The Inner Work: Finding My Way Back

I didn't find Louise Hay because I was trying to heal myself.

I found her because I was desperately trying to save a toxic relationship. I was praying, manifesting, searching for anything, not to get better, not to love myself, but to make a man who was lying to me and cheating on me stay. That is where I was. That is how lost I was.

But sometimes the thing you're searching for leads you somewhere else entirely.

Someone mentioned Louise Hay in a video. I looked her up. I started listening to her meditations, the ones about forgiveness, about releasing resentment, about loving yourself. And something shifted. Not dramatically. Not overnight. But something, a small, stubborn thing, began to move.

I got the book. You Can Heal Your Life. I read it. Then I kept reading, books about trauma, about the body, about the thoughts and stories we carry about ourselves without even realising it.

I listened to Louise Hay's forgiveness meditation every night for six months. Every single night. Forgiving my parents. Forgiving my cousin. Forgiving the people who hurt me. Not because what they did was acceptable, it wasn't. Not because it was right, it wasn't. But because I was done carrying it in my body. Because I finally understood: holding onto that resentment wasn't punishing them. It was punishing me.

The idea that my thoughts were creating my reality. That I had spent years telling myself I was broken, unlovable, unworthy and my body was simply reflecting back what my mind believed. That forgiveness, not for anyone else's sake, but for mine was the doorway to healing. That I could let go of the past, not by forgetting it, but by refusing to let it define my future.

I started with self-forgiveness. Not the easy kind, but the real kind, looking at myself with compassion instead of contempt. Something I still have to work on from time to time. Realising that I was not the abuse, not the shame, not the silence. I was the one who had survived it. And I was going to stop abandoning myself the way everyone else had. I was going to be there for me first.

That shift changed everything.

From there, the healing began to ripple outward. I forgave my parents not by excusing what had happened, but by understanding that they were doing the best they could with the wounds they carried. I forgave my cousin. I forgave the men who had hurt me. And most importantly, I forgave myself for staying silent, for believing I deserved it, for hating myself for so long.

I started to understand the connection between mental and physical health in a way I never had before. HS and emotional state feed each other. Stress triggers flares, flares destroy confidence, broken confidence creates more stress. It is a circle. And breaking it required working from the inside out. The outer treatments could only do so much when the inside was still in war.

As I did this inner work, something unexpected happened. My relationship with my parents began to transform. The anger softened. The distance closed. I started to see them not as the people who had failed me, but as people who loved me imperfectly, within the limits of their own healing.

Then COVID arrived. And with it, loss.

My grandmother passed away during the lockdown. The woman who had raised me. Who had held my hand through childhood, who I had held back through her old age. Twenty three years she had been my constant. And then she was gone.

In the same period, the toxic six year relationship finally ended too.

For someone who had spent years numb, dissociated, watching her own life like a third person, this should have broken me. And in some ways it did. But the inner work I had been doing gave me something I had never had before: a floor to stand on. I didn't collapse the way I might have. I grieved. I cried. But I held.

During COVID, stuck at home with my parents, something unexpected happened. I started to see them differently. Not through the eyes of the child who felt abandoned and neglected, but through the eyes of someone who had done the inner work, who understood that their limitations came from their own wounds, their own upbringings, their own unprocessed pain. It didn't erase what I had felt. But it made space for something new: compassion. Connection. A relationship with my parents that felt, for the first time, like something real.

I had spent years wondering if they wanted me to get well for me, or for my marriage prospects. During COVID, I started to let that question go. I started to see that they loved me, imperfectly, messily, in the only way they knew how. And that was enough.

As those relationships, with myself, with my past, with my parents, began to heal, something else shifted too. The medication that had always worked intermittently started working better. My body started responding. The flares became less frequent, less aggressive. My routine, my self care, the way I was treating my own body with softness instead of shame, all of it was working together.

I was finally treating myself like someone worth healing.

And then, just as HS was settling, something new appearing often. Hives. Cold urticaria. The first time it happened was in Rameshwaram when my grandmother was ill back home. Later, it happened again during the rituals after her death standing in the wind and water, and my skin erupting.

I wonder sometimes if it was grief made physical. A body that had finally lost its primary safe person, reacting the only way it knew how.

Recently, after I had moved away from India, I came across "It Didn't Start With You" by Mark Wolynn. And as I read about intergenerational trauma, about how our parents' wounds shape us, about the power of healing those relationships, I realised I had already been living this. The forgiveness, the compassion, the shift in how I related to my parents and my family history, I had already done that work. The book simply gave me a framework to understand what I had already accomplished. It validated the healing that was already happening.

In the UK, cold urticaria has become its own daily negotiation. Fifteen minutes in the wind and I'm covered. I carry antihistamines everywhere. I cover up. I manage but I don't hate myself or my body for it. Meanwhile, the HS while mostly under control, still flares when my body is under stress: heat, sweating, friction, or intensive physical activity. Small bumps mostly. My body is reminding me of its limits.

And when it feels unfair, watching people run in the rain, wear what they want, not think twice about the wind, push their bodies without consequence, I say something to myself that has become a kind of anchor for both:

I am meant for a comfortable life.

Not as a denial of the difficulty. But as a reframe. My body requires warmth, softness, care, and intention. Maybe that is not a limitation. Maybe that is just the shape of my life.