Stop the world I want to get off-how I had to nearly die in order to learn how to live.

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“Nobody said transformation would be easy,” said the butterfly to the caterpillar

They say insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

I spent the first 30 years of my life wanting to be happy and wanting to be thin. I thought the two were related. I would be happy when I lost weight, I repeatedly told myself, and to lose weight I just needed to eat less and exercise more.

And I kept doing, or not doing, the same thing, and yes, expecting a different result.

One day, I decided that I was tired of doing the same thing and feeling the same way. I had been screaming for months in my journal that I wanted to “get out” of my life but didn’t know how. I was a square peg being pushed into a round hole. I was growing more and more tired of reading how much I hated myself and my life, and how I wanted them to change, only to read the same stuff six months later.

It was my life and even I was getting tired of it!

In my mid 30’s, and a second year associate at a BigLaw firm. working between London and San Francisco, I was “successful”. Admitted to practice in the UK and New York, and earning 6 figure in the late 90s, I had made it to the big boys leagues.

And even with all of that, inside I felt a void, and outside, well let’s just say my outside did not reflect the way my insides felt.

Looking in the mirror I didn’t even recognize the person looking back at me. Where had I gone? When did it happen? How did it happen?

It had been more than 15 years since I last wrote in a journal. One night, feeling so low I didn’t know where to turn, I began writing. I didn’t know what I wanted to say and the pen just wrote itself.

I was alone and crying in my apartment. I had recently returned to San Francisco from London, and within two days I had collapsed walking home through North Beach. I lay there in the middle of the sidewalk, all suited up and all out of power. A samaritan stranger put me in a taxi-cab and my kind doorman at my Russian Hill apartment made sure I got into my apartment safely. The next day a concerned senior associate called a doctor and I was diagnosed with meningitis, after a painful spinal tap. It was a dark and lonely time to be far from home and so very sick.

Lying in the dark, alone other than my home nurse for a couple of hours in the morning, blinds closed, no radio, television or reading, all I had was my mind, and my mind altering drugs-I had some crazy hallucinations in that 2 months. I couldn’t shake the feeling that even though this was the life I had trained for, and even though I was good at it, now that I was here, it just didn’t feel right.

Something was missing, but I didn’t know what. There had to be more.

My journal became my constant companion. I was a bad friend, I only turned to her when the chips were down or I was feeling low but didn’t know why. I looked to her to put together the pieces of my puzzle to help me re-arrange them in a picture that was more me.

I poured myself into her pages, cramped hands racing across the page as the hand of time clicked on the clock of my life. Tick, tock, I could feel the hands of time moving, and I was not.

There had to be more to life than this. And even when I decided that there may indeed be more to life than this, I ran up against my belief that I wasn’t worthy of more. And even if I was, I had made my bed and now I had to lie in it. I kept running up against myself.

It was pre-FaceBook and all things internet, there was no-one to share with. I truly felt alone. Looking back I felt I just took one wrong turn, the turn to Law School, and my fate was sealed.

Lawyer til I die, like it or not.

Like the Tennyson quote my dad used to say when I was a child, “Ours is not to reason why, ours is only to do or die.” Well I ALWAYS wanted to reason why, do or die was not my choice, but do or die we do, whether we like it or not. I had made my bed, now I had to lie in it.

And then I nearly died. And asleep in my own bed no less!

Life would never be the same again.

I literally had to almost die in order to learn how to live.

It was two days before the World Trade Center came tumbling down, but of course I wasn’t to know that know that as my own home and world burned to the ground.

The phone rang at 6am, without that call we would most likely just not have woken up. We would have died in our beds, asleep never to wake up again. Never. But we did, because the phone rang. We never did find out who it was, the line was dead when my roommate picked it up, one can only imagine it was an Angel calling.

Racing through the house I couldn’t find the door. The sound of th efore raging through the house was deafening, like a huge animal roaring a long soar moan in deep distress. “I’m going to die,” I thought, “Right here, right now.” I was stood in the middle of my living wall, I couldn’t find the door. I was trapped. And then I wasn’t!

Within seconds I was running naked up the street. The flames were leaping out of the front of the house bringing down power lines that zig-zagged across the street smoking and hissing like angry serpents. Slowly people in the neighborhood started to wake up, congregating on the street, startled souls in pajamas with bed hair.

The fire department arrived, 12 trucks in total, along with the press and news cameras.

Though we lost almost everything in the fire, a few things survived-my Kundalini yoga book that I had bought only the day before-until a few days before I had never even heard of Kundalini Yoga. A pair of $500 Gucci shoes, unworn remained intact in their box, a Gucci key ring (I did love me some Gucci back then!), my Buddhist texts and books that were kept separate to my main library, my shrine and just one volume of my journal, the very first one from 1999. These few things survived as a map to my future, the remainder of my writing went up in smoke in books, on laptops, and hard drives. Fire does not discriminate, she eats it all.

That same weekend I had lost a friend to liver failure in England on Friday, on Saturday I had my only accident in another friend’s car, on Sunday my home burned down and nearly took us with it, Monday was pretty uneventful, other than finding a temporary place to stay, and on Tuesday the World Trade Center came down.

Stop the world I want to get off!

All those things I wanted before no longer mattered. It became a longing for three things-to be happy, to make a difference and to leave a positive footprint. Having stood and stared death in the face, I was no longer content with getting by or even being at the top of my BigLaw game. I had worked hard and found myself in the club that many would like to enter. And there I was, inside the hallowed halls of prestigious firms, living the dream that became a nightmare. Settling for someone else’s version of success was no longer a viable option. I had seen the light as my own was nearly dimmed.

There was more to life, that light showed me. I wanted to live and I wanted to do it my way, living, loving, giving back and making a difference as I do it.

After that near death experience, I realized that I could aspire to save money but I could not aspire to save time. My time was nearly taken away from me and I had been given a second chance, I was not going to waste it on something that made me feel anything less than happy.

But realizing something and knowing what to do, and how to get there, are another matter! I found myself once again turning to my constant companion, my journal. And of course running up against myself and all my inner gremlins. And feeling very alone.

I had spent 14 months asking how I could live a different life and then I was gifted with almost dying. It took quite a while to see losing everything only to find myself as a gift, and the weeks following were some of the most pain-filled times I have ever had.

But here’s something I have learned along the way, in order to rise fully from the ashes, the phoenix must burn. Sometimes it is in the most intense pain that we dig out the deepest and richest answers. My mantra became, “I am where I need to be in order to go where I need to go.” There was a reason I walked out of the fire, and it was not to sit in an office with a heavy heart and even heavier workload!

And here I was thinking that my lack of willpower had been the problem all these years. After nearly burning in a fire, I realized I it was not willpower that had been lacking but the right motivation. I have learned, through my own stumbles and triumphs, finding the right motivation is the energizer bunny to stay on track.

The days and weeks following the fire were long. Staring at piles of deal documents I was overwhelmed with a feeling of being past caring. I just wanted to see if happiness was possible for me. Why did I survive? What did it mean? Where would I find happiness, if at all? I knew it did not exist in those halls. But was it outside? Where would I find I find it? I could almost feel the mists of Avalon parting inviting me to seek out more. Where did happiness live, I had to know.

There had to be a reason I survived the fire, even the Fire Chief said he couldn’t believe we all survived and that Angels were looking out for us.

It was time to risk a blossoming. After all, my world was in pieces, what better time to rearrange it and put it back together in a different way?

On December 31, 2001, I walked out of the dream life and profession as a corporate lawyer. One that I had curated and worked hard for. I left my bags at the door when I walked out and I set off to find happiness, to make a difference and to leave a positive footprint.

I had no idea how I was going to do these things, this was an intuition ride now, we had changed ponies and finally it was time to try something different for a different result.

It has been a colorful, poignant and challenging decade and then some. I gave up on love only for it to find me in the most delicious way possible, who knew it was possible to not only love someone so much but to be loved back by them? Not me, but now I do.

I wanted to find out who I was without the six figure salary and high position, without the high heels, designer labels and power suits.

I gave up dieting and going to the gym, along with TV and magazines. During my Kundalini Yoga Teacher Training I ate a vegan diet of whole foods for 40 days. This was all new to me, I didn’t like vegetables and I had lived on Lean Cuisines, caffeine and Diet Coke when I was dieting. I was a McDonald’s eating, soda guzzling, hyper-caffeinated, over-worked, under-rested lawyer when I was not!

I dropped 25lbs in 40 days and I ate like a horse! After years of depriving myself, I realized that a calorie is not a calorie, 100 calories of chocolate and 100 calories of kale deliver a very different nutritional punch. And don’t even get me started on processed foods and what they do, that’s another time!

Simplifying my life, meditating, practicing yoga and eating a clean diet, I found out that inside of me there really was a happier person waiting to get out. I released more than 80lbs and 66” from my body, and have kept that weight off for more than a decade. But more than keeping off the weight, I have found a way that makes me feel good about myself, step by step.

And now as I look back to see what the key to my success was, I can see that it was all about taking care of myself-body, mind AND spirit. We call it Extraordinary Soul Care which sounds fancy but really means learning to ask ourselves, “What do I need at this moment to make myself feel better.”

And here’s the thing, the key to it all lies in that question.

“What do I need at this moment to make myself feel better?”

I had spent decades of my life running round in circles chasing my own tales (aka my stories of what is or is not possible for me). Reaching for, chasing down and crushing meaningless goals instead of tapping into my true motivation-which can often be found after a near death experience.

I was desperately unhappy inside my own body and felt it had betrayed me. It had morphed over the years into someone I did not recognize in the mirror yet slept inside of every night and woke up to every day.

After the fire, losing weight wasn’t my driving factor, it was living in, and savoring, the moment. With more time on my hands, I loved sweeping my kitchen floor in the morning as the water for my tea boiled, I loved it because I had time to do it, and until then I had no time for myself, I was always working or thinking about work. And there I was, time on my hands, with an unknown future ahead. Sweeping the floor is like sweeping the mind, it’s a great daily practice.

I loved walking to the store, under the big blue sky feeling the coastal air on my skin, to get fresh vegetables to make simple stir fry over rice. Chopping vegetables became my daily meditation. My heart started to ease open as tears from onions fell down my cheeks. The more I tended to my inside the more my outside began to look like someone I recognized. More importantly, my outside became someone I could get to like, over time of course.

I devoured books upon books about body, mind and Spirit connections (internet was not so handy back then, it’s even easier today). I tried poi, hula hoop, fire dancing and pole dancing to find a place to start loving this body I hated on for too long based purely on how she looked. I rode 585 miles from San Francisco to LA twice to raise money to the AIDS Foundation, I had never ridden more than 10 miles when I signed up.

I taught myself how to cook vegan food and then raw food prep. There was so much to learn and I didn’t have anyone to share with, but I did have a voracious appetite for information fueled with the right motivation. Many of my skills as a lawyer were perfect for the job ahead of me.

Doing all of these things slowly made me feel better inside, and as I felt better I started making even better choices. As I made better choices my insides and outsides started to glow. Getting my mind and body healthy and happy became my new daily practice.

All that time I had been preoccupied with advancing my career, looking thinner, finding the right mate, lusting after the latest Jimmy Choos, blah blah, I didn’t realize my foundations were crumbling, I was traveling on shaky ground.

I stumbled into some dark corridors in my inner journey and faced truths I had kept hidden for a lifetime. It was liberating in the most painfully sweet and poignant way. I rebuilt the foundations from the cellar up and worked from the inside out.

It is not a path without its challenges, but then what path is? On the other side of those challenges I found rewards beyond even my wildest dreams. I really never believed I would be truly happy or that true happiness really exists. I never expected to end the lifelong war and tyranny with my body. Now I am a happy convert, I want to yell from the rooftops that if happiness is possible for me, it is for you too.

Today, I live a very different life to the one that led me here, and I now know it is never too late to live the way you want to live. We do not know how long our life is but we do know we have an expiration date, there is no time like the present to make a change. And the only barriers to change are the ones YOU create. You are the one you have been waiting for, it’s all inside of you.

Now it’s your turn, what’s possible for you? If you are ready to make powerful, lasting change, come and join us for the Fall session of Get Your Happy Back 40 Day Reset for Body, Mind + Spirit, our worldwide online group workshop, starting September 20, 2016. It’s a soft place to land and a hard place to stay the same. Does change have your name on it? Find our more and register here. Alone we can do so much, together we can do so much more.