You can be living a life that looks good on paper, and have much to be grateful for, and still feel like something doesn’t feel right on the inside.

I know that feeling intimately.

This picture was taken of my husband and me at the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, one of the highest mountains in the world. Ironically, I was standing literally on top of the world, yet inside I had never felt lower. At the time, I had no way to make sense of what I was experiencing, and I felt lost, confused and stuck.

Looking back, I now understand that I was living what I’ve come to call The Good Life Paradox. A place where life looks full on the outside, yet something essential feels missing inside.

At the time, I was 50 and travelling all over the world after a long and fulfilling career as a nurse. My two children were successfully launched into adulthood. I had a stable marriage, family, and friends.

When my husband retired and wanted to travel more, it seemed like the perfect time to leave my nursing career and begin exploring the next chapter of life together.

To anyone looking in from the outside, I had everything. Friends often told me they were envious of my life and that I was living the dream, and for a while, it did feel that way.

At the time, I didn’t have the language to understand what was happening. I only knew that something felt missing in my life.

This is the confusing nature of The Good Life Paradox. When everything appears right on the outside, it can be difficult to trust the quiet voice within that says something isn’t.

The more I tried to ignore that I felt empty and that something was missing, the stronger it became. I found myself increasingly unhappy with my life. I was busy but not doing things that felt meaningful to me.

Ironically, a life that looked like the dream on the outside was beginning to create anxiety within me. My life force energy seemed to withdraw, leaving me wondering if I was depressed.

Looking back now, I see that this was not depression in the way I understood it then. Years later, I began to call this feeling soul hunger because something was withdrawing energy as if to say, “you’re not living in alignment with your truth”.

Ironically, living a relatively “peaceful” life began to affect my emotional and physical health as well. My stress hormones, including cortisol, were elevated, and a cascade of health issues followed.

Around this time, my doctor told me that my stress hormone, cortisol, was “through the roof” and asked me a simple question: “Are you meditating?”

Meditating?

I had no idea what that really meant. The image I had was someone sitting cross-legged in silence. Nope. Meditation might be good for other people, but not me.

And yet, everywhere I turned, meditation kept appearing. Eventually, curiosity won.

At first, I turned to meditation for practical reasons. I hoped it might calm my mind and help stabilize my stress hormones. And it did do that, but something unexpected also happened. I began to feel different. I was calmer, more present, less reactive, I slept better, and I worried less.

And slowly, I began reconnecting with parts of myself I had ignored for years. Meditation didn’t solve everything, but it gave me something I had been missing. A way to reconnect with myself and quiet the noise so I could hear the quieter voice within.

Gradually, those 5-minutes a day began shifting things inside me. I felt like I was coming home to myself for the very first time. Without realizing it, I was beginning to build a relationship with the most important person in my life — myself.

And that began changing everything. My health stabilized. My reactivity softened. My relationships deepened. My clarity returned. My purpose emerged.

I learned that I didn’t need to fix myself; I needed to find myself and learn how to live my life differently. Because what I discovered was that I was actually missing in my life.

A few years later, the Enneagram of personality found me. It was a mirror to see myself and my blind spots for the very first time. As a map of our personality and soul, it helped me understand the roots of why I had lost myself in the first place by spending so many years adapting, supporting, and being who I thought I needed to be, so that I had slowly lost connection with myself.

For over a decade now, I’ve had a daily meditation practice and used the Enneagram as a map for self-awareness and discovery. There’s been no long retreats or spending hours on my cushion, only consistent opportunities to come home to myself every day. Much like brushing my teeth.

As I look back and reflect on what has supported me over the years during seasons in my life when I was navigating feelings of loneliness, grief, burnout, soul hunger, and dark nights of the soul, what came to me was this:

The greatest gift of my inner practices has been that while the struggles of life change, the practices remain.

The specific challenge may shift and call for something different. One season may ask more of meditation. Another may ask for self-compassion, mindfulness, forgiveness, nervous system regulation, reflection, soul work, or simply learning to stay present with what is here.

But having an inner toolkit of practices and the belief that we’re held by something greater than ourselves has supported me.

This feels especially important because one thing about life is that it is stressful, and nothing stays the same. Relationships change. Circumstances change. Roles change. Seasons change.

For me, the gift of meditation, mindfulness and the deep wisdom of the Enneagram is that they keep me both grounded and open so I can be more present for the moments of joy and also present for the moments of struggle. Because the truth is these practices don’t remove life’s challenges, but they do help us build the inner resources to move through them with greater calm, clarity and self-trust.

These practices that have helped me regulate stress, understand my patterns and stay true to myself even when it’s uncomfortable have become the anchors in my life.

And ultimately, I’ve discovered that authentic inner peace doesn’t come from a perfect life with no struggles; it comes from knowing who we are and staying true to ourselves no matter what comes our way.