In 2012 I fled to Bali, on the trail of eat, pray, love, (I’m sure you’ve read Elizabeth Gilbert’s best selling book by now). I like so many women was in the search of something more, so I bought 3 tickets, in the name of Bali, South France and Thailand.  And that’s me getting stuck into a Bellini!

I ended up feeling more lost than ever.   Bali was full of expats, mainly Australian and European at the time.  I met and made friends with women  who had packed everything up to leave the rat race and move to paradise, some even their young families only to realise paradise was not their out of jail card. It was not going to change anything about how they felt about about themselves.  That was the group consciousness I found myself in.  But what else would my experience of been? We only attract what is on our vibration right? That is the law of attraction.

I had recently separated from someone we’d been together 17 years, then lost someone special in my life though a stroke, leaving me spiralling into the dark corridors of my mind. I felt emotionally and spiritually bankrupt, my health wasn’t in the greatest place either as depression became my partner.   I had disconnected from who I really was, something that happens to many of us at some point in our life, with the curve balls life throws, through ill health, divorce, bankruptcy or worst still death of a loved one.

Being a spiritual connected person I had all the tools, so I turned to my inner spirit to get me out of the funk. I read all the books on laws of attraction and manifesting at the time too. But I couldn’t understand why everyone’s lives around me were moving on yet I felt I was standing still.

Truth is it wasn’t one thing, I had healing to do.  I was disconnected from my truth, my focus was more on what I didn’t have going on in my life than what I did have.   Things felt messy!  It wasn’t until I got to work on my mindset, and started my own self love affair with life that things started to shift. I had to get back on that love train.  Aligning with my soul, my gifts and where this was trying to guide me. I was receiving the nudges but missing them. Stuck in the voice of the monkey mind.

Truthfully if I had a £1 for every time I judged – blamed, shamed and criticised myself today I would be well into 7 figures and wouldn’t have to worry about hiring a team to help with marketing funnels and FB Ads!

Thankfully winding forward today I tell a different story, one where I’m happier in my own skin, I’ve built the successful global business, empowering women to heal their own lives, listen to their intuition, and create lives and businesses they love too.

I listen and trust my intuition (well most of the time). I’ve manifested a beautiful home, it looks like the cottage in the movie Holiday, (it evens has a picket white fence).  I have friends I love on the same vibe and a fur baby, Milo I adore. I spend time skiing in the winter season and I’m off travelling to Bali this year, Spain and South France with other location independent women entrepreneurs.

And I get to support other women (powerhouses) align more with their soul gifts and make an impact leaving their own version of a legacy. For some that might be one of adventure, for other’s it’s their soul purpose, or their own business. Underneath them all is the same undying theme, living a more meaningful and fulfilling life where they feel they are contributing to something much bigger.  Something we should be teaching children in school today.

Having hit bottom through my own life’s experiences I know we can always bounce back stronger with fierceness, and passion, by having courage and a faith in something bigger. A knowingness that it will all work out. And there will be a net to land on.

But we have to give ourselves the space to linger, to dance in the void when it comes (as it will) but too often we don’t.  We are too in a rush to get on with life and the next thing on our to do list.  But this is the place of creation, to hear the nudges and we can only do so when we slow down enough to hear them.  Then comes the leap into the unknown, trusting that net will appear.

Bali wasn’t my savior, but it was a magical place. One that I will return to this year on my own group Mastermind and retreat.

LOVE note! You can never run from who you are, even to paradise. If you want to change your life, change your inner world, starting with a shift in perspective, get comfortable with being uncomfortable, healing is messy, life is messy, nothing is perfect.  I’m a recovering type A personality, so perfectionism was all I knew.  God I remember studying for my first Degree, I had to get a merit at the very least but had my eye was on a first.  A pass just didn’t suffice.  I lie so much pressure on myself.   This was the way I did life.  Always trying to prove something.  |To myself, to my father, to everyone.  Why?  I didn’t believe I was good enough.

That’s no way to live a life.  Life isn’t perfect. Life gets super messy. Relationships get super messy, when we lean into this we know we are living.  We are growing and we are feeling.  Live is for living.  Don’t do it feeling numb!