Finding truth, a new project

Trusted people take the time to marinate and integrate experiences, to find their truth to learn, their projections, their blindspots. 

For the past five days, I’ve been working on writing down a project that I’ve been preparing for years. It’s about facilitating relationships. I’ve always been naturally interested in the truth that lives at the center of any relationship.

Two years ago I told a wise woman, a shaman, that I desired to become a relationship guide/coach. She looked at me and said: “Well, you have a natural sensitivity around relationships because you know how to identify the truth and you received these gifts from the pain of witnessing your parents relationship’s crumble”. She didn’t know about how challenging my parents’ divorce was for our family. It’s true, my parents had been fighting and moving through a lot of conflicts since I was very young. I would mediate their fights or just pray that they’d resolve. I witnessed and felt all of it, all the sides, the lies, the truths.

When they eventually decided to separate, me and my sister took a long exhale. I was 14 and she was 11. The constant fights and deep rooted conflicts were so heavy and unbearable for us. We truly wanted them to stop hurting each other but it wasn’t that simple. I witnessed the hurt, the complexity and the truth of their struggles all at once, all the time.

Since then I’ve been naturally able to see the truth and blindspots of every relationship I witnessed. I know, that sounds a bit “know-it-all”, but all that hurt I witnessed and felt made me very attuned to the truth of human connections.

I never really got a proper degree to become a relationship therapist, I did not consider my gifts as the path I should follow work-wise, mostly because this line of work requires steel boundaries and the ability to move in and out of holding space while not letting others’ problems take over your life. And I truly didn’t know how to do that. Besides I believe that at university they don’t teach you to protect your empathy and heart, setting boundaries and directing your sensitivity in a way that doesn’t backfire you, are not part of the curriculum.

So I worked in different restaurants, at my dad’s marketing studio, studied multiple things, communication and marketing, then moved abroad, volunteered in an intentional community, got a marvellous degree in Fine Arts with a focus on design for sustainability, became a nature connection guide and started my journey with wegrowild. Wegrowild is the project that brought everything I loved and wanted to explore together. I began with sharing my crafty endeavours, then expanded it weaving together sustainable living practices, creativity and my intuitive embodied wisdom. Here we are, in it.

In the past years I obsessed over what my real calling is, what I should do workwise.

Since I’m a multipassionate woman and I cannot be boxed in, (believe me, I tried to box myself in several times but ended up sick and burned out), I decided that wegrowild is the way for me. I want wegrowild to be my work, I want to hold retreats, frolic with others in nature, craft, inspire and hold space for each other to live a more sustainably sovereign life. I’ve been very lucky to explore and study different topics around nervous system regulation and facilitation. 

I’ve been timidly promoting my work, trying different ways, pivoted, felt cringe, felt overwhelmed, quit, took more courses to empower myself, started again and refined my offerings which are still not fully out. All of this while living on a building site (we are building our home) in a new land, with no friends or family around. All of this while navigating my relationship, caring for a garden and many wonderful animals. Apparently this journey of finding, promoting and doing the things I’ve been wanting to do takes more time and confidence and trial and errors than I could ever imagine. 

I am immensely grateful for the life we’re living, for being so lucky to have a husband who supported us economically for the past few years while we’ve been working on our homestead, for having such amazing creatures to care for and that care for me. And it’s exactly because I am thankful for this life that we are building with our sweat and blood, that I want to contribute from a place of empowerment not shame. I needed to let go of the shame of not earning money to find myself and my calling. I want to bring more joy into our life by being empowered by the work that lights me up. Because doing what we love to do is a gift and an important medicine for others and the planet too. I want to give not from a place of shame, “that I’m not doing enough and so I should get a job”, that’s not giving, that’s scarcity and stress. That’s what we all felt at some point. 

When it comes from our hearts’ desire to contribute with our gifts, giving is an abundant act. Everyone benefits from this type of giving.

And the more I’d struggle trying to find an answer to the question “what’s my calling?”, the more layers of conditioning and shame I had to peel off.

Back to this relationship facilitation project. For the past 4 years, some friends and acquaintances have come to me with their relationship struggles. It was not a formal agreement or exchange, it just happened naturally mostly because I was genuinely curious about finding and holding space for their truth. I’m not going to lie, I felt somewhat useful and helpful and that gave me a sense of purpose which I thought I lost through the many challenges we were facing during these unsettling times. As the years passed, I felt less attached to whether they’d follow what I was suggesting them to do or not and, most importantly, I stopped carrying other people’s struggles.

I’ve realized that facilitating relationships is not about carrying the burdens of others on my heart to share the load, nor is about giving the perfect advice to follow. 

It’s about creating a trusted container and shining the light on different truths that can coexist all at once, without judgement. It’s about including the paradoxes and showing where agency, care and empowerment are. 

I deeply believe conflicts can be alchemized into fertile ground for honest and sovereign relationships to sprout. And from this place I can actually support others as they move through their relational dynamics.

I want to try to share this new branch of my work and it feels quite scary because it’s different from the experimental nature of what I shared so far on wegrowild.

This line of work is more rooted in human connection, it is less about me and what I do and more about interconnection. 

The past few days, as I’ve been writing down this project, I felt fear, excitement, empowerment, exposure, vulnerability. I questioned myself, “who am I to do this? I have no specific qualifications for this!” Yet, a deep and somehow ancient knowing was still there. Back in the days, villages had people who were sensitive enough to be qualified to hold space for others, they didn’t have to have it all figure it out, their only presence and willingness to care enough for the truth and to alchemize conflicts were the very qualifications that made them the spaceholders they were recognized to be. This doesn’t take away the fact that I do value professionals who have all the certifications and degrees but I also know that those I trusted to hold space for me were not formally certified. I believe that there is space for anyone who is willing to put their ego aside and create space for others so they can find their truth and express it with agency and care.

I never really dared to promote myself as a facilitator not only because I didn’t have the required certifications and degrees but because I didn’t have the confidence and trust in myself to hold space for others. I secretly wanted that but I wasn’t ready. I realized that trusted people take the time to marinate and integrate experiences, to find their truth to learn, their projections, their blindspots. And that’s what I’ve been doing within and without. And that’s why this project can now be shared, not because it’s perfect and it will be successful but because it comes from the heart and I believe in it.

The past few days I’ve been filming videos to share on my social media but would promptly cringe at myself every time I’d rewatch them. It takes courage to share and promote myself so I’m going to take my time to find the best way for me to share about this.

I called this project Rooted Together - RadicatInsieme.