What Taking Complete Charge of My Path Looks Like

I am 25. I am now learning to be a healer and a therapist. I am a student of Psychology, I am studying energy healing, emotions and how it impacts health and everything related to that.

I feel like I started out on this journey when I was 16, I said I wanted to become a doctor and started working on that. By the time I finished my 12th, it was too expensive for me to study medicine with my marks. It didn't seem right that I had to have the financial ability to do that. I thought may be I should study psychology, but the formal education system was to daunting, scary. 

I came across this alternate school called Swaraj University, a Self Deigned Learning program which did not have any exams or set curriculum, a program that helps you take charge of your own learning and narrative. This was such a scary decision to make! How dare I step out of the formal education system, how dare I take a \"break\", but when I took the leap it seemed just right. I didn't even want to go back to college or do medicine. 

This is something I understood about myself much later: I just didn't know how be still and listen to my own voice about I wanted, what was best for me. No one taught me as a kid that I am my own person and my voice is important, and spending time by oneself is important.

Even though I started off great at Swaraj by taking a look at my life so far and understanding what deeply bothered me. An incident of being child sexual abuse surfaced and I wanted to understand why someone would do that. Then I wanted to remove taboo around sex and sexuality, hosted workshops to do that. Came up with a tool to help people work on themselves called \"Love letters to Your Deepest Darkest Self\". 

Up until this point I was listening to my inner voice and following my heart. I tried working with sex workers, but I was told I am too young to do that. Annnnnd that was it! One rejection, I put my guards up. From this moment on, for the next 6 years I simply did what ever cam e my way, literally who ever came my way and what ever they wanted. I am realizing this right now in the last few months that I let the lack of self love and wanting external approval take over my life. 

I did really cool interesting stuff; but it was stuff that came my way, I didn't seek them. 

I worked for an anti-corruption organisation for 4 years, represented India in the UN, started a Silicon Valley funded company that did government liaison work without bribe, worked as a business development executive for The Hindu, Culture consultancy for a start up incubator, lived in Auroville curating experiential learning programs (river journeys), hosting psy-trance parties and pedaling drugs. This is typical of the wounded empaths' archetype. 

This was not just for work. It was for people, doing things that they introduced me to or doing things that they asked me to. Accepting love interests, fucking people, getting in relationships, accepting party invites, trying psychedelics, taking on someone's pain (quite literally, if you know about energy healing you know you can do that) and a lot more crazier weird shit. 

 You get the point, anything and everything that was cool, interesting and exciting. Towards the fag end of this 6-year-I-am-super-cool-phase, the \"I can do anything that comes my way and be amazing at it\" attitude got cockier and cockier; the duration of trying one new thing got from trying for 1 year then 6 months then 5, 4. Surfing everyone, everyone's wants, asks, whims and fancies; with no sense of self or the opposite of that, either from a place of zero ego or from the place of extreme ego.  

I am hurting for everyone of those decisions I took unaware of what I really wanted, and I am super angry because people who could have helped me out of abuse situations didn't. So mad at my parents too, who unintentionally let me seek for love and approval outside . I feel intensely burdened by the responsibilities i have now, my house, people I started engaging with, because I can't leave those halfway after opening up so many things for them. 

But I also know this is what taking complete charge of my path looks like this: 

Unlimited self-love, putting my needs before anyone else's, being aware of how powerful of a manifester I am and being very careful what I wish for, protecting my space and being very careful of who I let in, being aware that my guardian spirits are looking out for me, slowly healing myself and letting go of the need for approval while keeping some of that anger which is very fair and diving deep in the study of healing and therapy and sharpening my psychic abilities, healing and caring for people who deserve it  at my own pace and being very comfortable charging for my time.