this is
my story
hi! my name is tari ann. I am a creative, writer, spiritual seeker, and a sensitive person.
as far as I can think back into my childhood, I never felt like I truly belonged anywhere. I always felt different — like I was speaking a different language than everyone around me.
I had different needs, expectations, and gifts than what was expected of me.
so I learned from an early age that my authentic self is not enough, neither socially nor academically. to mask my “shortcomings”, I became an overachiever: I put my all into becoming a chameleon and pleasing those around me.
when I grew older, this escalated to me controlling every aspect of my life: I became a law student, hit the gym 4-6 times a week to be as “curvy-thin” as possible, tried my best at dating, and built a sizeable social circle. in theory, I was checking off society's checklist of the perfect life.
except that I was miserable on the inside. my solution to that was to "pull myself back together". again and again.
until I couldn’t.
I reached my breaking point when I was 21. pleasing those around me, placing high expectations upon myself, and striving for these superficial traits that society deemed necessary made me sick. I didn't understand why, though.
wasn’t I doing everything I was supposed to? because I didn’t have any role models or people in my life who understood me, I blamed myself and was convinced that there was something wrong with me.
sure enough, the doctors I saw tried to prescribe me pills to fix me. it was only when I took a huge step back from my life and dropped out of university that I understood: although I was controlling my outer world to concoct the perfect life - I was letting society’s expectations dictate my life. nothing about it was authentic to me. I was neglecting my needs, gifts, and desires and suppressing my trauma to keep it all together. that's why l was in such pain.
when I first started my healing journey, for the first time in years, I had so much time on my hands and absolutely no plan for my life. that’s when it all came crashing down on me: the tiredness, the emotional overwhelm and bad habits to regulate my emotions, the loneliness, and hopelessness.
the sensitivity that i had learned to suppress most of my life came back with a blast.
having stripped away my old identity of “overachiever”, I didn’t know who the person was that was left behind or how to love her. I still had very high expectations of myself and constantly felt like I was failing at being a good person. I felt intense amounts of shame for going against the grain and quitting my old life with no backup plan.
still convinced that I was broken, I kept spiraling into hopelessness and grief - unable to express or process these emotions and utterly identified with the emotional pain. I spent hours trying to find solutions to and understand my emotions with my mind and always wound up in hopeless, lose-lose situations with no way to escape. my intuition was buried beneath all of that inner turmoil and I had no clue how to access it.
my healing journey
it was like I had awoken from a horrible nightmare and now needed to learn how to be in the real world.
the real world was a new space to be in. since I had taken away the veils that had been clouding and cutting off my inner world and no longer suppressed my authentic self, I had to learn how to:
feel and regulate my emotions instead of becoming them
be with my inner critic and keep it from running my inner dialogue
create a new relationship with other people, movement, beauty, and my body
commit to routines, environments, and structures that take my sensitivity into account
sort through the fear and reconnect with my intuition
love myself despite my imperfections - despite not working hard for it anymore
communicate authentically and express my needs with my partner
craft a path for my life and decide what the next steps are
turn my suffering into meaning and start expressing myself online
launch my heart-led business
I didn’t teach myself all of this on my own.
I’ve had a lot of help along the way: my partner and the spiritual teachers who lead the coaching programs, sister circles, and other spiritual workshops I attended.
getting to know these people who feel just as deeply as I do and whose journeys and goals in life are so similar to mine and allowing myself to be seen by them has had a profound impact on my healing journey.
that is why I’ve made it my mission to hold space for all of you in our sessions. so that you may finally find a place where you are accepted and encouraged for who you authentically are deep down.
that is what this virtual space and my 1:1 sessions are devoted to.
what tari ann stands for
now, let me get one thing straight: I am not healed. just like you, I am still on my healing journey - still facing many patterns I write and talk about. healing is not a one-time process. some beliefs and trauma responses run deep and need a lot of compassionate integration to heal.
I firmly believe that there is no such thing as healing away your emotions. you just become better at feeling them. the same goes for self-destructive patterns and trauma responses.
I don’t believe in making my coachees dependent upon me. while I will always be in their corner - even after we stop working together - I want them to become their own empowered self-healers and leaders in their personal and professional lives. that is why I share with them my favorite insights for them to apply on their own at home to experience true empowerment and reconnect with themselves.
if you’d like to explore my teachings, then check out my…
blog
check out my blog where I go deep into the topics of emotional well-being, conscious romantic relationships, and self-expression.
follow me on Instagram to receive bite-sized insights into my teachings and to stay connected with me while I share my own journey.