I’ve been noticing something in the current mental health and wellness landscape that has been quietly unsettling me for a while now.

I see adults of all ages who come to me to learn meditation and mindfulness. They don’t come because they just want meditation itself; they come because they’re struggling. They feel anxious, overwhelmed, disconnected, lost, or not like themselves anymore. They come looking for tools, understanding, and relief.

Many arrive carrying a lot of labels and diagnoses about what’s wrong with them and what needs to be fixed. But beneath the labels of what’s wrong, there’s another, deeper truth, and that is what is strong and wants to emerge.

Without a focus on growth, we come to believe that the label explains who we are, why we feel the way we do and why we’re struggling. People aren’t lacking labels; we’re lacking the tools to understand ourselves, regulate ourselves, trust ourselves, care for ourselves, and grow more fully into ourselves.

The label may explain part of the experience, but it does not define us and who we are becoming.

And what I witness, and I am always humbled by it, is that when people find their voices, work with their emotions, understand their personality patterns, and step more fully into themselves, they blossom.

The conversation shifts from what you need to do to fix yourself to what needs to happen for you to find yourself, so you can live from a place of knowing who you are.

There are profound moments of relief when people learn they are more than what has happened to them, more than what they struggle with, and more than any label they carry. That there’s something that wants to grow in them, and they’ve been without the tools to honour it.

This is not fixing yourself. This is finding yourself.

My years as a nurse taught me an important truth: people are not machines that need fixing. They are more like gardens that need care, nourishment, and the right conditions to grow. Lasting change rarely comes from being repaired by someone else; it comes from creating the space, support, and awareness that allow us to reconnect with our own wisdom and thrive.

Like flowers finally given the right conditions to bloom. The blooms were always there. We just needed the inner conditions to come home to ourselves and discover who we are beyond who we’ve been conditioned to be.

That hunger for becoming more fully themselves has been waiting, sometimes for years, for someone to stop looking for what’s wrong and needs to be fixed and start asking what’s strong and wants to emerge. That shift, from deficit to potential, from wound to seed, changes everything. Not because the hard things disappear, but because we’re no longer defined by them.

I experienced this too in my own life. When I was a young woman, I never had the opportunity to find myself and bloom before I lost myself in all my roles as a wife, mom, nurse, and generally trying to be a ‘good” woman.

Because I never really knew who I was, over the years, I became even more of a stranger to myself. While everything looked fine on the outside, I lost my voice, my dreams, and my self-respect. This began to manifest as minor chronic health issues, anxiety, and resentment that simmered beneath the surface. I went to therapy to fix myself because I wanted to get rid of the uncomfortable feelings.

But the real shift didn’t happen until many years later, when my focus changed from fixing myself to finding myself. When I began asking a different question, that’s when I started actually to grow into myself, find my voice, and live a life that felt true to my soul, even though at times that felt uncomfortable.

That felt like agency. That felt like growth. That felt like finding myself for the first time.

I wish in my younger years that someone had helped me come home to myself and build a relationship with the most important person in my life – myself. Because if that relationship had been loving and more self-aware, I wouldn’t have lost myself. Like all of us, I needed to learn how to work with my mind and emotions, love myself, understand myself, and express myself authentically in my relationships and my choices.

What if you’ve been asking the wrong question?

The question isn’t, what do I need to fix about myself, it’s how do I come home and become more fully myself?

And growth doesn’t come from more information or understanding alone. It comes from intentional practices. A few minutes a day of building a resilient nervous system. Releasing resentment and bitterness. Creating empowered narratives around our past. Cultivating self-love and self-compassion. Practicing gratitude. Understanding the personality habits that contribute to our suffering and the patterns that keep us stuck.

These practices aren’t for what’s wrong or needs to be fixed. They create the conditions for what wants to grow and bloom within ourselves.

What I’ve learned, in my own life and in guiding many others, is that we grow by learning the skills that were never taught to build more loving and conscious relationships with ourselves.

Through consistent and simple practices that create inner alignment, we become more fully ourselves.

Because perhaps the goal was never to fix ourselves, but to find ourselves so we can live vital, connected and meaningful lives.

If this resonates, I’d genuinely love to hear from you in the comments.