After the Wake Up Call I Got The Hell Off The Hamster Wheel.

At home in my east end Toronto loft pre tiny cabin move into the woods.  

Photo cred: Stacey Naglie 

“All great changes are preceded by chaos” - Deepak Chopra 

In a recent post I wrote about how years of neglecting myself, while being under tremendous pressure and stress, while I grew my small business ended up ravishing my health. Yes, my wellness business made me unwell. Read the details of the health scare and wake up call here https://www.chijunky.com/blog/2021/8/28/friday-8pm-the-doctor-calls

So how did my life change after the wake up call? Well it took an entire list of diagnoses to finally force me to stop my life as I knew it, cold turkey and make a 180 change. This would be the second time I would change my life, rerouting the direction it was going and it all felt very déjà vu.

My first life change was leaving an almost decade long career working in New York City nightlife where the vampire lifestyle aka living for the night and all its vices left me bed ridden and confident that had I continued the toxic life I was living I wouldn’t make it to see 30. I was heavily addicted to hard drugs, alcohol and cigarettes. What started as part of the job turned into a full-blown addiction, which came with a lot of self-loathing, lack of regard for my body and deep depression. The same feelings I would have the second time around but the addiction this time took the form of work.

Post nightlife career, in 2009 I used myself as the test subject and discovered a level of health and well-being mentally and physically that would eventually birth Chi Junky and my mission to help people realize it is never too late to change. When Western medicine failed me after being pumped with more medications than I could count, I crawled my way into the healing space of Gil Jacobs, New York wellness guru extraordinaire. He put me on a cleansing lifestyle that would be the foundation to how I live and eat for the rest of my life. It was the first time I learned about cleansing the body of toxins through food, green juice, food combining, infrared sauna, bodywork, energy work and gravity colonics. I believe these principals and modalities saved my life after everything else failed. It enabled me to rid myself of cravings, addictive tendencies and a very long list of health issues that kept me bed ridden and in and out of hospitals and Doctor’s offices. Once I had my arsenal of knowledge, after an intense year of learning everything I could and working on myself, I decided to leave the city I never thought I would leave. I packed my bags and left New York City after almost a decade feeling the best I had ever felt. I traded in the island of Manhattan for an 18-mile long tropical island, Ambergris Caye, off the coast of Belize where I lived for two years before moving back to Toronto to open Chi Junky in 2014.

Fast forward to 2021 it felt all too familiar, feeling so exhausted I couldn’t get out of bed or off the couch. The stress of the studio had me crippled with overwhelm and anxiety to the point of debilitating panic attacks. The big difference this time was that I thought I was doing all the right things but ignored the elephant in the room, the silent killer. STRESS!  While I was fuelling my body with organic vegetables and green juice I also only averaged four hours of sleep a night. I was addicted to my work and I started drinking too much coffee to get going in the day and wine to unwind at night. I felt horrible and I existed in a body I didn’t recognize, the result of years of neglecting it. At the point of feeling so bad and having none of my usual get well protocols work I sought answers as to what was happening to me. What I found out was that I was far worse than I thought. As the diagnoses came in one by one, the long list brought me to a screeching halt, a state of disbelief and profound sadness. I had spent the last 10 years of my life bringing health and wellness to everyone I served while I was slowly hijacking my own personal health, mentally and physically. The more successful my career and studio became the further away I got to my own health and well-being. 

To the world looking from the outside in would assume and think that because I owned a yoga studio I must be the most calm, relaxed, healthiest person. The other assumption that always irked me was “you own a yoga studio? So you are never stressed then, you just do yoga all day long.” If you ask any independent yoga studio owner they will tell you they are stressed out to the max, the irony. Majority of my days were spent sitting behind a computer screen. What you think you know and what the eye can see is a mirage, we put out what we want people to see, which is most often not the reality. Behind every great experience be it wellness, fitness, restaurants, theatre, there is always chaos behind the curtain. I was the person that absorbed the chaos. When someone didn’t show up to teach, when staff didn’t show up to check people in, when the power goes out, when there is no toilet paper, when there is no one to teach on the holidays or weekends, when zoom doesn't work, I am the person who is called. Being an entrepreneur means being a professional on-call 24/7 fire extinguisher.

Leading up to hitting my second rock bottom I felt like I had created this beast of a business that would never let me go. (I believe rock bottoms are a way of redirecting you back onto your path when you have fallen out of alignment with how you should be living your life.)The reality is that to run a yoga studio to the magnitude I did was completely unsustainable and required more and more of me that slowly depleted all my reserves. While it was one of the hardest things I have ever done it has been to date my life’s biggest accomplishment. I love my studio and the community it cultivated more than anything. Let me be clear, I regret nothing. Regrets are limiting beliefs, so don’t simmer in it, with every “regret” there is a learning curve, a deep life lesson to help get us to the next lesson of life. 

I truly believe that while the pandemic created so much hardship for many, for me it was to the point I almost lost my business completely, there was a silver lining if you chose to find it. The way I was functioning before was unsustainable. If there is one thing I know about myself is I HAVE to learn the hard way, I learn my lessons by going through it. No matter how much I am told to be careful it isn’t until I am forced to quit, stop, slow down or fall flat on my face do I learn and I don’t think I will ever change. 

So this time around I was forced to stop via both the global pandemic and my body force quitting on me. Through 2020 I worked tirelessly to ensure the studio survived while I watched in horror as so many yoga studios closed. 2021 I continued to push the business forward but early into the year my body started to push back harder. With test results on paper it became crystal clear it was time to put myself first and the business second. It didn’t even seem like a choice anymore; it was an absolute. For years I knew I needed to slow down but it took being forced to stop in order to actually get the hell off the hamster wheel.

So what did I do once my business and health was halted? I grieved. Deeply. I lived in a state of overwhelm, confusion, grief, sadness and depression. I felt like I had lost everything. The business I gave everything to that had finally after 7 years become successful, was now closed and my amazing staff laid off, by reasons out of my control. My body had changed so much that I couldn’t stand looking in the mirror or seeing my body in the shower. I wore baggy clothes because most of my clothes didn’t fit anymore. I worked out too much then not at all and I used food as comfort, which only put more fuel on the fire. Then I picked myself up and put a plan in place. I reassessed all the things that were in my control versus what wasn’t. I started with my finances and how to save money in every direction. The biggest change was giving up my dream apartment in the city and moving full time into my 160sq ft. tiny cabin off grid, deep into the woods. I also turned one of the treatment rooms at the studio into a bedroom, which would become my pied-a-terre when I had to come into the city. You cannot heal in the same place or with the same lifestyle that made you sick in the first place.

my east end loft I left to downsize to the cabin in an effort to heal and reduce my financial load and overall stress.

Inside my tiny cabin. 160 sq ft. fully off grid. powered by solar and back up generator. no TV, internet. Just nature and peace.

I researched and assembled the right team to help me navigate my way back to health. It was incredibly overwhelming and there were so many things to address that it was difficult to know where to start. I tackled this like I do anything in my life, breaking it down piece by piece so it becomes less overwhelming. I made a work back schedule for my health with goals but no timelines to manage expectations. I made a very clear vision of where I wanted to be with my health and what steps I needed to take to get me there. I decided to work with both Western and Eastern medicine with a heavy emphasis on natural healing modalities but strongly believe that there is a place for both to have all checks and balances in place. In the beginning it felt like a full time job taking care of myself, between bouncing around to different Doctors, tests, appointments and trying to figure out what food to eat and which supplements to take.

Then there was managing my emotions through it all, which personally I think was the hardest part. Going through my health crisis while holding onto a small business through the pandemic only seemed to highlight being single and living alone, something that I never really felt before. Going through biopsies, painful procedures, doctor’s appointments, waiting for scary test results (like cervical cancer) and taking care of yourself on your own was by far the hardest part. It magnified a loneliness and emptiness I never felt before. I felt like I was living on an island where no one else could understand what I was going through. I also felt a lot of shame and often downplayed what was happening because explaining my whole list was, to be honest, long and embarrassing. I didn’t know a single person who mirrored my experience and it was very lonely. 

You never know what someone is going through and we all have so many invisible struggles. I remember receiving so many comments when I started opening up about my health that were said with good intentions but landed wrong with me. Mainly “but you don’t look sick” What does sick even look like? We have to move away from the idea that for someone to be struggling or not doing well it has to be obvious but very rarely ever is. Too many of us suffer silently. I was always expected to be the strong one and the “good girl” so when I did anything that deviated from those roles I hid it. I suffered silently behind closed doors not letting anyone know my struggles. But my whole life I really really wanted to be able to rip the mask off and not feel like I had to have it together all the time. I yearned for the freedom to make mistakes, struggle openly, show weakness and my emotions without scrutiny. It really wasn’t until this year that keeping it together became so unbearable for me that my mask of pretend fell off. Pushing myself to my breaking point I held nothing back and revealed it all. I started to speak truthfully when things weren’t fine or when I wasn’t doing well. I stopped being on call for the studio. I expressed myself and stopped suppressing my emotions. I started to say NO and stopped doing things I really didn’t want to do. I stopped living to try to please everyone. I finally bowed out of the rat race and it felt damn good and all the judgement I feared never came, and no one even thought twice about it and many people even cheered me on.