There’s a version of this work that’s been made palatable. Something you explore when you feel ready. Something that looks beautiful from the outside. Something that suggests you can gently step into yourself and come out the other side more whole, more healed, and more evolved. That hasn’t been my experience. I didn’t come into this work because I was curious. I came into it because something in my life kept repeating. I was in so much pain, and eventually it became impossible to ignore.
In 2017, after a series of heartbreaks and painful dating experiences, something began to shift in me. Different people. Different circumstances. Same outcome. The same emotional landscape, just wearing different faces. And at some point, whether I wanted to admit it or not, I had to face something that was deeply confronting: the common denominator was me. Not in a way that shamed me, but in a way that cracked something open. Because up until that point, I didn’t see it. I didn’t see how I was in avoidance. I didn’t see how I was emotionally unavailable. I didn’t see how I was choosing from my own wounds. What lived inside of me was unconscious, so I experienced it through projection. Through other people. Through relationships. Through repeated pain. If you’ve ever found yourself in different relationships that somehow carry the same emotional weight, the same confusion, the same ending, then you know what I’m pointing to. It doesn’t feel like a pattern at first. It feels like coincidence. Until it doesn’t.
And once I saw it, even just a glimpse of it, I couldn’t unsee it. That was the beginning of my descent. This is the part that often gets misunderstood. The descent is not something you choose because you feel empowered. It’s something you find yourself in when what you’ve been doing stops working. When the patterns become undeniable. When the distractions no longer distract. When something in you knows, I can’t keep doing this the same way. If I’m being honest, had I known what this path would require of me, I wouldn’t have chosen it. But I didn’t feel like I had a choice, because something in me had already collapsed.
What followed was not linear. It wasn’t a clean process of healing. It was more of an unraveling. An undoing of the way I had known myself. A confrontation with parts of me I had spent my entire life avoiding, and underneath all of it was shame. This is the part that sits at the core of shadow work, but is rarely spoken about in its fullness. This is shame work. The kind of shame that lives in the most tender parts of you. The parts you learned to hide. The parts you don’t want anyone to see. The parts you barely want to see yourself. The kind of shame that, when you finally come into contact with it, can make you want to disappear, to shut down, to turn away all over again. And when you begin to face those parts without guidance, without a container, it is very easy to get swallowed by it. I know that because I’ve been there. I know what it feels like to be inside that space without a map, trying to understand yourself while also trying not to collapse under the weight of what you’re seeing.
I didn’t have a roadmap for this. I didn’t have someone holding a mirror in a way that felt grounded, someone who could help me see without spiraling into self-rejection and self-loathing. I was searching everywhere. Through psychology. Through spirituality. Through different frameworks, different teachers, different philosophies. Trying to make sense of what I was experiencing. Trying to understand myself. And slowly, through that process, something began to shift. Not because I fixed myself. Not because I became a better version of who I was. But because I stopped turning away from myself. I began to understand where my patterns came from, what they were rooted in, how they were shaping the way I related to myself and to others. And instead of shaming those parts of me, I learned how to meet them.
This is where my understanding of self-love changed completely. Self-love is not just acceptance of your light. It’s the willingness to stay with yourself in truth. To see what’s there. To understand it. To take ownership of it, without abandoning yourself in the process. And this is where everything began to change. Because when you don’t do this work, your relationships don’t become conscious, they repeat. You don’t choose from clarity, you choose from familiarity. From what feels known. From what mirrors your wounds, even if it hurts you. You confuse intensity with connection. You confuse chemistry with alignment. You call it love, but it’s often pattern. Different person, same dynamic, over and over again. If you’ve ever said, why does this keep happening to me, this is the threshold where that question begins to turn inward.
But when you begin to see yourself clearly, something shifts. You start to recognize your patterns in real time. You stop outsourcing your sense of self. You stop expecting someone else to resolve what lives within you. You take responsibility for how you show up, not from shame, but from awareness. Today, when I enter relationships, I enter them from a completely different place. A more embodied place. A more sovereign place. And at the same time, I understand something I didn’t before. Every relationship will still reveal you. Every person will bring out different layers, different wounds, different aspects of yourself that may not have been in your awareness yet. But now, I meet that consciously, instead of being overtaken by it.
This is why the descent is not something you complete. It is the beginning of a different relationship with yourself, one that continues to deepen over time. This is also why this work is not for everyone. It’s not for the part of you that still wants to stay in denial, or the part that needs to hold onto blame to feel safe. Because as long as everything is out there, nothing actually changes. The same patterns will repeat. The same relationships will cycle. The same wounds will resurface, just in different forms. This work begins when something in you is willing to see. When you may not fully understand your patterns yet, but you can no longer ignore that they exist. When you’re ready to understand yourself, not punish yourself.
While much of my work is rooted in guiding women, this process is not exclusive to women. Anyone who is willing to face themselves will recognize this path. Soulaura was born from this lived experience. From walking through this without a guide. From knowing how disorienting it can feel. From understanding how easy it is to get lost in your own shame without the right support. This is not about offering quick answers. It’s about creating a space where you can begin to see yourself clearly and be met in that process.
If you find yourself here, in a place where something is no longer working, where patterns are beginning to surface, where you feel the pull to understand yourself more deeply, then you’re already at the threshold. And from here, it becomes less about finding the right answer and more about being willing to face what’s true. If you feel called into this work, you can explore Soulaura and feel into what resonates. Each offering exists as a different entry point, but they all lead to the same place: back to yourself, the version of you that is no longer hidden from your own eyes.
If you’ve lived even a fraction of this, you know this path isn’t something you move through alone. It asks to be witnessed and to be held. This is the space I’ve devoted my work to.
(You can read more about the Soulaura Philosophy here.)
With love and reverence,
Saddaf
Xo