Having made the transition from a successful Corporate job to being a fulfilling wellness practitioner, Dalia Halabi invites you to reimagine what your happiness looks like.
Have you ever experienced that feeling of dread after you realize you can’t afford to hit that snooze button one more time and you should just suck it up and get to work? I know I’ve had my fair share of those mornings, but back then I couldn’t understand why. It’s not like I hated my job, quite the contrary I loved what I was doing. I had an excellent career working with the best clients, representing the top brands and even had a few awards under my belt to show for it too. So why did I feel completely demotivated? I thought the job title, the security of receiving a salary at the end of each month and the prestige of working in a top-notch company should be enough to make me ecstatic. I mean, that’s what I had always been told. Isn’t that how we’ve all been conditioned to believe success looks like?
In my journey to self-discovery, I invested a lot in education and arming myself with knowledge. While working a full-time job, I enrolled myself in a Master’s of Science program to study Psychology. I had always been fascinated by the field and was largely self-taught even though I did my undergraduate degree in business. I found my passion in positive psychology and wrote my dissertation on happiness and mindful living. This was the start of a new chapter for me. I understood the science but still felt like I needed more, maybe something more spiritual. That’s when I stumbled upon Theta Healing.
We’ve all found ourselves lying awake at night wondering why we think and behave the way we do, or why our lives are in the state that they’re in. The answer to all the above is this: your subconscious created that based on your belief system. Your subconscious controls 95% of your life, and by default, you’re not conscious of it. Theta Healing is a modality that explores these subconscious beliefs and the role they play in creating our reality. With Theta Healing I felt like I found my calling. I loved it because it allowed me to truly understand myself and gave me the tools for introspection, and trust me it wasn’t all fun and games. As they say with knowledge comes power and with power comes responsibility. I had to face certain truths about myself and take full accountability for my life and my experiences. The greatest lesson I learned is that you have a choice at any given point in time. If life is a series of cause and effect, then you can choose to be on the ‘effect’ side which disempowers you because life then becomes something that is happening to you. Or you can choose to be on the ‘cause’ side of life, which is more empowering because life is then something that you are creating. With Theta Healing you are taught to be a creator.
After becoming a Theta Healing practitioner and instructor I realized that giving sessions and helping my clients in this way was more rewarding than anything I’ve experienced in my career. That’s when it dawned on me, the reason why I was so demotivated at work was because even though I was grateful for my job and I was doing well, I wasn’t fulfilled. Mark Twain said that the two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. Well, once I realized that counseling is what I felt like I was born to do, there was no looking back.
I dove head first into the universe of ‘wellness’ and grabbed onto anything I could learn from. So, I went on to do my 200 hour Yoga Teacher Training and today I’m a certified Hatha Yoga teacher as well as an Aerial Yoga instructor. I believe you can learn a lot about yourself through your practice. When I started, I was obsessed with mastering the poses all those Instagram yoga babes were posting. I pushed myself so hard and would get angry at myself for falling out of a pose or not being able to get into one. The best thing I learned through yoga was to exercise more self-compassion. I remember my teacher always repeating to me, it’s not about the pose, it’s about the benefits of getting into the pose. So I started to be more kind to myself and even though I still can’t get all the way into the splits or hold a full hand stand for long, I accept that if not today, then tomorrow. Once you adopt that mentality to life, things really start to shift.
The more clients I saw the more I realized there is no one size fits all approach to counseling. Some people are looking for something more spiritual while others need something more tangible. So I studied Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Neurolinguistic programming and became a certified Life Coach as well as a certified Hypnotist. I figured the more I knew the better able I would be to customize my sessions in a way that suits the needs of each individual client. Boy was that rewarding. I learn something about myself in every person I work with and it always amazes me how truly connected we all are. While yoga taught my self-compassion, counseling taught me compassion for others. When you start seeing yourself in everyone you meet, you begin to end the illusion of separation.
From corporate to wellness- two worlds colliding and from that impact little ol’ me finding herself empowered, fulfilled and happy. The point I’m making here is when you decide to follow your passion you have no choice but to exit your comfort zone. It’s not easy and by default, it’s not comfortable. Not everyone will understand your journey and if it’s something that contrasts with what they’ve been conditioned to believe is ‘normal’ you will be met with resistance. I see a lot of people give up on their dreams because when they think about ‘how’ to achieve them it freaks them out too much- they simply don’t know where to start. From my experience, if you’re brave enough to identify what it is that’s going to make you happy you’ll find that the how will sort itself out. If you answered yes to my first question, I invite you to reimagine what your happiness looks like.
………………………………………..
Dalia Halabi
Is a Hatha Yoga and a swing yoga instructor as well as a certified Life coach, and a Theta Healing practitioner and teacher. Dalia’s background is in Psychology and her thesis was on meditation and happiness.