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Post Traumatic Growth
12 × 16 inches | Mixed Media on 300 lb. Watercolor Paper | Reiki-Infused | Matted + Framed
There are things we survive that we would never have chosen.
Experiences that divide our lives into before and after. Seasons that ask more of us than we believed we had to give. Losses, betrayals, endings, awakenings, and moments when the life we understood falls away—and we are left to discover who we are in its absence.
And then, sometimes, something begins to grow.
Post Traumatic Growth was created during a season in my own life when I have been thinking deeply about what it means not simply to survive our experiences, but to become through them. The title came back to me during a coaching call this week, and the moment I heard the words again, I knew: this is where I am.
Not healed into some pristine version of myself.
Not untouched.
Not returned to who I was before.
Grown.
The painting holds that complexity. Deep teal and nearly black pools move through its center like the places within us that still remember. Brilliant turquoise and soft blue gather around them, while metallic gold rises across the surface—sometimes boldly, sometimes in fragments, sometimes appearing only when the light finds it.
And perhaps that is what growth after trauma actually looks like.
It does not erase the darkness. It learns how to hold light beside it.
There are places in this piece that feel almost geological to me, as though pressure has created an entirely new landscape. Other areas feel like water, cells, wings, roots, even tiny worlds beginning to form. Nothing is perfectly contained. Everything is moving, transforming, becoming.
There is no gratitude required for what hurt us.
But there can be reverence for the person who emerged.
For the boundaries we learned to build. For the tenderness we refused to lose. For the voice we recovered. For the life we began creating when merely surviving was no longer enough.
Post Traumatic Growth is an original Reiki-infused work in the evolving Heart Space Studio collection—a meditation on resilience, transformation, and the beautifully complex heart that can carry the evidence of where it has been while still expanding toward everything it is becoming.
Post Traumatic Growth
12 × 16 inches | Mixed Media on 300 lb. Watercolor Paper | Reiki-Infused | Matted + Framed
There are things we survive that we would never have chosen.
Experiences that divide our lives into before and after. Seasons that ask more of us than we believed we had to give. Losses, betrayals, endings, awakenings, and moments when the life we understood falls away—and we are left to discover who we are in its absence.
And then, sometimes, something begins to grow.
Post Traumatic Growth was created during a season in my own life when I have been thinking deeply about what it means not simply to survive our experiences, but to become through them. The title came back to me during a coaching call this week, and the moment I heard the words again, I knew: this is where I am.
Not healed into some pristine version of myself.
Not untouched.
Not returned to who I was before.
Grown.
The painting holds that complexity. Deep teal and nearly black pools move through its center like the places within us that still remember. Brilliant turquoise and soft blue gather around them, while metallic gold rises across the surface—sometimes boldly, sometimes in fragments, sometimes appearing only when the light finds it.
And perhaps that is what growth after trauma actually looks like.
It does not erase the darkness. It learns how to hold light beside it.
There are places in this piece that feel almost geological to me, as though pressure has created an entirely new landscape. Other areas feel like water, cells, wings, roots, even tiny worlds beginning to form. Nothing is perfectly contained. Everything is moving, transforming, becoming.
There is no gratitude required for what hurt us.
But there can be reverence for the person who emerged.
For the boundaries we learned to build. For the tenderness we refused to lose. For the voice we recovered. For the life we began creating when merely surviving was no longer enough.
Post Traumatic Growth is an original Reiki-infused work in the evolving Heart Space Studio collection—a meditation on resilience, transformation, and the beautifully complex heart that can carry the evidence of where it has been while still expanding toward everything it is becoming.