Being Found
When I realized that the presence I had been seeking was quietly following me all along
For much of my life, intimacy felt like something that only happened through emotional labor.
I believed connection required effort, vigilance, and self-extension—and I didn’t even realize I believed this. As with all trauma patterns, it felt like reality itself.
I thought it was on me to encourage someone else to open up to me. To ask the better questions. To soften first. To hold the thread. To keep the relational field warm enough that something meaningful could happen.
Now, I can consent to this in a healthy way within a clear contract as a trauma-informed coach. But it took me a very long time to separate the adaptive coping strategy from my personal life.
Before I healed this, I was erasing myself regularly and calling it emotional maturity.
What it really was, was a sophisticated fawning response—highly attuned, socially rewarded, and silently costing me my health.
I was praised for being grounded, wise, regulated, spacious. I was often the calm one. The bridge. The translator. The emotional adult in the room. And underneath that composure, my nervous system was running an ancient program: stay connected at all costs.
I did not know that my body was keeping score.
At the same time—almost paradoxically—I was having deep inner and spiritual experiences of being accompanied, guided, and held. These moments came through nature, prayer, altered states, intuitive knowing, and quiet inner contact. But I didn’t yet trust them as real or sufficient.
They felt beautiful… and also dangerously ungrounded.
How could something invisible be reliable?
How could I rest into something that didn’t require me to strive or prove?
So I kept reaching outward.
I kept trying to be found through effort.
The pivotal moment came during a period of profound physical and emotional collapse, when external support structures fell away and I was forced into stillness.
My body became so disabled that I nearly exited the world.
Basic functions—sleep, digestion, orientation—became unreliable. My nervous system no longer had the capacity to perform coherence for anyone, including myself. There was nothing left to give. No persona to maintain. No strategy that worked.
In that stripped-down state, I made a prayer that saved my life.
It wasn’t eloquent. It wasn’t faithful in the way I’d been taught faith should look. It was raw and desperate and true. Let this be the gooey cocoon. Let this immense pain, weakness and body-aching loneliness not be meaningless.
And then—bit by bit—I encountered a steady, regulating presence that was not imagined and not abstract.
It didn’t arrive with fireworks or certainty. It arrived as contact. As rhythm. As a sense of orientation that didn’t require me to perform, explain, or earn connection.
Sometimes it came as the feel of the bathtub wall against my back.
Sometimes as breath that stayed, or a pause in the MAST cell flares, a quiet moment in which my nervous system could let down enough to begin to drift to sleep.
Sometimes as a subtle sense of being accompanied through the night, my own arms wrapping my body through seizures and panic.
And eventually it came gushing in through my channel, as a series of visitations by spiritual guides that had been waiting for me to be receptive to their profound medicine.
I began to realize that my connection to the mystical was not fantasy—it was nourishment. Real, cellular nourishment. The kind that restores clarity and allows life to reorganize itself from the inside out.
The recognition was quiet but irreversible:
What I was seeking had never been missing.
I had been in relationship—with life, with my body, with something deeper—long before I learned how to recognize or receive it.
Being found, I discovered, was not something that happened to me.
It was something that happened in me, once I stopped abandoning myself to secure connection elsewhere.
This moment reshaped how I understand attachment, intimacy, and belonging.
It shifted my relationships from pursuit to resonance.
From effort to presence.
From longing to choice.
It taught me that true intimacy does not require disappearance. That safety does not demand self-erasure. That being met does not mean being managed, needed, or consumed.
And it continues to inform how I live, love, and support others now—especially sensitive, perceptive people who have been praised for their capacity while quietly burning out from it.
Being found, I’ve learned, is not about finally being chosen.
It’s about staying in touch with the field of love that exists beneath trauma, the field that continues even beyond death, and to source it as a compass in our lives.
It’s about choosing ourselves enough to become more human, to need without shame or demand, to tend to our own heart like a temple, to let go of any story that desecrates that holy ground, and to risk opening like a flower to invite the sunlight that wants to touch us in our true center and draw us forward.
