Why The Best Leaders View Vulnerability As A Strength | Kirsty Akaal

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Vulnerability – Why The Best Leaders View Vulnerability as a Strength

Vulnerability is something leaders like Howard Shultz, CEO of Starbucks value. He once said, “The hardest thing about being a…

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MEDITATIONS & SOUL WORK

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Here is an excerpt from my new websites about page

Here is an excerpt from my new websites about page. Feel free to take a look around the site and I would love to hear your thoughts. kx

MY STORY

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.

read more on my website www.kirstyakaal.com

#healing #awakening #trauma #myownstory
@michellevdijk 📸

HOPE?! someone in a group on nervous system regula

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.

That’s the difference.

It’s very important to know…
You’re still going to feel #TRIGGERED.

Part 2 in comments #heal #nervoussystemhealing #regulation

I noticed a pattern this week when three past clie

I noticed a pattern this week when three past clients reached out. These are people I have worked with for years. Three. Five. Seven.

They come in when needed. They do the work. Then they go and live their lives.

In the beginning, it can often be the deeper layers that bring a person to the work.

Burnout. Trauma. Addiction. A triggering event.

The kind of work that asks you to face what you have been carrying for a long time.

But over time, something shifts.

Now they are regulated & grounded in themselves.

Life is no longer something they are trying to survive.

And the work evolves. It shifts to something less about digging in the past to...now it is about finding peace or letting deep love in, or how to holding more capacity. Learning how to live in what they have built without needing chaos to feel familiar.

AND THIS! is what I love the most about reconnecting with a client 1 year or 3 or 7 years later for the next level, the next layer and seeing how much they have shifted, even though sometimes we don´t see that in ourselves, I see that.

I see their growth in how differently they now handle things s differently.

If we are truly growing, it’s not one and done.

We continue to meet ourselves at deeper levels of truth as our life expands.

This is what long-term integration looks like.Not one breakthrough. Seasons. I am so friggin PROUD! of these humans. As it has not always been easy and I am honored to have witnessed so much of their journey and honored they keep coming back in when their ready for another level or layer of the work.

I love seeing them meet the work differently as they grow.

This is the work. If your curious DM me or drop a heart emoji.

Where do you see yourself in this? The growth, the seasons, the work over years? I would love to hear.

kx

#NervousSystem #SelfLeadership #HighPerformer #ComeHomeToYourself #ʜᴇᴀʟɪɴɢᴊᴏᴜʀɴᴇʏ

Blast from the past! Spent the day going through 1

Blast from the past! Spent the day going through 11,000 photos and 2000 videos cataloging things so that they can actually be shared and used.

What I have noticed lately is as I get ready to step up in a big way and share more every time I do a task like this or redoing my website for example it’s not just editing or tech work.

I’m doing its inner work and it triggers me into a beautiful process.

A process of remembering who I am, a process of remembering where I’ve been, a process of remembering how much I’ve achieved, a process of letting go of the idea of more more more, a process of recognizing where perhaps some of my goals were more focused on by my ego rather than my true sense of self.

Have you ever done a deep dive into your past what comes up for you when you think about this post and what I’m sharing? I’d love to hear.

#life #dreams #success #lettinggo #rebirth

Miracles are around us every day. 😇 Today I was

Miracles are around us every day. 😇

Today I was coming back home in a taxi and as is common in Mexican taxis they have rosaries hanging from the rear vision mirror often for protection. I was commenting with the driver, how beautiful this particular rosary was and that I hadn’t seen anything quite like it.

When we arrived at the destination he told me that he would like to gift it to me he was very insistent.

I am not a religious person, but I do believe in miracles and angels and something bigger than all of us and I love collecting rosaries. I didn’t feel right to take it from him so I made an exchange and gave him a beautiful key ring I had with angels and we made a lovely swap.

Sometimes the most magical moments can happen in a simple taxi ride. We both now have a piece of each other and I hope to see Gustavo again.

Isn’t she an absolute beauty. She appears to be handcrafted and will take up residency on my altar. I feel truly blessed. Like a little kiss from the universe today.

What’s the last little magical or miracle moment that happened for you?

Kx
#mexico #rosarybeads #rosaryprayer

I didn’t know why Mexico was calling me. I just k

I didn’t know why Mexico was calling me.

I just knew I had to go.

I flew down just before the pandemic 6 years ago. With 15 years in LA behind me. No plan. No certainty. Just this pull I couldn’t explain.

I landed in Cancun. Ended up in Tulum. And I remember those first weeks thinking, what have I done? Where am I? Mexico and especially Tulum can be an assault to the senses. This wasn’t the glossy version I’d seen in photos. This was raw. Chaotic. Challenging.

But something in me knew to stay.

Six years on, I cannot imagine living anywhere else on the planet.

Mexico has been my greatest teacher. My deepest initiation. The place that cracked me open and put me back together in ways I didn’t know I needed.

This is where I feel the most grounded & the most connected.

Not because it’s perfect. But because it’s real.

There is so much here that is sacred. That is still connected to ritual and practices that I feel like a lot of the world has forgotten. The ceremonies. The offerings. The way people honor the earth, the ancestors, the unseen.

This is somewhere where I remember my roots. My ancestors. Even though I’m not Mexican. There’s something here that calls to the ancient parts of me. The parts that remember sacredness, rites of passage & initiation.

Mexico has given me so many gifts. I am a different woman from the one who arrived here, burned out, unable to sit still, to be in my body.

She gave me my community. My sisters. My Medicine circle. The women who held me through the hardest parts of my healing.

She gave me silence & permission to slow down in a world that worships speed.

Continued in comments below kx#xx #MovingToMexico #LifeInMexico #MexicoLiving #LivingInMexico

A few days ago, I got word that one of my beautifu

A few days ago, I got word that one of my beautiful sister has passed away. Ana was a friend & co-pilot in many retreats and we shared so many experiences together over the past 7 years. I am heartbroken that she won’t be joining me for more adventures on this earthly plane.

Even though we knew she’d been battling breast cancer on and off for years, there was no sign that she wasn’t going to make it, and she went downhill incredibly quickly in the last month, and that was when we began to worry. Everything happened so suddenly.

I remember thinking the first day there should be a 24 hour pause when somebody dies. We should be allowed to just collapse and stay in bed, not to have to be organizing and co-ordinating and traveling. It’s a strange feeling how life continues and you somehow have to keep up... the world doesn’t stop...but I have. So I have really allowed myself to full feel it all, to be with her family and partner and son at this time. To let the world slow down while I process it all.

I’m finding this a very different process to losing someone much older, perhaps like a grandfather. It’s a very different feeling to lose a sister close in age. To realize that perhaps we’re at that time in life where many of my soul sisters are either getting ill or dealing with loss. It makes you think about a lot of things. To realize how fragile life and being a human can be.

I have felt and reflected and learned sooooooo many things in these past days that it’s going to take me possibly weeks or months to fully integrate all of the wisdom and lessons of her passing. In life, she taught me so much and in death, she is still teaching me.

She was an incredibly special person, and I honor her life and I honor her death and I will miss her dearly.

Rest in peace, Ana.

I love you. kxo

The Spiral Returns: Integrating the Brave Truth-Te

The Spiral Returns: Integrating the Brave Truth-Teller I Used to Be

I spent this weekend watching old footage of myself on stage. Hours of it. From years ago, before everything shifted.

I was a truth-teller then. Unfiltered. Brave in a way I haven’t been in a long time. Willing to say the unsayable. To stand in front of hundreds of people and speak about herpes, trauma, shame, the things we’re not supposed to talk about.

I watched that version of me and felt two things at once: deep pride, and a quiet grief for the part of myself I’ve been holding back.

Because the truth is, I pulled back. Not consciously at first. But the repressed memories came flooding in right before one of those big truth-telling events, and something severed in me. I stepped off the stages. I went quiet. I did the deepest healing work of my life but I did it in private.

My partner said something to me recently. He called that version of me a warrior. And he’s right. That version was willing to do the thing before she was ready. She put herself out there in a big, loud, unpolished way that I’m still not sure I’m ready for even now.

But here’s what I bring now that she couldn’t then: groundedness. Softness. A willingness to go inside and do the kind of healing work she didn’t have the capacity for yet.

The two of us, the brave truth-teller and the grounded healer together? That’s integration. That’s coming home. That’s the medicine.

Someone said to me: it’s like you’ve come to the center of the spiral. There’s an ending and a beginning here.

part two in the comment below 👇 #awakenyoursoul #awakened #healing #holistika

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