From Survival to Rhythm

There’s a version of the spiritual journey people like to tell—the polished one. The one that begins with yoga classes, candlelight, and “finding yourself.”

That’s not my story.

Mine began in survival. And in the moment I stopped calling it normal.

This is the beginning of Lotus Rhythm—not as a brand, but as a quiet record. A place to trace what it actually takes to move from survival into alignment, one intentional day at a time.

It didn’t start as spirituality. It started as survival.

My parents divorced, and the emotional instability that followed shaped everything—how I learned to love, to cope, to endure.

There was no consistent guidance, no steady emotional safety. Love felt conditional: present one day, withheld the next. I learned early that being “easy” was safer than voicing what I truly needed.

I became a caretaker long before I was ready. I parented my mother in ways no child should have to. I carried my siblings. I managed moods and crises that were never mine to hold.

I learned to read a room before I learned how to rest. From the outside, it looked like maturity. Inside, it felt like never fully exhaling.

At twelve, I entered an abusive relationship. It wasn’t just a memory—it became a blueprint, etched into my nervous system before I had language for it.

It taught me the wrong shape of love: intensity as connection, fear as attachment, staying as safety.

I didn’t love myself, not because I was broken, but because I had never been shown what steady love feels like. I had never been held emotionally, chosen without condition, protected without cost.

So I searched for it outside—in being needed, in enduring, in staying longer than I should.

That pattern carried into adulthood. I struggled to end what was harmful. I never saw my mother choose herself, so staying became loyalty, endurance became love, suffering became familiar.

It led to a nine-year relationship that began toxic and grew abusive. Chronic lying that eroded reality. Sex addiction. No true intimacy.

I left and returned more than once. I hoped. I minimized. I waited for change that never arrived.

Not because I couldn’t see the truth— but because choosing myself felt like abandonment.

The shift didn’t come dramatically. It came through grief.

When I lost my first dog, something quiet cracked open. The layers of denial fell away. I saw the pattern clearly—not just in that relationship, but in the deeper wound it echoed.

And I understood: No one was coming to save me. If I wanted a different life, I had to love myself enough to leave.

Leaving wasn’t empowering in the glossy sense. It was lonely. Destabilizing. Disorienting.

But it was honest.

And honesty became the ground I stood on.

From there, everything began to shift—slowly, steadily.

I turned toward my body. Toward solitude. Toward nature. Toward teachings—Buddhism, spiritual texts—that spoke of awareness and responsibility, not escape.

I began listening. To my intuition. To the quiet rhythm beneath the noise.

This space is a reflection of what has followed that choice.

Not one grand awakening, but the daily practice of rising— rooted in the real, blooming through clarity, discipline, and quiet devotion.

This is where the rhythm continues.

Thank you for being here.