Nothing Is Missing — Awakening to the Wholeness You Already Are: A Mind Body Healing Journey
- Dr. Kidi
- Nov 3
- 11 min read
Segment 2
Episode 1: Nothing Is Missing
The cracks in our stories are openings through which light returns.— Dr. Kidi
Reflection
We all begin whole. Before the noise, before the mirrors, before we learned to measure our worth through the eyes of others, there was a time when being alive was enough.
This reflection is a return to that beginning, an invitation to remember the child within you who still knows how to be free. Your health, your peace, your healing all depend on finding that freedom again.
There are not many photos of me as a child. I did not grow up in the era of smartphones, but I recently found a black and white image from when I was about five, standing beside my older sister Meski. My hair was cut short after it caught fire one day when I leaned too close to the cooking fire, trying to understand why there was a blue part to the flame.
Our mother dressed us for the occasion, and the faint shadow of a person holding the camera must have told us to pause and smile.
We paused.
We smiled.
Yet our smiles carry the impatience of small bodies eager to run toward their next adventure.
The next fire to discover.
Life, as it was, felt vast and alive. I stayed outdoors until I was called in, getting my hands dirty, searching for living creatures, especially frogs, and blending into the quiet wonder of nature.
My body knew when and how to move, rest, and play. And I listened to its cues. That natural state of connection to my body and life itself was the foundation of wellness.
Now that I have children of my own, and capturing images is no longer a one-shot deal, I find myself taking pictures of them from every angle, eager to hold on to their becoming.
Images of children speak of wholeness. They hold unedited honesty, unfiltered joy, and unguarded laughter. Even in the ones that are posed, something pure remains. The freedom to simply be, and the quiet eagerness to return to that wholeness in the moment after the snap.
As we grow older, that natural freedom begins to fade. We learn to hold our smiles a little longer, to pose in ways that please others, to hide the parts of ourselves that feel too messy or uncertain. What was once effortless becomes curated. The light that once moved freely through us begins to narrow into what we believe will be seen, accepted, or praised. In that shaping, we begin to trade authenticity for approval, and wholeness for perfection. The body feels this trade. The tension of performance becomes exhaustion. The loss of freedom becomes the seed of dis-ease.
Perfection asks us to edit our lives the way we edit our photos. We crop the moments that feel too raw, filter the ones that seem too ordinary, and delete the versions of ourselves that do not fit the image we have learned to keep. What we call self-improvement often becomes a quiet erasing, a way of managing what is real instead of meeting it with love.
Beneath all the editing, the unguarded parts of us remain. The child who ran toward frogs, the one who leaned too close to the fire to discover, the one who laughed before remembering to pose. They are still here, waiting for us to see them again, because the body never stops calling us back to the truth.
Healing begins with awareness that there is a distance between you and the child in you. When you stop editing and start listening to the body, when you let the blurred edges and half-smiles stay, when you remember that beauty and health are not found in what we perfect or pretend to be, but in remembering the freedom to be as we are.
The Pull of Perfection
Wholeness does not require performance or perfection.
It is not something we earn.
It is who we are.
The farther we drift from that truth, the harder it becomes to hear what the body is asking for to be well.
We are taught to be perfect.
To keep going.
To silence our cries.
To hold ourselves together.
Perfection lives in the realm of control. It is shaped by ideals, by the gaze of others, by the myth that a flawless version of you exists somewhere at the end of your effort. It edits the truth and hides the ache.
Think of the times you celebrated a friend’s joy and yet felt yourself shrink. The moments you whisper to yourself, When I finally get it right, I will be happy. When I find the right love, I will be happy. When I move, when I lose weight, when I start over, I will be happy. But the finish line keeps moving, and the chase never ends. This kind of striving becomes a habit, one that exhausts the soul. It steals your freedom, your time, and your energy, the three most precious things we have.
Why?
Because perfection invites chasing and comparison. Both consume what is vital in us, and their final destination is insecurity. Insecurity takes away your freedom, the ease of simply being yourself.
The truth is, you are always with yourself. As Bob Marley said, you cannot run away from yourself. No new city, job, partner, or prize from the outside can connect you to the place you’ve been avoiding within.
So take the time. Pause. Turn toward yourself. Make peace with the one who will walk beside you all your life. Become your own best friend—the kind you would never harm, the kind who stays. You are your own savior. My sister Meski often says, “The only person I fear is myself, because I have the power to build or destroy me.”
Now, take a breath and ask yourself: Are you living in fear of not being enough? Do you feel less perfect—compared to whom?
The pursuit of perfection often leaves an emptiness we try to fill in small, familiar ways, with another scroll, another sip, another moment of distraction.
Healing does not live in that airless space. It needs breath. It needs awareness. It needs the parts of us that are still tender, still learning, still finding their way. Perfection silences those parts. Wholeness gathers them close and reminds us that we are already home.
When we spend our lives chasing the image of who we think we should be, we lose touch with who we already are. Yet what we are longing for is peace, and that begins when we stop running from ourselves, breathe, soften, listen to our bodies and return to wholeness.
A Bridge to Wholeness
The good news is that nothing is missing. You can return to wholeness again and again. Understanding this truth is the beginning, the bridge that leads you back to yourself.
Michelangelo once said, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” In the same way, your work is not to create wholeness but to uncover it and reveal what has always been alive within you, waiting to emerge.
The path of remembering may sometimes unravel you. It may open cracks in the beliefs you once held tight. Yet if you are willing to practice awareness, those cracks will not lead to collapse but will become gateways for light to enter.
The Gift of the Unraveling
Unraveling can be hard. It takes time. Losing the version of yourself that has learned to live in trauma, sadness, or self-blame is not easy because there is a strange comfort in familiar pain. Sometimes it even feels good to feel bad, because your mind pulls you to stay where it feels known, even if it hurts.
Think of how heartbreak can lead someone to replay old songs or revisit old messages, not because they want to suffer, but because the ache feels familiar, almost grounding. Neuroscience echoes this truth: studies show that the brain can become conditioned to repeated emotional pain, responding to it as something familiar and therefore safe, even when it causes distress (Koenigsberg et al., American Journal of Psychiatry, 2013).
The conflict you feel lives in the quiet space between who you truly are and what you still hold onto. It is the tug between returning to wholeness and clinging to what has wounded you—or to the illusion of perfection. One part of you aches for freedom, while another part resists, replaying familiar thoughts that keep you circling through stress and anxiety. Sometimes it feels safer to stay in that familiar pain than to surrender to the unknown work of becoming whole again. Yet healing waits, steady and patient, for the moment you choose to turn inward.
When you begin to face yourself in awareness, the discomfort of leaving what is familiar can feel almost unbearable. You may reach for something outside of yourself to soften the edge: the bottle, the pill, the screen, the smoke, the friendships that drain you, the endless distractions that keep the silence from finding you. Each act, at its heart, is a way of saying, I cannot sit with this yet. But avoidance only widens the space between who you are and who you are becoming. It carries you farther from your inner home, the place where peace lives and truth waits for your return.
Beneath the noise, your body keeps calling you home. When you finally choose to listen, the unraveling begins, not to punish but to heal. It may arrive as confusion, as weariness, or as the quiet dissolving of who you thought you were. The mind will whisper that something is wrong, that you have lost your way, that you should return to the comfort you once knew. In that conflict, the body tightens. Illness finds space to enter. Pressure builds, the heart races, and there is no room left for healing to move through you.
But this is where your power lives.
Every time you find yourself not being you, and you know how that feels, calm yourself and pause. Remember that unraveling is often the body’s way of clearing space for healing. Count your breath until stillness begins to find you. Create distance from the thought by placing it on a cloud and watching it drift away. And if it is an action, distance yourself. Then choose what feels true.
Each time you return to this practice when you feel out of alignment, the old patterns begin to loosen, and the light that has always lived within you starts to move freely again.
If you can soften into the unraveling, if you can breathe there even without clarity, you will begin to notice something miraculous.
The center of you is still intact.
The heart that beats beneath the uncertainty has not gone anywhere.
The love that moves through you is still pulsing.
The wisdom that has carried you this far still knows the way.
The child trapped in you is still waiting to be freed.
You are not falling apart.
You are breaking open into a wider truth, one that makes room for every part of you that was never lost.
A Truth to Hold
A spoken meditation you can practice daily
Take a slow, deep breath.
Feel yourself arrive.
Right here.
Now, speak these words quietly within you.
Let them find their way into your body.
Nothing in me is missing.
The ache I sometimes feel is not my damage.
It is my depth.
It is proof that I am alive.
With each breath, I come closer to what is already whole.
Healing is not fixing.
It is remembering.
It is the soft return to my own rhythm,
my own essence,
my own truth.
Wholeness is not something I must chase.
It is who I already am.
I do not need to fix myself to be loved.
I open to love by meeting myself with tenderness.
I was never lost.
I have always been here.
Waiting to be seen.
Waiting to be remembered.
Waiting to come home.
Take another deep breath.
Feel the quiet beneath your skin.
Let the child in you emerge.
The Return Home
As I conclude this reflection on Nothing Is Missing, I want to leave you with these final thoughts.
Wholeness begins with honesty.
By that I mean the courage to stop pretending.
To stop making yourself smaller or more certain than you feel.
To stop polishing your rough edges just to be accepted.
To stop comparing yourself to anyone but who you were yesterday.
To stop trying to be perfect.
Honesty invites you back to yourself.
It softens the distance between who you are and who you’ve been trying to be.
When you meet yourself here, without judgment, without armor, you remember that returning home was never about becoming more. It was always about remembering you were already enough.
Honesty invites you back to yourself. It asks you to name what hurts, to tell the truth about what feels tender, to breathe in the space where you are instead of where you think you should be. Only then can you return to the unguarded self of childhood, the self that ran barefoot through the grass, laughed without hesitation, and felt an effortless belonging. You begin by remembering that who you are right now is enough. That is where healing begins.
Holding the truth from ourselves to fit into someone else’s design is the essence of perfectionism. It sends the body and mind into high gear. It demands performance, silences the body’s voice that longs to guide us toward wellness, and shuts down the freedom of the child within.
Research shows that maladaptive perfectionism is linked to higher levels of anxiety, depression, psychosomatic distress, and even early mortality. The health of the body suffers when the heart is striving to be flawless instead of simply being alive.
This is where you pause and ask yourself: What can I do to return to wholeness? To be free to be me?
Returning to wholeness is a process, not a single moment. Like anything else, it grows through consistent practice. It may sound simple, but practicing wholeness requires dedication and care. It means questioning your intentions each day, moving through your choices with awareness, and reflecting through journaling at day’s end. When you do this, wholeness unfolds quietly in small, steady steps, in the moments you stay instead of flee, feel instead of numb, listen instead of avoid.
There will be times when you fall back, because old thoughts will try to pull you. That too is part of the process. Begin again. Focus on the present moment until freedom returns. That freedom is the gateway to your wellness, because the body can only heal fully in a state of wholeness. Healing happens in the moments you release the habits that keep you from yourself.
Awareness that nothing is missing is the first step. If you have read this far, you have already chosen change. I am here to guide you back to that place of wholeness through the 4C Reset—an invitation to Calm and Pause, Count your breath, Create distance, and Choose differently. These simple practices are touchstones that bring you home to yourself each time you drift away.
My hope is that you return to this practice until being with yourself feels natural and kind. Each time you return, you strengthen your body’s innate capacity for peace, balance, and healing. You fall in love with who you are again and again.
When you are ready, I invite you to my Healing Space, where we practice wholeness together through meditation, journaling, and healing words that call you home.
Guided Meditation: The 4C's Practice: A Guided Return to Wholeness.Every breath is a doorway back to yourself.
Join me in remembering that nothing is missing.
Journal InvitationWhat part of you have you forgotten that might still be waiting to be welcomed home?
Write a letter to that part today.
Begin your letter with:
“I remember you now…”
Healing Words to RepeatI am not broken.I am already whole.Let these words settle in your body, like a hum that grows stronger each time you breathe them in.
Call for ConnectionI would love to know how this reflection on listening touched you.What are your own listening challenges?
Share your thoughts in the comments so we can learn from one another and grow together.
If you share on social media, tag me on Instagram @drkidi.healing. I love seeing how these reflections meet your life.
You can also join me on Substack @drkidi1 for new writings and healing practices delivered directly to you.
Grateful for these words.
Congratulations on completing segment 1 and beginning segment 2 with such strength. I really enjoyed this episode. It is thoughtful and makes it easy for each of us to see ourselves in the themes you explore. Your observations are powerful, and this line captures it perfectly:
“Perfection asks us to edit our lives the way we edit our photos. We crop the moments that feel too raw, filter the ones that seem too ordinary, and delete the versions of ourselves that do not fit the image we have learned to keep. What we call self-improvement often becomes a quiet erasing, a way of managing what is real instead of meeting it with love.”
I often reflect on that idea myself…