Before discovering Southwest Institute of Healing Arts (SWIHA), Samantha Devine was navigating the intense demands of military life, motherhood, and the aftermath of deep trauma and chronic burnout. It was a powerful spiritual awakening during a Kundalini yoga practice that opened the door to her healing—and ultimately led her to enroll in SWIHA’s Holistic Health & Wellness Coaching program. Samantha’s path has been one of profound transformation, marked by courage, embodiment, and a deep desire to help others find their way back to themselves. Through her business, Nurtured by Samantha, she now offers trauma-informed coaching, Kundalini yoga, sound healing, and wellness services that empower others to reconnect with their bodies, rediscover their inner resilience, and heal with intention. Her time at SWIHA gave her practical tools and training, as well as reaffirming her purpose: to hold space for others the way she once needed for herself.
Resilience Reimagined: What Healing Taught Me About Strength
What if strength isn’t about how much we can carry, rather how much we’re willing to lay down? For a long time, I believed being strong meant pushing through, staying silent, and doing everything on my own. Yet over time, that version of resilience began to unravel me. Through burnout, anxiety, and deep disconnection from my body, I started to learn a different kind of strength—the kind rooted in softness, surrender, and self-love. This is how I reimagined resilience, and what it taught me about becoming someone I could trust.
Old Definitions of Strength
I used to define strength as pushing through life physically, mentally, and emotionally—disconnecting from the pain I was experiencing to get further, or at least to appear like I was further. It meant facing the issue, the problem, or the pain all alone, because if I didn’t, I wasn’t strong enough. Asking for help was a sign of weakness, even in the smallest ways—like bringing all the groceries in at once just to avoid asking for a hand. If I were carrying something heavy and someone offered to help, I’d force a smile and say, “I’m fine,” even if I was clearly struggling.
My military experience, coupled with early life conditioning from watching a mother who did it all, taught me that strength meant suppressing and pushing through, no matter what. This version of strength cost me more than I realized. Over time, I became indebted to it. It looked like disconnection from my body, racing thoughts, anxiety, and physical symptoms of burnout—muscle aches, frequent sickness, and numbness that made it hard to hear what my body was telling me. Or rather, what it had been screaming for a long time.
The Breaking Point & Rebirth
It wasn’t one big dramatic moment that woke me up—it was the slow unraveling. The quiet realization that I was surviving, not living. I had mastered the art of appearing fine while everything inside me was aching for attention. My body had become louder than my willpower.
As a project manager, I’d wake up nauseous before work, day after day. I thought I just needed to eat differently or manage my time better—yet nothing helped. I eventually saw a gastroenterologist and was told I had IBS; however, deep down, I knew it was more than just a gut issue. It was anxiety—loud, unprocessed, and screaming through my body in ways I could no longer ignore.
No matter how much I tried to push through, I kept breaking down—waves of anxiety, emotional shutdowns, and physical tension that turned into chronic discomfort. I remember one moment so clearly—before work, feeling sick for what felt like the millionth time. I knew I had to listen to my body, and that meant making a change I never thought I’d be brave enough to make: leaving my job. That was the beginning of my rebirth.
It didn’t come with fireworks—it came with surrender. I let go of who I thought I had to be to survive and slowly started to meet the version of me who could release the guilt, honor my truth, and become the person who knew she was worthy of putting herself first.
What Healing Taught Me About Strength
Healing has taught me that strength is learning to slow down and feel—to feel into the subtleties of my body and my breath. It’s listening to and honoring the messages I receive instead of pushing past them. Instead of avoiding discomfort or fearing it, I ask myself, “Can I be with this a little longer?” to hear what it’s trying to tell me without judgment. “Can I soften into it with love and compassion?”
Strength, now, looks like making space for the discomfort in all its sacredness. Affirming to myself that I have the strength to feel, to see, to allow, and to surrender to whatever is present. That strength might look like journaling, crying, resting, or speaking my truth—even when it’s uncomfortable.
Resilience Reimagined
According to the Oxford Dictionary, resilience is “the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness and/or the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.”
Well, I’ve redefined resilience for myself. It means evolving. It’s not about returning to who I was before the pain—it’s about expanding into someone softer, wiser, and more rooted because of it.
I’d like to redefine resilience from tough to soft—not as the capacity to push through, rather as the capacity to love ourselves—softly, gently, and tenderly.
Instead of bending back into the same shape like a spring, I now see us as fluid beings. We grow, shift, and constantly reinvent ourselves into new shapes—each one shaped by the season we’re in. Real resilience, to me, is loving ourselves through those shapes, welcoming each version with curiosity and compassion, and knowing that no shape will ever be exactly the same again—and that’s something to embrace.
That’s where I’ve struggled the most: embracing change, especially the in-between seasons. The uncertainty. The letting go. The surrender. However, I’ve learned that this softening—this release of control—isn’t weakness. It’s the sacred surrender that allows us to transform fully.
This reimagined version of resilience is the one I carry forward and offer to others through my work. It’s not about bouncing back. It’s about becoming—over and over again—with more love each time.
What version of strength are you ready to let go of?
