I had these visions of myself coming out of this teacher training with all my problems fixed. Clear skin, no back/neck/knee pain. I’d be more comfortable being myself than ever before and I’d be 100% grounded in my purpose on this planet.
Right now, that doesn’t seem likely.
In these past few months all of my problems have only gotten worse. My back pain has become so bad my teacher told me to stop the asana part of my practice (the reason you don’t see much of that in this blog at the moment). My skin has gone through cycles of the best I’ve ever seen it to so bad that I just cry out of frustration when I look in the mirror. I go through extreme highs of waking up in complete bliss and just loving every ounce of life and lows of waking up in a fog where I can’t stand to be in my own body.
It’s difficult to face these things having read all these books on how we create our own mindset and how changing how we think can change our lives. Because every time I have these really dark feelings, it creates conflict within me. I know that by feeding into them I’m just creating more darkness, but I don’t know how to get myself out of them. I become frustrated with myself and that only makes it worse.
I know I need help, but I don’t even know where to start…I need a dermatologist, nutritionist, therapist, chiropractor, physical therapist…and the list goes on…
One thing I do really believe is that our mental health 100% affects both our internal and external experiences, so I think that’s the place to start. I opened up to my mom the other day about wanting to go to therapy and I think it really stunned her. She had just finished telling me how inspired she was by all the changes I was making in my life and that’s when I knew I needed to tell her about everything she wasn’t seeing. I’m not someone who readily talks about the internal struggles I have, but after hearing how drastically different her view of the journey I’m going through and my view of it were, I knew I needed to set things straight.
And that’s what I want to do here. It’s so easy to portray an easy, beautiful life online. It’s difficult to open up about the struggles we’re going through. I have been holding off on writing about some of these things because I wanted to wait until everything had passed and I had something profound to say about the beautiful change I had gone through. But I don’t see that happening any time soon and I want to be completely transparent with how I’m actually feeling at this moment. Because that won’t come through in pictures of yoga poses or beautiful sunrises (although I obviously post those too). I want to be part of the change that’s slowly happening in social media. I want to be someone who inspires others to reach out and get help when they need it. We don’t need to go through these difficult times alone. This is something I’m beginning to learn. Being strong doesn’t mean not showing your weaknesses. It means allowing yourself to be completely vulnerable.
So here I am being 100% vulnerable…and it’s scary as shit.
Stephanie Lundgren 