Have you ever felt like you had to abandon parts of yourself in order to be loved, belong and be accepted?

What has the year 2025 taught me

This is just a reflective episode to bid farewell to the year 2025. I am sharing a love letter I wrote to 2025 as I was reflecting on the past year, which was a bit of a challenging year but also one of the most rewarding. I hope you enjoy this short and sweet episode and happy new year 2026 to you and yours.

Have you ever felt like you had to abandon parts of yourself in order to be loved, belong and be accepted?

Do you ever feel like you've had to abandon who you truly are in order to be loved, to belong and to be accepted by your family or others? This is one of the questions I have been trying to explore for myself lately as I joined a 28 day Instagram posting challenge called Messengers last month. The challenge invited us to show up for ourselves, our truth and our light, authentically, honouring whatever shows up for us moments to moments for 28 days straight. During the challenge, I have been exploring some of my shadows while trying to meet my edges. Halfway through it, I found myself reflecting on the link between our emotional health and body dissociation and disconnection. particularly, in my case, I explored how self abandonment used to manifest due to the disconnect I felt from my body's sensations and numbness of my emotions from a very young age. The short post on instagram has inspired this episode because I wanted to further explore and elaborate a little more here. So, I decided to record a spontaneous episode on this topic to share my personal experience and in the process invite you to get curious about your own relationship with your body and your emotions, especially the parts of you you might have suppressed out of survival. Enjoy!

What pain and grief taught me through heartbreak - part 2

In this part 2 episode I focus on the link between pain, grief and self-abandonment and how I learnt to recognize the patterns within myself. I tell the story of how my last breakup back in 2023, the most amicable and freeing breakup I had ever experienced in my life, opened my eyes to the ways in which I tend to unconsciously abandon myself in relationships. The healing work I had done prior years, revealed some outdated patterns, behaviours and preconceived notions of love that needed to be corrected because it always lead to self-sabotage and/or heartbreak. I share this story as I was reminded of this period of my life 4 weeks ago when I was journalling because life felt overwhelming and as I was reading the words I just wrote down back to myself the pain and grief felt familiar and old. I was yet facing another test/challenge and I was being invited into another descent into my heart and womb to face the the parts of me I am might still be hiding from, shut down and the parts I might still be unwilling to let go of in order to receive what I have been asking for.

What pain and grief taught me through heartbreak - The intro and check-in

With everything that is going on in the world right now, In this new episode, I am just doing a general check-in on our hearts and where we are at in this moment in time. As an introduction to the topic: what pain and grief taught me through heartbreak, a topic I will be exploring into more depth in a part 2, I start by sharing with the listeners how I have been doing the past month and why I have been absent here. I then introduce a little bit the listeners to what I will be talking about during part 2 and I end the episode with some prompt or questions for listeners to reflect on their own relationship with grief, how have they been tending to their body and if they've been able to be present with themselves lately amidst all the intensity in the world right now.

Learning to be present with grief

In this part two episode on grief, I am joined by my dear friend and sister Victoria Cernjak. Victoria and I's friendship started while we were both going through a massive spiritual transformation and we were on our own individual healing journey. We met purely by Divine providence when we both signed up for a year long program and it included a 5 days in person retreat in Halifax. We ended up being roommates and that first day we met, we talked non-stop. It felt like we've known each other many lifetimes before and we were finally being reunited in this one. We became very close friends ever since, chatting on the phone almost every day. Victoria and I talk about pretty much everything and we've had so many deep conversations over the years. Actually one of our intimate conversations inspired the start of this podcast, and that's why she had to be my first special guest.  During this particular episode, we start with an introduction of the guest, then talk a bit about our friendship before diving into our conversation on grief. And believe me, it is really just that, a conversation with a dear friend, where we explore her recent experience of loss and how she navigated her grief. We've talked for instance about her previous and current relationship to grief; what surprised her most about her grief this time around; how grief moves through her body; and what tools and rituals have been most supportive to her in expressing her grief.  I can't wait for you to discover this magical woman and I hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we've enjoyed recording it.