“I can’t heal anything I can’t feel.” ~Unknown
I was always acting strong. On the outside, it seemed I had it all together. I was competent, composed and competent. I have come by others for advice and support.
The stickiness was that my version of strength created a distance. I was unable to make myself look weak because I was afraid that if I broke it I wouldn’t be able to pull myself back.
Maybe under all of that, I’m so fragile that it might actually break.
So I hugged it. All of it – my sadness, my fear, my loneliness. This is something strong people do, right?
I learned to get stronger quickly because I had to.
My mother became depressed and committed suicide due to the younger years of my life. From a young age, I felt it was up to me to keep her alive. I have become a caretaker. I’ve become the person who made things okay even if nothing happened.
My father left before I was born. I didn’t see him until I was six and when I did it was not safe. He was abusive and schizophrenia. Once he tried to strangle me. That moment embedded something deep: every moment is risk. To survive, I have learned to stay vigilant, control and paralyze.
After that, my mother entered into a same-sex relationship. It was a bold move in the 1980s when such love was unacceptable. Her partner, the trauma therapist who became a former murderer detective, was emotionally unstable and narcissistic. My house was not safe. There wasn’t much room for me to be a child.
So I became super responsive. Perfectionist. Fixer. I micromanaged not only my life, but also the emotions of others as much as I could. My “strength” version became my identity with what I hidden behind.
But under all of that, I was scared. My “strength” was survival, not freedom.
A few years later I moved to Australia and found myself with a friend in a Power Vinyasa yoga class. It was hot, sweaty and intense. I hated that. I could smell the carpet. The teacher spoke all the time. I was angry.
And it hit me: I was always mad.
Under the appearance of having it all together, I resed exhausted. The yoga mat did not create these emotions.
Something changed that night. I realized that my “strength” is not really strong. It was my wall. The wall that kept me safe but prevented me from feeling.
So I came back. First to yoga, then to a deeper healing journey.
This process has become a layer.
Along my healing journey, I explored many different modalities. The first was EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), where I was exposed to the emotions I had been buried for decades. After that, kinesthetic processing showed that it was safe to feel all emotions, all memories through my body. This was the beginning of softness integrated into my life, not just as an idea, but as a living experience.
For a long time, my strength was armor and the courage to survive. But softness opened something new. My heart is no longer closed, so I am courage to prosper.
There was no single breakthrough or magical moment.
With each layer that fell, I began to replace the resistance with an open state. The walls have been connected. Slowly, I began to trust that softness was not something I would fear. It was something I could lean back.
And this is what I learned. I needed softness to heal. It meant vulnerability, allowing one to feel completely.
Softness is not weakness.
When everything about you want to shut down, it remains open.
You can see yourself without a mask.
I choose presence over performance.
True forces cannot be controlled. It’s a vulnerability. It feels your path throughout your life and trusts in yourself – trusting your thoughts, your decisions, and your impulses, you will stop your second guess and stop relying on constant external verification. Trust allows you to act from clarity instead of fear.
It trusts your body, realizes what’s nourishing you and what’s depleting you, setting boundaries without guilt. It trusts the natural flow of life and lets go of the pressure to force things along a strict schedule. It trusts your own inner truth. Trust and softness hold hands. The more you trust yourself, the more you can exist openly and without fear.
If you’re holding it all too much together, maybe strength doesn’t seem to be pushing through. Maybe it looks slowing down. It’s like taking a breath. It’s like feeling waiting for you to feel it.
And maybe, just maybe, your sensitivity isn’t something to hide or harden.
Perhaps your sensitivity is your superpower.
In a world that teaches us to be strong, brave, and unshakable, we can forget that our greatest wisdom often comes to tranquility.
It comes when we soften. When listening. When we let go of who we should be and come back to who we are already.
Strength is not unbreakable. It’s about being authentic.
As I began to listen to myself, I realized how often I ignored my needs and desires and pushed my life according to what I thought I should. I have learned to respect my feelings, trust my instincts, and make nourishing choices instead of draining me. As a result, my relationships deepened, my confidence increased, and I found a sense of peace and flow that I never thought was possible.
Sometimes the greatest thing you can do for yourself is to listen to the quiet, unchanging wisdom within you and trust what you hear.
About the Shawna Hawks
Shauna Hawkes is a specific mentor for women with over 15 years of experience, Gene Keys Guide and yoga teacher. Through instruction, workshops, yoga retreats, and genetic key readings, she brings women at crossroads to free themselves from self-faith, find clarity and walks confidently into the next chapter of their lives. Want to learn more about yourself? Take her free archetype quiz at shaunahawkes.com or click this link directly – take the quiz
