Eileen’s Journey
From searching for truth outside myself to learning how to live it.
For as long as I can remember, I have asked questions.
As a child, I questioned people constantly. I wanted things to make sense. I wanted to understand why people said one thing and did another, why rules seemed clear in one moment and completely different in the next, and why the answers I was given so often did not feel like answers at all.
I asked enough questions to be annoying.
I kept asking anyway.
Part of me believed that if I could just understand enough, if I could find the right explanation, if I could follow the rules correctly, then life would make sense.
It never did, but I tried.
I got good grades. I played sports. I worked hard. I did what I thought I was supposed to do. I learned how to perform well inside systems and expectations.
But underneath all of that was a deeper search.
I grew up around chaos, dysfunction, and trauma, and I was always trying to understand why.
Why were people behaving the way they were?
Why did things not match what I was being told?
What was I supposed to believe?
What was real? What was true? What was safe?
I did not have language for any of that as a child. I only knew that I was constantly observing, questioning, and trying to make sense of the world around me while living in a state of confusion.
Years later, I chose professions that gave structure to that instinct.
Accounting.
Fraud examination.
Financial investigation.
In that world, truth could be tied to something concrete.
A rule, a law, a regulation. A documented transaction. A financial record. A piece of evidence.
There was comfort in that.
If something did not add up, I could investigate it.
If someone made a claim, I could test it.
If there was a question, I could usually find something objective that helped lead me toward an answer.
Looking back now, I understand why I was drawn to that work.
I had spent my entire life searching for truth—sifting through lies, contradictions, and distortions created by human chaos.
What I did not yet understand was that the most important investigation of my life would eventually be...myself.
I became very good at finding answers.
As I got older, that questioning instinct found a place where it was useful. I studied accounting and taxation, became a Certified Public Accountant and Certified Fraud Examiner, and eventually worked as a financial investigator with the FBI on white-collar crime cases and later with the U.S. Attorney’s Office investigating fraud against the government.
I was good at that work because I knew how to follow a trail, notice inconsistencies, ask difficult questions, and keep pulling at the threads until the story made sense. Over time, that competence became part of my identity. I was independent, responsible, capable, and usually the person who could figure things out.
The work also gave structure to something that had always lived inside me: the need to understand how people, systems, choices, and consequences fit together. I learned to look beneath the surface, separate fact from assumption, and stay with a question long enough for a fuller picture to emerge.
For years, that way of moving through the world served me well. It gave me confidence, purpose, and a sense that even complicated situations could eventually be understood.
What I did not realize was how much of my identity had become tied to being the one who knew what to do next.
Then, in 2018, my life unraveled.
I discovered that there were major parts of my marriage and my husband’s life that I did not know existed.
As an investigator, that realization was devastating in a way that was hard to explain. I had spent years professionally examining facts, following evidence, and uncovering what was hidden. Yet in the relationship closest to me, I had been profoundly disconnected from what was happening.
At first, I thought the story was about what I had failed to know about him, or his secret life I was oblivious to.
Over time, I realized the deeper story was about how disconnected I had become from myself.
I had built a life that looked strong, capable, and independent from the outside. But underneath that, I had spent much of my life adapting to the people around me. I was skilled at reading others wants, anticipating needs, adjusting myself, keeping things moving, and becoming whatever seemed necessary in the moment.
I began to understand that what I had thought was simply being caring, flexible, responsible, or strong was often something much deeper.
It was codependency.
And when I began looking at that honestly, I could trace much of it back to childhood — to learning how to survive chaos by paying close attention to everyone else while gradually losing touch with myself.
The question eventually stopped being:
How could I not have known so much about him?
And became:
How could I have known so little about myself?
That question changed the direction of my life.
It was no longer enough to understand what had happened.
I wanted to understand who I was underneath all of the adapting, achieving, caretaking, and surviving.
And for the first time, I began to wonder what my life might look like if I stopped organizing it around everyone else and started learning how to listen to myself.
I started asking different questions.
After my marriage ended, I reevaluated nearly every part of my life.
I went to India and began studying yoga, even though yoga had never really been a significant part of my life before. I did not go with some grand plan to become a yoga teacher, open a wellness center, or completely reinvent myself.
I was trying to figure out who I was when so much of what I had believed about my life no longer felt true.
When I returned home, I kept learning. I completed my yoga teacher training and continued exploring different styles of yoga, but underneath all of that was still the same question:
Who am I now?
Instead of looking for one enormous answer, I began asking myself three much simpler questions.
what does my body need?
Movement
Not exercise as another task to accomplish, but movement that helped me feel, breathe, release, and connect with my body.
What does my mind need?
Continuous learning
My mind has always questioned, investigated, and searched. I needed something meaningful to continue exploring.
What does my soul need?
Authentic human connection
Connection where I did not have to perform, adapt, fix, or become what someone else needed me to be.
Healing through the body changed everything.
Those three questions eventually led me to Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy.
I began what became a multi-year process of becoming a certified yoga therapist. I entered the training thinking I was learning a new way to work with others. What I quickly discovered was that the first person I would be learning to sit with, listen to, and understand more deeply was myself.
I had already spent years in counseling, talk therapy, EMDR, and other therapeutic approaches. Each of them gave me important insight and helped me understand pieces of my story.
But yoga therapy brought me into a different kind of relationship with my experience.
For most of my life, I had tried to understand everything through my mind. I wanted to know why. I wanted the explanation. I wanted the facts to line up.
My body did not always have an explanation.
Sometimes it simply had sensation.
Tension. Tightness. Fear. Grief. Anger. Relief. Tears.
During that first year of training, I began experiencing what I came to think of as the “issues in my tissues.” There were days I left what felt like gallons of tears on my mat. Sometimes I knew exactly what I was grieving. Sometimes I had no idea.
For perhaps the first time, I began to understand that I did not always have to know why before something could begin to heal.
"Healing was no longer only about understanding my story. It became about learning how to listen to what my body had been holding on to."
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