For a lot of us, wellness means fitness. For me it meant being strong, feeling like no mountain was too high to climb, being able to run fast, bike or play basketball hard and long. I liked liking how I felt in jeans, or at the beach.

That was my version of wellness. But, in the midst of that ego driven definition of self, fears existed that had not been completely dealt with. I’d confused wellness with vanity, and ignored my fears. I compromised my true wellness, and relied on how I looked and what I could do. A lot of people find similar themes blocking their attempt to find wellness. It’s the way we look, the car we drive, the tropical vacation, the house, or other materialistic or ego driven definitions of wellness and happiness. But, for me, and maybe for you, that definition of wellness leaves a void.

Aldoues Huxley wrote, “Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with what happened to him”.

I made a conscious choice to deal with my pain, and to take what had happened growing up and grab it by the throat, choke it off, conquer it. Authentic growth means facing our fear. That is extremely challenging, because we are not accustomed to facing what is uncomfortable.

To truly heal, it took a life threatening illness and surgery, followed by years of holistic methods, yoga, meditation, therapy, prayer, mystic energy healers, and a naturopathic doctor prescribing herbs and diet, and more. It took the hard work of reaching into the fire of the pain born by an unhappy mother who could not express love, to allow me to see the light that was always in me.

Click here to read the full blog entry on Starr Wellness Coaching.