A part of me is fearful about writing this, but I feel I need to write about what I have been going through, because my work has been inconsistent lately, and I owe it to my crew to keep in touch. So 2024 began with a focus on my health, and I have recently been diagnosed with high anxiety and mild drepression. It feels like I have just begun looking deeply within to understand what is the root cause of these dis-eases, and the root seems to be emotional. I have yet to uncover its cause.

For years, I have practiced yoga, created lists of intentions and affirmations and followed a spiritual path as much as I was able to (and aware of) in my everyday routine. In 2020, I somehow managed to even collect and inspire a public with my inner work. Encouraged by my growing, online, soul family, I thought I was increasingly going down the route of radical self-love and self-acceptance and I was looking forward to the future and everything I still dreamt to achieve. I thrived and felt like I was becoming my best self, until I bought an apartment last year with the intention to have a solid base from which to work and to release the stress of paying rent. But when I moved into my home last year, this illusion fell apart as instead of joy and liberation, I began to feel an increasing alienation from the environment in which I found myself living in. Things don’t always feel like we expect them to feel..

So in the past year, I have been struggling to stick to a daily routine, to feel my deep connection to the Divine, to feel like there is a sense of forward movement in my life. Admitting all these things brings pangs in my stomach as I write these words. I felt abandoned, ashamed and sick with irritation. I felt I had made a mistake I couldn’t somehow repair. And I was guilty for feeling such things which put a lid on them.

On an obvious level, the expectations that come with my healing job is that I should help heal others. And even if doing the kind of spiritual work I am doing can provide a helpful energy exchange between me and those I work with – a string of energy which heals them as I also heal – something felt jammed up in the pipe of our spiritual communications lately; only with some effort could I muster up the energy to do what I love. And this state of affairs angered me. I find myself immersed in a typical Saturn transit to the Sun problem.

And yet in spite of how I was feeling, all throughout 2023 I got up each day and participated in all the things I used to do that brought me back into balance: I cleansed, I prayed, I saged, I cut chords, I used tarot to heal and understand my patterns, I relied on my knowledge of astrology to make sense of what I was going through, I published work and uploaded videos, I helped others as much as I was able to. And while these things helped to keep me on track, towards the end of the year I was not feeling alive inside anymore. I felt buried and forgotten. And I stoically carried this feeling until the threshold of New Year’s Eve when a random flu made my body stand still and deal with the realization of what I was carrying. After a string of unpleasant conflicts with my neighbours, I had to stop running from my symptoms and go ask help from my family doctor. I realized I needed a different type of support and I was determined to do the best I could to bring my whole Self back to myself.

As always, my incredibly intuitive family doctor, a Scorpio Sun, gave me a ticket to go and see a psychiatrist but she also put me in touch with a shamanic therapist. On some level, knowing what is happening to you rationally has the potential to calm you down when you encounter difficulties in your life, but it does not protect you from feeling all the feelings that come with such difficulties. So I took my feelings and my vulnerabilities and I went to see the psychiatrist. I talked to him about the irritation, the helplessness, the melancholy and the heigtened sensitivity I was experiencing. He advised me to intervene with both therapy and medicine and I agreed since I want to come at this issue with all guns blazing. Irrespective of the difficulty I find at the moment to live, I am stubbornly committed to my healing process. I am now on medication which has regulated my sleep patterns and am seeing a cognitive-behavioural therapist who is helping me with practical strategies to manage my anxiety. The light is slowly coming in…

I also felt intrigued by the shamanic therapist that my family doctor suggested and so I visited her and I have to say that she left the strongest impact on me. I felt like being welcomed into the beautifully lit and colourful den of a crone, who held all the magic and potions neccesary to treat my weary soul. After years of giving back to others, it felt so good to be seen and understood at that level and to find someone who understands the language I speak (although she specializes more in Chinese astrology and Mayan magic, while I follow Western astrology and Romanian magic).

But this article is not about my encounters with these people – it is a way to tell my crew something I have been carrying in my heart for a while now, ashamed that I would lose support if I disclose what I was going through. Sadly, I realised I was stripping myself of authenticity, and this did hurt my overall growth and the passion I was able to put into my work. So I am choosing to be open and frank here. And I hope I will be understood. I also wanted to share with you all, some of the things I have been doing to heal myself, and to let you know that if you are also struggling there is so much help available should you decide to heal and stay determined. There is hope.

Recent events haven’t shaken out of me the belief in the beauty and validity of energetic work, nor have they taken my faith in my angels and in Spirit. On the contrary, this experience is refining it and helping me expand and grow in a less obvious way than before. I always thought that science and spirituality need to combine in order for wholistic healing to take place and I am now experimenting with both. To develop this inner attention and inner growth, I have been practicing a soften, slower form of yoga, called Yin Yoga and one of my favourite teachers of this modality is Devi Daly. You can easily access her videos for free on Youtube:

After a couple of years of practicing Yoga with Adrienne, I felt the need for something slower and more focused and Devi’s channel just materilized in my feed one day when I was having a panic attack. I practised with her throughout January and it helped me come back to my center. I also love how her message is about ‘how yoga feels not how yoga looks’ and I am increasingly moving towards this belief. I find her inner peace so radiant and her composure and energy aspirational. Devi, much like my shamanic therapist, helps me look forward to ageing and continuing down this spiritual path, even as I will inevitably switch from the adult/mother stage to the crone stage, and am worried about how I will be perceived by the public.

Because I live in a neighbourhood in which there are constant construction noises and in an apartment-building in which there are strange or sudden loud noises and things that take me by surprise, my nervous system became increasingly compromised in the last year. And I was desperately seeking something to calm the irritation I was picking up on, with my ears (I had the transit of Saturn conjunct Mercury throughout most of 2023, and this is an aspect known for causing hearing problems and hearing damage). Playing soothing music helped but it wasn’t enough, until I got some noise-cancelling headphones and I discovered Yoga Nidra. Again, my angels spinned the Youtube algorithm & helped me with a recommendation, and this is how I discovered Ally Boothroyd’s channel:

In the past three months, I have been doing her soothing yoga nidra meditations and I have to say that it calmed me enough to adapt to the stressful environment I live in and not have some damaging anger-outburts (Uranus is at the moment perfectly conjunct my natal Mars in Taurus, increasing irritation). Yoga Nidra enhances your capacity to pay attention to what is going on in your body, and by doing it regulalrly you begin to feel a sense of deep inner calm, even when in the middle of a chaotic social event. To a large extent, I believe that this is the reason why Spirit is testing me in this period, it is to help me build inner strength and to find ways to seek resources to cope from within my Self.

Understanding my body better and how my nervous system works has been monumental in helping me reach a level of calming awareness about some ticks I developped as a consequence of prolonged stress. I started bitting my lips more often than normally and in addition, I have been a teeth grinder all my life, but only in this period have I started to seek ways to control my jaw movements and diminish the rate at which I grind. The advice I could find from Dr. Ginger Garner and Dr. Sukie Baxter have been practical and helpful. I learned how to massage parts of my face and spaces behind my ears, I never paid attention to before. I’m also learning about the massive importance that the vagus nerve has in the stimulation of well-being in the human body, as well as how important it is to do daily stretching to extend the knotted fascia that can often give us leg pains and back pains too. In this process, sound comes into play again and I find the work of Irene Athanasiou to be very calming and grounding for vagal relaxation:

My therapist told me that I am in the process of building a new brain, since the one I am currently running on is rattled by past pain. And because of this my body is somatizing years of hidden pain. The symptoms are just ways in which this energy is finally asking to be acknowledged and released, so I can begin my new life. I liked the metaphor and I am taking it literally. And to help this process I am not only using sound and movement but also exercise and nutrition. I started working out each day for 30 minutes at my local gym not to look good but to keep sane. Moreover, I eat at least two meals a day and they are either bought from places which have good quality ingredients or I cook my meals at home. I drink plenty of tea, coffee and cocoa, and I sometimes take adaptogens like Schisandra and Ashwaghanda (but I avoid to take them together with my prescribed medication).

Recently, I started adding sea-buckthorn, mango and honey smoothies to my diet and aside from the delicious taste, I feel like there is actual sunshine entering my system and it energises me. Whenever I get lonely, I go out and watch movies by myself at the city cinematheques (which we are so lucky to have, seeing as Cineplexes could’ve taken them completely out of business) or I work from cafes in the center of Bucharest (where I find myself right now as I am writing this article).

The final thing I do is that I go and visit my family whenever I feel the need for a hug, to see how they are and help out or play with the family cats (between us, my parents and I share 7 cats in total and the family may still be growing). I am however trying not to appeal too much to this solution, since it can lead me down the path of co-dependency on them (and suffocating situations of which my Libra South Node knows too well). There is still so much to heal in my relationship to them, even if I am more understanding and calmer about our shared history, at 36 years of age than I was in my past.

Whenever I can’t spend time being physically close to other people, I end up spending time with the minds of others, through reading. Reading has always been my main source of comfort and therapy in life and it is part of my karmic labour in this existence (I have a natal Saturn in Sagittarius). Two books on the topic of healing which I read recently and I highly recommend are Gabor Mate ‘When the body says no’ and Kelly McDaniel’s ‘Mother Hunger’:

And I am going to end this article with this: both therapists – these two experienced, inwardly beautiful and educated ‘Amazons’ of different ages and working in different modalities – had a moment in our separate conversations when they each took my hand in theirs and asked me to love myself more, to remember that I as a individual matter to my deep Self. This struck me so deeply. Here I am, sharing love and light in the online community and believing I am actually practising self-love, when in reality I seem to have taken some steps back in this process. But whatever has been pushed back is, by nature, meant to come to its initial state or pull forward. And armed with all this knowledge, help and support I am really looking forward to my energetic come-back! Thank you so much for being part of this journey with me x

With cosmic love,

Lexi