What the Healing Industry Won’t Say: Awakening Isn’t Pretty
There’s a version of healing we’ve all been sold.
You know the one:
The curated Instagram grids.
The soft lighting.
The breathy words like “alignment” and “manifest.”
The idea that awakening comes with herbal tea and a houseplant—not a panic attack.
But what no one tells you is that the real awakening—the kind that guts you, rewires you, resurrects you—isn’t pretty.
It doesn’t arrive wrapped in sage smoke and spiritual hashtags.
It shows up as collapse. And for me, COVID-19 played a big role—as I’m sure it did for many of you.
Not once.
Not twice.
Four times.
Each round stripped away something I thought I needed, until all that was left was the truth.
The First Fall: Los Angeles
The first time I got sick, I had just flown back from L.A.
I had a media pass from a past project, which made me one of the few people flying during the earliest waves of lockdown.
The airport felt like a post-apocalyptic dream—security guards in N95s, empty terminals echoing with silence.
Everything smelled like antiseptic and anxiety.
And yet, part of me enjoyed the exclusivity.
It felt like I had been granted permission to explore a ghost country— a solo adventurer in a world paused mid-breath.
But instead of returning home as a cross-country, spirited-away creative, I came back with a fever that wouldn’t break.
Three weeks of nausea. Vomiting. Bone-deep fatigue.
That was Round One.
The Second Wave: Miami, Glitter & Cowboys
Round two came after New Year’s Eve in Miami.
My friends and I had promised ourselves one wild night—just one—to feel alive again. We ended up at Treehouse, an exclusive, velvet-rope kind of place tucked away behind palms and pulsing bass lines.
We danced tiny dresses.
We drank mezcal under moonlight.
We even found real-life cowboys—hats, boots, belt buckles wide enough to carry a universe.
We laughed until our ribs hurt.
But this wasn’t a rodeo. And the joke, apparently, was on me.
Somewhere between boarding the plane and landing home, it hit.
A scratchy throat.
Fatigue like wet cement.
COVID.
Round two.
I remember lying on the floor of my apartment thinking,
How is this happening again?
I’ve done everything right.
But sometimes, the body tells the truth before we’re ready to hear it.
The Breakdown: Round Three
Round three is the one that changed me.
I was working at a mental health practice as both a Certified Holistic Practitioner and their Director of Digital Media.
Masked. Isolated. Indoors.
Doing everything by the book.
One by one, the building got infected.
And then—so did I.
Only this time… it was different.
I collapsed on my bathroom floor with a 104-degree fever.
I couldn’t speak.
I couldn’t move.
I blacked out.
A neighbor rushed me to urgent care.
I still remember the nurse’s face when she read my temperature.
Her wide eyes.
The quiet panic.
And I remember the shame.
Burning hotter than the fever.
As a holistic practitioner, I had built my career on the mind-body connection.
I taught clients how stress becomes sickness.
How unprocessed grief settles into the lungs.
How trauma embeds itself in the nervous system long after the danger is gone.
So why hadn’t I seen this coming?
I spiraled.
And yet—I still worked.
Still logged onto Zoom calls, glassy-eyed and hollowed out, trying to sound “grounded” when all I wanted to do was collapse.
Why am I here?
Why is no one telling me to rest?
Where is the compassion? The love? The basic human care?
It was one of those moments that rips the illusion clean in two:
When the ego separates from the soul.
When the professional fractures from the person.
When the healer is forced to meet the human underneath it all.
The woman I reported to—someone senior in the practice—offered no empathy.
Just expectations.
Push through.
Show up.
“I want more from you.”
But I wasn’t just sick with a virus.
I was sick with over-functioning, underpayment, and a lifetime of emotional labor that had quietly hollowed me out.
It would take nearly two years to unravel what really happened.
Because yes—
I witnessed manipulation.
I experienced coercion disguised as leadership.
I saw power misused in spaces that claimed to be about healing.
But I also had to confront something even harder:
I had no boundaries.
I had normalized over-giving.
I had mistaken obedience for strength.
And how could I not?
Understanding the Empath
I’m an empath.
That word gets tossed around a lot, but here’s what it actually means:
Being an empath means your nervous system is wired to feel everything—deeply.
You don’t just notice energy shifts—you absorb them.
You walk into a room and your body instantly scans for emotional temperature, danger, or unspoken tension.
It’s not just emotional sensitivity—it’s sensory immersion.
And when you grow up in environments where emotional attunement was survival, you don’t learn to draw lines— you learn to disappear.
You become a mirror for everyone else’s needs.
And no one ever hands you the tools to identify your own.
That’s why it’s so hard for empaths to feel safe.
Not just physically—but existentially.
Because if your safety has always depended on your ability to please, placate, or predict, then choosing yourself doesn’t feel empowering. It feels dangerous.
Until one day… it doesn’t.
The Turning Point: Shaolin & The Fourth Wake-Up Call
I started training Shaolin Kung Fu in December 2023 at the USA Shaolin Temple, led by Shifu Shi Yan Ming in New York City. After just one month of showing up—
I got COVID-19 again. For the fourth time.
Round four.
By then, I had stopped asking, “Why me?”
And started asking something else entirely:
What is my body trying to tell me?
Because at that point, it didn’t matter where I was— Los Angeles. Miami. New York. I could’ve flown to Italy, one of the places I love most, and I still would’ve gotten sick.
I stopped seeing COVID as just a virus.
I started seeing it as a mirror.
A reflection of the disconnect between my spirit and my life.
A weakening of my life force in a world that wasn’t built to nourish it.
A final warning that the way I was living was no longer sustainable.
That fourth time was my line in the sand.
I woke up.
And began walking away from everything I had built on top of my wounds.
I was burnt out from systems that rewarded self-betrayal.
I was surrounded by people who didn’t love me—just wanted access to me.
I was sick—literally—from over-giving, from being the strong one, from performing “wellness” while dying inside.
The truth?
I was starving.
Spiritually. Emotionally. Energetically.
I laid in bed for ten days, ignoring every work email with an auto-reply that said: “I have COVID-19 for the fourth time. I’ll return to sessions when I’m better.”
I didn’t reach out to anyone. And almost no one reached out to me.
I watched my Instagram story views climb—people waiting for me to post. But I didn’t owe them content.
What I needed wasn’t attention.
It was someone to bring me soup.
Some vitamin C.
Some care.
Some realness.
Not clicks.
Not curiosity.
Connection.
That was the moment I chose myself.
Not out of ego.
Out of survival.
For love of self.
And that became the first spark of what I now call Spiritual Reset.
The first piece in the triad of wholeness:
Self. Others. All.
A philosophy I live by.
Where free will is sacred.
Where discernment is power.
And where the most radical act of sovereignty is this:
To choose love over fear.
But how do we choose love when love itself has been so distorted?
How do we practice self-love when our entire lives have been shaped by survival?
That’s the question that changed everything for me.
And this—this is the beginning of that story.
A heroine’s journey through trauma, betrayal, disillusionment—and the sacred rage that becomes revelation.
Because awakening isn’t pretty.
What comes next?
Well…
It’s nothing short of a Goodfellas movie.
Only this time, the femme doesn’t fade—she fights.
ALEXANDRIA TAVA
10+ year Certified Holistic Producer and Accredited Personal Growth Coach leading radical transformation to inspire the next generational through conscious media.
