My Story

I was sitting in a meditation hall on the Sunshine Coast of Australia. Outside, kangaroos lolloped lazily in the winter sun. 

It was the ninth day of a silent meditation retreat, and if I’m honest, I felt like I was getting nowhere. My mind was stuck in a loop of negative thoughts, and my favourite pastime, comparing myself to others, was in full swing. I kept obsessing about how much better the other 60 meditators must be doing, as if there might be some scoreboard shown to us of who was ‘performing’ best. The irony, of course, was that I couldn’t know a thing about them. It was a silent retreat, after all.

There is nothing quite like a silent meditation retreat to reveal one’s own echo chambers!

For as long as I can remember I’ve had an almost chronic fear of rejection and failure. Irrational shame of not being ‘good enough’ has persistently lurked in the shadows.

Years earlier, a need to live up to expectations had led me to join the British Army. It seemed like the logical step, given my family’s history of soldiering, but deep down, I was trying to prove I belonged. Unsurprisingly then, I felt like an imposter. I put on a face that I knew what I was doing, but underneath I was often shaky. 

When I left the Army, I swapped one set of expectations for another: the ‘safe’ career, the desk job, the predictable path forward. But ignoring what I truly wanted only led to more anxiety, confusion, and resentment.

My soul longed for adventure.

A turning point came while walking the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain. For the first time in a long time, I felt space to breathe and to simply be. Along the way, a fellow pilgrim told me, with a twinkle in their eye, about a silent meditation retreat they’d attended. It sparked my curiosity and so I knew I had to try it. 

Two years later, there I was, on the Sunshine Coast, grappling with big questions after being made redundant from a job in Singapore. I was seeking clarity and didn’t know where to turn.

By day nine of sitting still and looking inward, my patience was wearing wafer thin and my sense of inadequacy was rising to fever pitch. Then, in the middle of all my frustration, the teacher said something that stopped me in my tracks.

‘Wherever you are is exactly where you need to be.’ 

As soon as I began the next meditation, those words sank in, and something remarkable happened. A surge of energy swept through my body, and I felt a visceral, undeniable connection to everything around me. For hours, I was flooded with awe, joy, and a sense of unity that defies words.

Over time, I’ve come to see that it isn’t my circumstances, or my emotions and thoughts that are holding me back, it is my resistance to them. Fear, doubt, and feelings of ‘not being enough’, have created walls within me and I needn’t make them (or any of my experience) ‘wrong’. The more I surrender to my experience, the more I feel myself rise.

We all have a purpose. Too many of us are stuck in our ‘default’ or ‘conditioned’ purpose, which for me has been to live in such a way that other people ‘approve of me’. It has quietly directed my life from the shadows. Thankfully, each of us also has a more authentic / true purpose, the discovery of which is a lifelong  and extraordinary journey.

I believe it starts, as it has for me, by both following our joy and listening to the wisdom of our pain. My experience on the Sunshine Coast shone a light on both and I’ve been learning to allow them to guide me ever since.