THE POWER TO TRANSFORM

How did growing up in communist-era Poland and later fleeing the country shape your resilience and determination to create the life you love?

This was probably the biggest and most important lesson my parents taught me – if things are not how you wish they were where you are – change them. They taught me that we have the power to change our own circumstances and change our lives by taking charge of our destiny.

This was such a powerful thing to witness as a child. First, they tried to create that change by standing up against what was unjust and unfair – speaking up against the corrupt government. When it started to cost them their safety and the safety of their children –they did the scary thing of packing up and leaving, leaving without telling anyone. It was such a lesson of standing up against what’s wrong, what’s toxic, what’s intolerable. They wanted to give their children a better future.

They wanted their own lives to look differently. They followed their dreams. So, I grew up refusing to accept anything as a rule I couldn’t break, if it was harmful for me. I grew up with a tough skin, a tolerance for pain but also very aware of the power I had within me to change anything that I did not think was working.

Some of that resilience and power was dimmed when I arrived in America as a teenager and was met with ridicule, abuse and disrespect as a foreigner. Some of it came at the cost of shutting down my heart just a little bit in order to protect myself. There was this dance between the toughness and the tenderness that I had to navigate and the waters around were sometimes murky. The path forward wasn’t always clear. I could get “too hard” sometimes and get lost in the harshness of life. But then I fell in love with my husband and opened my heart. Then I had my daughter and then my son – and they each reminded me of the tenderness and warmth f love that was within me.

While the normal and more comfortable ways of operating were often in the masculine energy of doing, achieving, and chasing – the love in my life would always remind me to soften and lean into the feminine. I am a beautiful balance of both these energies within me – the masculine and the feminine. Resilience and love. Strength and tenderness. Those two forces came out of that experience.

Mostly by sitting with a lot of pain and learning how to get back up after being knocked down, how to mend my own heart after heart-break after heart-break. It was resilience and a deep inner knowing that I deserved more. A deep belief that I was worthy of the life I dreamed of one day living. So, I put my head down and I worked hard. I learned the language. I studied the culture. I became like the other girls my age – I observed and copied, like a chameleon, blending in to fit in.

At the time I did not know it, but the method became to lose all foreign parts of myself because I learned they weren’t deemed worthy – life showed me evidence of it. So I worked hard to become American, to succeed, to prove to others (but most of all to myself) that I could do it. I took care of my younger sister, I cooked and cleaned to help my parents, I took on part-time jobs – all of this while studying with a dictionary and falling asleep on top of my books at night. It was not easy.

This was where I took on the roles by which I learned to define myself later on in life. Of course, I couldn’t see it back then, but by repressing the parts of myself that made me different from other teenage kids, I was actually repressing my true self – getting further and further away from my own essence and my soul. But that’s how it often goes in life – we do this to survive and eventually, the tools and techniques we use to ensure our survival end up preventing us from further growth. There comes a time to let them go – and that’s what happened to me after that first panic attack. Life asked me to release the identity of the survivor and embrace the return to my authentic self.

How did anxiety, panic attacks and a heart condition serve as a catalyst for your inward journey?

All of it stopped me in my tracks. Had this not happened, I am pretty sure I would have just continued the way I had been going – racing, running, chasing, achieving, pushing through and getting through life by being a warrior. I don’t think I would have made it that much further because obviously it was taking such a toll on my body and physical health – my heart was showing me the truth – that this way of living was simply not sustainable.

So it all served as a wake up call – a chance to take a long hard look at how I had been living and why and decide how I wanted to move forward. I really believe that my soul had been whispering to me for a long time telling me that a change was needed –but I simply did not listen. I was too busy and too important! Lol. And so my soul had to take drastic measures to get my attention! And it certainly worked.

Avert the challenges of panic attacks and heart conditions by cultivating a life of balance and unity—nurturing the well-being of your mind, body, and spirit.

Now I spend my time telling others that it does not have to come to this if we live life in balance and harmony of all aspects of what it is to be a human – mind, body and spirit.