What you avoid feeling keeps living inside you

English | Spanish


A big part of my life, I’ve hidden my “low frequency” emotions (anger, sadness, guilt, fear, anxiety, jealousy, insecurity, frustration, etc.), and I had been covering them up with external things: alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, parties, noise… any kind of stimulus I had around me.

There wasn’t a single weekend where I didn’t go out drinking or go somewhere, just to stay busy and not be in my own head. I didn’t allow myself to feel absolutely anything. I was living on autopilot.

And when you live like that, sooner or later life will put you in a situation that forces you to stop, to face yourself, and to feel everything you’ve been trying to forget.

In my case, it happened 3 years ago, living in Playa del Carmen, far from my family, my friends, and everything I was used to. An accident happened, and there was no way to escape from it.

At that time, I considered ending my life. Life suddenly became “too real” for me. I didn’t act on it, but for the first time, there was no escaping the pain, no escaping what I was feeling… there was no other option but to feel it all.

It’s something I haven’t fully healed yet. A lot of what I had been hiding for years came to the surface, and by that, I mean into my awareness.

Many people in my life think that because of this, I’ve become someone with less “spark,” because I’m no longer “the life of the party,” I’m no longer as carefree as I used to be.

But really, life put a stop to me. It held up a mirror.

I saw everything I didn’t want to see about myself: all my mistakes, all my losses, all these versions of me that I couldn’t see at the time because I was so numb.

And I did all of that without realizing the damage I was causing myself, and everything that had been building up inside me over the years.

That mirror that showed up in my life… I also asked for it.

Back then, I didn’t fully believe in God, but one afternoon, while I was taking mushrooms for the first time, I connected with myself and asked the universe to help me understand my purpose in life, to help me find spirituality, because I felt so lost and empty. I had heard of people who found it through this, who found themselves.

And I’ve lived through very intense things since then. And these experiences that I’ve gone through, even though they’ve been dark they have also brought a lot of light and value into my life.

And for the first time in a long time, I feel like I own my life. Choosing to go through this without listening to other people’s opinions, because maybe this isn’t the path someone who wants an easy life would choose. But now I truly recognize the power and value that I have and that we all have.

A lot of the things I used to hide about myself, or didn’t want to see, came from the fear of being “judged” by society, even in small things like how I dressed and how I looked, but also in what I did, and what I believed about life.

These past three years even though my close friends and my family think they’ve been, or could have been, “the worst years of my life,” because they’ve seen me change like never before and face very intense situations, in reality, this has been the time I’ve been waking up.

It hasn’t been easy. It’s been very uncomfortable. It’s been a constant internal battle because at any moment, I could give up and go back to my old habits, back to the life imposed by society.

And even though many people don’t agree with my decisions, the truth is I choose to live for myself. We have to learn to love ourselves with all our light and all our shadow, that’s what makes us unique, what makes us authentic.

I’ve learned so much about life in these past three years because I’ve chosen to heal my wounds and do whatever it takes to unlearn everything someone once told me I had to be.

That mirror that appeared in my life made me realize that freedom begins when you stop seeing through external eyes and accept the risk of learning for yourself.

Why do you do what you do? Or why don’t you do what you actually want to do? This is your reality, not your parents’, not your siblings’, not your children’s, not your uncles’, friends’, teachers’, therapist’s, or partner’s. In this life, you decide.

The answer will always be within you. You just have to learn how to silence the external noise, take a little risk, and look at that part of you you haven’t given yourself the chance to know.

With time, you begin to understand that everything you see is a reflection of you… and you start to understand life in a different way.

Those limiting beliefs that don’t let you see beyond what feels familiar were placed in you for a reason. It had to be that way for you to become the person you are today, but at the very least, you have to question them. Maybe this writing is your mirror, and the sooner you see it, the better.

All the emotions we repress get stored in the body. That’s why we sometimes feel tension in certain areas, why we sometimes get hurt, because our body is overloaded. The body is speaking to us. It’s so important to allow ourselves to feel and not ignore ourselves, to listen to our voice, our instinct.

All of this trauma that I buried in my body, I’ve chosen to release it by moving, breathing, meditating, questioning, stopping comparing myself, doing what I feel like doing, and learning how to listen to myself. I’ve chosen not to live the way I used to trying to fit into a society that refuses to be authentic and keeps repeating the same patterns across generations.

To be authentic, you have to learn how to recognize and fully love those parts of yourself that might not “fit” into society, the ones we sometimes hide behind a mask.

Sometimes it’s hard, because people think that if you’re a yoga teacher, or a parent, or someone with authority, whoever, you’re supposed to have your life figured out, to be “at peace” all the time. And that’s not the case. We’re human, and we all have a shadow. But we have to remember that if there were no shadow, there would be no light.

Also, life didn’t come with instructions, we created those over time. And if you really think about it, someone exactly like you created them for the first time, so…

Why do we sometimes make ourselves smaller for thinking differently?

Who said there’s only one absolute truth?

Why do we love making life so complicated?

And why don’t we focus on ourselves instead of looking at what everyone else is doing?