Healing became a returning, not a repairing.

I thought leaving law was the biggest leap of faith I'd ever take. Walking away from a career as a paralegal to become a full-time musician and yoga teacher felt like choosing alignment over security. At the time, I believed that was the bravest thing I had ever done. I had no idea life would ask me to surrender something even deeper.

I thought I was building a business called Uke & Yoga. Every week I walked into senior living communities carrying instruments, a binder of music, and lesson plans. Together we sang. We breathed. We laughed. We moved in ways that honored each person's body. We practiced mindfulness. We remembered joy. Looking back, I realize I wasn't building a business. I was learning how to create spaces where people felt safe enough to belong, to be themselves, and to experience the quiet kind of love that grows through genuine human connection.

By 2020, life was full in the most beautiful way. My days were spent sharing music, movement, mindfulness, and laughter in senior living communities, leading Uke & Yoga sessions, singing with my band, performing solo, teaching children each summer, building a business I loved, and raising my daughter. Music and yoga weren't simply things I did. They were how I moved through the world. I had no way of knowing how quickly that world was about to change.

I became ill with COVID-19 in March 2020. The acute infection eventually passed. The illness did not. What would later become known as Long COVID remained in my body long after the quarantine ended, quietly changing nearly every part of the life I had been living. While much of the world slowly returned to life, I couldn't. My world had become much smaller, and I had no idea how long I would be living inside it.

I thought I knew who I was. Then life became very quiet.

Not because I wanted it to. Because it had to. The life I had carefully built no longer fit inside the body I was living in. Music became difficult. My voice changed. Years of coughing damaged my vocal cords, and speaking became painful. I eventually had to relearn how to use my voice through speech therapy. I could no longer sing. Yoga disappeared too. My body hurt too much to move. A quick shower could leave me in bed for days. Words disappeared. My memory became unreliable. Even my hands, my trusted companions in music since childhood, no longer knew exactly what to do. One by one, the answers I had always given to the question, "Who am I?" stopped making sense.

There were seasons when my neurological symptoms became so severe that my mind could do almost nothing. I couldn't follow conversations. I couldn't process information. Sometimes all I could do was sit quietly and watch the world continue around me. It was frightening. It was isolating. And strangely, it offered me a glimpse into something I had spent years trying to cultivate through meditation. Presence. Not the peaceful kind we imagine. Not bliss. Just complete presence. The constant stream of thought that had always filled my mind simply stopped.

For the first time, I understood something that spending years with people living with dementia had never been able to teach me intellectually. I understood how exhausting it is to exist in a world that never slows down. How overwhelming sound, conversation, and movement can become when your brain can no longer filter them. I understood the vulnerability of depending on the patience of others. The people I had spent years serving had quietly become some of my greatest teachers.

I thought I had lost everything. Looking back, I can see that what was falling away wasn't my life. It was my attachment to who I thought I was. As my world grew smaller, my spiritual practice grew deeper. Not because I was trying to escape what was happening, but because I was trying to understand it.

Through prayer, meditation, reflection, and years of deep inner work, I slowly began releasing the layers of identity I had spent a lifetime collecting. First came surrender. Then acceptance. Only then could I begin to release the identities I had been holding onto so tightly. Not all at once. And not completely. I still have more layers to work through. More places within myself to soften. For me, spirituality isn't about arriving at a destination. It is a lifelong practice of remembering.

As my spiritual practice deepened, it also changed the way I served. I began recognizing ways of perceiving that I had quietly carried for much of my life but had never fully understood. I found myself listening differently. Trusting what I sensed. Becoming less focused on having answers and more willing to become a quiet vessel for whatever healing, love, insight, or understanding wanted to emerge.

That inner unfolding eventually led me to Divine Grace healing, a practice that felt less like learning something new and more like remembering something that had always been there. It became another way of creating the same kind of space I had always loved to create. A space where people could slow down, feel safe, and remember what had always been within them.

Somewhere along the way, another beautiful truth revealed itself. Every time I held space for someone else's healing, something within me softened too. For years, I believed I was serving the people who came to Uke & Yoga. Long before illness taught me about presence, they had already been teaching me about love without conditions. I thought I was there for them. Now I understand we were healing one another.

I thought healing meant getting my old life back. One of the deepest losses of Long COVID was not knowing whether I would ever sing the way I once had or play my instruments with the ease I had always known. The grief went deep. For a long time, it felt like there was a quiet space inside me where music used to live. For years, even hearing the songs I had loved was physically and emotionally painful.

During those years, my spiritual practice became the place where I slowly came home to myself. Prayer. Meditation. Divine Grace. Surrender. They became the quiet places where hope slowly began to grow beside the grief.

What is this experience inviting me to let go of? And what is it inviting me to remember?

Those questions didn't bring me answers overnight. They invited me to surrender the version of life I thought had to happen in order for me to be whole again. Little by little, I began to let go of the timelines I was trying to control. I stopped measuring my life by what had been taken away. I also stopped asking my body to become what it had once been. My body wasn't asking me to fight harder. It was inviting me to listen more deeply. As I softened toward myself, I noticed my body beginning to soften too. Not all at once. Not in a straight line. But enough to remind me that healing often begins in the relationship we have with ourselves long before it reveals itself in our bodies.

That curiosity led me back to music. I created my own form of occupational therapy, patiently teaching my hands to play again. I stopped asking them to remember everything they once knew. I simply invited them to remember the next note. One note at a time. The piano. The harmonium. Eventually, the ukulele. Not as performance. As prayer. As rehabilitation. As remembrance.

Some days my fingers surprise me. Other days they remind me that healing has its own timeline, and it isn't mine to control. I am still learning to surrender to that, and somehow that surrender has become part of the music too.

Today, I no longer measure healing by how closely I resemble the person I was before. I measure it by how honestly I can live as the person I am today. Healing isn't about returning to an old identity. It's about discovering what has been quietly waiting beneath our identities all along. For me, what remained was love. Not a love that had to be earned. Not something waiting outside of me. But the quiet truth that had always been there, weaving through every role, every achievement, every loss, and every beginning.

Today, that purpose lives through Use Your Love, where I create spaces through Divine Grace healing, music, meditation, speaking, and community for people to slow down, reconnect with themselves, and remember what has always been within them. Serving others through Use Your Love is the purest expression of what I am here to share.

Meaningful transformation begins where people feel genuinely seen, deeply heard, and unconditionally loved. Because when that happens, we don't become someone new. We remember the truth of who we are. 💜