Within: A Sisterhood of Your Body

I wasn’t always someone who taught people to soften. For a long time, I was someone who didn’t know how.

Growing up, I learned early that the safest thing to be was good, quiet, and capable. I grew up in a chaotic home, raised by my great aunt, and being the youngest, taught me I needed to be obedient in order to survive. I became very good at managing: my feelings, my surroundings, the way other people saw me. For more than a decade, I found ways to quiet feelings that never felt safe to feel.

From the outside, it looked like competence. On the inside, I was living a few steps away from my own body, as if it were something to control rather than someone to listen to.

I became a therapist because I wanted to help people heal, and I was good at it. But I was still helping from a distance, one more capable woman holding everyone else’s pain and very little of her own.

Then something shifted. Through years of my own therapy, and through training in Internal Family Systems and yoga therapy, I began to do something I had never done: I stayed. I stayed with the tightness in my chest, the clench in my stomach, the parts of me that had been working overtime to keep me safe. I learned to listen to them instead of fighting them.

The part of me I used to call my inner Bully turned out to be a protector who had been working for me all along. My inner Trouble-maker became an Advocate. And for the first time, I could feel anger, set a boundary, and sense something I hadn’t known was possible: safety inside my own body.

That didn’t happen in a weekend. It happened slowly, in rhythm, with support, over time.

For twenty years, I’ve worked alongside people in some of the hardest rooms in mental health care. I’ve led trauma-informed yoga in addiction treatment, run groups for eating disorder and trauma recovery, and sat with women in my therapy office who had never once been asked what their bodies needed.

I noticed the same pattern again and again. The women who struggle most are rarely the ones who aren’t trying. They’re the ones who have tried so hard, for so long, that their bodies never got a turn.

I also learned that a single breakthrough, a single retreat, or a single good session can open a door. But it can’t walk you through the rooms on the other side. Healing needs rhythm. It needs repetition. It needs other women who don’t flinch when you say, today is hard.

And I noticed what was missing. In most wellness spaces there was no room for my own lineage as a Filipino woman: my ancestors, the babaylan who once held healing for their communities, the understanding that none of us are ever separate from one another. I wanted that wisdom back in the room.

So I Built the Sisterhood I Wished I’d Had

What if this year, you stopped managing your body and started listening to it?

What if you didn’t have to do it alone, or all at once, or perfectly?

What if twelve full moons, a circle of women who understand, and a steady, gentle practice could teach your nervous system what it has been waiting to learn: that it’s safe to soften?

That’s Within.