“Follow the yellow brick road..follow the yellow brick road.. follow..FOLLOW…follow…follow…follow the yellow brick road…”

My journey in search of spiritual enlightenment began at a young age. My first real experience of spirituality was when I made my Holy Communion. I can remember feeling a sense of belonging, so much so that I begged my parents to pull me out of public school and send me to Catholic school at the age of 9. Through my tween and early teen years, I was a devout church goer. And in my late teens I joined the Church youth group, but I soon began to become disillusioned with the Church, and stopped going.

In my early 20′s I felt something missing, so I joined the Charismatic movement of the Catholic Church. But that too was short-lived. Organised religion just wasn’t something that resonated with me.

I drifted for a few years, recommencing my search for spiritual enlightenment again in my 30′s, immersing myself in the world of the Goddess. As I had lost touch with the essence of me, I needed to reconnect with my inner-feminine. I studied the goddess archetypes, read their stories and tried to apply their teachings to my everyday life.

Each day, when confronted with life’s challenges, I would ask myself: “What would the Goddess do?” Now that’s a great question, but what I should have been asking myself is: “What would I do?” I realised that by asking what the goddess would do, I was still trying to be someone who I was not, and not embracing my inner-Michelle.

So that’s when I turned a page in my life, and began to live my life more consciously. I started to listen to myself, rather than everyone else; I began to rust my instincts. Everything in my life went under the microscope: my core values, my workaholic work ethic, my choice of friends, and even the values of those closest to me.

I found a life coach to work with who shared the same values as I did. She came at things from a spiritual perspective and challenged me in ways that at times made me squirm and want to crawl under my bed and stay there. She pushed me to my limits, helping me to discover my shadow-self – you know, that part of yourself that you deny or suppress because it makes you uncomfortable or afraid.

Before long, I started to study the chakras and ultimately the teachings of Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung. The more I read, the more I delved into learning about my shadow self.

Now we all have a shadow, and a confrontation with the shadow-self is essential for self-awarness. We can’t learn about ourselves if we don’t learn about our shadow, otherwise we end up attracting it, mirrored back at us by those around us.

An adage from the alchemists of ancient times says: As above, so below, as within, so without, so that the miracle of the one can be established. This means that what is within us is also outside of us, that inner-states of consciousness are reflected in our daily lives time and time again. However, if we are willing to look at the significance of these repeating patters, we will see the synchronicity  of the events and situations in our lives, and ultimately begin to become one with ourselves.

Read Part 1 of my story

Read Part 3 of my story – coming soon

Often we try to be the person others perceive, or even want us to be, rather than remaining true to ourselves. I spent many years aspiring to be the person who I thought others would accept and love, only to discover the ‘person’ was only a shell, and I didn’t know how to be her.

I was exhausted. It was only after I had a serious health scare that I threw caution to the wind and decided to get to know the real me. This is probably one of the most confrontational things I’ve ever done in my life; taking a good, long hard look at oneself isn’t a walk in the park.

I was a workaholic – I worked incredibly long hours, yet something was missing in my life. After years of defining myself as Michelle the marketing manager, I wondered who Michelle the human being was, and why I had abandoned her.

It was then that I realised that I had lost myself … and my Soul skipped a beat.

After I looked beyond the superficial and began to look deeper, I discovered a soulful woman; she had compassion, strength and a great sense of humour. I found that I began to draw people to me with whom I felt comfortable and for the first time in my life I didn’t feel like an outsider.

So the question is: How do we stop being who we aren’t?

How can we shed the mask of the people-pleaser, and the obsessive need for acceptance and love? And how do we escape from that corset of self-dout and negative self-talk that keeps us so inhibited?

Finding me wasn’t easy – in fact it was rather messy. I made mistakes, and experienced disappointments and failure. I read and researched, and engaged in endless conversations with my friends, even losing some along the way to betrayal and ignorance.

Perhaps one of the hardest lessons I had to learn was the fact that it is in many people’s best interest for you not to find yourself.

As I began to walk my spiritual pathI found some friends joined me, while others fell away – threatened by the unknown or unfamiliar, I couldn’t say. At first I was hurt and confused, wondering if I had done something to offend. But soon I realised that I had reached a fork in the road, and that I’d taken one direction, while some of my friends had taken the other.

Now in my search for love and acceptance, I had become the perpetual rescuer. Add this to my workaholic tendencies and I was displaying all the negative attributes of the solar plexus archetype – the servant; the diligent and dedicated worker who focuses closely on details, works quite thoroughly, and serves others well to their satisfaction.

I was also very good at giving my power away; when a friend got into trouble, or needed help, I would make them my responsibility. I would try to ease their path and make the hurt go away.

While it wasn’t wrong for me to show compassion and understanding, to was wrong for me to take over their lives and to treat them like victims. What I was doing wasn’t empowering them; rather it was doing quite the opposite.

I made some mistakes. But what I did learn is that you have to make mistakes to find out not only who you are, but who you are not.

Read part 2 of my story.