10 Things I Learned in My 20s About Healing, Rest, and Being Myself

I just turned 31, and even though 30 felt like the prettier number, round and soft and satisfying, I have to admit something I find quite beautiful: I love getting older.

Not because I have everything figured out. I do not. But because every year has made me a little less interested in performing a life and a little more interested in actually living one.

My 20s were full of yoga mats, messy journals, teacher trainings, heartbreaks, strong friendships, big dreams, quiet mornings, financial stress, body lessons, cycle lessons, and the strange intimacy of building a self-employed life. Some lessons arrived gently. Others came through exhaustion, disappointment, or the uncomfortable realisation that the thing I thought would make me feel whole had become another way to measure myself.

Here are 10 things I am taking with me.

1. Healing becomes lighter when it stops being a project

Healing and self-enquiry are beautiful. They have helped me understand my patterns, soften my inner critic, and meet parts of myself I used to avoid.

But at some point, I realised I had turned healing into another perfectionist goal.

I wanted to become the clearest, calmest, most emotionally available version of myself. I wanted to process everything. Understand everything. Improve everything. Every trigger became homework. Every feeling became something to analyse. Every relationship became a mirror.

That can be useful for a while. Then it becomes exhausting.

The lesson was not to stop growing. The lesson was to stop treating myself like a broken object that needed constant repair. Sometimes healing looks like therapy, journaling, meditation, or honest conversations. Other times it looks like making pasta, watching a silly show, dancing in the kitchen, or letting a feeling pass without turning it into a full research project.

I no longer want to be a perfect healed person. I want to be a human being who can meet life with more honesty and less shame.

2. Numbers can feed the ego and starve the soul

In my 20s, I measured success in numbers more often than I want to admit.

How many people came to class. How much money came in. How many trainings I had completed. How many followers, bookings, emails, sign-ups, hours worked, things achieved.

Numbers are not bad. They can tell us useful things. If you are self-employed, numbers matter. Rent is real. Groceries are real. Taxes are very real, especially in Denmark.

But numbers do not tell the whole truth.

A fully booked class can still feel disconnected. A quiet class can feel like medicine. A successful month on paper can come with a nervous system that is begging for rest. A smaller offering can carry more integrity than a bigger one built from pressure.

3. Yoga asana is wonderful, but my body needs more

I love yoga. It has changed my life in ways I will probably keep understanding for years.

But yoga asana alone is not enough for my body.

That was a humbling lesson, especially as someone who teaches movement. For a long time, I thought my practice gave me everything I needed. Strength, mobility, breath, awareness, grounding. And it did give me many of those things.

Still, my body began asking for more variety.

More pulling. More pushing. More walking. More strength. More play. More effort in different directions. More rest. More movement that did not have to be spiritual, beautiful, or intentional.

Sometimes my body wants yoga. Sometimes it wants to lift something heavy. Sometimes it wants to go for a long walk in grey Danish weather. Sometimes it wants to shake, sweat, climb stairs, lie down, or dance badly.

The body loves diversity. It was never meant to repeat the same shapes forever, even if those shapes are beautiful.

4. The relationship with my body is the longest one I will ever have

This one sounds obvious. It took me years to feel it.

My body is not a project, a brand, a problem, or a before-and-after story. It is the place I live. It is the home I wake up in every morning. It has carried me through every version of myself, even the ones who were unkind to it.

That relationship deserves more than control. It deserves curiosity. It deserves humour. It deserves pleasure.

I want the relationship with my body to be a fun one.

Not fun in the sense that every day feels easy. Some days I feel heavy, tired, bloated, sensitive, or disconnected. But even then, I can choose not to turn my body into an enemy.

I can ask what it needs. I can dress it in clothes that feel good. I can feed it enough. I can let it move in ways that feel joyful. I can touch it with care. I can stop speaking to it as if it has failed me.

The relationship with myself, including my body, is the longest and most important relationship I will ever have. I want to make it warm.

5. I do not need everyone to like me

I have spent too much energy trying to be easy to like.

Not dramatic. Not too much. Not too honest. Not too visible. Not too opinionated. Not too soft. Not too ambitious. Not too spiritual. Not too ordinary.

It is such a tiring cage.

One of the most freeing lessons of my 20s was learning that I do not need everyone to like me. Also, and especially, because it is impossible.

Someone will misunderstand me. Someone will prefer a different teacher, friend, tone, style, or way of being. Someone will project something onto me that was never mine. Someone will simply not feel drawn to me.

That is allowed.

I still care about being kind. I still care about taking responsibility when I make mistakes. I still care about how my actions affect people. But I no longer want to trade my aliveness for approval.

Being liked by everyone would require a level of shape-shifting that would slowly remove me from myself.

6. My menstrual cycle is a gift

My relationship with my menstrual cycle has changed everything.

I do not mean that every period is magical. Sometimes it is painful, inconvenient, emotional, messy, and badly timed. But learning to see my cycle as a rhythm instead of a disturbance has given me so much respect for my body.

Every month, I move through a small cycle of death and rebirth.

There is a time for energy, expression, visibility, and creation. There is a time for slowing down, shedding, turning inward, and beginning again. My cycle reminds me that change is not a personal failure. It is nature.

Living cyclically has helped me plan with more compassion. I can notice when I have more capacity for teaching, social plans, and creative output. I can also notice when I need quiet, warmth, fewer decisions, and less pressure.

Of course, not everyone menstruates, and not everyone who menstruates has the same experience. This is simply what has been true for me.

My cycle has become a monthly teacher. It keeps whispering the same thing: nothing is meant to stay the same forever.

7. Rest is a fertile ground

For a long time, I treated rest as the thing I could do after everything else was finished.

After the emails. After the planning. After the class. After the cleaning. After the next project. After I had earned it.

But life does not work like that. There is always something else.

One sentence has stayed with me: Rest is a fertile ground.

Rest is not empty. Rest is where ideas compost. It is where the nervous system comes back into relationship with safety. It is where creativity returns without being forced. It is where the body repairs, the mind softens, and the heart has space to speak.

I have had some of my clearest insights after doing less, not more.

Rest still challenges me. I live in a culture that praises being busy and productive. If you are self-employed, rest can feel financially and emotionally complicated. There is no manager telling you to go home. There is always more you could do.

But I am learning that rest is not the opposite of devotion. It is part of it.

8. I do not need another training to be a great facilitator

I love learning. I love good teachers. I love being a student.

But at some point in my 20s, I noticed the shadow side of constant training. Another course can become a way to delay trusting yourself. Another certificate can become a way to ask for permission.

I used to think I needed one more teacher training to feel ready. One more method. One more lineage. One more skill. One more stamp of legitimacy.

Of course, education matters. If you hold space for people, you need care, knowledge, humility, and a willingness to keep learning. But collecting trainings will not automatically make someone a grounded facilitator.

Presence matters. Kindness matters. Integrity matters. Listening matters. The ability to adapt matters. The ability to say “I do not know” matters.

I have learned that I do not need another training to be worthy of teaching what I already know. I need to listen to my intuition. I need to stay honest. I need to be generous. I need to keep being human with other humans.

That is not less professional. It is often what people feel most.

9. Ready is a choice

I used to think readiness would arrive as a feeling.

One day I would wake up and feel fully prepared. Calm. Confident. Certain. No fear, no doubt, no imposter syndrome, no wobble in my voice.

That day has not come.

Instead, I learned that ready is often a choice.

Not a reckless choice. Not a choice to ignore preparation or pretend fear is not there. But a choice to begin before every part of me feels convinced. A choice to send the email, teach the class, host the workshop, speak the truth, make the offer, or change direction while still feeling nervous.

Readiness grows through doing.

This has been one of the most practical lessons of my self-employed life. Waiting until I feel completely ready can become a very elegant form of hiding. It can look responsible from the outside, but underneath it is often fear wearing a nice outfit.

Some version of me will probably always feel scared before a new beginning. I can bring her with me.

10. Being honestly myself is the bravest thing I can do

I used to think bravery looked bigger.

Big decisions. Big risks. Big declarations. Big life changes.

Now I think bravery often looks like telling the truth in small, steady ways.

Saying what I mean. Creating what feels real. Letting my work sound like me. Letting my relationships meet the actual version of me, not the polished one. Allowing my softness, intensity, humour, slowness, desire, grief, and joy to all belong.

Being authentically yourself sounds simple until you realise how many systems teach us not to be.

We learn to be impressive. Marketable. Pleasant. Productive. Attractive. Easy. Consistent. Uncomplicated. But being a person is not always neat. It is layered and changing.

The more honestly I live, the more permission I seem to give others to do the same. Not because I am special, but because truth is contagious in the best way.

Being yourself is not a performance of authenticity. It is a practice of returning.

The thing I keep coming back to

We have normalised being busy, tired, overextended, and available all the time. We have normalised working an absurd amount of hours. We have normalised measuring our worth through output and calling it ambition.

But common does not mean normal.

I am grateful for my 20s. For the mistakes, the teachers, the friendships, the endings, the beginnings, the cycles, the messy becoming.

And I am even more grateful to arrive here with less need to prove myself and more desire to be myself.

That feels like a good place to begin again.