Becoming Green Girl | Collectors Edition

Becoming Green Girl | Bend don’t break.

I could tell you everything.

Maybe one day I will.

But I didn’t want this book to be a story built around my hardships, or a life measured by the things that happened to me. I didn’t want to write myself as a victim.

I wanted to write a victory.

An ode to healing.

To becoming whole.

To coming full circle.

And to sharing the blessings I found along the way.

From the outside looking in, as it is for most of us, you might have thought my life was rather beautiful. You may have even wondered what I could possibly know about hardship.

The locations were beautiful.

The photographs were beautiful.

But sometimes beautiful places can hold very painful stories.

From the beginning of my life, I knew what it was to live amongst beauty while experiencing something entirely different behind closed doors. A spiritually broken mother. An alcoholic father. A childhood where I learnt far too early that no one was coming to save me from my suffering.

So I learnt to survive.

I lost much of my childhood to abuse, and much of my early womanhood to the loss of my health.

For many years, life felt almost entirely black.

But my life has never been only black.

It has been every colour of the rainbow.

And somewhere along the way, I began to find the colours again.

I never gave up.

I fought.

I fell apart.

I broke.

I rebuilt.

And somehow, piece by piece, I began putting my life back together.

I built something I never knew was in the cards for me.

I became a mother to the babies I was once told I would never have.

I built a business I was told would never succeed.

And perhaps most importantly, I found the little girl inside me who had been tormented, silenced and taught that she was hated.

That she wasn’t worthy.

That she didn’t deserve love.

I found her.

And I loved her.

Then I discovered something that changed everything:

I am love.

I always was.

And I deserve the beautiful things I once believed were meant for everyone but me.

The Ayú Alchemist was born from that knowing.

From the understanding that healing isn’t about becoming someone new. Sometimes it is about returning to the person you were before the world taught you to abandon yourself.

It is remembering.

Remembering your body.

Remembering your intuition.

Remembering your softness.

Remembering your power.

Remembering that you are worthy of being cared for.

This book is a collection of the things I have learnt along the way.

The rituals.

The wisdom.

The mistakes.

The medicine.

The mantras.

The little pieces of light I gathered from some very dark places.

I don’t have all the answers.

But I know what it is to lose yourself and find your way home.

And if you have opened these pages because some part of you is hurting, searching, beginning again, or simply wondering whether life can become beautiful after everything you’ve been through.

I want you to know this:

You are special.

You are worthy.

You are not what happened to you.

You are not the words someone spoke over you.

You are not your wounds.

You are still here.

And that means there is still so much life waiting for you.

I believe in you.

I believe you can heal.

I believe you can become everything you were always meant to be.

And more than anything,

I hope you know how special you are.

Please, love yourself more.

With love,

Petal de la Reta

The Ayú Alchemist