“Finding your true self” sometimes sounds like wishful thinking for many of us…  How can we escape our lives long enough to do that when we are no longer footloose and fancy-free and when have commitments and bills to pay?

“Finding yourself” doesn’t have to involve a trip to Bali, photos of you in a bikini or even a quick vomit on an ayahuasca trip despite what Instagram would try to have us believe.

No,  I’m talking about something far more fundamental than that.  Your life can look completely fine from the outside. Good, even. But inside, you can feel like you’re dying – shut down, diminished, struggling for breath, and it can happen at any age and at any stage of life.

Maybe that’s you. Maybe you recognise that feeling exactly.  I know it intimately because it happened to me when I had a profound spiritual awakening almost 30 years ago.

The thing is, that we are all conditioned by the outside world from the moment we arrive here.  It includes our family beliefs, what society says, the philosophy of our school and religion…   Layer upon layer of “this is who you are and this is what you should do” and “this is what a good woman looks like”.

And for a long time, most of us comply. Because that’s what you do, it keeps the peace, it keeps our families happy and it keeps us safe.  We do the same as everyone else and we “belong”.

But there comes a point where you simply can’t keep going as someone that you’re not. Something inside you just refuses and you can’t comply anymore. It’s become impossible for you and no matter how busy you make yourself or how much you try to push it down, you just can’t anymore and that feeling doesn’t go away.  In fact it amplifies.

Unless you’ve felt this “drive to find yourself”, it’s almost impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t also felt it and this is why you can begin to feel like you’re out there on a limb all on your own and that nobody really understands you anymore.

It’s not a midlife crisis because it can happen at any age actually. And it’s not you being difficult or ungrateful – or selfish or weird – or becoming a complete whack-job (as my ex-husband used to call me).

No, it’s your soul calling you home to yourself.

And it can be an uncomfortable, disorienting, sometimes devastating process actually, because finding yourself again means you have to first be honest about how much of what you’ve been living doesn’t actually fit you anymore.  And the questions that emerge as part of this process are uncomfortable ones.

Does this feel right for me? What is my heart actually telling me? What is my body saying? Is this really what I want my life to look like? Is this decision genuinely mine from my heart or is it my head?

They’re not easy questions. But they’re the right ones to ask yourself.

And sitting with them and facing the truth of them – as uncomfortable as that is – is how you begin to find out what’s yours and what isn’t. What’s true and what’s been handed to you. What you actually want and what you’ve been told you should want.

Is this relationship right for me?  Is this job right for me?  Am I even living in the right city!?

It’s a process… it takes time… and there will be tears… lots probably.

There will be moments when the fear creeps in and you wonder if you’re destroying your life … “What WOULD it actually look like if I found “my true self”? Does that even exist?”

But as you begin to break through the conditioning there also comes a feeling of freedom… a little bubble of excitement or a gentle feeling of peace perhaps.  And then the knowing begins…  a deep, embodied knowing… that you are becoming more yourself every day.

Here’s what I’ve seen consistently though, across nearly 30 years of sitting with women going through this process…

Doing this alone is one of the things that keeps you stuck.

I battled with this for a long time myself because I believed that if I truly had “everything I need inside of me” (which we are so often told we do), then surely I should be able to do it all on my own…? I had the insight and the awareness and I definitely had the desire, but I learned that stabilising at a whole new level in your day to day life is a different thing entirely. And its really hard to do in isolation, on your own, when nobody around you really understands you anymore.

So you have the breakthrough because you’re doing the work and you feel the shift. But then life happens, something comes up, life gets busy and you revert. Not because you didn’t do it right but because there was nobody there to help you hold yourself at that new level.

And that’s precisely why I created my membership spaces:

The Threshold and Sanctuary.

Both are small intimate group spaces for women who are ready to make a shift and change their life – and who recognise that doing it alone is infinitely harder – and slower.

These group spaces work at slightly different levels but both offer an energetic field – a place where the growth you’ve been carrying alone becomes solidified and embodied and integrated into your daily life.

If something in you recognises that this is what you need, then reach out and we’ll find out which is the best space for you.

You can book a free call to talk with me about this here: https://karenturpin.kartra.com/calendar/ThresholdInfoCall