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Cheer captain in high school. Best dancer in my college sorority.

Appearance of perfection from the outside, yet I was internally riddled with shame, anxiety, and self-hatred.

Yes, I was beautiful, but I was so identified with my body that I didn’t feel beautiful at all. Perfectionism. Drama. Gossip. Lying. This was my past: stuck in comparison. Stuck in proving myself. F*cking obsessed with keeping my 4.0 to prove my worth. Addicted to alcohol, addicted to Adderall, addicted to TV. Numbing, escaping, avoiding all my pain and emotions…this was my life.

I was looking at old pictures of myself from a couple of years ago and came across a picture of me skinny, tan, beautiful, seemingly happy and perky as ever. Yet, I reminisced on that day and remembered that the night before I had literally peed my bed because I was that blackout drunk. The world would never have known by just looking at this picture. But that was my internal reality at that point in my life.

We live in a culture riddled with comparison, pressure, and toxicity. We are taught to numb our emotions with Big Pharma. We are taught to buy into consumerism instead of creating our dreams. We’ve been programmed to check our phones every two seconds. Part of us buying into the fallacy that this is where the sense of connection lies.

Where does the suffering come from? Greed, insecurity, lust for power, adult babies who have an inner child who just needs to be held and given some unconditional love. We all could use a day, a week, a month, a lifetime of getting the weight of the world taken off our shoulders—giving us an eternal feeling that everything is taken care of, like we don’t have to do anything except learn how to be ourselves…explore, be curious, create, have fun.

This is what life is supposed to be about. Yet, we’ve been injected with fearful words causing us to spend our days living in anxious thoughts.

David Hawkins quotes, “Knowingness is that all fear is illusion. This must be known with absolute certainty.” This is the world I want to live in.

Today, I’m slowly filtering through what is working for humanity and what clearly isn’t. I rarely obsess about my body and hardly wear makeup. I don’t drink alcohol. I don’t abuse my phone. I replaced pharmaceuticals with occasional plant medicine ceremonies. I replaced TV with reading and meditation with the constant doing. I replaced consumerism with creativity, lying with integrity, and fear with trust.

Now I spend my days releasing thoughts that don’t serve me and replacing them with ones that do. Now I smile in pictures because I’m genuinely happy, not because I’m forcing myself to appear that way. Now I stop working when my body is tired and take breaks when life becomes too much.

This is how we grow mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually—making little changes at a time. Growth doesn’t happen overnight, and we are forever on the journey. And even though I don’t have it all figured out, life is 100 percent more beautiful. My days are filled with more joy. More fulfillment. More love. More connection. More peace. It’s great; existence is great.

As we make these small shifts in our lives, we are initially faced with tremendous resistance. Yet, we get to a point where life becomes more and more effortless. We naturally make better and higher choices for ourselves as our standards for what we are willing to put up with in life get increasingly raised.

We are no longer okay living in anxiety once we know the feeling of pure contentment. We will refuse to buy into the toxic programming that our culture incessantly bombards us with after experiencing for ourselves embodied wisdom—after experiencing what it feels like to be deeply connected and empowered.

I did it. You can do it too.

We can all do it.

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