My mission: Have Miracles, Will Travel


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In retrospect, I have known what my mission is for at least 25 years –  but I took a very long and convoluted route to get here. I have done a lot of things for work in my life, ranging from the seriously corporate to the deeply holistic and quite a lot in between, often at the same time. Working as a Hospice Chaplain with hundreds of people as they were dying gave me the privilege of sharing the priceless perspective of what really matters when people look back on their lives. I had been given the message over and over but it took losing my home, my health, being made redundant from the job I loved and the sudden accidental death of my mother all in the space of a couple of months for me to finally get with the program.

Left to my own devices, I would have stubbornly pushed on in a life that was not truly joyful, or very good for me and not really fulfilling my true potential even though my job meant so much to me and I felt proud of my work and the way I did it. I truly loved my the patients and families but my profound capacity for empathy was both my greatest gift and my achilles heel. I used to work in end-of-life care with sick children and even more difficult than that, in trauma where I would be dealing with the accidental, or worse still, deliberate deaths of children and by comparison, working with mostly elderly adults in hospice should not have been the thing that broke me yet perhaps there is a cumulative effect to sharing people’s tragedy and sorrow, an invisible threshold of how much one can bear to feel.

What I came to realize was how lucky I had been to experience such a chain of events. They were in fact an incredible blessing because they gave me to the rare opportunity to have my life as I knew it come to an abrupt halt without actually ending. I was profoundly grateful to find myself in the unique situation of stopping  the world I had created and getting off for a while and really think about what I wanted. If I had been given a choice, I would never have had the courage to walk away from financial security and my fear of letting people down and if I am honest, I was very attached to the comfort of having my identity tied to a job which I thought really meant something. I am deeply appreciative of the fact that my wake up call hadn’t come too late in order for me to learn the invaluable lessons I had been offered and so that I can share this epiphany with as many people as I could.

The comfort of this revelation was deeply challenged by the fact that, in spite of appreciating that I was getting an incredible opportunity to recreate my life, my fear far outweighed my imagination. I freaked out about what I was going to do now, how I was going to make enough money, would my private practice would be able to support me?, what is my elevator speech?, do I need a niche? what should I call myself?  and other very frustrating questions.

I worried A LOT about being too much or not enough. I had teeny existential tantrums, complaining to God about having to do marketing when all I wanted to do was to get on with being a healer.  I wrestled endlessly with what to call myself because although the first thing out of my mouth is ‘I’m a healer’,  I thought I couldn’t put that on my website because it doesn’t really tell people what I do and it might sound too weird, flakey or “woo-woo” for people to take me seriously.   In fact, I spent DAYS rewriting my entire website in order to seek the approval of the imaginary people in the imaginary corporations in my head that I hoped very much would hire me,I kid you not. This was the crazy town I was living in until Grace befell me. With incredible embarrassment and humility, it finally dawned on me last week that actually God has never asked me to do any of that marketing stuff and that maybe I have been tragically over-thinking what I was supposed to be doing with my life for a couple of decades.

What if, I pondered to myself, actually all I have to do is have the balls to come out of the closet as a healer and just get on with this unconditional love thing, glitter and all?  What if it’s actually just that simple and I don’t need to worry my pretty little head a moment more about the targeting, the marketing, the niches, the job title, where to find the people so I can heal them etc, and can leave that to people – err- beings well above my pay grade?  What if it doesn’t even really matter if I fail, because after all, who’s really caring or judging? And that, is how it came to be that here I am at age 48 and 3/4, embarking on the biggest adventure of my life,traveling the world on a mission to love, heal and inspire as many people as I can, whilst trusting the process.

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