
You're not smart/pretty/educated, etc) enough
There's not enough....
You should/shouldn't do...

Any type of "well meaning" talk like this is only your ego working to keep you small, in your place, not rocking the boat or being a "nuisance". Your ego steps in when you're pushing out of your comfort zone on the way to greatness.

When you commit to greatness, all the stories, beliefs, and habits formed as a child that helped you survive start coming up as an adult. The ego knows you’re stepping out of your comfort zone and will try to keep you stuck.

In order to bypass the ego we need to stop being afraid of ourselves and become who we really are, which is also what we have the most resistance to because of the lies our ego tells us about what will happen if we do it (everyone will leave/laugh/hate me).

When there ego conspires to throw you off course, sometimes it works! Last year I succumbed to fear, got stuck in small-minded thinking and was temporarily silenced because of attacks on my character.

When I finally stopped listening to my ego and listened to my soul, I realized that what helped protect me as a child now held me back. It was time to shift my attention from the ego to the soul, embrace my warrior within and stop being afraid of who I am.

When I embraced these challenges as a step to growth rather than attacks, that's when I experienced a transformation. I let go of all the old stories and beliefs about myself, and began transitioning into who I’m meant to be.

My resistance is the only thing that separates me from my power. I no longer want to be fueled by fear, living a mediocre life. I want to continue on the path to greatness living a shame-free, fearless life. You can too!

Embracing my feminine powers

One of my goals for this year was to embrace myself in all my oddities by stepping into my power to become who I really am. But what does that mean, exactly?

In the book The Magdalen Manuscript it says that "Restoring women to a place of honor in our culture begins with women honoring both themselves and their stories."

In order to reclaim my power I need to honor my story, honor my past and the person I've become as a result. I learned to honor the feminine in me and not see it as a sign of weakness. Honor my gifts, my sexuality, and my body. Everything that society taught us to downplay and be ashamed of.

For thousands of years we've been taught that women are evil, weak, helpless, and less than. We're taught that we're here to support man, to please him, to sit down and shut up & give him children. These are all lies passed down through generations to keep us from our power.

Our bodies are sacred, and we should treat them as such. We cut up and add things to our bodies to make us more appealing to men, then give our power away by sleeping with random dudes who bring us zero pleasure. We settle for the first ok guy that will make a decent husband with a mediocre life because we think aren't worthy of the man of our dreams. We are afraid of our own bodies, our cycles, our ability to heal, love, and bring life into this world. This and so much more is how we give our power away.

Each time a woman steps into her power and a man honors the woman in his life, the pain and lies of the last 2 thousand years gets closer to an end and women get closer to the power we lost along the way.

We must come back to a place of balance between spirit and earth, masculine and feminine. We must find our strength and stop letting anyone else tell us otherwise.

That's what I've been doing, what I'm continuing to do, and what I hope all women will embrace at the right time.

How I transform pain into power

The worst moments of our life are often the most transformational. 💖💕

I recently did a Tony Robbins course and charted out three main breakthrough moments in my life.

A breakthrough is moment in time when everything changes and the impossible becomes possible. It's usually triggered when you reach a threshold of pain where you simply cannot continue as usual and must make a change, both physically & mentally.

What can trigger a breakthrough?
Anything. A conversation, A book, a change in emotion, a belief, a mentor, coach, health issues.

This exercise showed that most of the time breakthroughs come through hardship by turning our greatest pain into our greatest strength.

A couple breakthroughs in my life that I struggled for a long time was eating disorders and relationship to food, fear of what would happen if I talked about my past, living in shame, unhealed trauma, and grief.

What triggered the change in all three of these things was my hair falling out and deciding things had to change. What helped make the needed changes in my life was hiring my own coach, reading a ton of self help, going down a spiritual path, plant medicine, therapy and changing my surroundings.

This journaling exercise made me realize that one of my greatest pains and source of shame (Hair falling out) was also the catalyst to some major growth. I would never had made some of these changes if it wasn't for my hair, and I wouldn't have made the connection if I didn't do this exercise.

Try this on yourself by asking the following questions and name the top three greatest breakthrough moments in your life.

1. What made the change possible?
2. What triggered the change in that moment?

The answers may surprise you!

Time Does Not Heal All Wounds

What doesn't kill you does not make you stronger, it actually makes you sicker, weaker, sadder, and unhealthier.

Based on the Adverse Childhood Experiences test (ACE) The more aces one has, the greater likelihood of auto immune disease. Women alone are 50% more likely than men to experience five or more categories of adverse childhood experiences. We are known as the “walking wounded” of our day because we suffer from so many diseases stemming from childhood trauma.

That’s why I do what I do. I was sick of walking around with inexplicable health issues, sick of feeling like my life was spiraling out of control, and sick of pretending I had it together on the outside when really I suffered from chronic depression and anxiety.

Healing childhood trauma means going back through your childhood, recalling the earliest painful events emblazoned in your brain, explaining the situation as an adult to your child self, and creating a safe space for your wounded child in order to heal the relationship to that trauma, in turn healing yourself.

Trauma is a misunderstanding, plain and simple. Something horrible happened to you, you created a story around that event, blaming yourself for what happened, and taking that story and belief with you throughout your life. This leads to a host of health and mental issues which can be reversed if you stop treating the symptom and go straight to the cause.

If you feel the same things keep popping up time and time again, the same health issues and symptoms are going undiagnosed and you can’t find the root cause, take the ACES quiz, find out your score and let’s talk! (Hint: with just 2 ACES you have a 70% increased risk of MS, type 1 diabetes, Hashimoto's, & an 80% higher risk of lupus, IBS, asthma & eczema.)

Your experiences and story matters!!

Liked or Respected? Can you have both?

I grew up learning to be a people pleaser, punished for using my own voice and questioning cult teachings. So I learned at a young age to keep quiet. Don't rock the boat, stop with the questions, keep quiet if I disagree.

Unfortunately this translated into my adult life. While I'm certainly not a wallflower sitting silently in the corner, I've often found myself silent and not speaking up on extremely controversial issues for fear of going against the majority and being shunned.

I've seen a lot of people these days keeping silent on what's going on simply because they have different views than the majority. On the other hand I've seen a handful of people unafraid to speak their mind & go against the majority to show more than two sides, more than black-and-white, and more than what we're seeing. 😦

I have more respect for those few people than I do for the hundreds of others who aren't saying anything different. It doesn't matter what their beliefs are, they know where they stand and they don't care about the majority. ♥

These people taught me about resilience and toughening up. This doesn't mean hardening my heart, but changing my mindset from appeasing and defending to standing by my convictions and beliefs.

There will forever be a little girl inside of me just wants to be liked and accepted. It may seem easier just being nice, but those days are gone. I learned that I can't always be liked, but I can always be respected. 🌠

So I decided I'd much rather be respected than liked. 💯