Magic, alchemy and transcending the impossible!

The life-changing magic of 2018!

Over the last few months I’ve been following my inner prompts on a big, bold adventure that has pulled me right out of the life I had been living in a leafy village in Hertfordshire into a whole new world – and country!

I wanted to share my journey with you and some of the things I learned and put into practice that I believe were instrumental in helping me manifest this incredible life change, where I’m now living in a beautiful, secluded valley property in Portugal with the time, peace and creative space to devote to writing my novel that’s been on the back burner for over four years.

Plus, I can honestly say that since being here I have felt the happiest and most fulfilled I have felt in over a decade!

And if you like magic, alchemy and the idea of transcending the impossible, you might find this article useful or inspiring when it comes to creating what you want for yourself in the year ahead.

A lot can happen in a year!

Round about this time last year I was participating in an online alchemy course, and one of the tools I really loved was a visual one for drawing power into the things you want to manifest in your life.

What you do first is get into a meditative space, connected to your heart, Source and a sense of infinite possibility, and then you search for and gather a bunch of images representing all aspects of what you truly wish to manifest. I’m not talking things like a new house or car, but something you wish to experience that has meaning, is a stretch and sets your soul on fire.

These images need to have a real emotional charge to them that touch your very being when you connect with them.

From those images you then distill further, keeping only the ones with the highest resonance. And for each of these final images you create an ‘I Am…’ invocation to repeat daily that conveys the deeper creative power and meaning of each image… “I Am unconditional love… I Am sovereign power… I Am divinely led and supported at all times… I Am awareness… I Am infinite possibility” and so on.

This powerful combination of words and images embeds deeply in your subconscious, and as we know, what we focus on is what we create. But more than that, this is like dialling into and embodying the frequency of those images, because each one is a powerful creative vortex that links who you are being now to that version of you who has already fully embodied these aspects and is living the life you are calling in.

Over time and with focus, this energetic calibration causes any existing limiting beliefs or fear patterns within you to be brought to the surface of your awareness to be released. And once they have gone your energy becomes a match for what you’ve been calling in, which is when ‘effortless manifesting’ happens.

Don’t let the term ‘effortless manifesting’ mislead you!

Creating the vision and focusing on it is certainly a delicious experience, and it’s true that if you follow the process whatever you’ve been seeking that is truly meant for you will frequently drop in with ease, ‘as if from nowhere’.

However, the bit in between is not at all plain sailing.

This is the not very fun bit where we get to re-experience the old pushed down feelings that we long ago locked away when we couldn’t accept our less-than-perfect selves. Or where we get to confront the lies about how small and limited we are, which are showing up as blocks in life in a very ‘real’ way. Or where our deepest fears are triggered and we have to decide whether to continue being a victim or see through the illusion to reclaim our true power.

This is the work we need to do in order to be the person we desire to be, and it can be really tough at times.

But if you do the work and get the support you need to feel safe enough to explore your own darkness, you will transcend the limiting programmes holding the invisible cage in place, and you’ll be free to move into alignment with what your heart is truly seeking.

The key here is to SURRENDER any RESISTANCE to whatever life is bringing you, even if it feels or looks like everything is falling down around you. TRUST that that too is part of the process. And BELIEVE in yourself as the POWERFUL CREATOR that you truly are.

When you stay aligned with this TRUTH no matter what, you will move past obstacles that might have seemed immovable to you your whole life.

Get specific about what you wish to experience

You can use the aforementioned visual transformation tool for many different things like attracting money, confidence, love or a new relationship, greater health, clear direction and purpose, etc. The thing I wanted to make happen was to somehow write my novel.

I’ve written dozens of blogs, programme content, talks, emailers and many other things for my business, but I’ve not written a book before, and I know nothing about writing novels. The story outline came to me in a meditation a few years ago, and more recently I’d started creating characters and scenes, but I couldn’t seem to write it seriously.

Too much of my time was caught up in running my business, marketing and doing my client sessions. Like most business owners I was busy, busy, busy!

This was not the space that my book was going to be born from.

I craved the space to totally immerse myself in the creative flow. I could feel there was something about writing this book that was important for my journey, and that ‘it’ wanted me to write it! However if it was going to happen then I needed some divine assistance!

I had to somehow get off my current hamster wheel, but with ongoing bills to pay I didn’t have a clue how that was going to work out.

Fortunately, we don’t need to know how. I just had to focus, choose and then surrender to the process. Things would change without me having to make them happen.

Make your visioning images dynamic

So for my alchemical visioning tool I collected pictures of women sitting at their laptops in beautiful writing environments surrounded by nature; a sense of spaciousness, productivity and creative joy. I found an image of an angel whispering into the ear of an author helping them to write effortlessly through channeled words. I gathered quotes of success – being a published author, making more than enough money from doing what I love, the writing process being full of ease and flow. And I explored visual themes that evoke the feeling of my book – the rise of the Divine Feminine, reclaiming our power, magic, love, and so on…

Taking the alchemy tool a stage further, I put all the images I’d collected into a folder and used them as my screensaver on my laptop, and they would start revolving whenever I paused work for ten minutes. I found this much more impactful than simply making a vision board because they were dynamic and engaging.

I used to sit and watch them with wonder. Every one of those images pulled me in to a new possibility and sparked curiosity about how it would happen. I imagined how it would feel to be there in that space, writing from the flow, surrounded by nature, getting my book written, published and successfully sold.

It always felt exciting to see my images, and I was also detached from how and when things might show up. I left that part to the universe, which was just as well because the way things unfolded was nothing like I could have imagined!

The sequence of events that took me from there… to here

Like many amazing service-led business owners, most of us have been stuck in the paradigm that to get something done we have to make it happen ourselves, and we carry on, mostly on our own, outsourcing this and that, and maybe collaborating on projects from time to time, but ultimately no one else has our back and cares like we do because our business is our baby, and our responsibility.

Dropping this particular paradigm literally changed everything for me in just three months.

I didn’t realise how transformative it was to be, but I was invited to join a circle of women whose focus was a new evolution of consciousness, where we were learning through a kind of being-ness experiment that abundance, comfort, physical nourishment and all that money can buy is not linked to the old survival paradigm of having to work hard for a living, and doing it all alone.

It was all about freeing ourselves from doing the things we don’t truly care for or that don’t express who we truly are, or settling for what’s on offer rather than going for what your heart really desires. It harnessed the power of shared group intention, peer support and healing sessions, and co-creation with the universe to move each one of us forward in alignment with who we were born to be.

I think it was the first time in my life I fully let myself be held by others in what has been a hierarchy-free sisterhood devoted to feeling, embodying and living from our truth and true power, where we each feel permitted to safely express all of who we were – the shadow side as well as the light – without fear of being judged.

It has helped me become more me than I have known before, it has up-levelled my life in so many ways and it has possibly been the most profound experience of my life!

It has reinforced my belief, from seeing it happen for everyone in the experiment, that simply being who you truly are, and following the prompts from your heart, rather than pushing and striving to become something/someone, following ‘shoulds’ or trying to reach a particular goal, is how we are able to live with more freedom, joy, fulfilment, abundance and love.

The lovely thing too is that this is actually how I work with my clients, but I’ve never been on the receiving end of this kind of support myself. So it has been life changing for me personally, plus it’s deepened my client work because I think my unshakeable trust in the process helps them feel very safe so they are able to fully surrender and allow the most deeply hidden lies and distortions about who they really are to be brought into the light and released.

It is an unfolding process of being, rather than doing, and it relies on the surrender of personal will to that of divine will. Trusting that the process and flow will take you through all the experiences that are necessary to strip back the masks and unhelpful beliefs of the false self. The small version of you that wants you to play it safe, stay the same and live small.

So as I surrendered to this process of unfoldment, I found myself creating more space and time in my life by dropping all the ‘shoulds’ about this or that business task.

First I stopped telling myself that I had to keep doing live streams, videos and blogs every week, and I started only to do them when I had something I really wanted to share. And I continued doing only the things I enjoyed, like networking and connection calls over Skype.

It soon gave me the spaciousness in my life I’d been looking for, but it wasn’t completely easy to allow and enjoy at first because dropping those ‘shoulds’ is no mean thing! I would create busy-ness for the sake of feeling productive or to avoid feeling like I was wasting time – or being naughty and irresponsible!

But I stuck with it because that’s what my heart guided me to do… after all, to experience something different in your life you have to do and be different.

Be ready to face your fears!

I’m not going to tell you that bucket loads of money flowed in immediately either, because it didn’t.

I had to go through a big lesson in trust in the abundance of the universe and in the letting go process. As I let go of my marketing, initially my fear that I wouldn’t attract clients and money magnetised the very thing I was wanting to avoid, and I watched my bank balance drop lower and lower.

But I dug deep, stayed connected to my inner guidance, asked for divine support, reminded myself that ultimately everything that was showing up was for my good, and eventually all fear around lack of money subsided and I was left with such trust that everything would be fine, even when the apparent ‘evidence’ in front of me said the complete opposite.

After a while I really started to enjoy the spaciousness.

And then, once that had happened, ‘work’ flowed my way with so much more ease. So now I was doing what I loved to do for more people and with much less effort, so it didn’t feel like work at all! In fact new clients started contacting me out of the blue because they’d seen one of my videos, they’d come across my website, seen me talk on a tele-summit or someone had recommended me.

It literally felt like magic!

Then I got another big test of faith. I was informed that my beautiful rented flat, where I’d happily lived for five years, was going to soon be sold. It was a nudge from the universe telling me I was too settled inside my comfort zone, and it was time for a change!

After having a good moan to myself for a couple of hours I remembered that the universe is always supporting us, and something good was bound to show up. But I didn’t expect it to happen so fast!

The next morning I was invited to house-sit for a friend for six months while she spent the winter in India.

How could I say no? It was the perfect opportunity to write my book without distraction.

And that is how it all fell together.

But it hasn’t been a ride in the park since then either! That was just the opportunity presenting itself. By saying yes to it I have since had to confront some of my deepest fears.

It has been extremely uncomfortable, intense and often unbearable at times. This is just how it is with the transformation process. People and situations trigger our stuff. But it is OUR STUFF. No one else’s, and when we can own it we are empowered to do something about it.

The main issue that came up for me over and over was a lack of self belief. So the universe brought me all kinds of situations that required me to embody my personal power in a much bigger way.

I had to speak my truth to other powerful individuals who were crossing my boundaries, ask for help, dig deep into self-trust and faith in the universe, and hold unconditionally loving space for people who were lost in their own unconscious fears and control patterns while projecting their stuff onto me and others.

More than once I had to be prepared to let go of everything I was going for, even though I’d given up my home, started the moving process and had all my tickets booked!

So I really have let go of a lot, including all my furniture, clothes and everything else that wouldn’t fit in my little car – radical decluttering, which mentally, physically and emotionally exhausted me, but which created a huge space for something new to come in.

Although it was really hard at times I’m so grateful to those beautiful souls who triggered my stuff, and I was able to eventually see through every illusion of fear that my mind conjured up. Because within every fearful situation there is always some gift and an expansion of freedom waiting to be discovered.

So here I am a few months on, house-sitting in a beautiful retreat house in the Portuguese countryside with money in the bank and no need to ‘work’ in the way I had been. I have the space, time and support to write my novel for at least six months and work with just a few amazing clients.

Ideas for the book are coming through in dreams, meditations and other inspired moments. I’m immersed in the world of my characters and it’s incredible, like nothing I’ve experienced before.

I have no idea what direction I will take at the end of six months of house-sitting, but I know in my bones that now I have broken free of the hamster wheel of living-to-work/working-to-live, I’ve faced down my fears and stepped back into the slip stream of my life, another door will open when it’s the right time.

So I feel truly abundant as we step into the New Year and welcome all it has to bring!

And I hope 2019 is full of health, happiness, love, abundance, magic and everything that you desire in your own life!

To living magically,

Much love