From Embers to Awakening: A Psychotherapist’s Journey Into the Fire of Transformation
Unsinkable Storyteller: Lola Thomson
Unsinkable Champion 2026
Registered Psychotherapist living in Calgary, Alberta, Canada
There are moments in a healing journey that arrive not through crisis, but through unexpected belonging. My short story Embers began with one such moment.
When I boarded a plane to Mexico, I wasn’t seeking a spiritual awakening. I wasn’t burnt out or lost. I felt centered, grounded, even curious. I fully expected a conventional psychology conference—cold coffee, florescent lights, professionals being politely “talked at.” I thought I knew exactly what I was walking into.
But the moment I stepped into the first opening circle, I realized just how wrong I was.
Finding My Tribe
It happened almost instantly: a recognition, a softening, a kind of psychic exhale. As I listened to strangers share their stories, dreams, pains, and hopes, something inside me whispered, These are your people.
For years, I had been longing for this exact feeling without knowing it—an embodied sense of community that wasn’t intellectual, performative, or clinical. A community that wasn’t just discussing healing but practicing it, living it, breathing it.
Never in my life had I felt so seen, so held, or so deeply understood.
This wasn’t a conference. It was a calling.
And through that sense of belonging, the real transformation began.
The Healing Power of Being Seen
As therapists, we are trained to intervene, interpret, reflect, strategize. To hold a plan, a technique, a direction.
But in those first hours, watching the courage of others and the tenderness of the room, I learned one of the most profound lessons of my clinical and spiritual life:
We don’t have to try so hard.
Holding space is enough.
Bearing witness is healing.
There is a strange alchemy that happens when human beings gather with the intention to tell the truth. The moment someone speaks their suffering into a room that can hold it, something shifts—not just for the person sharing, but for everyone.
It was humbling. Liberating. And strangely relieving.
I didn’t need to perform. I didn’t need to offer expertise. I didn’t need to carry anyone.
I only needed to be present.
Fire as Teacher and Mirror
In Embers, the fire becomes a central image—a companion, a witness, a mirror. What I didn’t fully grasp until writing the story was just how much the experience around that fire seeped into my bones.
The fire taught me in silence what no textbook or clinical supervision ever had:
That transformation often happens not in the breakthrough, but in the quiet moment of being fully with oneself.
That truth-telling creates openings we cannot predict.
That presence is one of the most powerful forms of care.
As the flames moved, I began to see myself more clearly—not because I was unraveling, but because I was finally reflected back by a community that understood the language of the soul.
Being Named by an Elder
One of the most unexpected moments of resonance came when an elder—a seer—named my elemental animal: water and polar bear.
The fluidity of water.
The grounded solitude of the bear.
The ability to move between worlds.
What he named wasn’t something foreign—it was something I had always felt but never articulated. A truth I had been carrying without claiming. The naming wasn’t a revelation; it was a recognition.
It became a symbolic anchor for everything that unfolded next.
Integration: The Soft Afterglow
Embers ends not with triumph, but with soft clarity. There is no finished transformation, no final destination. What I carried home from Mexico—and what the story captures—is the slow, steady afterglow of an experience that rearranged me gently but irrevocably.
Integration has meant:
● Creating space for more stillness in my work and life
● Trusting the quiet moments as much as the profound ones
● Allowing community to matter more than perfection
● Releasing the pressure to do in order to heal
● Letting belonging reshape my identity as a therapist and human
This journey has reminded me that transformation doesn’t require collapse. Sometimes it arrives exactly when we are steady enough to receive it.
My story is just one spark in a much larger fire.
And if there is one truth Embers carries, it is this:
Sometimes the fire doesn’t burn us down.
Sometimes it burns us open.
Click here to read ‘Embers’ on Wattpad.
To learn more about Lola’s work and free creative healing resources visit www.linktr.ee/momentummindset
