“Only after the vessel is ready can the Light come down.”
— The Zohar
When I look back at one of the most heartbreaking times of my life — the season when the darkness cracked my vessel open to more light — I realize it was the precise initiation my soul required. Before I ever became a Reiki practitioner or understood the language of energy and light, my body and spirit were already being prepared.
In Kabbalistic teaching, the soul is the vessel and Divine Light is the gift meant to fill it. But for that light to pour in, the vessel must be reshaped, refined — sometimes through fire. Darkness isn’t a punishment; it’s the sacred alchemy that makes room for more light. I can see now that the collapse of my jewelry business, the betrayal, the debt, the heartbreak — all of it was the refining fire. It was the moment my old self shattered so that a deeper, more embodied self could emerge.
The Rise and the Ruin
At the time, everything appeared luminous on the outside.My jewelry line was thriving, my work was being featured in magazines, and creatively, I was in full flow. The ideas poured through me effortlessly, and every piece I touched felt alive.
But beneath that flow, there was a quiet knowing — a whisper that something was missing. I couldn’t name it then, but I felt it. I thought I needed someone else to bring structure, to help me manage and expand. So I took on a partner, trusting that she could help me balance the creative and the practical.
Within six months, ignoring the red flags that began surfacing, everything I had built was stripped away.
One morning, I walked into my office to find it completely emptied. Everything was gone — inventory, records, even the money in the bank. The woman I trusted had taken it all.At the same time that I reached the pinnacle of success as a designer, I was simultaneously losing everything. I was left with over $100,000 in debt. My home was leveraged. And, already coming out of a divorce, I was facing a heartbreak that felt unbearable. It was as if someone had taken my dream and set it on fire in front of me.
The Descent and the Death
That period broke me open in ways I could never have prepared for.
It’s been almost ten years since that time, and I am still unearthing the lessons from it. The greatest of them all has been realizing that everything I needed was already within me. I had to learn to trust myself again — to forgive myself deeply, to peel away layers of shame, guilt, and fear.For years, it felt as if a piece of me had been ripped out and left to burn. The betrayal lodged itself in my body like a stone. It seeped into every corner of my life — my finances, my relationships, my self-worth. I carried it like an invisible weight.
It wasn’t until the last two years that I began to truly shed those layers. Part of that release has been recognizing how differently we speak about failure now than we did a decade ago. Back then, women especially were held to impossible standards. Failure wasn’t seen as part of the journey — it was seen as a personal flaw.
The Alchemy of Failure
One of the greatest wounds I had to heal was the belief that failure meant I was unworthy of success or love. We live in a culture that glorifies achievement and hides failure in the shadows. We measure everything — grades, followers, income — as if life is a competition for worthiness.But true growth, true mastery, lives inside the lessons of failure. It’s in the moments when everything crumbles and we’re forced to rebuild from the ashes that our souls expand the most.
I once heard Sarah Blakely, the founder of Spanx, share that when she was growing up, her father asked at dinner every night, “So, what did you fail at today?” Failure wasn’t shamed in her home — it was celebrated. It meant you tried. You reached. You risked.
If our culture embraced that understanding, more people would rise — because they wouldn’t be paralyzed by shame when things didn’t go as planned.
The Rebirth
For me, failure became the sacred teacher.
It stripped me down to what was real. It burned away illusion. It taught me the anatomy of trust, resilience, and self-forgiveness. And it opened the doorway to the work I do now — guiding others through their own rebirths, helping them reconnect with the light within their own vessels.The darkness that once shattered me became the path that shaped me.
It was never a punishment. It was preparation.
And from that descent, I emerged — not as who I was before, but as who I was always meant to be.
Closing Reflection
The Zohar teaches that all of this — even the pain, even the unraveling — is done in love. The soul came here to meet the darkness so it could remember the light and align with the Creator.
That is what this chapter was for me:
A descent into shadow that opened me to radiance.
A death that gave birth to the healer, the guide, the woman I am today.
Because the light only fills the vessel that is ready — and sometimes, it’s the breaking that makes us ready.
