![Kathleen Saelens [ Weave The Artistry Of Your Greatest Legacy ]](https://kathleensaelens.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/UNFURLING_MainSymbol.png)
A tight bud, one petal unfolded.
And for each new petal added to the bloom, adding to the richness of what it is becoming, there are many many moments of “not quite being here, nor there”. It’s true for the roses in my garden. And it’s true for you, stepping into a clear knowing of your purpose.
And that, my Gorgeous, is Why It’s So Hard to Find Your Life’s Purpose. Because it feels uncertain. No longer at home with the thing you’ve known forever, and not yet completely clear, trusting, and confident that what you’re moving towards will suit you any better…
Shedding layers of your identity and stepping into the wide unknown, pulled forward by this deep knowing inside that this is the way forward … but not entirely sure it’s a sane decision …
And so here is a reminder for you:
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No matter where you are in your journey,
know that it IS a journey. A process.
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And I know – DO I KNOW – how much that sucks. I do. Like me, you may thrive on fast-paced momentum and growth (in my corporate work, I loved fingersnap-fast ways of mastering things and fast project turnarounds. In my current work, I LOVE collapsing timelines. It’s my own personal Dr. Who moment). Or maybe, it’s simply the way we’re collectively trained to want things, NOW. With the threat of failure written all over the prospect of not getting it, fast, and getting back into the fastlane asap.
So I know how much resistance you may be feeling in your whole body right now when reading these words about purpose. You Want To Find Absolute Clarity On Your Purpose NOW, right? So – I promise you, we’ll dive into ways towards clarity on your purpose. But for now, please sit with this truth: you can have clarity. AND it’s always also a PROCESS.
A process of releasing so that you may reveal all that you are.
Releasing fear of judgement.
Releasing fear of being seen, of standing out and being different.
Releasing your ‘gives a fuck’ about other people’s opinions.
Releasing a way of being and doing that you have outgrown, that you feel yourself being pulled away from.
Releasing the need to do things a certain way, because that is how it’s done, or how people tell you it ought to be done.
Releasing your absolute relying on LOGIC alone, and slowly starting to follow the path of your heart…
Releasing the need to push, and embracing a beautiful balance of gentle and fierce…
A process of unveiling.
There is this beautifully poetic way of describing this process, used by Amber Magnolia Hill on one of the first episodes of her Medicine Stories podcast (which is SOOOOO good, by the way. If you resonate with how I talk about our journey through life, you may really enjoy her podcast too).
Mythic Threads.
Isn’t that just so gorgeous?
To me, it immediately conjures up images of a richly woven tapestry. An intricate spider’s web, the drops of dew caught between its silk catching the early morning sun and glistening like jewels.
Our life is like a weaving of just so many paths. And some of them, they make us catch our breath with an instant recognition. They run through the forests of our lives like steady meandering rivers, not always recognizable as such when we’re seeking our way through the many many pathways leading off into so many directions – but when we hit a clearing, stand overlooking the paths we’ve travelled from the hillside, we see it, with a sudden clarity: there’s a steadiness there. Going as far back as our childhood, certain paths – certain threads – hold a deep calling to our soul. And like a tuning fork, we weave in and out of them throughout the course of our lives. Always drawn back into its resonance.
Mythic threads. Etched into our blood and bones with a deep longing.
how do you recognize Mythic Threads? here are some examples from my life that may help you tune into yours:
▼ a fascination with magic: for as long as I can remember, I have *loved* stories of adventures, impossibilities-happening-all-the-same, and that flavour of magic conveyed through imagery and stories about elves and witches and wolves. It wasn’t until recently though that I recognized how deep this DRAW to the mystical really ran. Once I has started PHYSICALLY experiencing just how much wider and more magical the world (the life) we inhabit really is, at age 37, I suddenly recalled periods in my teens and twenties when I’d DEVOUR books on near death experiences, and childhood dreams that were more than just dreams. Magic and the mystical have been with me throughout my life – only I couldn’t recognize them as this CORE weaving on my path until I had the intense experiences of awakening in my thirties.
▼ women’s rights: As a student of English Literature, I wrote my master thesis on ‘Feminism in the 18-century works of Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft’. <uhmmmm…. that’s a rather surprising choice…. where did that come from?> Strangely enough, there is no real reason why. There has never been anything in my childhood or even teens that catapulted me into the flavour of activism that runs through my work, then and now. It has just always been there, this deep knowing of an IMBALANCE and a heart, bleeding, for the way girls and women are suffering such high rates of abuse in our world. Again, until recently I thought things like my choice of topic for my master thesis was simply a rather interesting turn of events. And that my intense rejection of the imbalanced way men and women were perceived, treated, and rewarded in my corporate jobs was just me being high-strung; that the way I was upset for days after reading or hearing about women being raped or killed or abused was just me being overly sensitive. Uhm. No.
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What I couldn’t yet recognize at the time, is that all these small, seemingly unrelated events and choices, all string together like pearls on one of my MYTHIC THREADS; one of the big themes of my life, the ways my soul is YEARNING to express and make a difference.
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so where do you see Mythic Threads weaving their way through your life?
Spirals.
The more I walk this path of personal unravelling and rebuilding, the more I recognise that everything is spirals. Fibonacci even in this most sacred of work.
The paths through our forests aren’t one-dimensional.
Rather than “getting there” – we get there, and then a new spiral starts, an invitation to take the work even deeper, to embrace and surrender to it even more fully.
Spirals of growth.
My wish for you, in sharing this imagery of the spiral, is that you’ll come to see your own efforts in “moving past my money blocks”, “finding my purpose”, “doing my sacred work in the world” as never-perfect, but simply, another iteration of growth.
The bigger threads of our lives are often the ones where we feel like the staircase just continues. The labyrinth goes on. I’ve had this with both purpose and wealth consciousness – icky sticky reiterations of the same thing. Except, I want you to know, it’s never really the same thing. Sometimes, our growth is incremental, and our ego is like ‘huh. now THAT doesn’t count. I want to clear this once and for all!’ And you’ll go back to what feels like square one – except it isn’t. It’s always, always, another level UP the spiral (us humans LOVE the idea of going UP, right?). And one day, that spiral will be gone. In its place, there’ll be serenity. And an ‘oh, actually, I’ve got this. I KNOW’ (which is the deep visceral knowing you’ve been honing in to all along). The crazy thing is, you’ll also say ‘OMG, I could’ve made this shift all along!’. Except, when we’re in the thick of it, the walls around us, the distance we feel seperates us from our goal, feels insurmountable. So – NO BEATING YOURSELF UP OVER THIS. You get to where you get to when you get to it. And in the larger adventure of your life, that’s perfect.
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So. Never forget this, Gorgeous. There is a deeper meaning to this journey – and it WILL ALL MAKE SENSE once you make it through the steeper bit. You Will Land In a Place Of Absolute Knowing What Your Purpose Is. It’s just that we’re a bit impatient with ourselves. Which is fine. Don’t make your process, or your impatience, another grievance you hold against yourself.
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Where are YOU bumping into your own impatience and frustration right now?
With where you’re at?
I hear you sister.
Let me know in the comments below….
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part TWO:
HOW TO FIND CLARITY IN YOUR PURPOSE
Connect with Kath
It’s my honour and delight to support you on your journey! Feel free to reach out and connect to learn more about how I can serve you via private mentorship programmes, activations and intensives.
