What 11 Years of Self-Inquiry Taught Me About Healing, Awakening, and Embodiment
by Blanca Amezcua,
June 23, 2026
For the last eleven years, Self-Inquiry has been at the center of my life.
It has guided every major decision, inviting me to inquire from which space an action is taking form.
It has deconstructed my understanding of reality and brought light to layers of conditioning I did not know existed.
One thing I can say with certainty:
The practice never allowed me to bypass what needed to be seen.
On the contrary, it exposed everything.
The wounds.
The fears.
The attachments.
The unconscious patterns.
The identities I thought were me.
The practice itself became a mirror.
What I did not anticipate was that seeing would be only the beginning.
Awakening Is Not the End of the Journey
My first major non-dual experiences arrived after roughly two years of intense practice.
Hatha Yoga played a profound role in preparing the body and nervous system for those openings.
Like many practitioners, I imagined these experiences would bring resolution.
Instead, they initiated a much deeper process.
The real purification began afterwards.
Everything that remained unconscious became amplified.
Patterns, fear, and pain became more visible.
The gap between realization and embodiment became impossible to ignore.
Discovering CPTSD
One of the most important moments in my path was discovering that I was living with Complex PTSD.
This understanding changed everything.
Spiritual practice was revealing the unseen, and additional support was needed to help integrate it.
Trauma does not disappear simply because awareness is present.
The nervous system, the body, and the psyche also need attention.
One of my Tibetan Buddhist teachers often says:
"If you don't attend trauma, your spiritual neck will break and after many years you will spiral down,
with the ego structure amplified, in delusion and without the possibility to see beyond."
The point is not that awakening is dangerous.
The point is that powerful and advanced spiritual practices and experiences can amplify unresolved wounds.
Without grounding, humility, and support, it becomes easy to confuse insight with true integration.
The Underworld Years
There was a period of roughly six years during which I largely stepped away from ordinary social life.
My life became centered around leading silent retreats, deepening practice, studying, and entering longer periods of solitude.
I completed three solitary retreats of sixty days each and one thirty-day silent retreat.
These retreats were supported by thousands of hours of meditation and a consistent daily yoga practice.
Those years felt less like ascending toward the light and more like descending into the underworld.
Old wounds surfaced.
Grief surfaced.
Trauma surfaced.
Everything that had been hidden demanded attention.
There were moments of extraordinary beauty and love.
There were also periods that felt like living through an inner hell.
Both were part of the process itself.
Healing Supports Awakening
Several modalities became essential companions along the way.
Feeding Your Demons practice
Somatic meditation
Therapeutic work
Shadow integration
These approaches helped me navigate experiences that my nervous system could not always metabolize on its own.
They did not replace spiritual practice.
They supported it.
Over time, they created more space for witnessing, compassion, and integration.
The Importance of Guidance
Another lesson became unmistakably clear.
Authentic guidance matters, even though some teachers along my path suggested otherwise.
The spiritual path can be beautiful, yet it can also be confusing.
Without support, there is a real risk of strengthening spiritual identity rather than dissolving it.
Insight can become ego.
Awakening can become performance.
Experiences can crystallize into identity.
A mature teacher, mentor, or guide can help illuminate blind spots that are often invisible from within the process.
Love Arrives When We Stop Chasing It
One of the deepest shifts was letting go of the need to be loved, chosen, or seen.
There came a moment when I genuinely accepted the possibility that I might spend the rest of my life alone, with myself.
Not from a space of resignation.
It came from peace itself, from completeness.
Ironically, it was after that surrender that my spiritual partner appeared.
Embodiment
True embodiment started when I stopped romanticizing the path.
For a long time, I compared myself to practitioners around me and imagined that spirituality should look a certain way.
The guidance of one of my teachers was not meeting the reality I was living.
My experience was different.
It was messy.
Intense.
Beautiful.
Terrifying.
Sacred.
Human.
Today, after eleven years, nothing feels missing.
And yet, the mystery continues to deepen.
There is more stability.
More grounding.
More capacity to remain present with whatever arises.
And perhaps that is what embodiment has always been:
Not escaping our humanity.
It's about allowing awakening, healing, and love to permeate every part of it.
For many years, the work was purification.
It was healing.
It was learning how to remain present with what emerged from the depths of the psyche, the body, and the heart.
Today, I sense the call into a different phase.
A phase that asks for deeper commitment, deeper surrender, and deeper guidance.
Not because something is lacking.
Because the mystery continues to unfold.
The path has become less about extraordinary experiences and more about allowing every aspect of life to become an expression of truth, love, and presence.
After all these years, the path still asks for the same things:
sincerity
humility
devotion
conscious action, not performance
the willingness to meet what is here, moment after moment
