How to Cope With Sudden Life Change and Find Your Feet

Have you ever had a moment where everything changed in a single breath?

One minute life looks the way it always has, and the next you feel like a completely different person standing in a completely different world, and nothing you believed about yourself, about the people around you or about life itself seems to fit anymore😩

😣"I don't even know who I am anymore… how am I meant to keep going like nothing's happened?!"

If you're wondering how to cope with sudden life change, my love, let's start right here. You're allowed to not have it worked out yet. What you need first is somewhere to put your feet, a breath you can come back to, and someone beside you while the ground settles🤗

I know this place in my bones

As a little girl I could feel everyone's energy, and I knew exactly how to bend and fold and contort to harmonise the people around me. I carried their baggage for years, until one day I woke up and couldn't move, walk or talk. My husband found me with a tear running down my cheek.

What followed was a 12-year journey through doctors and specialists. I'd lost the function of my immune and adrenal systems, burnt out from a lifetime of working so hard. I got better. Then I got influenza A, and with it, the pericardium (the sac that sits around my heart) filled with so much fluid that it crushed my heart. With my husband and my almost-four-year-old daughter watching from the end of my hospital bed, I died.

I left my body and moved through a tunnel of light to what I now call the origin of divine creation, pure, loving energy, and I heard a voice: "You can either stay here with me or you can go back there and do what I sent you there to do." I weighed it up, and I chose to come back, to my husband, my little girl and the work I was sent here to do.

Days later I was driving home over the bridge I'd crossed since I was a little girl, and I looked at the sunlight on the water and cried.

I was scared, and yet I felt so safe.

That wasn't the only time my world turned upside down either. Our home and our belongings have been flooded and destroyed in two separate floods, five years apart. And in 2019, less than nine months after giving birth to my youngest daughter, I was dying again.

So when I say I know what it's like when the ground disappears from under you, I mean it in my bones. That mix of scared and safe is exactly where I'd love to meet you today💖

When your world turns upside down, what's actually happening?

A big shift in what you believe is true is usually underway. The beliefs and patterns that don't match your True Essence anymore are being shaken loose, and while that's happening it can feel like there's nothing solid left to stand on.

These moments come to all of us in some form. A job ends without warning. You move house and the new place doesn't feel like home yet. A relationship changes shape, or your body says enough. Whatever the doorway, it can feel like your memory's been wiped and you're not quite sure how to function (and if your memory's anything like mine on a normal day, that's really saying something😂).

I think of these moments as a course correction, your life adjusting its direction so it can match who you really are. That doesn't make them easy, and it doesn't mean you did anything wrong to bring them on. Sometimes life moves fast and there were no whispers to hear, and that's ok too.

There's a gift in a big shift, and we can find it together

Every upheaval carries a new awareness with it. Usually it's the realisation that the way you've been doing things can't keep going, and a clearer sense of what your life's asking for next.

You don't have to dig for it on your own. Sometimes the gift only becomes clear when someone else is holding the space and you can finally breathe out. That's alot of what I do with my beautiful clients, and it's why I never want you thinking you've got to have this all sorted by yourself before you're allowed to feel ok again.

Those gifts can lead you towards the work you love, relationships that feel like home, finally loving and accepting yourself, or the changes that support your happiest body and life✨

Some of the fear might not even be yours

Change brings up fear coz you don't know yet what's happening or what it means. And when you're a sensitive Soul, there's often another layer, coz you're feeling everyone else's fear about the change on top of your own.

When a job ends, you might be carrying your partner's worry about money, your kids' unsettled energy and your boss's guilt as well as your own grief. No wonder it feels SO heavy, my love🥴

So before you try to make the fear go away, ask one question: "Is this mine?" What's yours gets your love and attention. What isn't can go back to where it came from. You can't work through a feeling that was never yours, no matter how hard you try, and it's such a relief to finally stop trying.

How do I hear my inner guidance when everything's so loud?

Your body's still talking to you, even in the chaos. Guidance shows up as physical sensations, emotions and the thoughts that travel with them, like a heaviness in your tummy, a tightness in your chest, or a little "hmm, that doesn't feel right".

We're receiving guidance every moment of our lives, and most of us were never taught to look for it, which is why it can feel like it's not there at all. It's there, my love. It needs a little space to be heard.

Getting better at hearing those whispers is a skill, and like any skill it grows with practice and with support. You don't have to learn it on your own.

You'll probably keep drifting back to the fearful thoughts (I feel you, my love😅 they're SO convincing when the ground's moving), and that's ok. Each time you notice, bring your attention back to your breath and ask the two questions again. It keeps you centred, and it lets you move what's been keeping you stuck in the very areas that are being turned upside down right now.

How long does the in-between last?

As long as it needs to. The space between who you were and who you're becoming is real, and you don't need to rush through it or have it all figured out before you're allowed to feel safe again.

When things get real, look past the fearful thoughts for the message of change they're pointing towards. The timing might feel awful, and you can keep listening anyway, one breath at a time, with someone holding your hand if you'd love that🤗