Conversation with Dawn Agnos

Speaker: Dawn Agnos

Surviving Life, Surviving Death, and Transforming Through Acceptance of What You Are

Dawn Agnos is a seeker and healer who draws upon her own personal healing journey to help individuals and groups in their journeys. Among her guiding principles are J. Krishnamurti's words: "If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation."

Dawn was born to two extremely young parents whom she describes as "not ready or willing to treat parenthood seriously." In her childhood, Dawn faced evictions, homelessness, hunger, beatings, foster homes, and abandonment. In the face of her mother's addictions, Dawn was responsible for raising her sister who was sixteen months younger. By the time of her early adulthood, Dawn body developed an auto immune disease that threatened to take her life. Within a two week period of her diagnosis, her health deteriorated to the point that she became bed ridden for a year and a half. She lost her boyfriend, then her job, home, car, and friends. In the eighth year of the disease, she was forced to remove her thyroid and to re-imagine her life in new ways without the support of family or friends.

Having been forced to let go of her ego attachment to the identity she had begun to build for herself, Dawn followed her passion and worked full time to support herself while earning a degree in neuromuscular therapy and injury-related massage therapy, and eventually developed a successful business rehabilitating professional athletes of the NFL for over ten years. Known as “The Body Whisperer,” she worked to help people understand their emotions and illuminate the sides of themselves that they could not see.

Dawn then went through even more transforming tragedies -- she lost a number of her best friends over the course of five years, culminating in the tragic death of her fiancé and soulmate. More than five years later, she has found a new soulmate and husband, and is dedicated to serving others in their healing journeys and in helping create a more loving, empathetic, and sustainable world.

"Everyday I wake up astonished and grateful to still be here on Earth. Alive with the knowledge of where I have come from, what I have learned, and why I feel so grateful to have survived so much. My wish is for everyone to recover their lives in a way which brings them into wholeness and love again. Life is an amazing journey once everything you do is interconnected with everything you have learned," she writes.

Five Questions with Dawn Agnos

What Makes You Come Alive?

Learning about myself and everything else in existence on the physical, spiritual, mental, and emotional planes of life. Being able to find gratitude for the difficulties I have suffered and knowing how to transmute the suffering and confusion of others because of the work I do to heal myself. My deepest intention is to learn from each situation and offer healing in any way I can be of service. Integrating everything I have ever learned and using it to transmute experience for others and for myself.

Pivotal turning point in your life?

I have survived death many times, and suffered great loss. One of the major catalysts of my life happened one evening when a my soul spoke to me and said, "Your life is going to change forever". Those words still chill my bones today. I awoke to find my fiance and soulmate had passed away beside me suddenly in the middle of the night. Every dream for a real life and the someone that truly loved me and knew me deeply was gone in an instant. I was alone once again in the world and found myself deeply entrenched in suicidal tendencies. Everyone was terrified to get too close to someone who had experienced such a recent loss, and the grief process was a lonely one. It took everything I had to find a reason to stay here in service to something greater than myself. And four years later, synchronicity led me to find love and safety with another soul mate.

An Act of Kindness You'll Never Forget?

We will very poor when I was a child and this particular Christmas, the cupboards were bare and the electricity had been previously shut off. My mother had been hired for part time seasonal work at a radio station in Detroit, to assist with a toy drive for families who were in need. The outpouring of gifts that came in brought me to tears and still do today just to experience the blessings we received because people in the community cared about those they had never even met. It was what kept me alive through much of my childhood, knowing that one day I would be able to meet the beautiful world that I knew existed somewhere out there.