Awareness Friday is a weekly invitation to pause, reflect, and reconnect — with yourself, your values, and your desires. It's a space where I share insights, stories, and quiet reminders that a different life is possible. A life that feels like yours.
Whether you're in transition, feeling stuck, or simply longing for more alignment, these reflections are seeds. Let them land where they need to.
Do you sometimes feel you wish you learned about something useful earlier? I felt like that when I started to work on myself during the pandemic in 2021.I learned about boundaries. I still feel shocked that I didn’t know about boundaries before I was 37.
A few months back, I went to a sounds bath in the rain forest in Kona, Hawai’i. The session was powerful; I lay down, looking up at the trees, hearing the birds and the sounds from the singing bowls.
The calmness of the moment. You feel so relaxed that you can fall asleep…But no, not me. At the moment I could feel my body shift, a small sound arose and interrupted my so-needed and desired moment of relaxation.Afterward the session, I went to talk to the woman who was offering the experience, to thank her and share with her how it went for me. I opened up that I had been struggling for the past few weeks to really relax. There was stress in my body that my mind was conscious of but couldn’t deal with. If you have been reading my story, you know that I had a challenging time for a couple of years in NYC, and some layers of it I can’t share here.But I know you can imagine, because you have been through and might be going through hard times right now. The stress from living in a country that is turning its back on immigrants had woken up old traumas from my life in NYC. After working hard to be where I am today, it feels very fragile again.Not being sure, I can come back to the place I call home if I need to go visit my parents in my home country. I haven’t been there in 7 years; the pandemic happened, and now I’m again in a state of limbo. I do have more rights than a lot of people because of my background and the color of my skin but I’m not fully free. This isn’t about comparison, it’s about flawed systems.The woman validated by feelings and mentioned the nervous system and how if you don’t take care of it, it keeps the score until you finally do. It felt like I was hearing about the nervous system for the first time; it clicked and made total sense.Sometimes speech therapy isn’t enough.We grow up in a society that never empowered the notion of taking care of our body. Or only in the superficial way around the standard of “beauty” and to control the inevitable fact that we all are aging. So, if you never heard about how to take care of your nervous system and vagal nerves, go look; it might unlock some old things in you that it’s time to let go. Believe me. You are not what happened to you. But you are responsible for what you make out of it, and how you relate to it.
