The Light In Me Sees the Light in You

When I was 13 I experienced an injury that left me in chronic pain. My head was turned, my shoulder stuck up near my chin, and any slight movement brought unbearable pain. We went to doctors and emergency rooms, but nothing helped. While my family and I searched for the right person to help (which took several days), I remember feeling so lost and helpless. How can I relax when something is this wrong? When I’m in so much pain?

One night, my Nana came over while I was struggling to fall asleep. She told me to close my eyes and start noticing my toes how heavy they felt, how gravity pulled them deep into the bed. Then we moved up to my legs. What I didn’t realize was that my Nana was guiding me through a body scan meditation. By the time we reached my neck and head, she had me count balloons. She told me to imagine being in her backyard, handing me a balloon. I wrote the number 1 on it, let it go, and watched it float all the way to the top of the sky until I couldn’t see it anymore. Then I took the next balloon, wrote 2, and released it too.

This simple technique completely pulled my mind away from my neck. Most of us are never taught what to do or how to think when we are distressed or in pain, but having even one guiding idea changed everything for me. Eventually, I went to a chiropractor who put my neck back in place. But I kept this meditation practice with me for the rest of my life. That was my very first experience with mindfulness and meditation. As I got older I begin to deal with chronic pain due to migraines and endometriosis. Whenever I couldn’t sleep due to this pain and the anxiety that accompanied it, I returned to my toes, my breath, my balloons.

Since that day, I’ve always had an interest in meditation-based pain relief and stress relief. Years later, I did my senior project on that exact thing: meditation-based stress relief. My mentor and I would go out into the community and host what we called med-mobs (like a flash mob, but mediation style). They were little pop-up gatherings where we’d sit down together in public places and meditate. We did it to bring awareness to this idea of disconnecting from the outside world and learning to drop into your body anywhere, at any time.

As I got older, I started hearing about manifesting, and I was curious what that really meant. I went into a local spiritual store and was recommended The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. That book cracked me open. It made me realize that our entire lives, we sign up for certain “agreements”, some we choose consciously, but many are handed to us by our parents, our culture, our society. And while some agreements help us fit in, they don’t always lead to the most peaceful or joyful life.

So, I began to question my own agreements. I realized how much information I was absorbing from the outside, rather than allowing wisdom to rise up from within, true insight. The more I filled my mind with other people’s thoughts, the harder it became to hear my own. I couldn’t always tell what was an original thought and what was given to me.

So, I spent years dropping into the depths of my own soul. I liked to picture it like I’m a well and my awareness is a rope lowering me down to see what’s hidden below. I wasn’t afraid; I believed I was strong enough to handle whatever I might find. I even have this theory — and whether it’s true or not, don’t tell me, because it comforts me — that our brain and higher self know what we can handle. That’s why people faint when they’re too scared, it’s a protective shut-off. It’s the same with repressed trauma: your body shields you from what you’re not able to withstand. Because it knows you and it loves you.

So with this theory, I went deep, again and again, sometimes through wild experiments, sometimes through quiet practices, always digging, always listening. I learned it’s a lifelong journey. There’s no one trip down the well that makes you enlightened forever. But every time I’ve gone down, I’ve come back up with something valuable.

This hunger for truth pulled me toward ancient knowledge. I started to see patterns and universal truths, things that remain true no matter who’s president, where you live, or how much technology changes. The Truth… That’s what I seek. Because the Truth will set you free and anything untrue is an illusion, a dream.

Wanting to understand more, I began spending time with our elder community. I wondered: What can they teach me?What wisdom can I gather from their stories? If I sat with enough elders, maybe I could see the patterns, the Truths that repeat. So I became a caregiver.

Caregiving taught me humility. It showed me how dense life really is, how much there is I don’t know. It taught me that things are rarely as simple as I want them to be. It taught me the Truth that our thoughts shape our world. Listening to the elders’ stories, I heard how their beliefs and perspectives lined up with their lived experiences. It made the idea of our inner agreements even clearer.

I saw that a positive mindset matters deeply. The happiest elders were those most grateful for the life they’d had, not necessarily the easiest life, but one they appreciated anyway. They didn’t care about wrinkles or appearances. They cared about moments: time at the beach with family, laughter with siblings.

I noticed too that those at the end of life spoke often of love, of family, children, and the kindness they gave and received. It reminded me that so many things we stress about now won’t matter when we’re 85.

After stepping back from caregiving to digest all I’d learned, I felt a calling tugging at me: Help people who are scared or in pain. I thought it would be children at first, remembering my own pain and fear as a child and how transformative it was to learn even a single calming practice.

While I was on this journey of discovery my husband lost his father. It was my first close experience of death. I realized that although I always knew intellectually that everyone dies, I had forgotten that the people around me would experience deaths, too and that for some, it would tear their hearts apart.

In our culture death is taboo. It didn’t used to be this way. We used to see death more often, it was almost apart of everyday life. Now, with longer lives and medical advances, we hide it away. I knew I wanted to be someone who could walk beside my family, my siblings, my community through grief but I also knew I had so much to learn.

So I studied life and death, love and loss, grief and sorrow. I volunteered with hospice to gain real experience. I read about the wild edge of sorrow and realized how incomplete a life is if we refuse the darker colors of our emotional palette. Without grief, we wouldn’t know the depth of love. Without sadness, happiness has no contrast.

I became a Death Doula and trained with the Center for Conscious Living and Dying. I learned what it means to companion someone at the end of life, to witness but not fix, to hold space without fear, to trust that the pain is sacred because it proves the love was real.

After that, I asked myself: What is a Doula, really? I realized death is not just the body’s final moment. Everything dies: friendships, ideas, jobs, conversations, moments. Everything is born, and everything ends. So what does it mean to companion someone through death? It means I companion them through all these tiny deaths and births, too.. The beginning of a day, the closing of a day, a dream, a phone call, a meal.

Now, I live by this cycle: the birth of a day, the death at night, and everything in between — a thousand tiny beginnings and endings. Maybe our dreamworld is an afterlife and a before-life, too. When we wake, we’re born again, into a brand new day.

So I remind myself: what doesn’t matter at 85 doesn’t matter now. I remember the ultimate truth: our thoughts shape our feelings, which shape our reality. We are the keepers of our own fire. We love and we lose, we laugh and we cry. We are angry and scared, and confused and overjoyed and content and anxious and everything in between. We live. And along the way, we find companions and we walk each other home.