Spirituality

When the Western medical and clinical psychology systems destroyed my health at the young age of 22, I found myself slowly—and I mean very slowly—turning toward spirituality.

It was September 2015 when I had the opportunity to walk around a cancer convention in Los Angeles, California, and was first introduced to the body's chakra system. In a room full of serious and sterile medical professionals stood Dr. Ravi and his very colorful booth, where he sold crystal jewelry, essential oils, divination tools, a three-day workshop, and chakra-balancing massages.

When I approached the table, he said, “Wow, you are very angry at your father. Would you care to cleanse your aura today?”

And he was right.

How did he know that just by looking at me?

At the time, I was still pretty linear and required valid scientific and biological proof, but for some reason, I kept going back to his booth. After many questions, he offered to let me take his three-day workshop for free if I booked a massage with him, so I did.

In 2011 at 22, I started having stomach pains that sent me to the ER several times. Looking back, I now understand my experience as being connected to taking Adderall and Ambien on an empty stomach and the severe digestive issues that followed. I had terrible stomach pains and issues going to the bathroom for four years, and I had been given diagnoses of IBS, acid reflux, and heartburn by Western doctors that never fully explained what I was experiencing.

Then I had one massage with Dr. Ravi, and I immediately—and I mean immediately—had a normal, pain-free bowel movement for the first time since 2011.

I was sold.

Since then, I have devoted myself to understanding health through the lens of the chakra system. I have spent the last decade studying everything I can about energy and spirituality, all to eventually come back to this very human experience.

Over the years, my understanding of spirituality has changed.

At first, I thought spirituality was all love and light. I thought I needed to find peace, bliss,

love, and joy every moment of the day, or else I was doing something wrong. I thought I had to be compassionate with people when what they actually needed were boundaries. I thought I needed to swallow my tears of sadness and be grateful for my blessings. I thought spirituality meant bypassing the process of actually feeling my emotions and being present with my experience.

I eventually realized that spirituality wasn't about transcending the human experience. It was about becoming more willing to fully inhabit it.

Today, being spiritual looks a lot different.

Today, being spiritual to me means cleaning my space, keeping up with my chores and responsibilities, being present with my loved ones, being present with what is in front of me instead of trying to create something different out of discomfort, having hard and honest conversations with the people I love, allowing myself space to be human while still holding myself accountable, honoring my boundaries and values, building a business, cooking my own food, taking care of the animals in my life, taking care of Mother Earth, and maintaining a growth mindset focused on my own soul's evolution, to name a few.

It means finding the sacred in the ordinary.

And perhaps that is what I was looking for all along—not an escape from being human, but a deeper way of experiencing it.