I used to think healing meant not getting triggered anymore.

Now I think healing means having the capacity to stay with myself when I do.

Let me explain.

I’ve been holding space for a Rose Master Plant Dieta, and although I’m not actively dieting Rose myself, she has been incredibly present in my field.

Last week a friend encouraged me to get back out there in the dating scene and helped me create a profile on an app. At first, I felt grateful that my friend had given me the nudge that I needed to take action and excited about meeting some new people. I thought I had taken an important step toward finding a partner.

Instead, after only a few hours, I found myself face-to-face with decades of unprocessed fear and grief. Fear of putting myself out there to potentially be hurt. Fear of being more visible. Grief of all the years where I hid who I was and what I needed in order to keep the peace.

I found myself curled up in the corner on my couch feeling so much resistance. And as much as I wanted to eat a bunch of carbs and binge Netflix to distract myself….I leaned in. I told the scared part of myself that I was there for her. That nothing she could do or say or feel would be too much for me. That I was not going anywhere.

I felt something soften, and waves of rage and grief moved through me with an intensity I had never allowed myself to feel before. Decades of rage and grief came pouring out of me through wailing and punching of pillows. I could feel the part of me that was FINALLY given permission to feel the pain. I wasn’t trying to run from it or suppress it anymore. I showed up for my younger self and attuned to her and held space in the ways that she needed all those years ago.

When the crying subsided, and I started to feel more calm, judgement and shame started to creep in. My inner critic got LOUD.

“You were doing so well. You took one action step and freaked out. What happened?!”

“It’s just a dating app, why are you spiraling so much?”

“No one will want to be with you if you make such a big deal out of everything.”

And my favorite, “You’ve done so much healing work, why are you getting WORSE?!”

That last thought stopped me in my tracks. I realized that I’m not actually getting worse. It’s just that the feelings were bigger. The truth is, the way I showed up for myself, held space for what was arising, and coached myself through that trigger is actually a testament to the healing work I’ve done.

The pain wasn’t bigger. My capacity was.

I realized that I needed to CELEBRATE the fact that I had the capacity to feel everything that came up to be processed. That my ability to lean in and go to the center of the pain and actually feel it fully without holding back, is what I needed to close the trauma loop.

And looking back, I knew that Rose had orchestrated the whole thing.

Rose’s love is not all rainbows and unicorns.

It’s the kind of love that says, “I love you too much to let you keep abandoning yourself.”

I thought creating a dating profile would help me find a partner.

I thought I was opening myself to love.

Instead, I discovered my capacity to stay with myself through pain.

The gift from Rose wasn’t receiving romantic love.

The gift was a deeper capacity for self-love.

And that feels like the greatest gift of all.

My friend’s 7-year-old is currently obsessed, and he has been teaching me. I have been fascinated watching him manipulate his Rubik’s cube at lightning speed, especially when he’s about to solve it and it always seems to get more mixed up only to magically transform into a perfectly solved cube.

I’m definitely not going at lightning speed yet, but I’m having a lot of fun learning!

(In full disclosure, I finally learned from a YouTube tutorial, because an enthusiastic 7-year-old teacher is not always the easiest to follow…but I digress.)

The next day, my mentor offered virtual breathwork, and to my surprise, my entire breathwork session turned into one big Rubik’s cube metaphor. Each round of the three-part breath seemed to activate more and more unwinding.

I could feel my body and energetic field as one big Rubik’s cube twisting, moving, and unscrambling.

In moments of resistance, like my jaw getting tight, I could sense that the movement of the metaphorical Rubik’s cube had stopped. The energy was stuck.

But as I kept breathing and surrendering more fully into the experience, the energy started to flow again.

The cube kept turning.

Spirit was showing me how often, in moments of resistance, nervous system dysregulation, or trauma response, I try to control the movement of energy in order to feel safe. I could see how breathwork, plant medicine, and somatic exercises are the things that help me soften resistance and return to flow.

At one point during the breathwork journey, I realized that wanting to become a “perfectly solved” Rubik’s cube — to finally heal enough that everything is permanently aligned and regulated — is actually impossible.

Because then we would no longer be living human lives.

To be human is to constantly be in motion. To respond to what is happening around us and within us.

As this moved through me, I could feel shame start to release.

The shame that I need to be a certain way to be acceptable.
That I need to monitor myself constantly in order to avoid discomfort.
That feeling deeply means something is wrong with me.

But to feel is to be human.

We can’t avoid feeling any more than we can avoid breathing.

Feelings are not meant to be analyzed.
They’re meant to be metabolized.

And breathwork reminds me of that every single time.

What struck me most afterward was how deeply supportive it felt to be held in the experience by someone I trust. I had honestly gotten away from my own breathwork practice over the past few months, and this session reminded me how powerful it is to have support while moving through an unraveling.

Sometimes we don’t need to force ourselves into perfection.

Sometimes we simply need support while our metaphorical cubes are in motion.

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If this resonates, I offer 1:1 breathwork, integration support, virtual and in-person group experiences, and other spaces for people navigating healing, transformation, and life’s thresholds.