2023 has been filled with some huge challenges. Intentionally I decided to shake things up with my life and make some big changes. Almost two months ago now I packed up my life in the UK and started making my way through Europe to my new home, Lisbon. I decided to make this move back in summer 2022 when I hit this point where I realised that I was just ticking the boxes in life vs actually feeling like I was alive and living my desires. 

That realisation brought be back to when I was 24, I landed in NYC for the first time and was instantly hit with this download “I want to live here, I want to move abroad”, it was such a deep feeling that my whole body felt energised. Then I did what so many women do, shut down my desire and kept ticking boxes – bought an apartment, climbed up the career ladder, searched for ‘the one’ (find a few of them and moved on), travelled to countries I had on my hit list. I did that for 13 years whilst always holding by biggest desires locked into a box and kept ticking off the things that were what “I thought” “I should” be doing. 

What I am not saying is that those things were wrong/bad/not enjoyable, they all served a purpose and gifted me something, so many lessons learned from the highs and lows of relationships, all the wild experiences from different cultures and the people I met travelling, the skills I learned from career that serve me in my soul-led business today, the property that has provided some financial freedom for me – but most of them weren’t heart filled full F**K YES LFG desires, in fact many of them I said yes to out of fear – no regrets, because now I have learned the lessons and the difference between fear vs love. 

Reality is that most of the time what you desire (like me moving country) won’t feel good all the time. Your desires can come with challenges but those challenges are there to bring you closer to the truth of who you are and bring you back to feeling that internal safety and security that we as a collective are conditioned to outsource. Truth is that doing whatever the f**k you want has never been one of the subjects that were taught at school, we were taught to listen to others, speak when spoken to, wear a certain uniform, pass a grade at a certain level to be “accepted”, good girls and good boys do their work on time and the list of control and suppression of freedom goes on.

So of course when a desire comes up for you and maybe it’s not a desire ‘in the norm’ it doesn’t fit the structure you have come from or maybe all that squashing down has you feeling that you are not worthy of the desire because you have so much fear inside of you of failure. And that fear creates stress and anxiety in the body – the stress of where you are feeling deeply unfulfilled with your life and the stress of looking at where you want to be, but feeling like it’s not possible for you. That’s alot for the body energetically so of course when we hit these phases of our life most women experience low energy and zero motivation, because they don’t know how to move past that first step of taking action.

Moving to Lisbon and meeting my desire has brought so much to surface in just a few months. I have welcomed it all, because alongside all of the internal BS I have been holding (that I was not aware of back in the UK!) I have experienced an expansion in my emotional field, it’s as though all the years of inner work with my own coaches and healers have brought me to this season in my life where I can truly experience everything around me in my every day, my level of presence has lifted and the courage in my heart has strengthened. A big part of this journey is trusting myself and having my own back through the dark moments. There were a few panic attacks in the UK before moving here, an opportunity to go deeper and to be with myself, regulating the body to bring myself back to safety and calling in the support of the wonderful tribe of humans I have built around me. The dark has been the biggest gift of building that true self trust because now I have this deep knowing and unwavering faith which feels so powerful. 

And the bigger piece and gift that I have already experienced in being here in Lisbon, is that it has reawakened a desire of mine that I have suppressed since I was 25, you just never know when you unlock one desire just how many others it opens up for you. So right now, I get to settle and ground where I am, appreciate what I have created and then gift myself this next desire. Stay tuned, I cannot wait to share it with you all.