08/07/2025
Life is about the AND.
Currently I'm sick—I have a cold and my body is struggling to warm from the inside as I'm healing and integrating.
This brought up my own triggers…
My Shadow wounds.
My fawn responses in people-pleasing.
My unworthiness that I still carry in some layers.
Healing is a multi-integration process.
It's many spokes in the same wheel—as it turns, so do the lessons, the insights, the understandings.
Today, I had a conversation with a friend grieving the version of themself that no longer matched the version of their childhood friend circle.
It ended with:
"Part of life, I guess."
And this got me really riled up.
We use this band-aid so much.
And it’s one of the many reasons I love what I do.
Because I’m definitely an AND person.
Yes, it's part of life AND yet it sucks.
Yes, I want success AND yet I feel like I'm failing.
Yes, I love food AND sometimes I body shame the kilograms on the scale.
✨ Life is about the AND. ✨
We have the Wheel of Life because life naturally comes in parts — different spokes representing our health, relationships, career, emotions, and more. Humans tend to live in these parts, compartmentalizing our experiences, feelings, and identities. Saying “it’s part of life” often feels like accepting these fragments as fixed and separate.
AND invites us to step beyond that—beyond the fractured pieces—and into the full circle of our wholeness.
It is the space where we stop living in isolated parts and start integrating the whole of ourselves,
holding the light and shadow,
the grief and joy,
the ache and the awe—all at once.
What came into my consciousness is this:
To God and the Devil, the same scenario could be perceived completely differently.
God and Devil here representing the Light and Dark lenses we so often use to view the world.
What is love to one is control to another.
What is passion to one feels like pressure to another.
What looks like confidence to you could be arrogance to someone else.
Your freedom might be someone else's abandonment.
It’s from this dual perception that I believe we start to create separation in our energy—we fragment it.
This is where I find most Shadow Wounds and Shadow Scars are created.
We reject instead of witness.
We shame instead of embrace.
We split instead of integrate.
When Grief comes knocking, we push it away and condemn it to the shadows as we race to “feel better.”
We band-aid it with "It’s a part of life."
Instead of deeply honouring that moment, that feeling, that truth.
But Grief doesn’t go quietly.
It waits.
It layers itself with Anger, with Fear…
And then reenacts itself in different scenarios,
just waiting to be witnessed.
And maybe that’s the real cost of rushing through the ache:
we lose something sacred in our speed.
When we don’t sit with the moment, we miss its medicine.
When we patch it too soon, we can’t hear what it was trying to say.
We turn wisdom into noise.
We skim the surface and call it healing.
But the core—that precious aha, the integration—that’s only revealed in the stillness.
---
So I’m curious…
Where have you pushed instead of heeded?
Where have you slapped on a band-aid when your soul was asking for a witness?
What parts of you have been banished to the shadows because they didn’t fit the “better version” of you?
It’s okay. You’re not alone.
But maybe… it’s time to let those parts be seen.
✨
