You are never too far from yourself to return.
I know this not because I studied it.
Because I lived it.
I know what it feels like to look like you have it together on the outside while something on the inside feels completely, quietly wrong.
To smile in the right places. To show up where you’re supposed to. To be the person everyone else needs you to be.
And underneath all of it, to feel a distance from yourself that you can’t explain and can’t close, no matter what you try.
I know what it feels like to move through your own life like a stranger in it.
And I know what it feels like to find your way back.
For a long time, I was very far from myself.
Not in a way that was obvious to anyone looking in. From the outside, my life looked like a lot of things. Exciting. Full. Fine.
But I was living a double life.
I got deeply caught up in things that had nothing to do with who I actually was. Chasing money, chasing status, chasing experiences that looked like freedom but felt hollow. The drinking. The shopping. The relationships that were more about distraction than connection.
And underneath all of it, something I’d been carrying since I was 14. A war with my own body that looked like control but was really self-hatred in disguise. Bulimia has a way of making you feel like you’re managing something when really it’s managing you. And for ten years, it was one more way I’d learned to override what I actually felt.
The version of myself I performed for the world and the version I was when I was alone were two completely different people.
And I was exhausted from holding both of them.
The strange thing is, I always knew.
There was a voice. Small, persistent, impossible to fully silence no matter how loud I made everything else. It would find me in the stillness between things, in the moments I couldn’t distract myself quickly enough.
This isn’t you. You know this isn’t you. It’s time to come back.
I didn’t listen for a long time.
I told myself I was fine. I told myself this was just life. I told myself it would work itself out in time. I lived in the fantasy of one day instead of the truth of right now.
But the body keeps score. And mine was keeping it loudly.
I felt it not just emotionally but physically. In the tension I carried everywhere. In the fatigue that sleep couldn’t fix. In the growing sense that I was disappearing inside my own life.
And still, I kept going. Until I couldn’t.
Then came the moment I stopped.
I hit a wall. The kind that only comes when you’ve been running in the wrong direction long enough that your body simply refuses to keep going. The kind that strips everything back and leaves you alone with the truth you’ve been avoiding.
And in that silence, that terrifying, clarifying silence, I finally heard the voice clearly.
It wasn’t a whisper anymore. It was a knowing.
You have always known who you are. You have just been choosing everything else instead.
I didn’t know what to do with that at first. I just knew that whatever I’d been doing wasn’t it. And that something had to change. Not on the outside anymore, but all the way down at the root.
So I listened.
For the first time in years, I actually stopped and listened to myself.
The first thing I did was sign up for a yoga teacher training.
It sounds simple. It was everything.
I had wanted to do it since I was seventeen, but really, the pull toward this work had been there much earlier.
I took my first Reiki training at thirteen. I didn’t understand then what I was stepping into. I only knew that something about energy, intuition, and the unseen felt strangely familiar to me. Reiki wasn’t where that part of me began. It was simply the first place I was given language for it.
Then, at seventeen, a girl in my class mentioned something called the Landmark Forum.
I bought myself a ticket, got on a Greyhound bus from London, Ontario to Toronto alone, and went.
And then I kept going.
Level 1. The advanced course. Week after week, sitting in rooms with strangers asking the kinds of questions I couldn’t stop asking myself.
Why am I here?
Why are any of us here?
What’s actually true underneath everything we’ve been told?
I didn’t know it then, but I was already following the same thread that would eventually become my life’s work.
So years later, when yoga teacher training came back into my awareness, I knew the feeling.
This time, I followed it.
And that one yes changed the direction of my life.
It eventually brought me to Bali at twenty-seven, where I returned more deeply to Reiki and continued through Level 2 and Reiki Master. What had felt instinctive to me as a girl began taking shape as something I could understand, practice, and eventually offer to other women.
And with every step, I had the same recognition:
I wasn’t becoming someone new. I was coming back to something that had always been mine.
That became the thread I kept following.
In the years that followed, I went deeper. Not just into the modalities, Reiki Master, somatic, subconscious, nervous system, but into the mechanism. Why the body holds what the mind tries to release. Why emotions that go unprocessed don’t disappear but settle deeper. Why women who hold everything together are often the most profoundly disconnected from themselves.
I studied it because I had lived it.
And somewhere in that studying, I arrived at something that shifted everything in my world. Most healing models teach you to move away from the difficult emotions, to rise above them. What I discovered is that you don’t move away from them. You move through them. And when you do, they lead you back to the thing you were searching for all along.
And the more I understood, the more I saw it everywhere. In the women around me, in the clients who began finding their way to me, in the stories that sounded different on the surface but underneath were always the same:
I don’t feel like myself. I don’t know why. And I don’t know how to come back.
I had spent years learning exactly how to come back.
And I understood then that this knowledge, this lived map of disconnection and return, was never meant to stay only with me. It belonged to every woman still searching for the way back to herself.
This is the work I do now.
Because I know, in my body not just my mind, what it costs to live disconnected from yourself. And I know what becomes possible when you finally stop and come home.
I help women who feel disconnected but can’t explain why finally feel like themselves again. By working with the body, not just the mind.
Because the answer was never in becoming someone new. It was in returning to who you have always been underneath.
The you that exists underneath all the managing, the performing, the overriding is not lost. She is not too far gone.
She is waiting.
She has been waiting patiently through every moment you pushed past her, every time you told her not now, every season you chose everything else over the soft spoken truth she was trying to hand you.
She is still there.
Because I was the girl who wandered as far from herself as anyone could, and I am the woman who found her way back.
If you’re reading this, you already know.
A subtle recognition waking up within your body. That recognition is the same quiet voice that has been finding you in the stillness. The same one that has been saying, softly and persistently:
It’s time. I can’t keep doing this.
You don’t have to have it figured out. You don’t have to know exactly what’s wrong. You don’t have to be ready in the way you think ready is supposed to look.
You just have to be willing to stop long enough to feel what’s actually there.
That is all this work asks of you. And it will give you back everything.
You are never too far from yourself to return.
This is where we begin.
I am devoted to returning to more of me and guiding you back to more of you.
— Elle
Elle is the founder of Live Amala and creator of the RETURN Method™, a body-based healing practice for women who feel disconnected from themselves but can’t explain why.
She has been working in the healing arts since the age of 13 and holds Reiki Master certification alongside training in somatic work, subconscious rewiring, and nervous system healing.
Her work is rooted not just in what she has studied, but in what she has lived.