What is a portal?

If you want to use everything in your life — and I mean everything — to be the springboard for you to become all that you are, to be the best that you can be, and to turn your life into an unimaginable work of art, this is the concept to understand. A portal to healing is something that actually happens in your real, 3D life — something challenging that leads you to confront your energy and see how you created this challenge, and how your energy needs to shift to transcend it. For me, relationships in particular have been a huge portal. When I say portal, it's like you walk into it and there's a seemingly unending set of things to look at — ways your energy is triggered that you can straighten out, that you can heal. And when you do, you shift your energy in a way that what was challenging becomes one of your greatest gifts and greatest sources of pleasure.

My biggest portal: relationships

Relationships have been quite challenging for me, and letting myself see that as a portal to healing let me heal things like codependency, people-pleasing, perfectionism, and social anxiety. All of that healing has let me step into myself as a healer, as a leader, as somebody who's happily married, with nourishing, beautiful friendships. I'm sure there's more to come — this is likely a portal that's going to keep feeding me, keep teaching me, keep challenging me.

Dating the same kind of person, again

Life is full of challenges — nobody said coming to earth was going to be easy. When a challenge is in front of us, we can fight it from our current level of consciousness, and often that works, until the strategy stops working, and then we fight and fight and fight and do the same thing over and over, never getting a new result. That's Einstein's definition of insanity. Say you keep dating the same kind of person, and it keeps getting you into the same kind of trouble. That repeating pattern can be a portal to help you embrace your own inner edgy one, your own inner rebel — a portal to your own expression, your own creativity. It has nothing to do with the relationships anymore; it's a portal to you becoming all that you are. And once you've claimed that for yourself, you may no longer be subconsciously attracted to the people who embody it — and you can start attracting a different kind of partner, one where the relationship is less wonky, less designed to make you suffer.

Money as a portal

Money is a big one too. Money issues, money difficulties, can be a portal to really owning your worth and standing in what you offer the world. Say there's a raise you want to ask for at work — that ask is a portal to claiming more of who you are, standing more confidently. Once you do that inner work, the money portal lets you feel confident enough to actually ask, and that confidence translates into more money too.

Health as a portal

At some point you might face a health challenge, and as you face it, you might notice you've contributed to creating it — not all health challenges are like that, but a lot of lifestyle health habits can be a real portal to healing. Say you've been smoking and want to quit because you know it's right for your health. What's underneath that might be needing space, managing your sensitivity a little better, because you reach for a cigarette when you feel overwhelmed by emotional energy around you. As you learn to self-soothe a different way, learn to take different kinds of breaks, that lets you disengage from the habit — and it becomes a portal of healing. Weight can work the same way, and so can plenty of other lifestyle habits that feel stuck.

Relationships, money, and health are the big three — the ones that hurt enough to really motivate us. But even more subtle things in your life can be portals too, if you're willing to look at them that way.

That which was challenging now becomes one of your greatest gifts and greatest sources of pleasure.