Written by: Rosalyn Palmer, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
How do you go from personal disconnect to reconnecting with your authentic self?
Sometime in mid-lockdown, probably when I was on Clubhouse and being interviewed for a lot of podcasts, I grew tired of talking about how my life had imploded many years before.
During an 18-month period between 2003 and 2005 to be precise. Then on repeat in 2014.
Many who listened to my story told me that they loved how I had turned my ‘mess into a message’ hearing how I’d gone from a seemingly healthy and attractive 40 something who had made a million from her amazing PR career, living in a beachfront house in The Bahamas, to a single jobless mother in a rented house in England having cancer treatment and supporting my depressed father after burying my mother.
But the story started to feel hollow to me. I was fed-up of being called the ‘Reset & Resilience Queen’. Increasingly I had what Brené Brown calls a ‘vulnerability hangover’ after interviews and sharing my story.
So, you will be happy to know that I’m not going to dwell on any of that. I’ve done so much shift work that it is now like reading someone else’s story for me.
What is important however is to share what I learned from it.
How did I get past years of being disconnected from my authentic self to who I am today?
While struggling through depression after returning to the UK in 2005, using CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) to get off my meds, I realized I’d felt like down for what seemed like forever.
I’d come through so many life events and losses that my therapist marvelled at my ability to be merely depressed and disconnected, without going the whole hog and developing dissociative identity disorder as a way of coping. My therapist wanted to use me as a case study. I wanted to feel happy. I wanted to feel alive. I wanted to sleep at night and have a sense of centeredness during the day that wasn’t courtesy of prescription drugs.
I had many mantras for getting through.
In the 90s I’d done the PR for Tony Robbins and by age 40 become a self-made millionairess and PR guru in London. I had so many tricks and NLP devices for driving myself on yet I didn’t have the word NO in my vocabulary. Also, I found that the more toys and accolades I acquired the more the gnawing sense of emptiness inside felt like a total mismatch. I looked great on the outside. Inside I was really asking ‘Is this it?’.
Then I pulled off a new trick. After losing much of what I’d sacrificed so much for I started to be lauded for bouncing back so well. Even in the hospital in Tampa I was congratulated for my grit and ‘Blighty Spirit’ as if resilience was somehow in my British DNA.
I would bounce back, temporarily ‒ but it was taking a huge internal emotional and physical toll.
After the cancer journey, I moved on from the former negative fixes that kept me going such as alcohol, anger, sleeping tablets, or allowing my subconscious to take charge of my appearance and keep my body a size zero via bulimia.
I embraced the positive with the help from acupuncture, massage, Ayurvedic medicine, hypnotherapy, diet, and meditation. Yet the latter was like plasters holding me together.
I had to really work out where the real shifts had come from. Not just the tenacity to bounce back or push on through in the tough times.
Soon I saw that my true realignment had come while living an organic 10-acre farm in the out island of Eleuthera, Bahamas that we rented while I was having cancer treatment in Tampa Florida.
It was here that I truly learned how to allow nature the time to heal a body that science had saved.
For two years we lived on the land and sea. I would haggle daily with the local fishermen for their catches, adding fish to my otherwise vegan diet. The farm was abundant with fruits. We grew mixed salad greens and watercress. I moved on to eggplant, courgettes, carrots, and onions. I purchased bushels (large cardboard boxes) of amazing mangoes. I swapped homemade onion bread for tuna. I distilled Noni-juice.I meditated, read, watched positive movies, and walked the beach with my dogs. It was one of the most amazing and uplifting times of my life, and I recovered fully.
Fast forward to 2014 and while coming through a second divorce, the death of my father and the onset of menopause, I retrained to be a Rapid Transformational Hypnotherapist and Coach. The training and process of working with and healing others then gave me the insight and perspective that finally healed me deep inside.
Courses including LifeBook, and events such as A-fest, led to connections with spiritual, brave, heartfelt people. I had the courage to understand that all of it had been for a reason. It awoke in me my spiritual calling.
I started to really meditate and join soul-awakening groups. To understand the moon and the patterns of influences beyond me. During lockdown my eyes were opened like never before to what is real and resonates with me. I gave up alcohol as I wanted different more elevated spirits in my life and future.
It has ignited in me the wisdom, compassion, and empathy to share my story in a new way and to help others beyond just my RTT training. To share my story in a more spiritual way via my books, columns and on the radio.
All lead me back to myself, where I connect to my inner being and know my life promise with certainty.
It is really all about Temet Nosce (from the Matrix if you are a fan) which means ‘Look within’.
All I ever needed was within me all along it just took a while to face enough challenges to find it. What has shifted now is that I’m not caught up on talking about the challenges but about the inner discovery.
That is the real reconnect. That is the real reward.
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Rosalyn Palmer, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Rosalyn Palmer is an award-winning transformational coach and therapist and one of the Brainz 500 Global 2021 list of Companies, Entrepreneurs, Influential leaders and Small business owners recognized for their entrepreneurial success, achievements or dedication to help others. Her work combines advanced rapid transformational therapy with clinical hypnotherapy & NLP-based coaching to create deep desired changes. She works 1-2-1 with clients and via her group courses including the 13-week The Realigned Leader and The Realigned Life transformations. As best-selling author of the award-winning self-help book: ‘Reset! A Blueprint for a Better Life’ and three other Amazon bestsellers, Rosalyn makes emotional wellbeing accessible to all. She enables high performers to live their best lives that feel as good inside as they look on the super-successful outside. Rosalyn draws on extensive business experiences - in top London PR & Marcomms (‘retiring’ as a self-made millionaire at age 40 after a stellar career helping clients including Tony Robbins and Edward de Bono) and the insight of being conflicted when the outward vision of your life doesn’t serve you. Added to this are her deeper values and life experiences born from many challenges including cancer; redundancy; bereavement; menopause; divorce; financial loss that broke her open to finding out what really matters in life and how to live a life of balance and joy. As a natural communicator, she is the well-being expert for radio show Girls Around Town, has a monthly newspaper column, and two podcast series: Monkey Business and Life Alchemy.
