It's Me! Iola.

The winter of 2018 was the moment that everything shifted. I was on a travel nursing contract on a medical floor in Nova Scotia, braving the Atlantic winds and blistering snow. I worked six 12 hour shifts a week and in my physical exhaustion, I had to somehow keep my head right; that season I was continuously met with grief and calamity as week after week I found myself comforting and caring for those facing a close and inevitable death (6 cycles of lives completed).

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Wrapped up in my work, I also faced death on the home front and across the ocean. My Lola was pushing through an illness that we thought would take her life and our family pets had unexpectedly died on New Year’s Day. I came home from that contract with more to take on; needs that were aching to be met from people void of my contact for months. And as I began to settle into the familiar chaos of nursing at my home hospital and caring for my family, the threat of COVID-19 would amass further unrest and loss.

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The pace of life was impossible to keep up with, while my reality was begging for pause, for reflection and inventory. I was scared. I was scared of being alone in this world and reverted back to being deeply dependent on others to feel safe. I was scared of myself; my moodiness, my lack of self-confidence and negative self-talk that became proof that I deserved the cards that I was dealt.

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I was continuously plunging back into the depths of my toxic behaviours of working too much, eating too much, emotional outbursts and temper tantrums, all to numb the fears that were bubbling to the surface. Most of all, I became frustrated and afraid of the banalities of contemporary medicine just as the pandemic hit. In a system that was already flawed, tacking on the unrelenting stress that a virus would bring to healthcare, to society, to me… talk therapy, yoga and journaling wasn’t going to cut it.

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In one of the deepest contraction periods of my life, a liminal space tinged with tragedy, mundanity and paralysis, I decided that there was going to be another way. Through healing, through pain and through fear. I didn’t know what that would look like, but I had this unwavering, throbbing, deep belief in my womb, that I was going to find the missing piece to this unshakeable fear that had been hijacking my emotions for so long.

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In nursing school, you are introduced to the concept of holistic medicine and the determinants of health; that a plethora of stimuli can and will affect the trajectory of someone’s life. A huge conversation that is glossed over… because it is that big. And I realised through witnessing my own healing that the missing piece for me was, first and foremost, the connection to my own body. Bombarded by so much external stimuli, judgement, opinions, expectations on how we should be, we lose track of the communication system that lies within the senses.

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How can we make sense of the world and our relationship to it without sensing?

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I took the deep dive into my somatic coaching certification, breathwork facilitation and studied any manner of somatic experiencing, trauma, pleasure, self love and relational healing that I could get my hands on in order to bridge the gap between our external environment and our internal experiences. Filling the void of self-doubt and confusion with body-based knowledge I have been able to successfully lead tribes of women to rediscover their trust in themselves, their voices, their sensuality, their connection to their pain and their essence of choice. To move away from the loop of risk-aversion and fear-led living and into heart centered, intentional, abundant and rich experiences.

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In moments of resistance and contraction there is an opportunity to transition from the mundane to the extraordinary. Traditional modalities are simply the tip of the iceberg; we ride the waves and venture below the surface to find the density and depth of our experiences in a place that remains unfamiliar until we choose to continuously find reason to take the plunge.