The Price Of Success | Kirsty Akaal

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The Price Of Success – Discussion On What It Takes & Can Cost Us

[powerpress] My friends and I were chatting about the risks involved when we go after our dreams. There are almost always sacrifices……

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MEDITATIONS & SOUL WORK

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The ego death... That journey into the darkness y

The ego death...

That journey into the darkness you fear.

Into your trauma. Into your past.

It will be the same path that leads you to so much light.

To heart bursting wide open love.

To expanding your capacity to feel, to be seen, to help others see themselves.

You will be taken to the brink of hell and back.

You will stand on a precipice high above this world and wonder if you will fall.

And then the ego death will come.

It will feel like a total collapsing of everything you thought you were.

A death.

Only to be reborn.

Like a caterpillar dissolving completely inside its cocoon.

Reshaped.

A butterfly.

A total metamorphosis.

I promise you it’s worth it & I promise you there is light at the end.

kx

For me, the healing journey was also an awakening

For me, the healing journey was also an awakening journey. And it was about remembering the truth of who I was.

Healing is not about fixing yourself. It is about creating enough safety so that you can actually meet yourself.

For years I thought I needed more answers for what I really needed was the courage and the safety to listen to my inner voice to my truth.

The wisdom you’re searching for is not somewhere else it is already within you.

Kx

#healingfromwithin #traumaheilung #traumahealingjourney

Dear Algorithm, Connect me with those who have bee

Dear Algorithm,
Connect me with those who have been to hell and back.
The demon slaying badass warriors who made it.
The ones who learned how to survive things
they should never have had to survive.
The ones who can hold everything together on the outside
and still feel something missing underneath.
The ones coming out of survival mode
and not quite recognising themselves without it.
The ones quietly unmasking.
The ones who are ready to tell the truth.
Not polished.
Not perfect.
Just real.
That’s who I’m here for.

kx

#warrior #healing #shamanic #shadowwork
@michellevdijk 📸

For years I thought exhaustion was just part of be

For years I thought exhaustion was just part of being successful.

Part of being responsible.

Part of getting things done.

What I didn’t realise was that I had become so used to carrying everything that I no longer noticed the weight of it.

A lot of people aren’t struggling because they don’t know how to heal.

They’re struggling because they’ve forgotten how to rest.

Not laziness.

Not weakness.

Just a nervous system that has been on guard for a very long time.

Start where you are.

One breath.
One walk.
One quiet moment.

What helps you come back to yourself when life feels too loud?

kx

#survivalmode #hustleculture #selfcare #healing

I found an old journal entry this week while going

I found an old journal entry this week while going back through old writings for my book. I was struck by this one entry on LOVE and dating because it was so clear. The kind of clarity that only hindsight and years of real healing work gives you.

Before this love I am in now in a love that is the greenest of flags, safe and steady and real in ways I genuinely did not know were possible for me.

I used to date wounded men.

The journal entry I found was from the day I came back from a trip and met a girlfriend for dinner. She told me she was seeing the man I had been in an on-and-off situationship with for 18 months.

I was gutted in a way that surprised even me.

I came completely undone. Not my finest hour.

Logically I knew he didn’t belong to me. We weren’t committed. I had no claim on him.

But what happened in me had nothing to do with logic.

I spiralled over the next weeks into comparison and shame. Wondering what she had that I didn’t. Replaying every private thing I had shared with him, imagining them together now, laughing at me.

He had kept our relationship a secret. Said it was discretion. Said it was about the industry, about keeping things private. Our age gap... and SHE was the only friend I had told...

I found out later he was seeing multiple women.

But either way, I was a secret.

Something kept in the dark. Unimportant. Discarded the moment something more real came along.

Used.

And looking back now with the clarity that years of deep healing work gives you, I can see exactly what was happening.

It was a re-enactment.

The feelings, used, discarded, a dirty secret, a dark shameful thing to be hidden, those weren’t new feelings. They were ones from my past. Feelings that had their origin long before that man, in childhood experiences where I had first learned this was what I deserved.

This was just one of many men I allowed to treat me similarly. This was just one of many ways I re-enacted abuse patterns. Continue below for part two….
#reenactment #datingwithtrauma #attachmentwounds

HOPE ?! someone in a group on nervous system regul

HOPE ?! someone in a group on nervous system regulation asked for hope yesterday, for some positive stories to show there is a light at the end of the tunnel, to healing. I shared this in a comment and thought it might help a few others.

As somebody who has a history of deep wounding and sexual trauma, and when peri menopause hit combined with ADHD I really struggled.

Anxiety, depression, lack of sleep, you name it. Everything was on fire, even with all the tools I had for decades working myself in this space. I struggled.

Flashbacks, repressed memories everything started to surface when at 40 I was finally safe, when I finally had the support I needed.

When my 1st safe love & partner arrived my system could do the work it had held off for decades ...never safe enough and it got worse before it got better. My body had learned that safe & normal felt weird, I wanted drama and to run! anyway that´s all a story for another day.

HOPE? light at the end of the tunnel...

YES! I am now in the BEST place of my life and just recently turned 50. I am safe, happy, loved up and doing my most rewarding work in decades.

HOWEVER what I want to say to anyone on their healing journey is that a lot of people think the goal is to never be dis-regulated and I think it’s incredibly important to normalize having good and bad days. To meet yourself where your at.

The nervous system conversation right now is so loud and I think this gets lost...most people think healing their nervous system means becoming calm all the time. Like one day you’ll arrive…and nothing will shake you again.

That’s not real.

And chasing that will quietly EXHAUST you. It creates a mental war with yourself where you’re never THERE wherever there is…
What I now know is a regulated nervous system isn’t one that never gets activated. It’s one that can move. One that can be flexible.

It can rise into stress when life calls for it.

It can drop back into safety when the moment passes.

It doesn’t get stuck there.

See comment below..

MY STORY I’m Kirsty Akaal. As a global speaker on

MY STORY I’m Kirsty Akaal.

As a global speaker on courage, I built a high-performing life of achievement that looked powerful from the outside.

Inside, I was deeply disconnected from myself.

For fifteen years, I stood on stages teaching vulnerability while unable to see my own blind spots.

I thought that because I could speak about shame, I had moved beyond it.

I thought success meant I had finally arrived.

I hadn’t.

When burnout and repressed memories surfaced at 40, the glass wall shattered.

The high-flying life I had built on hustle began to unravel. It wasn’t just burnout. It was the realization that survival had required me to leave parts of myself behind.

I traded stages for silence. Spotlights for ceremony. Spraggon for Akaal.

I stepped away from constant performance and into integration, a sabbatical in Mexico that became an 8-year initiation into the deeper work of healing and embodiment. Into the body. Into truth.

Somatic healing in the mountains. Plant medicine. Breathwork. Regression. Deep Inner Healing & Trauma Informed Studies.

I learned what no stage ever taught me:

Trauma isn’t just what happened to you.

It’s the moment you learned it wasn’t safe to be yourself.

To survive, we learn to perform.
To perform, we put on masks.
We live in our heads because our bodies don’t feel safe.
We call it strength. We call it success.

But we never truly lose who we are. We just forget.

Trauma disconnects.
Healing is reconnection.
Awakening is remembering.

This is the journey. This is the work.

Trauma disconnected us from ourselves, from our bodies, our truth, our essence.

Conti In comment’s… link in bio
#innerwork #transformation #healyourself

I just completed my Psychedelic Integration Coachi

I just completed my Psychedelic Integration Coaching certification. After 7 years of holding space with plant medicines and clients in retreat I felt it was a nice addition to my certifications. And how fabulous that this is the first one in my new name, Kirsty Akaal it seems very fitting and aligned with the Medicine woman in me.

And honestly… it felt less like learning something new
and more like seeing everything I’ve spent the last 20 years living and studying come together.

Holding space.
Nervous system work.
Somatics.
Reading what’s not being said.
Staying with people in the in-between, not rushing them out of it.

It’s all the same work.

Just a different doorway.

What stood out most is this.

It’s not about the experience itself.
It’s about what happens after.

Anyone can have a big opening.
Not everyone knows how to stay with what it brings up…
or how to actually live it.

This is true of working with pyschedlics and without. Spiritual awakenings, braethwork and deep trauma healing in retreats and private work also lead to this big opening and require INTEGRATION.

Real integration looks like:
Being able to sit with discomfort without shutting down
Letting the body process, not just the mind explain
Turning insight into something lived, not just remembered
Building self-trust instead of needing to control the experience

No forcing meaning or rushing timelines or “this is what your experience means”

Just space, attunement & meeting what’s actually there.

It´s less about peak moments & more about what you do on a Tuesday morning after.

It wont change the work I have been doing just validate some parts for me & a reminder of the path I am on.

Helping people come back to themselves and actually live what they already know.

Proud of myself. k

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© 2026 Kirsty Akaal. All rights reserved.

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