The Untold Unraveling that Catalyzed IT ALL, part 2 (My Story)
Life is a portal for transformation. If we are willing to meet it with openness and reverence, if we are willing to make space to be with what’s here right now and trust, the next door on our path will open as we do.
Hi First name / there,
Guess what?! The Sanctuary Membership Doors are opening tomorrow (5/29) at 12pm Central Time! 🎉⛲️😭🙌🏻
I am so excited to welcome you in, to have this special realm and community for Sacred Tending and Liberated Expression available to you on your journey.
Tomorrow I will share all about it, including the special founding member pricing and our first LIVE Sanctuary Session happening next week!
In the meantime, I've continued to write my story, and part 2 (of 3) is ready for you today. Finding words to share everything that was stirring within for me in 2020 was a challenge. It was a year of profound exploration and emergence, as well as terrifying unknowns for the world and our family.
So much was coming to life that didn't fit with the outer reality yet, but it was a profoundly beautiful year for me personally, as I touched into a sense of inner aliveness I had never accessed before. The seeds of who I am now, and the work I offer today with my clients, in programs, on the podcast, and in The Sanctuary, were defined and planted then, yet there was so much left to live before I could walk this path fully.
The Untold Unraveling, Part 2
If you haven't read Part 1, you can find it here.
Here's where we left off: Knowing that I LOVED working 1:1 with clients as a nutritionist, and was profoundly inspired and impacted by the transformational and energetic process I had been engaged in over the last few years, I began to dissolve my nutrition-focused work in late 2019 and was intuitively led to enroll in the Center for Transformational Coaching’s Deep Coaching Intensive (DCI) practitioner certification program in January 2020. A live cohort of 24 of us from all over the world began to meet weekly, taking two hour live classes each Wednesday evening. I’ll never forget Leon, the Center’s founder and renowned Deep Transformational Coach, introducing us to the philosophy of Deep Transformational Coaching in the first class, and my whole heart and being vibrating with “Woah, this is it, this is what I’m meant to do.”
One of the foundational philosophies of Deep Coaching that spoke to me immediately, and remains a foundation of everything I do and offer, is that our authentic, vibrant, Divine energy, our Spiritual Heart and wholeness (enter 5 thousand different possible names for this) exists at the core of our being already - who we are, our most true and vital nature is alive NOW within us. The role of the Deep Coach is to set the space with this recognition and sensitivity to (what I like to call) the ‘Greater Being’, without an agenda. Once the space is set, and the client has been guided into deeper connection, the coach invites the client to share what is arising for them, and trusts whatever is there is the perfect entrance to whatever needs tending, processing, releasing, etc.
As a session unfolds, a powerful energetic release and shift can occur, in organic timing. The client has space to unravel whatever conditioning, emotions, beliefs, pain, or blocks, and as they do, the natural flow of their being is liberated more and more. They can begin to embody their wholeness and effortless vitality – their light, essence…(whatever you like to call it). As this occurs more and more, a transformation of being - a return to the authentic Self - can begin to unfold, not only in their inner world, but in how they live, relate to, and approach all of Life.
(This is the root and essence of EllieFlow’s tagline, “Sacred Tending, Liberated Expression”.)
This philosophy described exactly what I had been living over the past 1.5 years, and I breathed this awareness in with incredible RELIEF! No force was needed, no mind based expectations or ideas of who I needed to be or what I needed to do were necessary (truly radial to someone that had been unconsciously calculating this my enter life previously). All that was required for continued transformation (for me and my future clients) was the willingness and space to connect with our core and release what was ready to go each week, to make space for what was ready to emerge.
With the freedom these awareness offered me, my multi-dimensional unraveling and opening deepened in a new way energetically, and in the physical I dove in head first to embracing business and life from the Heart.
Simultaneous to the DCI, my friend Sarah and I had created and began leading a mentorship community called the Well Together Collective for women entrepreneurs that craved support and community as they built wellness business that nourished their hearts and their families. I actively shifted my 1:1 work more toward coaching and away from nutrition, and I enrolled in my first program with Pilar Lesko, who quickly became another powerful mentor for me for years to come in the realm of creating, running a business, and leading from my authentic nature.
All three of these experiences were working together on me, on my humanness and my soul, inviting more of my heart to the forefront. I was beginning to tap into my gifts on a new level and own my intuitive and energetic sensitivities.
Ironically, as I was opening more and beginning to feel the beauty and renewed energy of my flow, the pandemic began and a global constriction was occurring. Less than a month later, in April 2020, my mom’s PET scan results showed more cancer growth and she rerouted her treatment plans in hope of continued life.
Another foundational practice of Deep Coaching is “expanding your capacity to be with pain”. What isn’t stated explicitly is that usually this capacity expands by meeting and opening to YOUR OWN pain with greater space, compassion, and acceptance. I had already begun to see how my own journey into intimacy with my pain and grief had cracked open my gift of extending loving, agenda-free space to others as they moved with their own, and this season of life was challenging and deepening my capacity in this way even more (and I had no idea how much more was to come in the years to follow).
I flowed between weeks of excitement as I accessed more of my being, weeks of hope and encouragement as I accompanied my mom to treatment weeks in Chicago, and weeks of fear and grief as we waited to see if her integrative chemo plan was working.
At the end of the summer that year, I took myself to a sunflower field for a “Joy Adventure”. I was in a season of leaning into the innocent joy of my being, which I had previously felt quite disconnected from. The idea to go on a date with myself to the flower field arose through a vision I had during Deep Coaching session, so, I set a date, told my husband I was going to be gone for the day, and bought myself a pair of garden sheers.
I put on my favorite playlist as I drove, bought an espresso over ice from my favorite coffee shop, and drove to commune with the flowers. When I arrived, I was already feeling tender, present, and free, my only focus for the day placed on following the inklings of desire, joy, and expansion that moved through me.
I will never forget that day – it still marks an important moment and shift in my being and awakening. Nothing flashy or big happened on the outside, but a part of me came back to life as I sat among the flowers and listened to the hum of nature and humans collide.
I heard a little girl state from the next field over, “I just love places like this”. Her words hit me right in the heart, and tears of pain, gratitude, and healing waved through me. Afterward, I drove to Lake Michigan and sprawled under the historic trees at the park, more tears flowing as an energetic shift I still can’t explain ensued.
The next few months catered, yet again, to a deepening of my exploration and embodiment of the inner transformation underway. I studied meditation and breathwork and became certified as a facilitator, and simply stayed the course of everything that had already been initiated.
Many moments of Life showed me how much I'd grown, how different (yet more myself) I felt, and how my ability to engage with both painful and joyful moments was amplified. In November, as my 32nd birthday came and went, I found myself ready to bring the new program and the creations that were brewing in my heart to fruition, even though uncertainty loomed in so many corners of my life.
As the year came to a close, unprecedented moments of healing happened in my relationship with my mom, yet in retrospect she was declining more than I was willing or able to see at the time. Again, my inner blossoming didn’t match much of what was happening around me. And yet, I leaned in to who I now was, and how I felt called be and live as much as I could.
From mid-December 2020 to early-January 2021, I led a 21-day program that felt so aligned and alive to bring forth, but as we crossed the threshold into the new year, my panic around my mom’s health and life increased. By late January I felt the call to put everything on pause to focus on being present for my family and with myself as she lived out the last weeks of her life with us by her side.
(If you would like to read more, I have written about this critical time period here.)
On February 19th, 2021, she died, and a whole new level dimension of my unraveling began.
Part 3 coming soon.
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