Some go through their awakenings slowly over time. I went through mine like I got shot out of a cannon to the cosmos. Everything I ever thought I knew flipped in an instant. My mind blew wide open and my heart followed. I had emerged through the most intense and what I now know, as the first of many Dark Nights of the Soul, born again. I was so happy. The happiest I had ever been. Uncontrollably happy, many might say. It was like the mirror I had been looking into my entire life became this portal into who I really was, who I always wanted to be, and was the opening to the beginning of the rest of my life. The lifelong cloud of depression that I had been living under and within, cleared like a summer storm. As the clouds began to fade and the birdsong rang, I saw a world full of magic. Full of hope. Full of creativity. Full of wonder. Full of love. Full of dreams yet to be brought to life. Full of this feminine essence and energy I had never felt before.  Brought to me on the wings of my awakening, were the gifts. The visions, the premonitions, the clairvoyance, the seeing, the sensing. The gifts I knew I had as a child, but didn’t have the words for what was happening at that age, which frightened me, so I never spoke of them. I unknowingly repressed them. Now they were coming back with strength and power, and I had enough awareness at the time to realize this was nothing short of divine intervention. Here is the thing when you change that drastically, that suddenly - many people around you are terrified and confused over the change they are seeing. Many people that were always part of your life, overnight do not align with who you are anymore, or where you are going. It’s incredibly disorienting, yet a completely necessary purge in order to move into the frequency and direction that your soul has been guiding you to since birth. My uncontrollable happiness swiftly turned to fury. I didn’t have a filter like I once had. I wasn’t putting up with being spoken down to anymore, manipulated, gaslit - choose your therapy buzz word and plug and play. My people pleasing vanished in the blink of an eye. I was seeing just how much I had allowed myself to be silenced. How much I had been emotionally, verbally and physically abused throughout my life. How many times I had ignored my screaming intuition. How much I allowed others to manipulate me. How much of myself I had given up to make sure others were happy and comfortable around me. How terrified I was to stand up for and protect myself. I didn’t know how. I was never taught those skills. I was taught to be the good girl, keep my head down and work hard. I didn't know what a boundary was, and certainly not how to implement one into my life. I became enraged. My body felt like it had been lit from the toes up. I couldn’t understand how no one around me was witnessing what I was. No one could see the magic I was seeing. No one could see how perfectly our universe is connected. No one could see anything other than what was directly in front of them. It was maddening. By July, I was walking into a mental health treatment facility and was diagnosed with Bipolar 1, PTSD and Severe Anxiety. While the depression cloud of my life had cleared, within three months the mania tornado had touched down. All of the unhealed trauma that had essentially laid dormant within me, emerged as one of Khaleesi’s Dragons. I was in a full blown manic meltdown paired with psychosis. 10 days after being diagnosed, I checked myself into The Lindner Center of Hope, for in-patient treatment. While having to check myself into a mental health facility was humbling, I was grateful. Grateful to have this space to dive into so much of my hurt, confusion and anger. I arrived at Lindner completely raw, open, and ready for healing. During my time there, my greatest and most profound lessons came during the time I spent outside. I spent time in the garden. Talking to all the bees, butterflies and beetles. The bunnies that would hop through the fence, and the deer that would peer out to me from the other side. Positioning myself in direct sunlight to watch the sun rays dance through the clouds. To watch the sun begin to set in the west as the moon rose from over the tree tops, before being called in for the evening. I spent even more time in the Labyrinth. Winding my way in and out, to and from the center watching every step I took. It was in these moments, these days, these weeks, that I began to realize how divinely orchestrated this all was. That I had to be placed exactly in the center of this specific Labyrinth to begin to understand I was at the center of it all. That I had spent my entire life putting everyone and everything in that center, other than myself. It was during that time that I envisioned myself as the core of Saturn. I started to view everything in my life according to the rings that surround her. I started with people. People on the first ring, people in the middle and on the last, and those lost into space. Then I moved to my behaviors, my toxicity, my patterns, my relationships & my feelings. I began to feel like what it felt like to be Me, in my body. It was in those moments where I knew in my soul that all the pain, heartbreak and confusion I had moved through leading to this point in time happened exactly as it was meant to. That every person, experience and memory, was in the exact place in time it was meant for, and for all of that, I am eternally grateful. ​It was in that Labyrinth that I came home to myself. It was there that I knew there would be no HollyLand without Holly, first.