Hello beautiful humans!

In order for me to show up more continuously and authentically, I have to reflect on the past to help bring me forward. Thank you in advance for listening and holding space for me while I do so. I hope that in doing so you may hold yourself and your shadow parts with the deepest love. And if you find yourself in a similar space as I was, I hope that this gives you the strength and resolve to continue taking baby steps forward.

It’s been a long while since I’ve shared anything that I’ve been up to. I have been enjoying being a hermit and hiding away from a world and society that can often feel far too loud and chaotic for someone whose as highly sensitive as I am. I’m the type of person that when I’m not my energetic or emotional best, I will cocoon and keep to myself until I get everything sorted out. I do this for many reasons - it’s comfortable, I don’t want outside opinions while I’m working through my stuff, I don’t believe in projecting my low vibe energy while I’m working through heavy shadow work, onto other people, it feels safe, and I have grown to love hanging out with myself through this period. While this method isn’t for everyone, it’s how I’ve been handling some of the darkest years of my life.

Shadow work is no joke, y’all. Healing is continuous and can sometimes feel like a bitch.

For those of you OGs who have been on this journey with me since I started my YouTube channel, @IfomaGenevieve, in 2015, you will know that I’ve been on a journey to healing myself. At first, it started with food. I became a board-certified holistic health coach to learn how to better care for and heal from chronic symptoms that had plagued me for years. Then I became a certified yoga teacher because I realized that while food is the foundation (to me), healing our physical and spiritual was important too. During my time as a yoga teacher, I also got certified in reading tarot, reading the Akashic Records, and embraced stepping into the role of a Reiki Master/Teacher.

While gaining those tools has been monumental in my journey and support, it’s not as perfect as I would have loved. At the end of the day, I still have to pull myself out of the deep emotional hole I can find myself in when the feels feel too big. I’ve learned that its you that will save you. No one else will do the heavy lifting of healing for you. You have to be willing to keep going and show up for yourself. You are the hero and writer of your journey. For all of you who a stumbling on your healing path, I encourage you to find some tools to help ground you, help you to grow, and make you stronger and that can anchor you through the dark times. Finding genuine, loving, and supportive people helps too. I had my BFF, my Shaman, my furson Hammie, my husband, and my family.

So many tools, so much pain, and so many lessons.

It gets worse before it gets better!

We recently sold our El Paso house! All 2600 beautiful square feet of her. She was the largest house I have owned/lived in as an adult. With this house also came imposter syndrome for the first few years and inner darkness among its south-facing walls that I didn’t know were there. ‘am I worthy to have a house this large?’ ‘it’s only Husbie, Hammie, and I, what are we thinking ‘Who Do I think I am to own a home of this size?’ ‘What will people think?’ ‘where are these thoughts of feeling unworthy come from?’ After Imposter syndrome I got really sick. My doctors has no idea what was going on with me. I had a ton of auto-immune symptoms but no real diagnoses. It was frustrating and depressing. It got to the point where I couldn’t walk or stand without excruciating pain. So much so that I considered ending my life. It was like a permanent dark cloud was hanging over me, following me around, without a ray of sun to be seen anywhere. I realize now that this house was part of my healing. I had to unlearn some feelings I had around my self-worth. I had to dig deeper (still digging) than I ever have and ride with the waves while still looking towards the light. I had to release people from my life that kept me small and fed the not enough narrative that was on replay in my head. I had to learn to deeply love myself and that meant sitting with this level of darkness that was coming up for release. I had to learn to get grounded in who I am, as a Black, Nigerian, Biracial Woman, living in the social unrest of systemic racism, and white supremacy that the rest of the world was newly waking up to - which was also triggering to myself and those of us who have had to navigate through a whitewashed world all of our lives. During all of this my Husbie, love, and rock, had just deployed to a combat zone and he and his crew had suffered a plane crash upon arrival to their final destination. Everyone survived, thank the Universe, but that close call to how quickly and horribly it could have ended for my Husbie, well, it was A LOT for me and took its toll on my entire being. Alone with all of that during a global pandemic, and living far across the country from all my family was not ideal. The idea of traveling as the virus was out of control and with no vaccine insight wasn’t something I was willing to do. As for my physical vessel, I rapidly gained 60 lbs from not understanding what I exactly needed to be eating to heal my body (more on that in a bit). And with all the stress that I just mentioned, I had no idea who I was, what the heck I was doing, and how to exist in the world.

I was unraveling to become whole again.

In order for us to heal, we must move with and through the storm. There is no other way.

As I tended to my wounds, I found a deeper love for myself. I didn’t know it at the time, but despite not wanting to get out of bed and move forward, I did. The process was slow. A lot of days it felt like I was just merely existing. I didn’t want to talk to many people. Social Media felt heavy and annoyed me. I watched a lot of rom coms and slept as they were the only things I could muster the energy to do. Feeding myself was difficult. I found myself in a vicious cycle of not having any energy to make proper meals, and not wanting or having a taste for anything at all. I didn’t want to bathe myself. It was even hard for me to climb the stairs to go to bed on time, so I found myself going to bed into the early hours of the morning only to wake up late the next day and repeat the process all over again. We were all Zooming with our distant friends and family due to the pandemonium and I found myself lying and saying I was okay. Lying and pretending was exhausting. Trying to find the energy to share my pain and truth and have to hash it all out was equally exhausting. Conversations with my mom and sister and snuggles with Hammie got me through.

Somehow I survived all of 2020, the resurfaced trauma, my birthday, and all the holidays alone with my pup in my huge and beautiful house. Husbie came home from his deployment a few days before Valentines day 2021. While I was still healing and fighting chronic fatigue, it felt so good to have someone close to me. To reach out and be able to physically touch another human being. And not just any human, but my best friend and love of my life. Husbie had a month off of work and we spent that time hanging out and getting reacquainted with each other again while living in the same space. It was so wonderful and such a light spot after so much darkness. And then Husbie went back to work and I found myself slipping back into the depressive habits that I had developed while he was gone. Having Husbie home was (and still is) amazing, but I realized that his presence was a bandaid for me finishing my inner work.

That was a lightbulb moment for me. Husbie grounds me and soothes my soul, but this wasn’t something that even he could help me with. I had to make the choice to continuously choose me, show up daily no matter what it looked like, and keep fighting for my healing all while giving myself grace. Whew! It felt like a tall order but I was at the point where I was sick and tired of being sick and tired.

I slowly took baby steps forward. I had started a new diet lifestyle change in December 2020, a few short weeks before Husbie was due home. I stumbled upon some podcasts and social media LIVES from the Medical Medium and something in the core of my being told me that this is what I needed to do. Implementing those dietary changes was the very first big step that I took towards my healing. I did his 3-6-9 Advanced Cleanse and lost 10 lbs! After my weight kept increasing until the scale settled at 260, I was elated! Nothing else worked and I knew that I was on the right path. Doing this cleanse for 9 days moved the scale backward and my needle of healing forwards. To this day, I still haven’t gained back any of those 10 lbs! Despite everything I had learned on my holistic healing journey from school and life previously, and trying just about EVERY dietary theory out there - THIS was the only thing that was not only working but actually made me start to feel better. I slowly started to have more energy, my chronic inflammation has been slowly healing. My hair stopped thinning and falling out and even has new growth again. My chronic pain throughout my body has slowly decreased and has provided more movement in my body. My acne has been clearing up and my nails aren’t as brittle. My hormones are healing, my uterine fibroids have disappeared, my period is actually normal now and any cramps I had while I was at my worse, are now gone. My moods have stabilized so much., that I no longer feel like I’m bipolar and my depressive episodes have seemed to disappear. I stopped taking my thyroid pills. I stopped taking progesterone and testosterone medication. My anxiety which felt unmanageable feels almost non-existent now. My chronic fuzzy and foggy head is going away and my chronic eczema is healing too. For the first time in what feels like forever, I have hope and excitement about my future and where I’m going in life. I’m not perfect with the Medical Medium protocol, I’m finding that I am still healing some disordered eating that results in me not feeding myself and then binge eating comforting foods and take-out. Happily, these moments are getting fewer and farther between. When they creep up, I’m now trying to self-talk myself through it. ‘Why are you feeling the need to self-harm by eating foods that get you sick?’ ‘What is coming up for healing and release?’ ‘If you eat these foods now, how will you feel afterward and in the days to come?’ How can you show love to yourself that doesn’t require you to eat foods that you know keep you sick?’ You are deeply loved and worthy of eating well.’ ‘Eating foods that are in alignment with my body is a form of self-respect.’ Each and every day is a process. Some days I take five steps towards my healing only to take 2 steps back on other days. Through it all, I’m holding space, and giving myself grace and compassion, and honoring all the feelings that come up for me.

So…back to my big ginormous house.

We just sold our house about a month ago, and thanks to the pandemonium and the crazy housing market in the US, we sold a decent profit which we’ve used in its entirety to pay off debt. We have moved into a sweet, small, apartment (that I call our cozy cottage) that is nestled around green grass and mature trees throughout the grounds. If you know anything about El Paso, Texas, you’d know how rare this is and why it makes me so happy and excited! It’s a desert out here. Beautiful for sure but for a girl who grew up in lush New England, it isn’t my ideal. With the transition, I have been able to see my journey up until this point with clearer eyes. Eyes that have fought to stay shut are now wide open and seeing more clearly for the first time in a long time. I’m so eternally grateful for the lessons, for that chapter, and even the pain. It makes this very moment feel sweet like pie.

There is a silver lining in some hardships when we get past the stickiness in life. We have the ability to turn our pain into power and that is exactly what I did.

I wrote a book! I took all of these lessons and pain and I put it together in a book, The Self Love Files, that I wrote and self-published myself! I did that at the beginning of 2021 and am so stinking proud of myself still!! I have it sitting on my bookshelf and it’s one of the most awesome accomplishments I have done so far. Taking my pain and turning it into magic. If you feel inspired to read it, you can find the ebook here and if you want a physical hard copy you can find that here.

Oh! The Implants! I almost forgot!

In November of 2017, while living in South Korea, I got braces to fix my open bite, crossbite and some other fancy dental speak for what was wrong with my mouth. Essentially my top jaw was far more narrow than my bottom jaw and my tongue felt too big for my mouth resulting in a lisp. I was also ONLY touching and chewing on my wisdom teeth which wouldn’t be sustainable long term. I started all this to avoid double jaw surgery. When we moved to El Paso, my new orthodontist was convinced that he could not only finish my treatment without surgery but that he could finish it with Invisalign! Like what?? Yes, please! Well, it’s been slow, to say the least, and I guess that can be expected with where we started. Because of the slowness of my treatment (my jaw is stubborn to move!) and being on a timeline because as a military family we’re due to move again early next year, my ortho installed implants into the roof of my mouth 😩. They are called TADS and they are little screws that are anchored with springs into a metal bar that goes across the roof of my mouth. All this bling is designed to further pull my top jaw down so I make contact with all my teeth and not just the back molars. More on that later as treatment progresses. But so far so good! I’m excited about the progress and hopeful to see how it ends!

That’s it. At least for now. At the present moment, I have more strength and energy to want to be seen again. I’m excited about sharing with you all, all the things I’ve learned, what I’m reading, what I’m eating currently, and recipes I make, and maybe even some tarot and energetic readings again! I’m loving that I’m finding ways to show up for myself to be more consistent in showing up everywhere else. I’m reading more, I’m working on being more mindful and present (as an air sign, this is not always easy for me 😂). Because of these practices, my relationship with myself is better, and my relationship with my Husbie is amazing. I’m a ball of love and gratitude at the moment and soaking up all the vibes.

If you’ve gotten this far, thank you for reading and sharing in my journey. I hope that it has helped you in some way as sharing is helping me to heal and close out this chapter of my life.

I love you, you beautiful human and I hope you love yourself as well 🖤

Love, healing, and Unicorn dust,

Check out the corresponding YouTube video to this blog post!