(00:01): Recently I shot a video about the
fear of failure, where I shared a very personal story about my struggles in feeling insecure and
vulnerable as a content creator and teacher. When the video editing was finished, I showed it to my
best friend and deep soul connection, and as she was watching the video, I noticed that she was
getting upset. She shared with me that seeing that video and what I had shared on that video
made her feel like she didn't really know me, that here I was publicly on YouTube sharing this story,
sharing these feelings and these insecurities, and even the sense of depression that I had felt. I
was sharing this on a public video, but I hadn't talked to her about it when it was happening
at the time. Like there was a part of me that was hiding this pain from her, my deepest soul
connection, and the closest person I have in my life. And then she said something that just sunk
my heart. She said, (00:51):
It feels like you live a double life sometimes (00:54):
That sometimes what I show on the outside is very different from what I'm feeling inside,
and that it feels like sometimes I hide my deepest struggles in pain from the people that I love the
most, aside from feeling really sad. After that conversation, I also felt a deep frustration and
a sense of urgency. I knew exactly what my friend was talking about. It was an unhealthy pattern
that I had been repeating since I was a child, and I was tired of repeating it, not just because it
hurt me, but also because it hurt the people that I love the most. And I knew right away that it had
to stop. But before I could stop this destructive, unhealthy pattern, I had to solve two major
issues. First, what was it really? I wanted to go deep and understand what this pattern really was,
where it came from, and why I kept doing it. (01:39):
Second, how to heal it because I've been trying to heal this pattern for years. And
yet here I was again with another soul connection, telling me to my face that I was doing it again,
so something wasn't right or healed completely. And that really frustrated me. In order to get
to the bottom of this pattern, I had to take a detour to my early childhood inside a very
traumatic family experience when I was little. My dad was very sick. He had developed type one
diabetes, and the diagnosis hit him really hard. Suddenly he had to monitor his blood glucose,
give himself daily injections of insulin, and be very careful with what he ate. There was a part of
him that just gave up on life after that, and he just didn't care anymore. And this created so much
havoc in my family because it meant that he didn't take care of himself in the way that someone with
diabetes needs to. (02:30):
On many occasions, he injected himself with too much insulin and that would induce hypoglycemic
attacks that were life-threatening and made him lose his mind. So from my earliest memories,
I remember that I just lived in a state of panic at the possibility of my dad dying. And one of the
things that happened in that family experience was the dynamic that was between my mom and my dad. So
my mom, when my dad would have these hypoglycemic attacks, my mom would get really angry. She would
go into panic mode, and she would get really angry because she knew that my dad was killing
himself slowly. And so when those hypoglycemic attacks came, my mom would get really angry,
really nervous, and she would try to force feeded some sugar into my dad so that he would come out
of that hypoglycemia. But what ended up happening was that anger and her anxiety, her panic would
make my dad lose his mind even more. (03:23):
So he would run away from her. If she would give him sugar water, he'd spit it in her face. So what
ended up happening was the energy that my mom was giving out was making the hypoglycemic uh, attacks
that my dad was having longer because he just didn't do well with that energy. I
was a really emotionally intelligent child, and I was a spiritually intelligent child. So I was
sensing all of these energies, and I knew that that situation was very dangerous. So at a really
early age, I think I was about seven or eight, I remember that I just pushed myself between
my parents when my dad was having a hypoglycemic attack, and I sent my mother away so that I would
stay alone with my dad. And as soon as my mom left, I remember I would just take a deep breath
and I'd go right in front of my dad. (04:06):
I'd grab the cup of sugar, of sugar water, and I'd go right in front of him. And even though I was
feeling complete panic, I was in total panic mode. Something clicked inside of me. And when I felt
that clique, suddenly I was standing in front of my dad and I was completely calm. I was completely
peaceful. There was just something ha, it's almost felt like something had left my body and I had got
in front of my dad, and I very gently asked him to drink sugar water. And he would, most of the
time he would. He listened to me. And this was the first time that I ever disconnected that
disconnection and dissociation that I experienced as a child. That continued for many years. And I'm
pretty sure that at the time, this pattern that I was exhibiting, it was lifesaving for my father,
but it was only many years later than I noticed how excruciatingly painful this was and how this
was extremely traumatizing experience for me and something that it would be very difficult
for me to heal. (05:08):
Later on, I became an expert at disconnecting from difficult feelings and presenting the
outside world with a different version of me than what was going on inside. I could be dying inside,
but people wouldn't notice on the outside because I presented this calm and collected Christina that
looked like she never lost her. Years later, I would learn about dissociation from a psychology
perspective, but it wasn't until I started to learn about shamanism and spirituality that my
healing really started. I learned that shaman's call dissociation soul fragmentation, and that
it's very common to have soul fragmentation. When you experience trauma, especially early in your
childhood, the heavy and difficult emotions can be too much for your system to handle, especially at
an early age where you don't have the capacity to give meaning to these painful experiences and be
able to work through them. So what your soul does is it literally pulls out a piece of its essence,
and when it does that, this could be lifesaving if you're going through trauma in your life,
but what ends up happening is you can then have symptoms of that soul fragmentation,
and you can end up feeling numbness. (06:14):
You can feel like you are disconnected from your emotions, or you can't feel your emotions. You
can feel like you have split energy, like you have two different people living inside of you. These
are all symptoms of soul fragmentation. This is very, very common when people have trauma or they
experience something deeply painful in their lives. And the worst part about fragmentation
is that once you do it, you keep doing it without knowing. This creates adults that have a hard time
accessing their emotions, speaking their truths, sharing their feelings, and being vulnerable and
authentic. Because when you fragment, there's a version that you are showing the world and then
a version that you don't want to show the world or that you may not even have access to. And the
hardest part about fragmentation or dissociation is that because it involves a disconnection, you
don't even realize you're doing it at the time. (07:08):
When my beautiful friend asked me why I hadn't shared with her the struggles that
I was going through, all I could say was that I was disconnected. When I finally decided to
do that video on the fear of failure, then it was easy for me to look back on how I was
feeling and share those feelings and access those feelings. But at the in the present moment when I
was going through it, I was clearly feeling disconnected and I wasn't able to access the
emotions in real time. For years, I worked to heal soul fragmentation on my own. I meditated a lot,
wrote pages and pages of journaling, and tried to be as aware as possible when I felt I may
be dissociating in my life. I also spent a lot of time alone just feeling my feelings,
and it worked to a certain extent, but there was something missing, deep connection.
(07:54): It wasn't until I
manifested deep soul connections that I started to heal from fragmentation on a deeper level because
one of the hardest things about fragmentation or dissociation is that you don't notice you're doing
it. And so if you spend too much time alone, that could really backfire because you don't
have anyone to mirror back to you or to tell you that you're dissociated. Dissociation is so hard
to notice in yourself. It helps so much to have people in your life that are deep soul connections
because they can spot very quickly when you are masking something or when you're dissociating,
and they aren't afraid to point that out to you. So imagine how frustrated I was when my deep
soul connection told me that I was dissociating after years that I've been trying to heal from
this trauma. When she shared with me how hurt she was that I wasn't sharing my challenges
with her or that it felt like I was keeping her out, part of me felt like giving up.
(08:44): There was a voice in my head that said,
maybe this is just the way you are. Maybe I was just naturally disconnected, but below the surface
level of that more immature voice, I could could feel that my soul was saying, you can heal this
and you can heal anything. Okay, so maybe it would be a little bit harder than I initially
anticipated, and maybe I would have to be humble enough to recognize that I'm always learning,
I'm always healing, and I'm always expanding. But somewhere deep inside, I knew I could do this. So
I started slowly and I changed my tactics a bit from what I used to do. The first thing I do is
I use connection. So I ask the people that I love how they see me versus how I may be
feeling inside. And this works especially well if you have sacred connections in your life.
(09:32): I ask questions like, how do I seem to you right
now? This question is really important because it helps you see how others perceive you versus
how you may be feeling inside. And if there's a discrepancy between those two things, then you
can detect whether you're disconnected or not. The second thing I do is I communicate a lot. So this
is something that I had to learn over the years because I wasn't very communicative before. And
so now I try to communicate as much as possible how I'm feeling, especially when I'm going through
challenging times. And that's crucial because usually we'll dissociate or fragment when we're
feeling something challenging. We don't fragment or dissociate when we're happier, when everything
is going well in our lives. We tend to dissociate when something difficult is happening. And so
I tend to communicate a lot more. I'm very mindful about communicating more and more,
especially when I'm going through challenging times in my life because the, the likelihood that
I'm dissociating is pretty high. (10:27):
Communication is really important because it helps you start to have access to the feelings
before you dissociate. So if I have access to the feelings and I'm communicating them,
the likelihood that I dissociate is going to be small. The third thing I do is check-ins.
So I check in with myself regularly, making sure to just tap into what I'm feeling,
especially when I'm going through challenges in my life. All right, so here's a hint. Check in with
yourself more, especially if you are di, feeling difficult or challenging. Emotions, and these
check-ins that I do are very easy. I just close my eyes, put my hands on my heart, and I say, how am
I feeling right now? The fourth thing I do is that I write. I still write a lot. I don't journal as
much as I used to, but I still write a lot because look, I'm making scripts for my YouTube videos.
(11:20): So as soon as I make a script detailing the
struggles I'm going through or the struggles that I have gone through, that's a form of journaling
for me. It's almost the same thing. But the point here is that I write, write, write. This is really
important because if you don't have a sacred connection in your life, where if you don't have
close soul connections that aren't able to give that connection mirroring back to you, writing
is crucial. Because when you put something on paper, you're writing down your emotions, you're
accessing what you're feeling, and then you get to see that on paper and you get to read it back to
yourself. That's one good way of also connecting and doing that integration work. Even if you've
already gone into disconnection, journaling and writing, extremely important to bring all those,
those submerged feelings and those repressed feelings up to the surface and out into the world,
so you can see and heal it. (12:07):
Here's a pro tip. I've let go of the idea of perfection or that I'm going to totally heal
from fragmentation because that was creating an expectation that could lead to disappointment or
feelings of failure. What I do do now though, is I've committed myself to catch myself with every
little time that I feel like I may be dissociating and, uh, remain connected to those I love and to
myself more often. So this small step of just catching yourself when you feel like you're
about to dissociate those, if you catch yourself many moments, uh, one after the other, that's
going to lead to a huge, huge healing of that fragmentation. Maybe it heals completely, maybe
it doesn't. But the point is, every day you're going to be more healed. And speaking of failure,
if you're struggling with that feeling or with a fear of failure, I shot this video here that
talks about where the fear of failure actually comes from and what you can do to overcome it.
(13:06): ,
open your eyes. No, close the eyes. Look at the stars. .