Culmination point.

A year ago, I was let go from my office job, at the exact time where I was craving pursuing purpose rather than spending 80% of my time working to survive. I started my journey with a couple months of resting and pondering. I knew that I wanted to help people; to help them understand themselves and get out of survival mode. I signed up for a neurolinguistic coach program, with a neurodivergent specialty. Followed by a somatic therapy course and finally a microdosing for nervous system regulation practitioner certification. After a year of studying to understand the nervous system and becoming a coach and mentor… I feel like all of this is wrong.

I spent 20 years of ayahuasca journeys, integration circles, breathwork workshops, ecstatic dance, somatic exercises, mediation of all sorts, peyote and drum circles, talk therapy, countless self help books and podcasts, an entire shelf of supplements… I have come to the conclusion that the holistic healing industry is nothing more than a lifestyle marketed as medicine. A gym bro who’s life turned around after making his entire life revolve around his workout schedule will believe the cure to all ailments is the gym. Alex Honold, the rock climber renowned for free soloing El Capitan affirms that people need to be afraid for their life more often in order to not sweat the small stuff. Spiritual narcissists of all shapes and form will peddle their own shaman or guru (or themselves) as the ultimate stop to heal all wounds because that worked for THEM. This is an industry that markets low success rates methods, often rooted in the placebo effect, as the solution to things that shouldn’t even be considered problems. 20 years and I don’t know how many thousands of dollars and no one, not a single fucking soul has ever told me “do you know who are before you decide what you don’t want to be?”. I spent 41 years living half a life, thinking that I was broken and needed healing, and only once I had healed enough I would start living. In the end, the only thing that has made a real change is a better life philosophy and self acceptance. I’m still messy, still moody, still disorganized, still hypersensitive… and I don’t see that changing any time soon.

In the fall of 2025, I’ve started taking in coaching clients. Likes attract like I suppose because I ended up with women who were exactly like me; believing something was fundamentally wrong with them because of procrastination, lack of will power, chronic fatigue and overwhelm. Women who wanted to change who they were at their core and had already tried a million techniques. In the beginning, I applied my tools: we made schedules, meal plans, workout plans… but without fail this would last only a few days or weeks until crash out. I took a completely different approach : radical self acceptance. In the end, none of the actionable tools I learned were used, all that was needed was self acceptance. The actual things they came to see me for didn’t change, but they started to slowly feel less stressed on the daily, less self loathing and more self acceptance and self love, which made relationships easier and life more hopeful without ever really changing anything to their routines. I think little by little some things got better, but nowhere near what they wanted to achieve initially.

At this point… I don’t know how much I believe in change. I feel like the people who do change are the ones who were always gonna change, no matter what tool, therapist, shaman or book they fell on at the time they were ready for change. For people like me, and these women, who’s suffered from C/PTSD for decades, I don’t know how much change is really possible. The only thing I whole heartedly believe in, is radical self acceptance and from there, I don’t know what else is possible, but I know that it must be the first step.

But here’s the problem… how could I possibly market myself as a self acceptance coach? No one looking for healing understands that the very problem is that they’re looking for healing. All of their drive for change stems from negative self perspectives created by a toxic capitalist, hustle culture. If on session one I would have said “nothing will change, you’ll just love yourself as you are” I don’t think any of them would have stuck around.

I feel like I spent the entire past year trying to find my path, to satisfy my profound desire to be of service to my community, but I’m back to square one. I am grieving a version of myself that will never be… but also celebrating getting closer to my authenticity.

Maybe I just skipped a step. Maybe if I want to be a life coach, I should actually live a little. Maybe I’ll just spend a year enjoying my life, making art and moments. Applying my own philosophy and become a self acceptance inspiration, rather than a teacher. Maybe.