A Nine-Year Descent Back Into My Own Light

What happens when life whispers come home for 9 years straight

There are moments when the universe times things so precisely that it feels like a quiet blessing landing in your lap. This essay from my friend Valerie Demont is one of them.

The moment I finished reading it, my whole body softened. Something in me lit up. I felt that familiar grounded warmth that only truth can bring.

I’m honestly so honoured that Remembering SELF gets to be a home for words like hers. Valérie, thank you for trusting this space — it means more than I can say.

I hope her remembering touches something inside you, too.

---

Photo by Shruthi Vidhya Sundaram

There are seasons in a life where everything looks successful on the outside… and something quiet inside keeps whispering, “This isn’t the whole truth.”

This is the story of the whisper that became a turning point.

The story of a woman who:

• hit all the marks,

• climbed all the hills,

• carried all the roles (woman, wife, mum, daughter, sister, friend, entrepreneur, etc)

and then realised she had been walking away from herself.

This is my ninth-year return. My remembering.

The years I was fighting to prove something

When I started my company in 2010, I was fueled by fire. Not the gentle, warming kind, the kind that says I will carry everything, I will hold everyone, I will not bend. I was such a warrior, a wonder-woman.

And the world applauded. Oh yes! I was seen and recognised everywhere as a pioneer in my region. Between 2014 and 2017, my work exploded:

• big revenue, a team, opportunities with the greatest local business, and recognition.

• I was the woman who could do it all.

• Entrepreneur. Mother. Partner. Daughter.

• Strong. Capable. Relentless.

I was carrying an invisible inheritance: the belief that a woman must prove she can hold everything with grace: motherhood, entrepreneurship, partnership, lineage. My drive wasn’t ambition; it was loyalty. A desire to honour the way my father lived and raised me, and to show the world that a woman can build something solid, lasting, worthy.

And yet… inside that climb lived a longing. I wanted my father to see me win. To look at me with that quiet, unmistakable pride. To say without saying: you made it, my daughter, I am so proud of you.

The year I reached my biggest success… he passed. Three days after his retirement, in a helicopter crash.

Before I could show him what I had built. Before I could offer him that proof, I had carried like a stone in my chest.

When he left, something in me felt… emptiness and silence. A doorway.

Life had been speaking long before that

When I became a mother, my intuition, the ability that had always guided me, softened into the background. I didn’t lose it, I simply stopped hearing it. I became the woman who “knew” but no longer listened. And the farther I walked from my inner voice, the louder life tried to speak.

Looking back, there was a pattern. Every accident carried the same message: “Slow down. Return. Reconnect.”

I can see it so clearly now: two burn-outs, car accidents I walked away from, a fall into a river, headfirst, ski injuries that kept repeating.

None of it dramatic, just unmistakable reminders that my body was speaking long before my mind was ready to hear.

The moments where my body hit the brakes while my mind kept racing.

I had been dodging messages from the universe with the grace of someone who refuses to listen.

I had lost my intuition, my inner compass that had always guided me, without even noticing it was gone.

His death cracked the shell I had built around myself. And in that crack, a question rose with impossible clarity:

What am I actually living for?

There was also a moment when I realised that my personal-development journey had quietly turned into another race: to meditate longer, to silence my mind perfectly, to be the “highest version” of myself every day.

The Miracle Morning, the workouts, the food rules… all of it carried the same pressure as my old way of working, yet a spiritual… performance supported by spiritual ego.

Understanding my own inner process and the way I guide my clients through alignment changed everything.

Today, my morning practice lasts ten minutes. Ten minutes that tune me into what I call Calibrated Efficiency, where my energy and my decisions fall into place with ease.

Because my business model now supports my rhythm, my truth, and the way I want to live, I released the pressure to “optimize” myself. I am already my Complete Self.

And it feels liberating.

Ten minutes is enough for me to stay aligned, to choose clearly, and to serve deeply. This is so good that I am gonna offer it to the readers of my upcoming book.

And with this presence in my body — through breath, through awareness — I finally feel safe living the life I came here to live, without fearing burnout, collapse, or the accidents that used to mirror how far I had drifted from myself.

The moment that split my life in two

Summer, 2016.

I’m sitting on my balcony, warm evening air resting on my skin. My son is laughing below me, his feet dancing on the tiles, sunlight in his hair. I saw my son laughing in the sun, and I felt time collapse.

And suddenly it hits me with the force of a wave: He is nine. Nine years. A full cycle.

And in that instant, I realised I had lived beside his childhood more than inside it. The guilt didn’t break me; the clarity did. It showed me what I was unwilling to miss again.

The end of a first childhood cycle. And I have been here… without really being here.

I was physically present, yes. Emotionally? My mind was always half in strategy, half in survival, half in performance — and none of those halves were home.

That day, I whispered a promise to myself:

I want a life where presence matters more than performance. I want to live in a qualitative presence.

A business led from the heart, for the right true reasons, and motherhood lived from inside my body, not from the edges of my schedule.

That was the true beginning of my nine-year remembering.

The unravelling and the remembering

These nine years have been a slow return to my own centre. Letting go of identities I carried like armour. Releasing the version of me that was built to impress. Unlearning the structures I inherited from my father (and my whole family), from society, from capitalism itself.

I carried a quiet shame about the world I had worked in — the old paradigm of marketing I once mastered. I knew too much about how the system functioned, and a part of me felt complicit in a way of doing business that no longer resonated with my soul.

What saved me wasn’t the personal-development race.

It was Kundalini yoga, the hours on the cushion, the raw intimacy with my own breath, the silence that finally quieted my mind. My healing didn’t come from becoming “better”. It came from becoming present.

And in that unravelling, I found things I had forgotten:

• The softness in my own chest.

• The intelligence of silence.

• The deep well of intuition that had been waiting for me to stop running.

• The future-frequency I’ve been wired into since childhood.

Meditation, Kundalini yoga, long hours on the mat until I had no more tears, the cleansing honesty of breath, they peeled me open in a way that felt like remembering a language I once spoke fluently before being a young adult.

And then new gifts arrived:

• My healing channel opening.

• My connection to abundance shifting.

• The future lines appearing with more clarity than ever before.

• The quiet understanding that I am a bridge between timelines, between lifetimes, between possibilities.

In the final three years of my nine-year cycle — my 7, 8, and 9 — everything opened.

My intuition sharpened, my healing channel activated, and my connection to future timelines became undeniable. I stopped “seeing ahead” by accident. I started understanding that this was my natural frequency, the way my soul had always navigated time and had always been connected to the future.

The rebirth: Yellowstone, again, nine years later

This summer, the cycle closed. Nine years. Full circle.

I found myself in the Yellowstone River, my feet in water that felt like initiation.

Something lifted and landed. And in that moment, I felt myself being born again, as the woman who finally carries nothing but her truth.

I am receiving life and no longer chasing recognition.

Every day feels like a soft arrival. My business looks nothing like those early years, and it has never felt so abundant, so spacious, so peaceful.

I wake up with gratitude for the long road, the pain that opened me, the presence I now inhabit and for the woman I finally came home to.

This is the true success I wanted all along.

And then life gave me the last key:

Writing my book, Being is the New Doing, became the final portal. Page after page, I laid down pieces of myself I had carried for years: the ambition, the wounds, the old identities, the parts of me that still wanted to prove something.

The book gathered everything I had lived, avoided and finally understood. By the time I wrote the last chapter, something in me had unclenched.

This book freed me. And in that release, I felt my own rebirth begin.

Holding the book in my hands for the very first time, I felt something I had never experienced before: pride in the work I had done, and in the woman I had finally become.

My business now feels like an ecosystem that breathes with me. Abundance arrives in forms I could never have planned. I receive as naturally as I serve. And for the first time, my life feels like a place I can live in — not survive through.

---

I’m gathering the first early readers for Being is the New Doing, a small group of conscious souls who wish to receive the book before its release and walk this remembering with me.

If you want to be part of this founding circle, and read the book that emerged from my nine-year rebirth, you can join here → beingisthenewdoing.com

---

If you are somewhere in your own nine-year cycle…

Maybe you are in the unravelling. Maybe you are in the middle of a silent ache. Maybe something in you knows it’s time to release a version of yourself that once kept you safe.

If this is you:

Your remembering is already happening.

Your truth is already rising.

Your life is already preparing a new chapter that feels like your own skin again.

You are already on your way home, even if you don’t feel it yet.

2034 - CardiaNova