“We are coming to a world where there is so much conditioning”, said Lisa Francesca Lewak, a therapist in Lagos, and author of "Loving who I am: a journey to the heart" published in 2017.

Her book is a guide to the path of love and self-care, which she illustrates with her own story. Lisa has made her own way to heal her heart and wants to help others doing the same. "I recommend starting this magical and life-changing journey," she said.

During our conversation, she used the word healing several times, which made me curious. So I asked why everyone needs healing, to which she replied that "we don't necessarily live in a natural world, we are limited by everything around us. We are conditioned by our family, our care takers when we go to school. Unfortunately, I’d say yes, everyone needs healing”.

Lisa works in Lagos as an alternative therapist, but she wasn't always a healer. She has spent many years of her life teaching English around the world to non-native speakers and it was during one of her stops in Canada that she came across upon a school that taught holistic medicine and natural health. Up until then she had no interest in this field, but she thought it was really cool and decided to look into it and ended up signing up for a course. And what started out as a simple experience turned into an intensive five-year study of Chinese medicine, acupuncture, sound therapy and more.

A book that got the better of her

Years passed and the desire to write her first book was born. As many authors can feel, inspiration came like a wave that you just have to catch. One day she just sat down and started writing. "I think if there's a book inside you, it will come out when you're ready and that's exactly what happened”.

It took her seven years to complete the book. During this time, she explained that she had written according to the parts of her life that she was experiencing, "As it is a healing book, I couldn't go on with each chapter until I had done my own healing about that particular chapter that I was doing." Also, "the book kind of takes on a life of its own, at some point I had let the book to write by itself through me, because it really became something that I had no idea how it was going to end up."

Practising self-love

As Lisa explained, the book is split up into five parts. The first is called "The Work" and “it's about setting boundaries and really taking care of yourself".

The next chapter is about resistance. “Starting the work is the first challenge, but the second one is to maintain that work and if you get to the end of that section, I would say that’s been a lot of transformation and you are not the person you were when you start the work”, she pointed out.

The book then introduces a third section, called "the circle", which is about getting rid of your patterns and beliefs and helping you accessing your power. Once you've gone through this stage, you can start to create your new self, how you want to be from that point on, and she calls this 'Cultivating the Self'. “Now you can create what you want. This can be a challenge in itself, because many people have no idea what they want”, she said.

“It’s stepping into the unknown. The unknown can be a challenge but it is a great place to be, because everything is possible in the unknown”, she said.

While the fourth part is where you learn to create your new life, in the fifth is the part where you finally, after all the work, reconnect with yourself.

For more information on Lisa's work as well as her book, please visit the following websites:

www.lovingwhoiam.weebly.com

www.goingbeyondcentre.weebly.com

www.facebook.com/lisa.francesca.lewak

Author

Paula Martins is a fully qualified journalist, who finds writing a means of self-expression. She studied Journalism and Communication at University of Coimbra and recently Law in the Algarve. Press card: 8252

Paula Martins