The Untold Unraveling that Catalyzed IT ALL, part 1
In early 2016, a few months after my mom’s 3rd diagnosis with Breast Cancer, I began to unravel on all layers - mind, body, soul. It was a very painful inward time that I didn’t feel I could share with many people, as I still felt the need to uphold the strength, poise, self-sufficiency, steadiness and determination I had always used to mask my pain, grief, and fear, and to ease the worry, fear, and anxiety of my closest loved ones.
My body was screaming at me to soften and release, overcome with fatigue and stress rashes on my neck and eyelids, as I did everything I could to hold my emotions in and power through. But no matter how hard I tried to keep it together, I could feel my inner dam cracking more and more with each passing day, no longer able to contain the profound level of emotion and energy that was asking to be acknowledged and worked with. The moment anyone engaged with me even slightly beyond surface level, tears would start streaming down my face and a rock would form in my throat.
Through a series of events, I was referred to a Anthroposophic Therapist named Paz (Peace, in Spanish), and a profound unraveling that would take years to move through began.
Each week for about a year, as I met with Paz, I cried and cried, releasing the tears I had held in for years - the frozen, braced energy of restraint softening little by little. I now recognize how powerful of a space holder she was (something I didn’t have words for at the time, let alone ability to recognize that same space holding presence beginning to awaken within me), seeing into my heart and soul, and simultaneously making space for my humanness.
In Autumn of 2018, after moving to the US with my Chilean husband, finishing my training as a holistic nutritionist and beginning my first business, and then witnessing my mom go through her first summer of agressive chemotherapy, I collapsed internally. My first completely ‘broken open moment’ was underway.
Miraculously, in the same season, I met the woman that would become my long-time coach and mentor, Rebecca. As we had our first sessions together, and began to pull apart the inner pieces, she offered me acknowledgment of the anticipatory grief I had harbored around my mother’s health for 20 years - receiving the gift of “Ellie, this is grief” for the first time (ever) was indescribably healing, and my conscious walk with grief slowly began.
At the time, I still didn’t understand how important what was happening would be in my story - I could feel that I had no other choice but to turn toward my messy-feeling inner landscape, but I had no idea how doing so was laying the foundation for the most profound inner transformation, which would ultimately completely shift my energy and how I move through my life and the world.
I had no idea that as I embraced each layer of grief, pain, fear, and resistance I had been pushing past for years, my natural flow of energy, connection to my intuition and greater gifts, purpose, creativity, joy and playful, wise and light-filled spirit would finally have the space to reside in my body and being.
After about a year of intensive guided inner exploration and healing, of heart-opening and deep learning about who I was beyond the protection tactics I had identified with for years, I began to see that my career as a nutritionist had been formed as a sacred, yet fear-based, defense mechanism, hoping to save my mom’s life from Cancer. Upon this realization, I immediately knew nutrition was not my path forward, and that I was called to embrace life from a place of love and authenticity, instead of fear and control.
My work with Rebecca continued and we dove deep into the on-going grief and uncertainty of my mom’s health, my relationship to work and productivity, my sense of value and worth, the spiritual, soul-full curiosities that were bubbling to the surface, the ways I related to Life, and my true Ellie beingness - my true EllieFlow.
Knowing that I LOVED working 1:1 with clients as a nutritionist, and was profoundly inspired and impacted by the transformational and energetic process I had been engaged in over the last few years, I began to dissolve my nutrition-focused work in late 2019 and was intuitively led to enroll in the Center for Transformational Coaching’s Deep Coaching Intensive practitioner certification program in January 2020.
A live cohort of 24 of us from all over the world began to meet weekly, taking two hour live classes each Wednesday evening. I’ll never forget Leon, the Center’s founder and renowned Deep Transformational Coach, introducing us to the philosophy of Deep Transformational Coaching in the first class, and my whole heart and being vibrated with “Woah, this is it, this is what I’m meant to do.”
Part 2 coming soon.
