“Finding your true self” sounds either like wishful thinking — or something you do on a gap year at 19 when you’re footloose and fancy-free. What I’m talking about though is something far more fundamental than that… far less Instagram-worthy and doesn’t involve a trip to Bali, photos of you in a bikini or even a quick vomit on an ayahuasca trip…

Their life can look completely fine from the outside. Good, even. But inside, the person can feel like they are 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.

We are conditioned by the outside world from the moment we arrive here — family, school, society, religion. Layer after layer of this is who you are and this is how things are done and this is what a good woman looks like.

And for a long time, most of us comply. Because that’s what you do. Because it keeps the peace… and because it keeps you safe.

But there comes a point — and if you’re reading this, you probably know this point intimately — where you simply cannot keep going as someone that you’re not. Something inside you refuses – you can’t comply or just go along anymore. It’s become impossible for you.

It’s a knowing that won’t go away no matter how busy you make yourself or how much you push it down.

That drive to find your true self — to remember who you actually are beneath everything that’s been placed on top of you — it comes from somewhere deep. Somewhere real. And unless you’ve felt it yourself, it’s almost impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t and this is why you can begin to feel so alone and lost… like nobody really understands you anymore.

It’s not a midlife crisis. It’s not ingratitude. It’s not you being difficult or ungrateful or selfish or weird… or becoming a whacko (as my ex used to say).

It’s your soul calling you home to yourself.

And it can be an uncomfortable, disorienting, sometimes devastating process — because finding yourself again means you have to first be honest about how much of what you’ve been living isn’t actually yours.

– The beliefs that feel like facts that you suddenly start to question…

– The choices that feel like yours but are really just pre-programmed responses designed to keep you safe and in your comfort zone – but that begin to feel anything BUT comfortable.

– The personality traits you developed as a child to survive your environment that you’ve been carrying ever since as though they’re just who you are…

But they’re not who you are. They’re what you learned to be… and there’s a difference.

The questions that emerge in this process are uncomfortable ones.

Does this feel right for me? What is my heart actually telling me — not my fear, not my conditioning, my heart? What is my body saying? Is this really what I want my life to look like? Is this decision genuinely mine?

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 to want.

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

There will be moments when the fear creeps in and you wonder if you’re destroying your life for something that doesn’t even exist.

But as you begin to break through the conditioning there also comes a feeling of freedom.

And perhaps a little bubble of excitement… and a feeling of peace.

And a childlike feeling of joy that you didn’t know was even available to you.

And the knowing — the deep, embodied knowing — that you are becoming more yourself with every layer you shed.

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.

Not because you’re not capable – or because you don’t have the insight – or the awareness – or the desire.

But because knowing something and holding it and really stabilising at a new level in your actual daily life is a different thing entirely. And it’s very hard to do in isolation.

You have the breakthrough. You feel the shift. And then life happens and you revert. Not because something is wrong with you but because there was nobody there to help you hold it – or rather to hold yourself at that new level.

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.

They work at slightly different levels but both spaces offer an energetic field – a place where the growth you’ve been carrying alone finally has somewhere to land — and where what you already know begins to become how you actually live.

If something in you recognises what this is — you don’t need to figure out which space is right for you first. Just reach out and we’ll work that out together.

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