Healing Body Dysmorphia& reclaiming our feminine blueprint

I am delighted to be sharing this content after a lifetime of deeply struggling with body dysmorphia, disordered eating, a ten-year spinal injury, and other body-limiting injuries. Layers of sexual abuse and childhood hardships shaped the soil I grew in.

I myself was born without ninety percent of my hearing — it took nine years outside of the womb for my ear canals to fully develop so I could hear like other children. I spent years in the resource room with a speech impediment, learning cognitive abilities that I did not fully heal until my mid-twenties after deep somatic work.

I was also born with a birthmark on my nose called a nameshioma. I was teased so badly that I begged my parents to have it surgically removed when I was ten. It did not change the way I felt about myself. The dysmorphic relationship to my face was already infused into my psyche. As a little girl, so many people would ask me what was wrong with my face. I thought I was deformed. Even once the birthmark was gone, I still felt ugly and insecure.

By the time I was twelve, growing up in a dysmorphic society, I began to rebel. I felt like I didn’t have control over my own body or how people related to it. I went into a deep depression. I had on-and-off eating disorders, would intentionally hurt myself, and started smoking and drinking at a very young age — creating a new identity from the awkward insecure artsy girl to the rebel wild child. Male teachers began to sexualize me, as well as friends’ fathers. I grew up with my own grandfather as a pedophile, and was consistently around him and his perverted friends. My foundational years were a gauntlet of initiations.

By the time I started having sex at sixteen, I didn’t know what I was doing or how to protect myself. I was projected to be a slut, called slut in the school hallways. When I was eighteen, I felt I had to fulfill the rumors and lost control of my self-respect. That year I received the most amount of sexual chaos, including many times of painful sex. I was out of my body. I then went directly into an abusive psychological relationship for two years where I was constantly being put into danger and manipulated.

When I was twenty-one I met my husband and began my deep re-wiring and healing journey. It took many years of hard, devoted work. One day after years of healing my mother looked at me and said, “I feel like you are returning closer to who you were as a little girl, like your energy is returning back to who you most naturally are.” After healing not just from this life, but many layers of ancestral trauma, I am finally finding my baseline — which is love embodied.

I spent years snowballing into what I call the monster’s mind, the inner critic that never felt good enough. The beauty I was seeking wasn’t just surface — it was something beneath the skin, an inner light. I was always beautiful but could not see it, desperate for anyone to confirm I was worthy of loving myself. After years of dancing between my own inner hell and heaven, I finally began re-wiring my brain and my connection with my body as a sanctuary. In this self-love something started blooming from within me — an inner radiance, a garden of love and beauty.

This is how I found what true beauty is. Beauty is found in nature, in what is natural, in what is healthy. Beauty is found in the poetry of life and death, of the journey of self-discovery and coming into union with God and creation over and over again. Beauty isn’t skin deep — it’s in the energy within your body, the way you treat yourself and others, the way you see and relate to the world around you.