Authentic Integration: Understanding the Quiet Transformations That Shape Your Life
The largest moments of transformation that I’ve experienced throughout my life were never “large” in the way people expect. These transformations don’t announce themselves. They creep in when we least expect them and settle themselves down among the fibers of our being.
This kind of growth, these kinds of transformations, they aren’t fireworks and billboards.
They’re ease.
They’re integration.
They’re the things a bystander might not even notice unless they knew you on a deeper level.
The greatest moments of integration I’ve experienced weren’t huge “aha” moments. They were gentle waves that took me over slowly but surely, until one day I woke up and realized something inside me had shifted.
I was in a women’s circle the first time I heard the phrase remembering, the idea that we aren’t becoming someone else or someone entirely different, we’re remembering who we were always meant to be. We’re remembering the truths and the stories that have always lived within us.
This wasn’t the first time a light clicked on for me, and it wouldn’t be the last. But it was a memorable moment of something sparking back to life inside me that had been dormant. This understanding that I had all the answers I was seeking already within me. That I had everything I needed to become the woman I desired to become.
There was this gentle sadness I experienced amid the awakening that this understanding had unraveled within me. Not a sadness of lack or loss, but a sadness of being held back from your own truth, being held back from your own power, and not by something reckless or destructive, but by your own lack of awareness and recognition. By your own inability to remember. And so I made a decision, in that moment, to start integrating that insight, that awareness, into my very core.
That’s not to say I didn’t experience the cycles of depreciation, the forgetting cycles, where everything I had come to know and remember slipped away again. Those periods where the knowledge tucked itself deep inside me like well-worn books in the restricted section of a library. I still knew they were there, but I was no longer granting myself access.
Because that remembering takes time, energy, and effort to uncover.
Like a knotted ball of twine, you have to unravel it section by section, piece by piece, to truly see what lies within.
Coming Back to Myself
After leaving my career and finally having space, time, and energy to come back to myself, the reintegration of everything I had learned felt deeply personal. And yes, I’m aware many other women are experiencing their own awakenings and self-discovery moments, but for me, living inside those moments felt intimate in a way I hadn’t experienced since puberty. Not feelings of shame or embarrassment, but this quiet discovery of oneself that we all experience on an individual level.
Waking up new parts of me.
Meeting parts of me that had been dormant for years.
Returning to gifts I thought I had sacrificed at the altar of what I believed counted as success and progression, but what was actually greed and stagnation.
All of this felt incredibly personal. Vulnerable.
Like rediscovering pieces of myself I wasn’t sure I would ever get back.
Re-establishing a relationship with myself allowed me to integrate what I was learning, all that I was remembering, all that I was becoming, without needing or wanting any kind of outside validation or acknowledgment. I didn’t want applause. I didn’t want witnesses. I didn’t even want to talk about it.
I just wanted to be in it. I wanted to be present to it.
When I finally came back to myself, I spent the better part of two years in self-isolated bliss, a bubble I eventually broke on my own. That process ended up being just as important as the integration itself. Maybe even part of it. Because coming back into a society that expects you to be one thing and then returning as someone completely different is… more than a culture shock.
It’s something I’m still not sure I even know how to explain.
The resistance I felt wasn’t self-projection. It was a resistance to the systems that are built to keep everything I’m speaking to, the remembering, the intuition, the self-connection, asleep. Those systems want us disconnected from ourselves so we stay predictable, manageable, obedient… or at the very least, small.
When you go through any type of spiritual process or transformation, there is bound to be aftershock. And for me, it rippled outside of myself quietly but vigorously until I found that there were only a few people in my sphere who could even minutely grasp what I was doing with my life.
The strangeness of it all was this:
It felt more socially acceptable to be “normal” and miserable than “different” and deeply at peace.
We Weren’t Taught Integration, We Were Taught Repetition
If you grew up in the public education system, you know the drill: repetition and regurgitation. Not actual embodied learning. Not direct integration.
And if you exist online at all, especially in the self-improvement or spiritual space, you know the same narrative gets repeated there:
Do more
Buy more
Heal more
Push more
But what I’ve learned, over and over again, is that the biggest growth I’ve ever experienced did not happen in the periods of nonstop doing.
The biggest growth happened when I slowed the hell down.
When I stopped forcing the knowledge to take root and allowed it to settle organically. When I let things marinate instead of rushing to the next thing. When I finally created actual space for integration and embodiment.
If we’re constantly bouncing from one thing to the next, we leave no space for remembering.
No space for embodiment.
No space for becoming.
We’re not retaining anything, not the shifts, not the wisdom, not the expansion, because our energy is already moving on to the next thing. Just like the public school model: we learn it long enough to “pass the test,” and then forget it immediately after.
I’ve had to learn this lesson more than once. When I was working 60-hour weeks in my previous career, there was no time for myself, my relationships, or anything else. It was one of the biggest seasons of my life where not only was I unable to integrate, I felt like I was backsliding.
Having lived through that major experience, and others along the way, I have learned (again and again) the art of slowing down, and that doing less often leads to gaining more for ourselves in the long run.
The Quiet Shifts Are the Ones That Stick
Growth isn’t always a before-and-after image on Instagram.
Growth is often subtle. Quiet. Unwitnessed.
The biggest shifts happen underneath the surface, the ones no one claps for, no one posts about, no one even knows are happening. The recalibrations that only you can feel. The ones that rearrange you from the inside out.
Some shifts happen so quietly that you don’t realize they’ve changed your entire life until you’re already living differently.
One of the quietest shifts I experienced happened in the way I saw myself.
For years, my worth felt tied to what I produced, how much I checked off, how hard I worked, how much I could hold for everyone else.
But somewhere in the slowing-down, somewhere in the remembering, that belief dissolved without any kind of announcement.
One day I caught myself sitting in the living room doing absolutely nothing —
no guilt, no urgency, no mental checklist screaming at me —
and it hit me that the pressure I used to carry had evaporated.
I wasn’t chasing my worth anymore.
I was inhabiting it.
Quietly. Naturally. Without even realizing when the shift had happened.
It’s these kinds of shifts, the ones that take root quietly and reshape who you are at your core, that remind me why I speak about this work at all.
Why I Share My Growth Now
As I’ve continued to grow on my own journey, I’ve reached a point where I want to share my experiences, not because I need someone to validate them, but because speaking them out loud is part of my own integration. It’s part of honoring the woman I’ve become and the woman I am still becoming.
For so long, I kept everything internal.
My awakening.
My remembering.
My unraveling.
My rebuilding.
All of it felt too intimate, too sacred, too raw to bring into the world before it was ready. And honestly, there was a time where I didn’t trust that anyone would understand the shift happening inside me. It felt easier, safer, to walk it alone.
But as I’ve settled deeper into myself, I’ve realized how many women are walking their own versions of this path quietly. How many of us are remembering parts of ourselves we had buried. How many of us are shedding identities that no longer feel true. How many of us are craving a life that aligns with our inner rhythms, our instincts, our intuition, even if we don’t have the language for it yet.
If my words can help another woman trust the changes happening inside her, the ones she maybe hasn’t told anyone about, then sharing is worth it every time.
And if hearing someone else’s story is the thing that makes another woman exhale and think, “Oh… it’s not just me,” then that is the kind of connection that changes us all.
The quietest shifts often become the loudest truths we live by.
So ask yourself:
What inner transformation is unfolding in your life right now, quietly, steadily, profoundly, that deserves to be honored instead of hidden?
And if you’re craving support as you navigate your own becoming, you can explore all of my current offerings here:
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