Lisa Reagan

What Love (and Chronic Illness) Inspired

A Very Short Version of Lisa’s Mother (of a) Quest

Read this storyhere.

Kindred World, and my story of creating and stewarding Kindred’s vision of a Wisdom-based, Wellness-informed World, is a story of transmutation, a personal quest for wholeness that began long before I gave myself permission to have a child. In my twenties, I simultaneously built my career as a communications specialist while anxiously visiting doctors, healers, shamans, and therapist’s offices searching for “what was wrong with me.”

After a ten year-long journey, I arrived home to myself, more whole and healed than I could have imagined. There was nothing “wrong” with me. My lifelong depression and chronic illness were signals from my wise body to simply listen and believe what I experienced as a Highly Sensitive Person and Intuitive Empath. As Judith Orloff, MD, writes in her books on Empaths, we must prioritize cultivating self-nurturing skills, while avoiding the pitfalls of an anti-nurturing culture. To maintain my state of wholeness, I learned to take my path of self-nurturing as seriously as my career goals of launching a communications company.

With expanded capacities for self-awareness and self-love, I created a constantly expanding, wellbeing plan based on deep, relational listening to myself. Confident that I knew the way ahead for both of us and that I could keep us both whole and healthy, at 33 years-old, I gave birth to my son. Within the first few months of my son’s life, I realized motherhood, and parenting in any age of human existence, requires community support. Without a supportive community, the path to human family wellness in modern, disconnected America did not exist.

There were many questions I did not anticipate before experiencing the hard, grounded reality of motherhood. My well-laid plan for self-nurturing, extended to my child, triggered the entire world to show up to judge, shame, criticize, and berate me. It was not possible to do anything “right” as a mother and soon I found myself back in the familiar territory of feeling like something was “wrong” with me.This time, however, my skills of listening to myself and the messages I received were louder than the external din of criticism.

Deepak Chopra has said that the experience of wholeness is wisdom. Through walking a path to wholeness, I had transmuted my “illness” into wisdom.

Read the story here.