Navigating the cycles of being lost with intuition, gentleness, and trust.
This is such a big topic that I feel needs to be written about again and again.
Feeling lost in life can at times leave us frustrated, angry, sad, despondent or even depressed. I’m 48 years old this year. I’ve been through the wringer of life. I’ve seen the lows that we can experience and I’ve seen other people’s lows too. So I don’t talk about this lightly when I say, the experience of being lost is a very human thing. I believe it is part of our journey of being human that cannot be avoided. But it is an experience that we can learn to navigate and even come to honour. How?
It may strike you as counter intuitive but I believe what we need to help us when we are lost is spiritual practice. Not just because it helps us self-soothe and calm, or because spirituality is one of the big ways we can find meaning as humans in this life. Rather because it helps us to start to build a map of our inner world and out of that map, we can discover our intuition, our inner knowing that is always there to guide us, even when we are lost.
At this point I’m worried you’re thinking ‘but I’ve tried meditation’, or ‘I don’t like meditation’ or ‘Reiki is weird and not for me’. I’m not proposing that you do these practices that I do. I am also aware that the idea of discipline, of showing up intentionally each day can seem impossible. I’ve struggled with this myself for many years so I get it. It’s not impossible — if we approach it in the way that works for you.
In this post I draw from my own experience of being lost, finding my authentic self, and I share some of the perspectives that this experience has gifted me. Let’s start with a story.
Being Woven
Around the early 2000’s (my early twenties) I was working as a receptionist and god I was lost. People would ask me what I really wanted to do with my life and I couldn’t answer with any conviction. Which, of course, was actually fine at that age—or any age. I used to say as a teenager `you know, I have 80 years or so to figure out what I want to do’. Oh for the freedom of a teenage mind!
Something happened in my receptionist years for the first time that I’d noticed in my life. My technical interest was being gradually exposed to engineering work and I was noticing burning questions in my mind too and strong feelings. Although I didn’t have a clear course or the awareness yet of what to do or where to go I was very focused on developing my inner world. (thank you, past Sally). And through noticing what was going on inside, I began to notice what felt like a thread in my life, “sustainable energy”.
I mean, `so what’ everyone finds an interest eventually. But no, what I had was a knowing. I was being pulled in a direction. It was subtle but compelling. And this was the first time I noticed it and named it – a thread. How wonderful right, there was something there I could grab on to. And more than that, to me it felt a sign that there were things at work in my life, working for my benefit underneath everything. I followed the thread to a job in wind energy, then a Master’s in Engineering — all from noticing that subtle, recurring interest.
I have since noticed this thread again and again pulling me in different ways.
Even if we don’t notice it yet, there is always a pattern occurring in our lives. And when we see it, many things will make sense in my experience. It may show up as a thread. It may show up in dreams. It may show up in all sorts of ways that it is for us to discover. But it is there I assure you.
We Need to be Open, to Lie in Wait
While our life may feel out of our control at times (maybe all the time), and any pattern elusive, what we do have control and influence over is learning to notice the pattern. And what could be more important than actually finding and following the pattern that is occurring? If we knew the pattern was there and how to find it, we probably wouldn’t feel so lost.
The reason I could see this pattern in my twenties was because my mind was tuned into finding patterns, to listening and observing. I was aware that there was something called intuition that I could access to find guidance, that this was something important. I’d done a lot of reading about intuition and a lot of practice connecting with it. I had taken risks, I had been daring with my inner realms. I was also gifted with a family culture that made me aware that intuition was a thing and made it ok to do and try weird woowoo things. And I was practicing – journalling, meditating, experimenting, forming a relationship with the unseen and unconscious.
To notice the pattern, we have to be open to there being a pattern. This `modern’ world has so many ways to cause us to distrust ourselves. ‘The science’ has become part of the vernacular over the past twenty years. I am for science, the disciplined and coordinated method of studying and understanding the universe. But I am not for some of the philosophical biases that cause people to become adherents to a faith of skepticism that shuts down the empirical knowledge that naturally occurs and has occurred for millions of human years!
We know this. As a human being, here right now in this moment, breathing, you and I, we are the product of millions of years of evolution. Millions of years of surviving, and thriving and sensing and thinking and developing and creating and weaving and testing, and wondering. We sit on the shoulders of a giant. The giant is our gift of genetics, our sensing, our cells. Our mind and heart. Now what happens in our world is that people don’t really trust the unseen.
I was fortunate because I grew up in a family that had some awareness of the unseen and the unconscious and did talk about it. We nurtured possibility. Also, in my Catholic childhood, I would speak to `God’ and expect answers! Now I’m writing this I realise how funny that is. Let’s just drop `God’ though because of so many reasons and just say that, in this world, we are so accustomed to thinking in a certain way about the world and using our minds in a certain way and taking this reality as given.
But as soon as you start questioning, you realise this idea about the mind is really weird. I mean, where does a thought come from? Have you ever traced a thought? I used to lie in bed in my sleepy mind and I would think about that and notice it. I realised I could freeze a thought, and then I could trace it backwards. I could fire off and each time I would get a little closer to its origin. Where was its origin? Mystery!
Our brains might be wet and cellular, but our minds are swirling energetic mystery bubbles. We’re a product of an intelligence that lives way way beyond our life. And that, is really cool. And that intelligence though uncanny and maybe uncomfortable to our intellect, is whom we need to form a relationship with. We need to understand her valleys and mountains and pathways and summits and trenches and oceans. We need to be open to this, and her patterns.
This will take some trust and trial and error.
The Importance of Being Lost
When I feel lost, this is such an important thing. It’s taken a lot of self work to get to seeing it that way, but being lost is very important I’ve learned. For one thing it shows me something. It shows me that there is a part of me that is yearning for something. And what is it that we are yearning for? We don’t quite know, do we? But it must be damn good. Because even if we are in an objectively good job or other situation, with all the ‘right’ things in place around us, it can cause us to break our world.
I should know, I exploded my world in my thirties when I realised my own transness and came out to the world despite this very objectively `right’ situation. I went against everything that looked right in my life because my feeling that things weren’t right was so strong. But that knowing and that yearning is often so counter to what we think we should be in our life. And the most important thing is – we have this yearning, again, even amongst ostensibly `right’ conditions. And a decade on from that coming out, despite having blown apart my whole world and experiencing the pain of loss and change, this intuitive knowledge carried me to shores that are abundant and real and thick with truth.
We are going to keep getting lost — sorry
It keeps happening. You know, going back to the Sustainable Energy thread, eventually I found that even though I was in what felt like the right area and the right job, this didn’t last. I still didn’t feel I’d found my place in the world. There was still yearning to be something, to be enough maybe. Isn’t that interesting. And even though I’d found this thread and had followed this thread and found a place, in other ways I was lost again.
I believe it’s important to learn to embrace this truth that we may be lost again and again, that perhaps we won’t find a clear stretch of life from now until the day we move on where we feel completely at home forever after. In acknowledging this, we can own it and even honour this facet of existence as a human.
I know it’s hard. I know it’s hard when we hurt inside, when we’re out of money and resources. Coming to this place of awareness is not perhaps something to aspire to when we’re in a pit of despair, but rather when we have the space of months or years to absorb our time of being lost.
But when the time comes, when fairer times are upon us, it is possible that we can find the space to understand that being lost is very natural. When we fight who we are and how we work, we can create a terrible experience for ourselves. It is in the spirit of acceptance that we can find peace and even more than that, we can even find surprising grace and beauty in this acceptance. It’s not easy.
You might not know how it looks from your perspective reading this blog or watching any of the videos I make. But I have been through searing emotional pain coming to do this work. I am riddled with the effects of low self esteem, and judgement and fear. In 2023 as I came to start making videos I had tremendous shame come over me, shame that is real pain inside, like 9/10 pain. It was crushing. Whenever I seem to push my creative boundaries I suffer. I don’t know exactly why, but I feel scared and alone and lost. I feel lost as I come to write this very blog. Judgement coming up in my mind, navigating the writing process without really having developed a creative writing process that’s mine. There’s a lot going on.
But, what keeps me going is my knowing. I know and I am following a knowing. An instinct that keeps me afloat, that keeps my compass needle pulling in a direction.
Sometimes the Last Place We Look is in the Mirror
Coming back to spiritual practice, emotional work, self work, these are so important when we feel lost and when we don’t. Practice and self work is so important because it helps us let go of shame, fear and anger. It helps us embrace our grief and find our joy. This work helps take the edge off our human experience of feeling lost or that we haven’t found meaning yet. And it may even give us the space to find activities or ways of living that give meaning and help us feel found.
You may find like I have, that a profound feeling of connection with life becomes quite readily accessible by doing daily spiritual practice. And you may find that this connection starts to give you a sense of meaning outside of any career or achievement or life wins. You may find too, that you wake up in the morning feeling perhaps a little lost, but that through your devotion to your own cause, your practice of centring in on you in your way, that you’re able to home in on your sense of belonging in the same way you make a cup of coffee.
By daily working internally to notice feelings and patterns and develop interoception, and bringing more safety to our sometimes challenging inner world, in this way we come to teach ourselves about our intuition, our inner knowing. This knowing is like a foundation we can come back to even while we might feel lost at times. We can be both lost and found together.
We often overlook how much spiritual self-work can help us when we’re lost. So often we are looking for the right job, or the right relationship, or the right something that we feel is missing from our lives. It seems so reasonable and it’s what we’re taught by the world – something is missing, then fill the gap. If this, then this. It doesn’t occur to us, in fact it is possibly counterintuitive to go inside ourselves to find meaning, because we are so accustomed to searching outside ourselves in this `modern’ world, we may only know to look outside ourselves.
Or as is so often the case for highly sensitive people – our inner world may be confusing, unstable or feel like it’s opening us to a potentially frightening spiritual world — a topic I’ll explore further another time.
Keeping a Spiritual Practice can Sound Impossible, But It’s Not
I understand this. I was on and off it for decades. We’re already doing it in our lives anyway. The threads are already there. It’s just a matter of finding our own way that suits us, and to follow our special interests, our heart, our soul. We must be inspired to a kind of discipline that is kind and nourishing and not tough and dominating.
I want to encourage you with all of my heart to find this practice if you don’t already have it. To find the actions that if done daily for a time, maybe 30 days, maybe 2 months, will change your experience of life. Because this is your life, right now today, in this instant. And there is a whole of you that wishes you to touch life today and touch those around you in deep intimate ways, not in some imagined future when everything is perfect, but rather today.
And this whole being is never lost, and in your way you can come home to this whole being and you know that you belong in this world. I hope you’re inspired to cultivate or reignite the sacred fire of your spiritual practice.