When I was 21 I was briefly locked up in a psychiatric hospital. I became severely depressed.  At least that is what I was told I was.  Deep inside I knew my depression was the result of no longer being able to outrun the personal issues I had struggled with all of my life. Without anyone to confide in and nowhere to turn for help, I retreated inward as an act of desperate self-preservation.

At the time I considered life too unbearable to continue. So the answer as professionals saw it was to medicate me and slap a variety of labels on my condition.  But labels only served to further distance me from a real solution to my underlying problem – self-acceptance.

While I cannot speak for everyone, I have learned many things about the variety of reasons we get lost in the limitations of our mind. With our lives moving at ever faster speeds we are often too quick to reach for a drug, or to give up on ourselves, or to isolate ourselves in an attempt to cope. For me, healing began in earnest when I stopped looking for answers to repair my heart from someone or something outside me.  As long as I continued to give my power away to other people to fix my life, to accept me as I was, or to validate my existence, my life remained broken.

While one size does not fit all when we speak about moving past depression and traumatic issues, I feel it is important to remember our soul is powerful. Within us is a loving force capable of helping us overcome the challenges we tell ourselves we cannot.  While physical and emotional trials are very real, so is our soul’s power to move us past them. For me, and countless others who have taken our power back, we simply want to share our experience of how powerful we truly are when we believe in our soul’s power to help us heal.