Shownotes
What happens when the life you built no longer feels like you? In Inner Peace Better Health, hosted by Nazish, Karina (K. K. Biernath) shares a deeply human journey through identity loss, motherhood, and healing.
This episode is for anyone navigating change, grief, or quiet inner struggle. You’ll hear how pain can become a doorway to self-understanding, how writing can heal what words once hid, and why your story still matters—even when you feel lost.
About the Guest:
Karina, writing as K. K. Biernath, is a writer and yoga teacher whose work explores identity, healing, and transformation through storytelling and personal reflection.
Episode Chapter:
00:00 – When life quietly changes you
01:27 – The self-love we never learned
04:07 – Pain as growth, not punishment
06:14 – Grief vs. failure: understanding the difference
12:52 – Losing identity and finding yourself again
18:58 – Writing as emotional healing
23:21 – Why your story still matters
Key Takeaways:
- Self-love and acceptance cannot be outsourced
- Pain often carries growth if you stay present with it
- Grief isn’t failure—it’s adjustment to change
- Reflection without judgment builds self-awareness
- Healing is slow, ongoing, and deeply personal
How to Connect With the Guest:
Website: https://kkbiernath.com/
Also active on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube
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Transcripts
00:00:07 Nazish: Sometimes the pain that changes us doesn't arrive loudly. It comes quietly through laws, through identity, shifts through the life we didn't plan for. And now, somewhere inside that disruption, a question begins to form. Who am I now? So today's conversation is about that tender space between breaking and now becoming what it means to find purpose and not in spite of pain, but through it.
00:00:34 Nazish: Welcome to Inner Peace Betterhealth the space where we explore the connection between our inner world and how we live, heal, and move forward. I am your host and today we are joined by Karina, writing under the pen name K K Vietnam, a writer whose personal journey through motherhood, identity shifts and emotional healing led her to rediscover herself through storytelling. We are talking about the breakthrough, finding purpose through pain, and what happens when life takes away the version of you that felt familiar. And our healing can begin when you finally allow your story to speak. If you have ever felt lost in transition, unseen in your struggle, or unsure how to begin again, this conversation is for you. I welcome you to the show. Karina.
00:01:27 Karina Pen Name K. K. Biernath: Thank you for having me. I am grateful to be here.
00:01:32 Nazish: Wonderful. So, Karina, before we get into into the deeper layers of this conversation, I want you to. I want to begin with something simple. When you look back at the version of you who was quietly carrying so much, what do you feel she needed the most? Like, but maybe didn't know how to ask for.
00:01:53 Karina Pen Name K. K. Biernath: Number one, she needed to love herself most, which is. Which is something nobody can give us. The parents can teach us that, but sometimes they they themselves don't know how to do that. So I think this is what I was missing the most loving myself. And through that, accepting myself for who I am.
00:02:21 Nazish: I accept yes, yes, absolutely. Accepting yourself is such a big, big thing for all, all, all of us to learn and to do because we are so hard on ourselves so many times.
00:02:35 Karina Pen Name K. K. Biernath: Absolutely. And I would say everybody at some point throughout their life is very hard on themselves. Some of us do it daily, couple of times a day, maybe others a little bit less. But I truly believe many of us struggle with that. Absolutely.
00:02:53 Nazish: Yes. And you know, that lands deeply because so many people look functional on the outside while carrying something unspoken on the inside. And often the need isn't dramatic, it's tenderness, permission, or simply being seen. So that is something that we are learning the most from you right now.
00:03:14 Karina Pen Name K. K. Biernath: Um, yeah, you said it. You said it very nicely. Absolutely. You know, I remember people sometimes were like, what do you mean you have an eating disorder? I mean, you're like, really? Um, you look so strong, you know, so fine. I'm like, yes, you know what you see on the outside? It doesn't always match the inside. Um um. Yeah. That's right. So when, when you were doing the introduction, I was like, you know, uh, you know, uh, shaking my head because this is so true. We often come up, uh, show up to, to the world as somebody else. And, um, because it's just easier, because it's easier not to look at the inner, our inner landscape and really face what is bothering us inside.
00:04:07 Nazish: So, uh, I am curious about something that many people believe without even realizing it, that the pain is only something to survive, hide, or to get over with. In your experience, what do people misunderstand most about pain when they see it only as a setback, not as a turning point.
00:04:29 Karina Pen Name K. K. Biernath: So the pain through the pain I believe we grow. When I was in my yoga teacher training a little bit less than over a year ago, what impacted me most in is learning about the discipline. And there's a quote there in a book by Deborah, Adele, Yamas and Niyamas stay in a fire and wait for the blessing. What does it mean to me? It means, okay, stay in the pain. I know it's not easy. It hurts. But through that pain you will grow. Something better will come out. You will transform. So just feel the pain. Stay in that pain. Because this is how we grow through the life experiences. And so I think we're forgetting about that, that we grow for that, for our experiences. We for life. We're hoping for a good one, but I think the hardest one, the most painful one, the one we have a hard time to understand, make us the most strong girl.
00:05:44 Nazish: The one that is hardest to understand makes us so the strongest. And that is something that is going to land in a lot of hearts tonight, right? Yeah. So when that pain is tied to a major life shift, like stepping away from a career, adjusting to caregiving or losing the version of life you thought you'd have forever. So how do you begin to separate grief from failure?
00:06:14 Karina Pen Name K. K. Biernath: Very good question. How do you begin to separate grief from failure? MM. First, allowing yourself to grieve. You know, you have to go through that grief period. And then. I think the only way you can begin to separate that through, um. Through, through. Let me think through working on yourself, through going through understanding what's happening. It means you really have to go through some pain, meaning understanding, okay, telling yourself, okay, Karina, you quit your job. It's not mean you failure because you want to be mom. So this is actually very powerful. So you're going to have this inner dialogue. You're going to tell you our failure, but then you're the stronger you are, the more work you do, the more trauma or reflections you have on your life. Then you're gonna slowly start to understand. But this is not a failure. But this is called growth. And in your life will change and you're going to be more accepting of whatever. Do I make a little bit of a sense here? Like I said, it was a hard question.
00:07:47 Speaker 3: You do, you do, you do make a lot of sense because.
00:07:51 Nazish: You know, the way, the way you mentioned to like, you know, working on yourself, understanding yourself. These are few prime things that a lot of us miss out.
00:08:02 Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:08:02 Karina Pen Name K. K. Biernath: And I think, you know, in order for you to be able to let yourself grieve and understand that this is not a failure, you actually have to do work on yourself. You have to start to reflect on your life, on who you are and why you do the things you are. And instead of punishing yourself, um, you're gonna understand, okay, I did it because of that, I. I am also a yoga teacher, quite new yoga teacher, but I'm Yogi for twenty years and recently during my class I introduced the students to the call by Swami Rama. Maybe I'm not going. I'm not sure. The hardest spiritual practice is is is Self-observation observation with compassion and without judgment. I repeat one more time because it's such a beautiful quote. The hardest spiritual practice is self-observation with compassion and without judgment. Why am I mentioning that? Because once we start to look at our life and observe it instead of judge it and just reflect on that, then we're going to understand. But what did happened? It's not a failure. It's just a part of life. So the reflections of compassion and judgments toward ourselves, which comes with working on yourself, with whatever it means reading self-help book, working with a therapist, but most most of it with reflecting on what you're doing and who you are. Then you're going to be able to separate the grief, the value from each other, and look at yourself as a person and allow you and accept yourself as a person the way you are right now, at that moment.
00:09:53 Nazish: Absolutely. That is very important. And the way you mentioned separating grief from failure is super. It's, it's something that a lot of us are gonna learn. And, you know, it's like putting it into words. Those feelings are there.
00:10:08 Karina Pen Name K. K. Biernath: Yeah. And you have to allow yourself to grieve. And this is the most important you just any emotion you have to allow, you need to allow yourself to be angry. But the question is how long you're going to be angry. So allow yourself to be angry for these two minutes of temper tantrum, then accept it. And once you calm down. Why did I. Why was I angry? Start reflecting. You know, why was I angry? And the point when it comes to anger is how long are you going to be angry? Is it going to be two months? Being angry at some or at somebody? Or is it going to be twenty minutes in one day and it's over? So all the emotions are good, even if we think they are not good because we are humans. So just the question is, how are we going to see them? And the acceptance, it's most important because I think people easily accept happiness, grief, but the anger, temper tantrums, oh my God, it's so bad. No, it's just another emotions and we all have them. Simple.
00:11:16 Nazish: Absolutely. That is so true. And you know, this distinction actually matters so much because what you are naming is that grief often gets misread as weakness, and when really it may be the heart of trying to adjust to new reality. So learning how to process your grief and to feel those emotions, just like you mentioned, it, is something which will lead us. You know, it can start becoming a place of honest discovery.
00:11:45 Karina Pen Name K. K. Biernath: And, you know, if we're talking about the grief, it's like the grief doesn't mean that somebody dies. You may experience the feeling of grief when you change your job, when you move from place to place, when maybe your child's gonna be diagnosed with a, you know, lifelong condition. Like in my case, when I discovered that my child has cerebral palsy. Uh, actually, no, the first condition, three M syndrome, type two, which is short stature condition, type of dwarfism. I grieved and my best friend described that to me. She's like, Trina, you just lost the child. The child you thought you had, quote, normal child just died and you had to welcome the child, which has a condition. So you have to allow yourself to grieve, which I did. But we often have a hard time and you also maybe don't see certain situations, but somebody should grieve. You know, like, like I said, change of a job, moving from one place to another. It also can cause grief, feeling of grief as well.
00:12:52 Nazish: Completely true. Your eye and your story carries so many layers about migration, ambition, motherhood. Like you mentioned, caregiving, identity, and the quiet loss of the life you were building. So when you reflect on that season, what deeper pattern do you think was underneath that pain? Like, was it disconnection from self, the pressure of keeping to pressure to keep holding everything together or something else entirely.
00:13:24 Karina Pen Name K. K. Biernath: When I, I think when I came, when I moved to America, I think I set some goals. I'm a goal setter and a goal getter. And so I set the goals and I had the vision. I built a vision in my head of, you know, I want a big house. I want to first I want a car, then I want a place to live. And I wanted the house to be bigger. It's no longer I am here then I want a husband, I want a family. And I got it all because I guess I thought all these material things. Yeah. Will give me happiness two decades later. And in all of that, while trying to accomplish all of that, I became less and less me. I lost myself in that process. So the things I enjoyed were just pushed really to the side far away. So after two years of this type of life, I have discovered when I still wasn't happy and my body definitely showed that, I have discovered that these material things will not give me happiness. And I am not happy and I don't want to be that person anymore. I don't want to wear this type of hairdo. I don't want to wear this type of clothing. I, I, it's not me. And I slowly started to change once I realized that what I thought gave me happiness will give me happiness didn't give me. So actually kind of right now I am on the way back to myself and I think when I. Maybe I think so I am the person I think I was maybe when I was ten years old, you know, I'm going back to that person trying to find the happiness in the simple life pleasures. Like yesterday, we had a big snow, not snow. Sorry, snow is over. Big rainstorm. Beautiful. It was warm outside, like sixty degrees Fahrenheit, which is about maybe what, uh, ten degrees Celsius? I'm not sure which one you're working off. And my daughter decided to go out and play with rain. So I'm like, first. No. Then I'm like, you know, I'm gonna go first. I was standing on a deck hiding from the rain, and I took a big umbrella and I went with her. After ten minutes, she took the umbrella, took her jacket off. She was playing in the puddles. After half an hour, she was all wet. But she was so happy. And it brought me so joy to see her. I actually wanted to jump in a puddle with her, but I was just too lazy thinking about the mess I have to clean up. So I want to be that person. I want to be able to freely jump in a puddle, even in the age almost fifty. Because these little moments, I think, really bring the happiness to at least my life. And you know. Yeah. So it was a beautiful moment.
00:16:21 Nazish: Absolutely. That is such a beautiful story that you shared with us. You know, that that, you know, there's such a strong mind body connection in that sometimes the body starts carrying what the voice has no room to say. And what I am hearing in your story is that breakthrough didn't start with having answers. It started with you noticing what could no longer stay buried.
00:16:49 Speaker 3: Yes.
00:16:51 Karina Pen Name K. K. Biernath: The breakthrough really started with the pain. First physical pain, then, was the emotional pain. Why am I feeling so bad physically? I had a different, you know, health issue. Not life threatening, but, um, annoying. You know, quite interesting. Annoying enough to stop me. I'm like, what's happening? Why is this little thing after another showing up in my life. And then, um, I mean, I have a breakthrough, you know, year. You know, I guess each day, every month, something happens and I'm really rediscovering myself. I'm finding patterns of my thinking or doing things which I'm like, why am I still doing that? It doesn't serve me well anymore. I would like to change it, but it's very important to mention to the listeners that break the patterns. It's very hard. There are some things, even five years in working really deep with therapists are still bothering me, are still deeply rooted in me, and it's really very hard to change my behavior. But the most important part is I am noticing that and I'm wanting to change. And I am slowly changing one by one every day. Everyday something else. So. And I also believe, you know, some people when they start, like even I think my sister, you know, when she started to work with her therapist, she's like, Karina, you know, two years later and I'm like, Bella, it's, it's a life ongoing process even for me. And I accepted that, that the transformation, the change, the growth, we grow all life long until we die. And the question is, are you gonna go against it or are you going to surrender and flow of it? And I think the easier way is to surrender and flow with the changes, challenges happening in our life.
00:18:58 Nazish: Absolutely. You have to surrender to it. That is so beautifully said. And, you know, your writing began as something deeply personal, a letter to your children. And then it became something much deeper. I'd love to explore that. So what did writing give give you that everyday survival could not.
00:19:24 Karina Pen Name K. K. Biernath: Through writing, I had to face the emotions. Um. I remember a few situations writing in my favorite cafe in town and you know, you just put it maybe I wrote a few sentences, started, you know, about something I experienced through my life and just the tears just started to go down my face naturally. And I'm like, wow, I guess I still have to work on that. I guess this issue is still not resolved. So and I would at that moment, I would let myself, um, just cry, be in the moment, let this feeling in me and pass from me because this is the only way we can heal that trauma. So for me, writing, it's definitely healing experience. And also I do I reflect a lot. Right now I am in process of translating my book by myself into Polish language, which became basically writing a new book. It's a little bit easier because I have a base, but I still have to write it. And I have noticed that how much I already have changed since I began to write the book back three years later, because I started that back twenty twenty three. I am not that same person anymore. So I had to adjust. I just the book to to reflect how I feel about certain situations right now, especially my reflections throughout the books. I have my auto reflections, reflections about life. So I'm writing from the past perspective, but once in a while I have reflections as I'm talking now, and they have changed. So and I am like three quarters through the book, I have a feeling about the ending of the a book may be different because I am just a different person. And the good way better way. So as I'm writing, there's less pain because I have a more understanding why I acted, reacted, did things the way I did. And also, I understand more who I am and what makes me bring me to life, what makes me alive, what is purpose in my life?
00:21:37 Nazish: That is something you know, I love to hear because it makes healing feel more human and less performative. And the way you have mentioned about writing it is it gives purpose to a lot of people.
00:21:55 Karina Pen Name K. K. Biernath: Definitely. And I forgot to mention about the poetry, you know, like, I never know when the inspiration would strike me. Most of the time in the morning after my yoga, meditation, yoga practice. You know, I open my journal and very often it's just the title, like last few days ago was expectations. And the word just started to come out of me about what I experienced lately. And I put them on paper and this is how my poetry, um. Comes to life. I, I would, I would say that so I, I believe, um, I mean, I start to write because I myself love to read memoirs and inspirational stories. That's why I thought my story may be inspiration for somebody else until today. I love to read and inspirational books because, uh, the inspirational simple because they helped me understand why I am who I am and they help me grow. They helped me become the person I always meant to be. And they helped me dig deep inside and also remind me that I am human and that there are others who struggle just like I do.
00:23:21 Nazish: You know, Karina, for our listeners, the who is buried in between places right now, heart tired, identity blurred, trying to hold everyone together while quietly falling apart inside. What would you want them to remember about themselves before they give up on the idea that something meaningful can come from this chapter?
00:23:48 Karina Pen Name K. K. Biernath: I need to remember that every story is important. Like every story matters, meaning every life matters. And, um, um. And they just have to remember that and either have a hard time to understand or find that deep connection to their own life, then look somewhere else, look around, grab a book, listen to a podcast to help you understand what you do matter, your story matter, your life matter. And also you are in charge of your life. You know which I which I talk a lot, especially by the end of my book. You know, I want the readers, listeners to understand why they are in charge of creating the life. They are the creators of their life. And the life can be as they envision. And. But first they need to realize that, wow, the power is in my hands and they can slowly start to change it for changing the way we think, through going through the pain, through going for the growth and transformation.
00:25:07 Nazish: That is so beautiful and more than beautiful. It is so grounding because sometimes people don't need a solution. First, they need a reason to stay open to their own becoming. And you have given them that.
00:25:22 Speaker 3: Thank you.
00:25:24 Nazish: Yeah. So this has been a beautifully heartfelt conversation with you. Before we close, where can our listeners find you and stay connected with you?
00:25:34 Karina Pen Name K. K. Biernath: Uh, the easiest way is to go to my website, which is w w w k k b I e r n a p h dot com or whether they can have, we have direct links to, to the book, to the book trailer to all my social media, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Spotify, YouTube. I also have their address. So if somebody would like to send me, reach out personally the old fashioned way. They can send me a letter. Absolutely. And the most important, I think I would like to also bring to attention that at least once a month, like this month, twice, I am hosting events with the readers. You know, in locally new Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York State, um, where I connect with my readers, tell them my story and I truly enjoy them. So very, I really enjoy these one on one. I mean, the in-person, um, meetings with their readers and also can do listeners.
00:26:39 Nazish: Yes. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. I will make sure to include all these details into the show notes. And thank you so much for joining us today on Inner Peace, Better Health. It was absolutely beautiful to have you here today with us.
00:26:54 Karina Pen Name K. K. Biernath: Thank you. It was a joy to be part of your show. I appreciate that, thank you.
00:26:58 Nazish: Yes. And dear listeners, if today's conversation is a reminder that healing doesn't always begin with certainty. Sometimes it begins with acknowledging what hurts. Honoring what changed, and trusting that your story still has somewhere meaningful to go. If this episode stayed with you, share it with someone who may need that reminder too. And come back for more conversation that help us care for mind the body and the quiet truth within us. So until next time, take a breath, be gentle with yourself, and keep listening to what your inner life is trying to say.
