I was traveling alone and I was on a bus in Bangkok, hearing the people around me speaking Thai, which at that moment seemed almost alien, and it was then that I realized that my life makes sense. I have the courage, freedom, and abundance to travel alone around the world in perfect safety as a woman. I have my health and vitality and I am absolutely free to get on a plane anytime I want to, in order to go anywhere in the world. My work is exactly what I choose to do, and I feel that my life has a meaning and a purpose. How did a girl like me get from having a life that I hated to a life that I love?
Today I stand before you as a beacon of hope that the journey of transformation can be extraordinary. Through healing my body and mind I also was able to heal my path, so I no longer experience misfortunes. I learned over the years many tools and modalities and any one of them should have been enough. It was a journey to repair my trust in the love and goodness of this world. For me, the answer always was within. I stand to tell you that it is through freedom, through empowerment, through love and humility that the healing journey can start and continue. I stand to tell you that healing from deep pain, trauma, and suffering is possible and that life can be the most incredible journey of love and abundance. I have come to understand that pain and suffering are just not necessary. There is a way to leave the pain behind and to connect to the healing that comes from the love that heals. I believe that this can be true for everyone and it is this belief that allows me to guide people to discover what is their unique individual journey: the key that allows to take control of their destiny and purpose.
It takes great courage to start on the journey of healing from trauma and abuse and I am here to show you the quickest way to do it. I am here to believe in you and your healing when everyone else has given up, maybe even yourself.
Yet it was not always that way for me. After suffering a childhood and subsequent life, full of trauma and abuse (emotional, mental, physical, and sexual), full of drama, abandonment, and betrayals, my body started breaking down screaming for help. I got to a complete breakdown and that began my true healing journey.
It was almost 20 years ago when I found myself in a wheelchair, in agonizing pain with the doctors telling me that I was going to be sick in a wheelchair for the rest of my life that my journey of transformation started. After months in the hospital with steroids and my weight was over 320 lbs. Only my mother was there for me, staying with me at the hospital and afterward. My fiancé had left me telling me that even if we were married and had children he would disappear anyway because he wouldn’t want to be with me the way I was. My friends, the few that stayed close to me, were busy with their own lives. I had no job. I thought that everything was lost and I was depressed. I was on welfare because all my savings had gone to hospital bills, and I was suddenly one of those people that qualified for food stamps, even though I had some of the best education out there having graduated with three degrees from MIT and the Sloan School of Management. “How could this happen to me?” I was wondering. My perfect plan for what my life was going to look like did not look so perfect anymore.
I honestly thought that I had been born unlucky, and in fact, maybe it was a mistake to have been born at all. I had tried all my life to be nice to people and yet those that were closest to me would betray me and hurt me. I would always be giving and yet I was surrounded by people who took without gratitude, and turned around and abused me.
I thought that maybe being diagnosed with a serious condition would finally make people stop hurting me and would make them love me. But, the more time I spent in the hospital, the fewer people came to see me. The more time I spent dealing with pain and symptoms, the angrier I got. I was a charity case and I truly understood that being so helpless did not actually give me anything I wanted. I felt that if there was a divine orchestrator out there, then he or she had a twisted sense of humor, and had personally selected me to have the worst life possible.
My path to freedom and healing was long. Getting out of the wheelchair took me 18 months and I thought this was enough. I learned meditation and prayer, and I had an incredible array of spiritual experiences, that made me think that I had found the answer to all my questions. And yet, I continued through to many more very serious accidents and diseases, through more betrayals and abuse. That made me truly wonder if it was better to just end it all.
No matter how much I tried, no matter how good of a person I was, no matter if I was meditating, or praying, or eating well, or doing exercises, the results were always the same. I would end up back where I started. My life kept falling to pieces. I would rebuild my life again and again, only to have it fall apart through circumstances that seemed extraordinary and always outside my control.
What I did not immediately realize, was that I was in perfect control of my life and that I was responsible for my own destiny. It was up to me to change my destiny. That was the key that allowed me to slowly stop this crazy escalation of misfortunes. For me, this journey through pain took me very deeply, all the way until I actually died, and I thought I saw the mysteries that lie beyond. And yet this was not the complete answer either.
I had deep scars and trauma trapped inside my body and psyche. My trauma was so deep, that I would wake up at night gasping, trying to breathe, crying, and feeling that the only way out was to die.
My journey was long. What I learned was that what I was seeking was true freedom. I was trying to escape through the pain that was all around me, always closing in. I learned that freedom came through the true empowerment of myself in every area of life. As a byproduct of my journey, I learned about healing and energy, and connection. My answer came when I started combining it all through the lens of love and humility, of true acceptance, and of living life on life’s terms.
You can contact me if you have questions. I’d love to hear from you! You can write to me via email at contact@mariakellis.com.
