I don’t know. It sure feels good to say those three little words. 

As we come to the end of June, we are halfway through the year, which means SIX WHOLE MONTHS SPIRIT FREE FOR ME! 

I feel very reflective of all that I have achieved, all that I didn’t know I was capable of. And now, I don’t know what the future looks like, but I sure know that the possibilities are limitless. 

I laugh thinking back to being seventeen and thinking that I was so mature and knew everything. All I really know for sure now is that I don’t know anything for sure, other than that at some point, we will all die, and before then, we will all suffer. And all I would like to do before I die is free myself and others from as much chosen suffering as possible. 

When we are caught up in the hamster wheel of life, a year can feel far away. There is a lot of pressure to keep things moving, have goals, achieve them, make more goals, become a better person, connect with yourself, connect with others and not miss out on opportunities whilst looking after yourself at the same time. 

This time last year, I ended my two big relationships; I left my corporate job and my last romantic relationship. With both, the offer on the table wasn’t something that my ever-evolving self was willing to settle for anymore. It was a big journey of Knowing When to Leave. 

Leaving both relationships with as much conviction as I did wasn’t something that the me from a year before would have known how to do or been brave enough to push through the fear. I didn’t have the courage to trust my inner truth yet. Well, I always had the courage, but I wasn’t aware of my ability to utilise it yet. 

For the last six months, I have really been embracing the path of “I don’t know.” Knowing in the intellectual sense, the thinking mind. I am learning to feel my way through life with my heart, experiencing strengthening the rapport with my inner truth. Learning the ease with which life flows when in agreement with my inner being. Trust. 

I’ve said many times before, and I will say it again. The decision to embrace sobriety is the best decision I have ever made. Well, The Decision wasn’t technically made by “me,” but I did choose to listen and act upon it. I choose to trust that message, guidance, call for alignment from something greater than me. And watching the beautiful experiences that have come out of it has strengthened this rapport. 

I love Osho’s description of trust: 

If you are in rapport, and the truth is there, your inner being simply agrees with it – but it is not an intellectual agreement. You feel a tuning. You become one. This is trust. If something is wrong, it simply falls away from you… If it fits, it becomes your home. If it doesn’t fit, you move. Through listening comes trust.

Osho, Trust

“What’s meant for you won’t pass you by.” Isn’t it so much easier living like that? Like there are no missed opportunities? That you can relax and know what fits with you will become your home and the rest will fall away. That you are divinely guided and protected and that everything you experience is a lesson or a blessing. Something you can be grateful for. 

If you approach every relationship as a gift, as a person come to be your teacher, then even relationships that you may have once coined as “negative” or painful can be looked at in a whole new light. What is this person coming to teach me? How can I show up and respond for myself? How can I approach this? 

How can I approach this situation with love and compassion? These questions can shift our perspective and open us up to the lessons and growth that every interaction offers. 

One big “I don’t know” these days is with regards to others. I don’t know how anyone perceives the world. I don’t know anyone else’s experience of reality. I don’t know how anyone other than me thinks or feels, and I don’t know what their needs are without them communicating them. I don’t know what is best for them, what their journey needs to be to serve their soul, and I certainly don’t know what actions they need to take to align with their inner truth. 

I don’t know how someone will respond when I give them what they asked for. I don’t know how I will feel when I give it. But I do know that the only person’s experience I can truly know about is my own, and if I listen to my truth, the rest will unfold. 

Our innate state is well-being. We are pure spirit, energy, love. If we listen to that in trust, that’s all I really see as being important. I don’t know what the future holds, but I trust, and I am so excited to watch it unfold. 

How did I get here? To this trust and knowing? I would say a lot of it is down to intention and dancing with trust. It wasn’t a simple case of me stopping drinking and it all unfolding. And it is still a journey, a work in progress.

So here’s a good time to get into the story, the juicy bit, the first-person narrative of my own reality. 

No parents are perfect. They aren’t meant to be. I see part of our journey in life as overcoming what our parents pass on by learning to parent ourselves. Meeting and healing our internal childhood wounds so we can hold ourselves accountable for who we are and who we are to become as adults. 

I’ve touched on it multiple times throughout this blog, but I have been carrying a very deep paternal abandonment wound for a hell of a long time… aka Daddy Issues. For almost as long as I have been carrying the weight of this wound, I have also been trying to heal it, resolve it, or fix it somehow. In every workshop, retreat, seminar, course, my intention has been to try and free myself from it. Lighten my load by letting it go with forgiveness. Because, damn! is it tiring carrying that sh*t. 

Projections are stronger, relationships are harder, and living feels sadder and heavier. You can run away to tiny tropical islands, but no amount of ocean is going to stop it from catching up with you. 

You get the picture. I knew it wasn’t serving me. The person it was hurting the most was me, and I wanted to forgive and live. 

Now, forgiveness frustrated me because it wasn’t happening. The number of times I heard “You need to forgive” made me want to give a defiant teenage screw face at whoever thought they were clever enough to impart that wisdom on me. Even if they were right. 

Forgiveness suggests there is something that needs forgiving. That it wasn’t just a misunderstanding with someone acting from fear rather than love. If everyone is just doing all they can at the time with the tools they have, then really all it boils down to is something simple like just wanting to be loved. 

So love is the trigger point, and fear is the guardian. One of my best friends at Uni used to tell me that I had a barbed wire, cast-iron, marshmallow heart. I like this imagery and think it’s pretty apt. I felt so vulnerable in expressing my love for fear of being abandoned. And in this, I did a lot of not loving and abandoning myself. Which is why building this love and trust with myself has been monumental on this journey. Over time, with consistently showing up for myself and responding to myself with love, I have developed the most beautiful relationship I have ever had, with me. And in doing this, I have stripped away those layers of barbed wire because I now trust that I won’t abandon myself and neither will the power that is greater than me, whatever you choose to call it. 

In some ways, what I needed to forgive wasn’t my Dad at all, but myself. For perpetuating that hurt for so many years. For not accepting the situation as it was and keeping myself in a state of suffering by not freeing myself from the patterns and choosing differently. 

Intellectually and spiritually, I know that things couldn’t have happened any differently than how they have. I have never been one to regret and certainly just know that I couldn’t see then what I can now. I simply didn’t know. 

Subconsciously though, my nervous system has not had the memo. It has not been up for dropping the suffering and moving on to greener pastures. And recently, when I was triggered by a professional relationship, I went right back deep into my abandonment story. Off into my little cave of woe, I went to lick my wounds and reinforce my narrative that people aren’t able to be there for me. Self-sufficiency is the life for me! Yawn. 

Suffering is a bottomless pit. Especially around things like parental wounds. You don’t heal it by marinating in it. The flavors of hurt, sadness, and shame just become increasingly potent and harder to wash off. Of course, it feels far from this when you’re in it. Thankfully, I am connected enough to myself these days to recognise it and get curious about whether another round of emotional release was really necessary or if I was caught up in an unhelpful cycle. 

I had achieved one of my dreams and goals of organising and running a retreat, but I turned around and there was no one there with me. No one to celebrate with, wind down with, or simply be in the company of. The abandonment felt real. And to some degree, it was. The work I am going into is an open-hearted space, and integrity is everything to me. My heart was open, and I wanted someone to share it with. The gooey, delicious marshmallow uncased and ready to delight upon, but it was just me, and God did it feel lonely. 

I decided that maybe I needed it. I allowed myself to feel it all again. Feel the pain of being on the other side of the world from my family and friends, so many people that I love. I spent a good week sifting around in the darkness to see what I found and came out to the brilliant light on occasion, but as I sunk back into it again for a second week, I called upon my spiritual teacher for guidance. 

“How addicted to your own suffering are you?” she asks. 

I have no words to respond. I don’t know. 

By the end of the session, I am glowing. Sparkling in delight, in complete trust of her guidance. Remembering what I am: energy, spirit, love, connected to everyone and everything. I am anchored and intend to stay that way. 

That question keeps coming back though, “How addicted to my own suffering am I?” 

Utilising my trust in what I am called to, the decision to attend a rebirthing breathwork session emerges. I have been meaning to go for some time and had countless recommendations for the same facilitator. To be honest, I have no real idea what it is I am going to exactly! I just trust that I am going. 

After a half-hour-long talk, essentially the instruction is: lie down, get comfy, breathe deeply, let all emotions that come up flow, and keep coming back to the deep breath until eventually your body takes over the experience. And boy, after a lot of releasing and deep breathing, something happened. My tears of the pain from resisting love turned into laughter as I am given the message from my late Auntie, “All it was ever about was love.” Sounds obvious. Sounds like something I already knew. But it felt VERY different. Suddenly, the fear was gone, the cast iron and barbed wire were but a memory, and all I feel is love. And I can hold that love and feel vulnerable in that love. I love feeling it so much that it’s worth everything to set it free and let it radiate unprotected to wherever it can shine. 

I knew that there was power in the breath, but I didn’t know that it could transform pain into pure bliss. 

There is so much we don’t know. We don’t know how many tools are out there that can transform our lives, transcend us out of our suffering, and set our spirits free. The power of “I don’t know” is infinite. Only in admitting there is doubt can you build a platform of trust. If you dance around in your beliefs, thinking they are the same as trust, then you won’t get anywhere because a belief is just a thought given to you by someone else. 

What do you know? Know for sure? 

I know that I have never known that I would be sitting where I am today, writing this blog from a bamboo hut on a hill in Koh Phangan. Five years ago, I would have laughed at you if you told me I would have stopped eating meat. One year ago, I would have scowled at you if you told me I wasn’t going to drink again. And six months ago, I would have looked very concerned if you told me I was about to spend eight days in silent meditation, living like a monk. 

All these things feel so aligned with where I am right now, yet the life I am living isn’t even something that I could have dreamed up. I didn’t think I got to live the life I wanted for a long time. I didn’t really know what I wanted for a large part of my life. And if I did know, I wasn’t always showing up as having wants or needs. 

I don’t know how I will see the world tomorrow, and I sure don’t know how I will see the world in another six months’ time when I complete my year spirit free. It’s so exciting to trust that I will experience life beyond my own imagination and to watch that unfold. As the observer of my own reality. 

You know what I also would have never imagined? Celebrating six months of sobriety with a Vipassana. I didn’t know what a Vipassana was six months ago. The only celebration I used to know was alcohol. Get the champagne out, something wonderful has happened! And what I have come to realise, is that whilst it may seem like source of joy and release in the moment, it is actually removing you from that wonderful moment. It is stopping us from being present with all the real, pure emotions of our achievements. We numb ourselves to not only our pain but our joy! And in this sense celebrating with alcohol is a paradox, as it perpetuates our own suffering. 

If I had to think of a reason why I am now headed into the noble silence of a Vipassana to celebrate, it’s to anchor this increasing freedom from chosen suffering. To celebrate by sitting silently with myself. However, the truth is I don’t know why I am doing it. Since I have first learnt about it, I just knew it was something I was going to do. I originally had plans that clashed with it that the Universe has diligently cleared away. And I don’t know what I will uncover or what lies on the other side, but I do know that I am called to go. 

For those of you who, like me earlier this year, are unfamiliar with Vipassana, it is a practice rooted in the teachings of Buddha. Vipassana, which means “insight” or “clear seeing,” is a timeless technique that involves observing sensations and thoughts with mindfulness. Through deep exploration of the mind and body, you gain insights into the impermanence of our experiences and the true nature of reality. Passed down through generations, this ancient practice is now offered as a retreat, providing a space for profound self-reflection, liberation from suffering, and the cultivation of inner peace. 

On my mission to share the incredible joy of inner freedom, I’m captivated by the intriguing parallels between the restricted lives of prisoners and the liberated existence of monks. It’s a remarkable contradiction that holds a profound lesson about our own state of mind. 

Think about it: prisoners are confined behind bars, governed by strict rules and limitations. They yearn for freedom, both externally and internally. And you know what? Many of us can relate to that, feeling trapped in our own mental confines, burdened by negative thoughts, fears, and societal pressures. We construct our own little prisons, imposing restrictions that prevent us from fully embracing life. 

But here’s the twist: monks willingly release attachments to material possessions, desires, and distractions. They embrace simplicity and discipline, dedicating themselves to inner transformation. They understand that true freedom isn’t about external circumstances but about the state of their own minds. 

And that’s the real eye-opener for me. Our minds can either be personal prisons or sanctuaries. The power lies within us to make that choice. By practicing meditation, self-reflection, and letting go of attachments, we can break free from our mental shackles. We tap into our limitless potential, infusing our lives with profound peace, boundless joy, and an extraordinary sense of fulfilment. We become the architects of our own freedom, molding our mental landscape into sacred realms where genuine liberation reigns supreme. 

So, the next time you feel trapped or constrained, remember the prisoners and the monks. Embrace your inner freedom and unlock a world of boundless possibilities that will leave you in awe. It’s time to break free from those mental prisons, the first step being to recognise that we are in one. To be aware and accept that we are often our own prison wardens, telling ourselves we are not good enough, worthy or capable of living a life beyond our dreams.  

Next time you find yourself doubting your abilities, why not entertain the idea that just maybe, it might be possible? What if you can actually do it? Take a moment to play with that notion. Explore how it would look and feel. Let your imagination run wild. Allow yourself to dream. Dance with the idea, even if it’s just for a little while. 

Maybe, in this playful exploration, you can even build a rapport with the prison warden, charming them with a smile to let you out for a brief afternoon outing. And who knows? If they grant you that freedom once, perhaps you can negotiate another excursion in the future. Maybe, over time, the prison officer starts to trust you, and there’s no longer a need for a physical key. 

Maybe this feels unrealistic for you? Maybe you think it’s possible for others but you don’t know if all this freedom malarkey is for you. Great! Start there. You don’t know! 

In a society that often values certainty and expertise, embracing “I don’t know” can feel counterintuitive. But it is in that space of not knowing that true growth and transformation can occur. It opens us up to the vast possibilities and potentials that exist beyond our limited understanding. 

So, as we navigate the second half of this year, let us embrace the power of “I don’t know.” Let us approach life with curiosity, openness, and a willingness to learn and grow. Let us release the need for certainty and control and surrender to the beauty of uncertainty. In doing so, we may find that the most profound wisdom and fulfilment lie in the humble acknowledgment of our limitations and the endless possibilities that await us.