In the piercing silence of the dark hours of the early morning before the world has woken my phone rang.  Only two people could get through at that time, my mother and my father.  It was my mother’s voice that shakily said, “Shauna, Dad is being airlifted to the trauma hospital, he was at work, we don’t know what’s wrong but it’s not good.”  I was living in Hawai’i at the time, where I had done much of my growing up, and there’s a Paradise Tax to living in the middle of an ocean.  Sometimes that tax is terrifyingly steep.  

He died while I was flying halfway around the world to get to him where he and my mother had recently retired to Florida.  

In an instant my champion was gone and my world turned upside down.  As the only child I now had an entire life to sift through that wasn’t my own, while my own felt like sand sifting away through my hands.  

Less than a year later I would find myself going through a very heavy divorce that left me facing the radical realization that my entire identity was rooted in trauma responses and I didn’t know the woman staring back at me the reflection let alone who she could become.  

On top of that I had three little children, two with special needs, looking to me for safety, guidance, and peace when I couldn’t even trust the safety of my own intuition or guidance let alone believe peace actually existed.  

It was one Christmas Eve the first year my children would be away that I laid in a bath and sobbed, not knowing how to get through the next moment let alone the next morning without the sounds of my childcare’s voices filling the house in Christmas glee.  In that moment I thought anything is better than this, even if that meant I was unalive.  

I let that feeling swim over me for a moment before rage replaced it and I let myself speak, “God if you decide to breathe life through me tomorrow morning I promise you I will never allow another woman within my reach to feel this alone, this far from peace, and this unloved by life.  There has to hope be somewhere in all of this.” In the morning when Life breathed through me I sat up in toddler like defiance and wondered, “Now what God?”

The answer would come two months later in February when the company I was working for hosted a vision workshop put on by a life coach and I attended, reluctantly.  I figured that since I had said I would help those around me struggling through what I had I should go through the motions.  It was hard to trust people still.  But two thirds of the way through I decided to go all in, it was a moment of desperation that if nothing changed then nothing would change, and things had to change.  

After that vision workshop I signed up and began the very same program that I now coach, Dream Builder, and I was filled with a sense of hope.  It would seem everything was turning around and I could almost imagine a light at the end of a very long very dark tunnel.  

Until the world came crashing down again when my youngest daughter, who was then 5 years old, was diagnosed with a life threatening brain malformation that would require surgery.  There were so many moments of deep confusion, loss, anger, and heartbreak.  Through out her entire journey I never gave up on the Dream Room and I as I spoke words of encouragement and healing into my daughter I knew I was also speaking them into myself, and every woman I would ever walk with through the darkness.  

A year later I would find that I had become my own champion and have built a tribe of champions around me.  

I have met the woman in the mirror, me, and I can say how much I love and adore her.  The best part is that I believe in every single one of her dreams and her deservingness of them. 

I have leaned so far into my own intuition and guidance that I get to experience peace and safety every single day, and not only that but I get to help all three of my children experience that peace and safety as well.  

And I am now part of the complex trauma recovery community, learning and becoming certified to help women who are experiencing the very same things I did be able to experience the incredible magic of life I do now.  

It is an incredible honor and privilege to walk alongside women in this journey of healing, I hope you find a soft place to rest while you are here.  Thank you for being so brave, I believe in you.  

Soar.

-Shauna