This is something that only my closest friends know.

Everything in life comes full circle.

Around this time last year I hit rock bottom.

I was coming out of a relationship with a broken sense of self respect, boundaries and inner peace.

I had always taken pride in having healthy, joy-fuelled states of mind and for the first time ever I faced depression.

I had always thought I’d never find myself in that space, but I did.

I would melt down through the week, wanting to stay in bed all day, and constantly rescheduling clients because my mind wasn’t in the right place.

My first way of coping was through numbing out and distracting myself (women, alcohol, drugs, work, etc.)

Very soon I realized that this was not who I wanted to be, so I decided to push the brakes on everything and go back to Colombia for a couple of months to be around family and nature, so I could get grounded again and find much needed support.

There I decided to dedicate this year to learning to embrace self love.

Learning to say No.

Learning to ask for help.

Learning to reconnect to nature (and to my nature).

I realized that we grief through heartbreak because we lose two people:

The person we were with.

And the person we were.

And this is a beautiful thing for we get to forge our own truth from the ashes.

We get to draw a line on the sand and say No More!

No more accepting less than we deserve.

No more giving and sharing less love than we’re capable of.

Losing ourselves is the first step to finding a deeper truth.

I was recently tagged on this picture,where I was speaking at the Ars Amorata international conference earlier this year, about love, heartbreak and moving on.

I was humbled by the tears in the room, and the words from several people in the audience who were going through similar processes or who experienced their own pain shifting as my speech went on.

My journey healing through this experience had just come full circle.

It was now a gift I could share with others.

It became an invitation to see beauty in the midst of the darkest storms.

To create magic out of chaos.

To face it all.

After all… lukewarm fires don’t shape gold.