When I was going through what was the biggest challenge of my life, the series of events that aided in my transformation, when my children were small and I was just getting divorced and lost so much that my husband at the time and I worked to build, it would have been easy for me to dwell in the pain and fight the drama. I didn’t fight the drama because I recognized that doing so would mean to stay in the drama. I knew that in order to come out of this with my humanity intact, I would need to respond to it like a mature adult experiencing pain rather than a hurt child who believes this is her entire life.

I did get sick because of the pain I felt, and I had to go through that, first by feeling it. Then I put some things in place.

I adopted some bits of wisdoms I learned. For instance, I read that every time shit happens to this one yogi, he celebrates that more karma was burned. So I visualized a stance I kept constant at the time like a baseball player on home base with bat ready to swing, saying “bring it on, let’s burn more karma.”

I learned that the loophole to karma, if there ever was one, was to live your dharma. So I adopted a litmus test. I asked myself, does my decision I am about to make come from love? Does it come from integrity? And if I couldn’t answer it in a millisecond, I assumed the answer was no, because it only takes that long for my ego to start justifying anything.

I committed to honing in on my intuition and stop second guessing myself by second guessing instead the construct that we all lived by in this world. We make decisions based on values that have nothing to do with human value, health, true wealth, and happiness and more to do with either the economics of things, unquestioned “traditions,” or fitting in.

The book The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz became my bible. It helped change the way I thought, and it changed the trajectory of my life.

I learned that loving someone can mean acting from my boundaries by knowing what was acceptable to me and what wasn’t. It can mean giving others some space to suffer through, experience, and learn what they need to learn on their own. It can mean that they might think I’m mean, not because I’m lashing out at them but because I’m not saying or doing what they want me to, or just taking it. I learned that time heals all this, and everyone comes out better when I hold to these, and even they come around to realizing that I was there the entire time. And in the end, I was there for myself.