Meet Dawn Petalino
Dawn Petalino is a Transformational Coach and Reconnective Practitioner for Reconnective Healing and The Reconnection. She helps women in transition move out of overwhelm and uncertainty and into a new life with clarity, confidence, and joy.
Dawn is also a writer, inspirational speaker, and teacher. Her teachings and publications have appeared on The 22 Tango Show, Oneness Wellness Lifestyle Network, Uptown Magazine, and an anthology called Imagining Heaven.
For the past several years, she has taught classes through Elemental Healing and Carolina Learning Connection on relationships with self and others. Sample topics include: The Biology Behind the Stress of Men and Women, Effective Communication, and Finding Your Footing and Faith Through Change.
Dawn’s own transformation came when her marriage unexpectedly fell apart after years of experiencing anxiety and emptiness covered over with workaholism, food addiction, and relationship dysfunction. In June of 2006, she left the marriage, quit a 13-year career, and moved to a new state within one week. This transition was the catalyst needed to stop living a life out of fearful control and start living a life based on self-confidence and trust.
Today, Dawn helps other women work through their own inner and outer transitions by listening to their own inner voice and creating a life in which they feel capable, connected, and joyful.
A Sample of Dawn’s Writing
Embracing What’s Not Perfect
by
Dawn Petalino
Many on the spiritual path hold in their mind a “perfect” life and believe if we can intend it, we can have it.
This is true.
And not.
What we intend, we do receive. However, let’s look at what is meant by “perfect”. In our western world, there is loud voice that says, “You need to have this, achieve that, or look this way to be happy, acceptable, and loved.” And most of us, myself included, have believed this voice. We see it on billboards, hear it on the television, and receive it from parents, teachers, or any other significant person in our lives. People teach what they’ve been taught.
But following the dreamy lure of, “When I finally….” is to follow an illusion. The Course in Miracles reminds us not to put illusion ahead of Truth. And the truth is anything about us or our lives that would point to not being worthy right now for complete love is an illusion.
I was in the gym the other day, getting dressed for my workout, and I caught a sight of myself in the mirror. Hmm. When did those saddlebags show up? And what happened to the tight, flat stomach of my 30’s?
Now, most people who know me would say, “You’re so tiny! What are you talking about?!”
And to them, I’d say, “It’s all relative.” No matter what others think of us, it really boils down to how we see ourselves that determines whether or not we allow ourselves through the gate of “Worthy of Being Loved”.
I became a compulsive overeater in my 20’s, and if I’d been able to make myself throw up, would probably have been bulimic as well. Fortunately, I couldn’t, but I held many of the same self-loathing beliefs anyone with an addiction does. In my eyes, my body was never thin enough or perfect enough to be acceptable. In my 30’s, I got into weight training where I experienced moments of “now, I am good enough”, but they were only moments and fleeting at that. Self- judgments followed by, “if I just work harder” were not far behind.
Now here I was in my 40’s, looking again at my reflection. Alone in the locker room, I stood in front of the mirror; the lighting shining on my arms and torso. I saw the muscles I’d just worked out shadowed under the cast. I looked again at my belly and thighs. They weren’t model perfect, but neither were they obese. I was average. In the past, average would have been the kiss of death- who wanted “average”?
But today I did because average meant freedom from trying to become an ideal. I’m not an ideal, I’m a human. And when I can accept myself as such, something amazing happens.
I no longer try to prove myself to the world. I know who I am today is enough. And I feel a lightness and pride in my heart for just being me, doing something good for myself.
My outward circumstances haven’t changed, yet everything is different.
Acceptance of ourselves, right where we are, opens a porthole to self-love. And from there, everything becomes perfect the way it is.