The Mountain Before Me…
The Mountain Appeared When I Stopped Hiding
This mountain wasn’t planned.
It wasn’t sketched out with intention or strategy.
It arrived on the page.
I started to paint and it just sort of evolved into this painting! I had already started my healing journey a few months before I did this piece of artwork and when I began putting the paint onto paper I realised that it had great significance to the story of my life.
For much of my life, I was surviving rather than living. I learned quite young how to go quiet, how to disappear inside myself, how to adapt to unsafe environments by becoming smaller, softer, less visible. having experienced sexual abuse as a kid and being blamed for that plus being silenced about it had a huge effect on the way I related to everything and all my relationships throughout my life. My body carried the weight of that for years — through illness, chronic stress, and relationships where my voice and my soul slowly disappeared.
There were years after being diagnosed with Multiple sclerosis where I just wasn’t able to function properly and at my lowest point couldn’t even sit up in bed. Times when my world felt reduced to fear, shame, and endurance. And later on in my life after two failed marriages behind me, I followed my heart into what I believed was love, only to find myself caught in yet another cycle of abuse, one that ended with a rescue and the complete shattering of an illusion I had built my future on.
When that fell apart, so did everything I thought I knew about myself. I really had to spend time alone sitting with my feelings and my emotions and let them come up. it was a dark time for me.
Healing didn’t arrive as a dramatic breakthrough. It came quietly. Slowly. Through learning how the nervous system holds trauma. Through understanding trauma bonds and conditioning. Through sitting with the parts of me that had learned to survive by leaving my body. Through choosing, again and again, to stay with those feelings and let them be part of me. Finally learning to integrate and accept everything about me was ok.
The way my mind operated when I painted the picture I saw it as an obstacle that I had to climb, something to conquer and get over. Once I got over that Mountain before me I would be better, stronger, healed. I saw the image as something in the future that I would achieve. In 2025 I completed a Mastermind Freedom Course with Peter Crone and that really changed the way I looked at myself. I now see the painting from a completely different perspective. I now feel that I am the Mountain, solid, dependable and strong, full of energy and power, majestic in its silence yet moving and ever changing. The Mountain has become me.
If you chose to explore your own Mountain before you and would like to talk it through with me, just connect using the button below.
If this reflection resonates, I have made this piece available as a giclee Print for you to purchase, you’re welcome to explore it here: Mountain painting