How Life’s Unexpected Challenges Can Actually Lead To Transformation
What my first panic attack taught me about true alignment and finding growth in life’s hardest moments.
The Wake-Up Call
2024… the year my eyes were opened to the full truth of my reality.
And it started with my first panic attack.
I was sitting on the couch on a cold winter night, blankly staring out of the window of my apartment into the city skyline, feeling completely overwhelmed and out of control with life.
Between the pressures of full-time entrepreneurship, navigating new social landscapes, going deeper into my womanhood and uncovering more truths about the impact of past experiences on my life, my heart began racing uncontrollably. It was like everything became clear at once, that I wasn’t seeing myself fully and that in some ways, I’d been living in a disassociated reality clouded by my past experiences.
I felt like I was in a house of mirrors. My chest tightened and my breath felt trapped in my throat. As the room began to spin and I found myself unable to gain control — I wondered, “Am I having a heart attack? Am I losing my mind?” and it was in that moment, I truly thought, “this is it, this is how I die”.
I was too afraid to tell anyone what I was experiencing and in that moment, felt like I had no one to call. The reality that I didn’t feel truly supported as the most authentic version of myself, or fully aligned with the communities I’d been building, hit me hard, amplifying the feeling that I was in this alone.
But, once I was able to regulate my breathing and return to a calm state, I questioned deeply what was happening to me. How did I even get here? What’s really going on?
I’d accomplished so much and had faced much harder obstacles, so why now am I feeling something, whatever this is, so intensely?
Over the next few months I reflected and realized the stress of continuing to operate outside of who I was at my core fully—and making decisions that didn’t align with me—had finally caught up.
For a while, I carried the weight of shame and guilt for ending up out of alignment after working towards it for the last 7 years since leaving corporate.
I questioned myself, my beliefs and my teachings. I thought, “If I’m supposed to be the expert in alignment and emotional intelligence, how could I possibly be struggling with something I help others with so well?”
But, in the quest to uncover the root cause of my experience, I found the answer to my question:
Instead of allowing myself to be 100% authentically me, I was still suppressing parts of myself to conform to other’s expectations of who I should be. I didn’t allow myself to feel sad, angry or frustrated and I had a hard time asking for the support I needed. I pushed myself to stay strong for others, to keep showing up and to reach alignment by any means necessary, regardless of how I felt. I decided to put on a brave face and smile, even when I was suffering deeply inside.
I prioritized how others around me felt, and I’d forgotten to prioritize how my experiences were making me feel, even if they looked and seemed great on the outside. Everyone else seemed OK, so I told myself I just needed to align with the world around me and focus more on logic, rather than feeling.
I’d forgotten a key element to alignment I learned early on in my journey — that how you feel is the most critical component to living your most joyful and aligned life.
On your personal development journey, you may have stumbled across the teachings of Neville Goddard, whose teachings played a significant role in my initial transformation, reminds us that the feeling is the secret. He says:
“Live in the feeling of being the one you want to be and that you shall be. Be careful of your moods and feelings, for there is an unbroken connection between your feelings and your visible world. Your body is an emotional filter and bears the unmistakable marks of your prevalent emotions. Whenever your feeling is in conflict with your wish, feeling will be the victor.”
Meaning, you cannot feel what you’ve unconsciously repressed or consciously suppressed. And, if you can’t access your feelings, you, by nature of energetic laws, cannot live your most abundant and joyful life. Instead, you live the life of your subconscious feelings which inform our beliefs, patterns, behaviors, decisions and even addictions.
When I first discovered alignment in 2017 after leaving corporate, I peeled back the first layer of my true identity. I knew I was meant to leave my job, and I understood I was in new and uncharted territory. The idea of building a business online was still very much new, and the idea of quitting my job to pursue entrepreneurship without a real plan got me a lot of side eyes and doubt.
During that time I received a lot of clarity around tools that could support me in developing the mental stamina to embark on this journey. I studied and practiced the rewiring of my subconscious mind through meditation, EFT tapping, hypnosis, metaphysics and Christianity. I deepened my relationship with God and discovered my spiritual gifts and connection to the Divine.
When I revisited my journey up to this day, I realized: this wasn’t just a breaking point—it was another wake-up call. First, it was to leave corporate, now it was to see and accept all parts of myself — the dark and the light.
This is how I learned that alignment is parallel to healing — that it happens in layers — and that my soul was calling me to go deeper. I saw this as a new opportunity to uncover more parts of my subconscious, and get to know myself in a new way. I’d repressed so many pieces of me in order to perform well in society and business, that my “mask” had become my new identity. I understood the logic and feelings of alignment, but I hadn’t allowed myself to go deeply enough into the shadows of my subconscious and face my biggest fears that lived there.
But this time, instead of suppressing those feelings, I allowed myself to feel them deeply and grieve. And in that grief and loss, the feelings I wanted to avoid the most, something shifted.
I remembered that every challenge we face is here to teach us something. And within every struggle lies an opportunity to grow and evolve.
The Opportunity in Struggle
I believe that grief clears the fog.
Once I let myself feel the weight of my emotions fully, I realized they weren’t my enemy—they were my guide.
This clarity revealed an undeniable truth: I’d been living out of alignment with my core self.
But even in the midst of this internal storm, I kept pushing.
That year, I:
Hosted 14 in person events as a team of one.
Accepted more public speaking opportunities.
Expanded my network and grew my business.
Explored new ways of healing and reconnected with family.
From the outside, I was thriving. I was “pushing through”—because that’s what high performers do, right? We push, even when our mental health and personal lives are quietly crumbling beneath the surface.
I’m sharing this because there’s a common misconception: that once you find alignment, everything falls perfectly into place.
The Illusion of Success
The manifestation community often suggests that all you need to do is decide what you want, and it’ll appear.
But the truth is, you have to become an energetic match for what you desire.
Your story, your experiences, and the decisions you make because of them all create your energetic signature—the unique vibration you carry into the world.
Most of us mistake this energetic signature for our true selves.
We think:
“I’m still achieving, so I must be aligned.”
“I’m still functioning, so everything must be fine.”
But when you pause to pay attention, you notice the cracks.
You notice the moments when you accept less than you deserve.
You notice where you’ve settled because claiming what you truly want feels too risky.
True transformation begins when you stop chasing the illusion of happiness and success, and instead start asking yourself what you value most and prioritizing those values in all areas of life.
Living Parallel to Your Aligned Life
Here’s the thing: you can live parallel to your aligned life.
It can look so close to your ideal life that, at first glance, it seems like you’ve made it. But if you feel subtle dissatisfaction—if you’re still searching for more—then something is off.
What you’re searching for isn’t external. What you’re searching for is you.
Maybe, like me, you’ve forgotten who you really are.
You’ve built a survival identity to protect your core self. You’ve become who you needed to be to navigate the world safely.
And over time, you’ve grown comfortable in this survival identity.
But true happiness, joy, freedom, and alignment will always elude you until you retrieve the pieces of yourself that you abandoned long ago.
Retrieving the Pieces of Yourself
Who were you before the world told you it wasn’t safe to be you?
Maybe you were told you were:
Too kind.
Too sensitive.
Too soft.
Too much.
So you changed. You became who the world told you to be.
And because you longed to feel joy again, you started chasing a reality that looked like happiness. But when you got there, you realized it wasn’t what you thought it would be.
It was an illusion.
True happiness, true alignment—it can only be found within. You don’t have to be perfect, there’s no such thing, you just have to be you.
Facing the Shadows
To experience more light, you have to face the darkness within you.
You have to:
Acknowledge your shadows.
Feel the weight of your mistakes, regrets, and losses.
Grieve them deeply.
But here’s the most important part: after you grieve, you must let them go.
Forgive the people who hurt you, especially those who were supposed to protect you. Forgive the version of yourself who made decisions from a place of survival or lack.
And in doing so, you create space to find joy again.
Coming Home to Yourself
Transformation isn’t about becoming someone new—it’s about coming home to yourself.
It’s about retrieving the pieces of your soul and stepping into the person you’ve always been.
Alignment isn’t a destination; it’s a journey. And it starts with one step at a time.
One small step toward alignment, taken consistently, eventually leads you exactly where you need to be:
Back home, to you.
Wow, I’m at a loss for words. This piece is so beautiful. Thank you for sharing your truth with us ❤️
Oh this is just what I needed to read as I started my day. You have no clue how I’m impactful this post was for me. I literally sit here now in tears feeling all the feels as I refocus toward alignment.