What would my body like me to know about safety and support? is a prompt I used when I hosted a 5-day meditative writing and channelling ritual for a small group of women navigating uncertainty in various aspects of their lives. 

What I didn’t expect was to be a participant in a ritual I was facilitating. 

I looked down at the blank page, there only to take notes about the ritual, and yet my hand picked up the pen as though it were answering a call I had not heard, and I began writing along with the other women. 

One of my angels stepped beside me and began to whisper what I needed to hear, the same words the pen was scribbling. 

How could this be? How am I to hold space for these women and also participate? 

But as always, I didn’t ignore the pull. I did exactly as I was guided to do. 

So what did I write?

I am no longer in survival mode. I am being supported; it just looks different from what I expected. 

The time of slaying dragons is over. I’m in an era of peace and prosperity, where I feel and know the Universe is co-creating with me. In fact, one of my guides who arrived at the start of my being in the liminal space attached his desk to mine and has not left it since. I knew then that as long as I showed up and did what I was able to do, my spiritual team would take care of the rest.

But old ways of living take a long time to shake off. I’ve never had an easy life until now. Up until this point, everything I’ve achieved has been because I’ve climbed a mountain carrying a boulder on my back with chains shackled at my feet. 

Every time something good happens to me, I’m looking over my shoulder for the equivalent in a negative form, because that is how it has always been. 

But now, like Moses and his people who wandered the desert for 40 years, I’ve finally arrived in the land of milk and honey. 

You’re probably wondering what living in the land of milk and honey feels and looks like. 

In February, after much research, I realised my body stopped responding to the way I lived my life. I was doing cardio and HIIT six times a week, eating mostly whole foods, with a couple of takeaways a week, and moving through life like I was the Road Runner in the Looney Tunes cartoon. 

And yet my joints were aching, I was constantly getting UTIs, and my stomach was getting bigger each time I worked out. I no longer felt serene after exercising either. Instead, I felt as though I had gone 10 rounds with heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis. My head was blown, and I was seeking to be knocked out as a way of rescue. 

And so with dread in my heart, I wrote down a plan. I didn’t want to because I knew what it takes to implement new habits. But I couldn’t go on like this either. So I prepared for another mountain climb. I packed the boulder myself and chose which chains I was to be shackled with. 

I stood waiting, carrying the boulder and chains, yet the mountain did not appear. I just put it down to doing something new, and after a couple of weeks, the novelty will wear off, and the willpower will activate… the two weeks appeared and turned into a month, and I showed up each day, but there was no mountain, and no devil showing up telling me what I wanted to hear for me to give up. It was seamless. 

I enjoyed the process, and my body began to change. My joints stopped hurting, and my UTIs disappeared. My body began building muscle, and one day I woke up to abs showcasing a four-pack. 

So what does all this mean? 

People still operating in survival mode, even when they have resources, are always rushing around, always tired, have no time for themselves, and are usually dealing with health issues. 

I was being asked to slow down. Actually, I was being forced to. And in the slowness, I understood I was no longer operating in survival mode but from a garden, with loamy soil, guided to choose the seeds that I wanted to plant and nurture. 

Click here to download my free heart meditation to help you slow down the overthinking and anxiety so that you can lean into your intuition for guidance and clarity

There was no force in this, just a space asking me to trust myself. I was asked to show up as a creator, as the creator, and my guides became less instructional and more like, “What do you have for us? We are at your service.” 

I put down the boulder and chains, picked up the seeds and small garden shovel, and started digging up soil to plant my seeds. 

My garden was to be full of wildflowers, untameable and free, nurtured by my hand, and it would give back to me limitlessly. 

I planted wisdom, truth, trust in myself, the ability to not give a fuck about what people think of me, for my voice never to be censored, nourishment, love, patience, kindness, fun, play, abundance, and to be fully witnessed.

These showed up as sunflowers, Scarlett Indian paintbrush, marshmallow hibiscus, cornflower, and wild bergamot. With Oak trees on each side of the garden and strawberries appearing when my guide has a sweet message to give me, or bitter leaves when the message is not quite what I want to hear. 

Nevertheless, a garden that brings forth ease. That’s not to say I do not face challenges, but the challenges do not feel like a sinking ship. They are teaching me how to do the same things differently. 

For instance, I’m learning to lean into uncertainty instead of guarantees. To choose intuition over logic. To be okay with not knowing the answers and not having it all figured out. Trusting that how I show up is enough, and the universe will take care of the rest. To trust in my gifts after being gaslighted for so long about them. 

The garden is allowing me to bloom, and in that, I am nurturing the parts of me that have been hidden and allowing them to shine. 

I have no idea if this garden is a permanent fixture, but it has shown up while I’m in the middle of a transition, and so every day I show up and tend to it. 

I pray that in this lifetime you get to experience a place of ease and peace, where your gifts and passions are nurtured, and you are fully witnessed by yourself. 

The garden you cultivate is a space that is pruning you to be the woman you’ve always wanted to be. 

Want to know how I got here? Click here to read The Liminal Space: Living in the In-between

How do you know you’re living in survival mode? 

This can vary from person to person, but for me, I used to have anxiety attacks a few times a month and experience anxiety daily. 

I would always be worrying about something bad happening. Even when things were calm, I’d worry that something bad would happen. It was debilitating because I would never take risks. I always chose the path of guarantees even when it sacrificed my happiness.

You can read more here at The London Psychiatry Centre

How do I stop living in survival mode? 

I went to therapy and began to work on healing my trauma. I was a neglected and abused child who never felt safe, and with therapy I worked through the wounds. My body became a safe space. 

I started to truly see who I was and realised that I am important, so I stopped neglecting myself and started to choose myself instead. 

I deserved safety, peace, and security. I realised that stability on the outside is not something I can control, but I can control the stability within. 

I reparented myself and became the mother and father I desperately needed in my childhood. 

If you’re based in the UK and a person of colour, click here for a directory of therapists for you. 

If you’re based in the UK and not a person of colour, then click here for a directory of therapists. 

How can a person survive in survival mode? 

Twelve years ago, I became homeless with my children because of the abuse I was experiencing at the hands of their father. 

They were two and six years old at the time, and it was the scariest time of my life. We were homeless for three years, living in a hostel, and there was no guarantee that the council was going to help house me. 

In the beginning, it was so stressful that I had boils forming on and around my ears. They were sore to the touch, and yellow pus would ooze from them. 

Instead of hiding my situation, although embarrassed, I became transparent to the people in my life, even acquaintances, about my living situation. 

They would tell me stories of experiences that were similar to mine to help me through it. I don’t know why, but it really did help me, so much so that I started a business selling natural skin and hair products. The income I brought in helped me maintain a car so that on the weekends I could take my children to the beach to play in the sea, and I could visualise a better future. 

I then went back to college and became a qualified beauty therapist and started up a mobile facial business which brought in more clients. 

Once my son turned four years old, he went to school, and I went back to being an accountant in corporate. We were still homeless, but now I had a regular income. 

A year later, we were given our permanent home. 

So, to give this mini story a practical action you can take with you, focus only on what you can control. I couldn’t control the housing situation, but listening to others who were once in my shoes helped me to have faith that all will work out for me. 

And then I focused on making money and making sure my children were not affected, because I had control over that. 

A couple of years ago, my children and I were going through old photos, and there were photos of us in the hostel. I told them that we were homeless at that time, and they couldn’t believe it. My daughter, who was 17 years old at the time, thought we were on one big adventure and loved our trips to the beach and nature. They enjoyed our late-night trips to a friend’s house on Friday nights (that was because of the issues at the hostel) and loved being able to sleep in the same room as their mum. 

This brought me to tears because, in hindsight, I was doing much better than I had thought, and I want you to know that you too are doing so much better than you actually think you are.