Coming Home to Your True, Authentic Self

Why did I create Inner Calling?

I wanted a space that existed as an invitation to you to pause, reflect and gently reconnect to the deeper voice within you. It's the voice that already knows who you are, what you need, and the path that feels right for you. 

It's a voice that goes beyond thought. 

And it's one that everyone has, but many of us have forgotten exists because there's so many voices in the world today we're surrounded by them. We forget to connect to our own stillness inside, to the own voice within us, the one that has our own personal truth. 

I know what it's like to feel lost or alone, searching for meaning, for connection or a way forward, when life is really hard and nothing seems clear, so know that if you've been feeling that way, you're not alone in that. This is a space where we'll all be journeying together. 

One of my favorite quotes is by Ram Dass where he says, We're all just walking each other home. This space is a celebration of that, where we're all just walking each other home together. 

In terms of my own life story, growing up, I felt trapped. My parents did their best, but they had a lot of their own pain to work through, and my earliest memories are of them crying, arguing, and my mother spending entire days behind a locked bathroom door, crying, depressed. So my home was filled with a lot of toxic stress as a child, and I knew from a very young age that if I wanted something different for myself, if I wanted to escape this, I was going to have to find my own way. 

Maybe you felt that too. Has childhood been something that you've had to survive or make through? 

That's what it was like for me. There were happy moments too, but for the most part, I just couldn't wait to leave my home because it just felt like home didn't have what I needed. So I like to say I was raised by Oprah. It was the 90s then, and every day after school, at 4pm I'd sit in front of the TV watching her talk show, listening to her–not just to the advice she gave, but to something deeper. I could sense as a child that she was connected to herself, to her own inner voice, and to something greater than herself, and from her connection to that my own woke up. Something inside me woke up. She was the first person in my life to acknowledge the human spirit, and the importance of having a spiritual life, of trusting oneself and what you know inside you. 

Sometimes, all we have are books or a voice on the screen or a message that finds us at just the right time, especially when we're young and we don't have control over our circumstances. I know how hard it is to rise above where you come from, to keep going when no one is holding you up, and to trust yourself when the world tells you not to. 

If you felt that way, like you've had to transcend your own circumstances, but feel lost and don't know how this space is for you. 

The thing about life is that it has a way of pulling each of us away from who we really are. 

I believe that we start life in our truest essence as children, and then life happens; fear, expectations, trauma, the world telling you who you should be, and it drowns out your inner wisdom and your connection to yourself. I see my job as a psychologist to help people hear it again, to hear the voice, and to connect to their deepest, most authentic self. 

Personally, I live with bipolar disorder, which means that I feel everything–highs, lows, and everything in between–more intensely than most people, and oftentimes it feels like my brain is wired to be against me, like I have to transcend my own mind. It's not always easy, but it's taught me a lot about self acceptance, neurodiversity and how to turn struggles into strengths. 

I want this place to be where darkness isn't something for us to fear, but instead something to learn from and to sit with together, because I believe the true purpose of darkness is to lead you to the light within you, that within everyone is a light, and the true purpose of darkness is to help reveal it to you. 

Spiritually, I am Christian, but I also study Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, and ancient texts from across traditions. I'm eclectic, because I honor all paths. I see them as different ways up the same mountain. To me, spirituality isn't about religion. It's about connection and recognizing the divine within you, knowing that you have the divine inside you, and that something inside you is vast, wise and sacred. 

This space will be here to help explore what feels spiritually true for you.

It's important that it feels authentic for you. We'll be exploring the big questions such as, who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose? Along with other ones, like, how can you tell it's your inner voice of truth versus thoughts that you're having? 

People don't talk enough, in my opinion, about spirituality, leadership and mental health and how they're all connected. They really are connected because at their core, they're about one thing, which is being your most authentic self. It turns out that true power isn't something external to us. It's not something outside there, even though the world tells us that's how we get power, it's not a source of true power. Instead, true power rises from within you. It's when you are able to be aligned with yourself and who you are and be authentic. So this space is about connecting to that, how to live from your deepest truth, even when the world doesn't validate it or makes it scary to believe in yourself and have faith in what you know inside yourself. 

I believe there's something inside of us keep calling us home to ourselves, that when you listen to the deepest voice inside you, it actually calls you home to yourself–

–home being everything that you've longed for, that feeling of safety, belonging, security of love, that when you listen to what you know inside yourself. And maybe you know that voice, maybe you've heard it before. It often starts as a quiet whisper, telling you this is the way, or something's off about this. It's this knowing you have about a career, a relationship or a choice you need to make, some part of you that just knows that that's the choice for you. It might be a pull that you feel towards something greater or something you can't explain. 

But too often we don't listen to these whispers or these pulls. Instead, we run from it, or we stay busy, or we numb ourselves, or we feel depressed because the world has told us to ignore it. Or we might be afraid of what we might hear if we really listened to ourselves, so we silence our intuition because the world tells us it's not practical to listen to it. 

But here we're going to discuss how your inner voice and your intuition is real and it's wise and it's yours to trust. 

Inner Calling is an affirmation of what's already inside you, your dreams, your vision, a space where you're supported, not just in hearing your inner voice, your inner knowing or your intuition, but in believing and having faith in it, and the adventure that that can take you on in life, the ups and the downs and where that all leads. And I want you to know that what you carry inside, your intuition, your experiences, your vision for your life, is real and that it deeply matters.  

Listen to the full episode of the Inner Calling podcast “Coming Home to Your True, Authentic Self” to learn more about this here, & get the workbook to go along with it in our Resource Library!