My name is Florence and I am 29 years old. I am currently self-employed, working as a freelancer and an online entrepreneur. Self-esteem and self-image are issues I had for as long as I can remember. I will share a few stages in my life that ultimately brought me to meditation and Reiki as a form of healing my inner child. I began feeling ashamed of my physical features, especially my facial features as young as 8 years old. While I have a loving family, their remarks about the way I looked created a certain image of myself. In my head, I was not beautiful and I shouldn’t put much effort into my self-image.
This made me have a severe lack of self-esteem and self-confidence and I always tried to isolate myself from people. I was bullied in school because of that and my grades took a deep dive. When I got to high school I could just feel early signs of depression sinking in. My parents took me to a doctor due to my severe weight loss and the doctor didn’t find anything wrong. I hated my life, I felt like I was dead. I just wanted to hide most days, and some days I wish I could just kill myself.
Things improved in college. It was a new atmosphere and I met a group of friends that I liked. I even met a boy I fell in love with. I’d almost forgotten my wounds from past experiences. I appreciated the extra-curricular retreats that I participated in. They included meditation as well as group therapy, which was an outlet to share in a safe space. After college, I broke up with my boyfriend, life set in again, and I could feel the same old insecurities creep in and take control of me.
I went through the motions of life after college. But I kept linking my self-worth and being attractive to the fact that I broke up with my college boyfriend. I sank into a bit of depression and I ended up partying and getting drunk to numb out the feeling. When I started looking for jobs later, the harsh interviews brought back up some of my self-confidence issues.
I got into the rhythm of life for a bit after when I started freelancing. Found a new apartment, did a bit of local travel to get a breather, and did some soul-searching. This was around the time I got into meditations and affirmations. It was a slow start.
Just when I thought things were getting better one of my dear friends died suddenly. This happened right before the COVID-19 pandemic, and when the whole world went into lockdown I went further into a whole downward spiral of depression.
I would say I was lucky I found meditation while I was in a period of my life where I was soul searching. I stumbled upon a guided meditation while watching a YouTube video. It was about 7 minutes long, and that was great because I have the attention span of a squirrel. I liked it. It gave me peace of mind and a sense of calm from within that I have never experienced before. I searched up a couple of similar, short, and guided meditations. After a while, I immersed myself in meditations and healing rituals during New Moon and Full Moon cycles.
It wasn’t always easy to quiet down my mind and meditate being a heavy over-thinker, plus living in the city with so much noise didn’t help either. Sometimes I would just play meditation music and simply dance to it or let it play in the background while I stretch. It was the thought of calm and peace of mind that gave me the push to keep meditating.
I found Reiki serendipitously after a year and a half of meditation. Meditation took me to deeper lengths of the wounds I thought were not as deep. The further I meditated, the more I was open to parts of me that needed deep healing, stemming from childhood abuse and shame. Reiki healed those broken parts of me and made me feel whole again. It was as if meditation brought wounds to the surface and Reiki gave me the energetic strength to heal them.
I didn’t realize how much I had healed through Meditation and Reiki until NYE 2020 when one of my friends asked me “where do you get all your confidence and inner strength from”. I had to think for a while and told myself it was from going within, calming my mind, and healing my inner childhood wounds through Meditation and Reiki. Every time my mind wanders back to a bad experience or someone brings it up either as just a memory or to be vindictive I think of it as a growing experience, and that’s how I know I have healed.
Peace of mind and love for yourself can be a beautiful thing. Meditation can take you to a peaceful and balanced state in your mind that nobody can take from you. And Reiki healing can free you from past pain and it will make you feel alive again. Meditation and Reiki combined helped me reconnect to my wounded inner child in order to start healing. Once you start the healing, it is contagious and you will never want to go back to how you were before.
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