You delve full on if you’re all in. On a daily basis. Hourly, every minute your thoughts stray. At first and for a while or maybe every time a new challenge shows up, you have tons of doubts, questions and micro-resistances. And lots to learn. About how to behave from a place of rigorous honesty and radical integrity. This is your spiritual path. It mirrors with the yoga tenets of the Yamas and the Niyamas.

With time, it becomes a quest for self-approval, self-acceptance and self-care rather than looking outside yourself for validation.

And then, it is an exploration of how to give from a place of surplus. The abundance of love and fulfillment needed to supersede an ego-centered past life. You extend the repairing and maturing. You strive to become whole and complete, releasing trauma and not letting it define you or interfere with who you are today in the present moment. You connect the dots and realize it’s all been necessary. The journey becomes a continuous learning curve wherein your biggest leaps of understanding and wisdom come from a place of pain, suffering, confusion and ultimately surrender to what is. You ride the waves, enjoy the ride; swell, crest and crash and then serenity creeps back. Like the breath, it’s the in and out, the up and down, the RIDE that builds your character.

In essence, recovery is repairing your relationship with self and how you react to the world and taking responsibility for absolutely everything that you now do and did. You reframe your challenges and see where you were indeed the creator or reactor to circumstances. You are taught to love yourself no matter what, surrounded by strangers that love you for coming into the deep folds of healing. United and together, on misfit island, you share from the heart and are allowed to be vulnerable without judgment or comment. Common cultural barriers and mores are broken in order to love the newcomer with love they do not have for themselves yet. You might want to isolate but people reach out to you and you are in disbelief. Alone is not lonely any more. And you never have to suppress or hold onto negative thoughts anymore.