The path that brought me back to myself
A journey of return, healing and remembering.
There was a time where I didn’t trust what I felt.
I would sit in spaces, in conversations, in relationships…
and something in me would feel off.
But instead of listening, I would question it.
Overthink it.
Explain it away.
Maybe I’m too sensitive.
Maybe I’m overreacting.
Maybe it’s not that bad.
So I stayed.
I adjusted.
I softened myself to fit.
I learned how to read people, how to respond in ways that felt acceptable…
even when it meant leaving myself behind.
From the outside, things could look normal.
But inside, there was always this quiet unease.
A sense that something wasn’t aligned and that I didn’t quite know how to come back to myself.
About the Author
Ash
Founder of Rooted Return
I create a space of safety where women can remember.
Together, we walk the labyrinth of Rooted Return, a journey of returning to truth, to freedom and returning to the woman they have always been.
The medicine isn’t something I give. It is something they remember within themselves.
I didn’t have language for it at the time.
I just knew I couldn’t keep living like that.
The first shift didn’t come as clarity.
It came as a feeling…a quiet knowing that there had to be more to life than just surviving, adjusting, and holding everything together.
That’s what led me to Reiki.
Not because I fully understood it.
But because something in me was searching for a way to feel… different.
What I didn’t realise then
was that I wasn’t just learning a practice.
I was beginning to create a sense of safety within myself.
For the first time, I started to feel my body again.
Not just move through life in my head,
but actually feel what was happening inside me.
And slowly… something began to soften.
Life has a way of deepening things when you’re ready.
For me, that came through motherhood.
With each of my children, something in me opened
but also something in me could no longer be ignored.
After my second child, everything became clearer in a way I couldn’t turn away from.
I could feel where I wasn’t being met.
Where I wasn’t being held.
Where I was still abandoning myself to maintain something that didn’t feel right.
And at the same time…
I experienced what it did feel like to be held.
Not through words.
Not through explanation.
But through presence.
Through being seen without needing to perform.
Through being supported without having to ask in the “right” way.
That experience changed something in me.
Because once your body knows what safety feels like…
it cannot unknow it.
From there, my journey deepened.
Into shadow work.
Into understanding the patterns I had lived through for so long.
The people-pleasing.
The adapting.
The staying too long.
The questioning myself instead of trusting what I felt.
I began to see it clearly.
Not with judgment but with awareness.
And that awareness started to change the way I moved through my life.
What I came to understand through all of this, is that healing isn’t about fixing yourself.
It’s not about becoming someone new.
It’s about learning to feel safe enough to be who you already are.
That is where everything shifts.
When your body feels safe…you begin to hear yourself.
When you can hear yourself…you begin to trust what you feel.
And when you trust what you feel…you stop abandoning yourself to belong.
Rooted Return was born from this.
Not from theory.
Not from something I was taught to repeat.
But from lived experience.
From walking through disconnection,
and learning slowly, gently how to come back.
Again and again.
If you feel called to begin your own return...
You don’t have to navigate this alone, I’m here to walk beside you.
