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Your purpose is a theme, not a destination

Your purpose is a theme, not a destination

A lot of my channelling and mentoring work focuses on helping women align with their purpose. I regard this as some of my most important work because it empowers women with the information they need to do what their Soul is calling out for.

We can spend a lot of time, spinning our wheels and going down blind alleys without this information. While I don’t believe any of that time is wasted – there is always a reason and lessons to be learned from these situations – living in alignment with your purpose helps you stay motivated when the times are tough. It also helps us understand why we might do things that aren’t obviously connected but are still, definitely, taking us in the right direction.

Using words to heal, empower and share stories is a key part of my purpose. This explains why I have spent 20-plus years working in communications and public relations. The same theme is also evident in my work as an author, blogger and mentor. For me, words are the key to everything. I may explore other avenues along the way but I will always return to my words.

Your mind may tell you that your purpose must look a certain way and lead to a specific outcome. But your mind will usually be wrong.

You can do more than one thing in this lifetime – your purpose is a theme, not a destination.

Think about Cleopatra, Michelangelo, Marie Curie, Martin Luther King – none of them did only one thing. If you let your thoughts restrict what living in alignment with your purpose looks like, you could miss out on all kinds of adventures and discoveries.

If you want to learn more about living in alignment with your purpose, let’s talk! One of my programs might be just what you need to get you moving in the right direction for you.

Do you have visions and premonitions?

Do you have visions and premonitions?

I had a vision during savasana at the end of my yoga session yesterday. At some point, my mind drifted away from my teacher’s words and I found myself somewhere else entirely.

I heard the screech of plane tires hitting the tarmac and saw a plane taxiing along a runway. I saw inside the plane and heard the pilot say, “Welcome to Fiumicino Airport, it’s a beautiful sunny day outside. Then I saw myself, getting ready to deplane with a look on my smiling face that said, “Here we go.” This was followed by a moving image of me walking through the airport with a single, large suitcase.

I shared this vision with my teacher afterwards and found myself crying. Just by holding the space to allow me to drop into the moment so deeply, she had given me a beautiful gift – a vision of what is yet to come.

It’s the second time I’ve had a vision at the end of a yoga class. A few years ago, an image of a ticket was shown to me with a specific date on it. I hadn’t asked for any insights regarding tickets. I was just enjoying a yoga class. In my mind, I was already planning to head to Italy mid-year. But the date on the ticket was a few months later. I convinced myself that it wasn’t a plane ticket. Maybe it was for some other trip? Perhaps I would stay longer in the country than I’d planned and it was the date for a train trip. After all, there was no way it would be that long until I got on a plane and got out of town.

The Universe had other plans.

My intended departure date kept being pushed back. Work and other commitments kept putting blocks in the way, again and again. Months passed and my frustration grew. Finally, when I could see a way out, I asked a friend who specialises in travel to find the best value ticket for my departure. I specified the time I wanted to land and the week but not the date.

Guess what date she came with?

I remember shaking my head and rolling my eyes. The Universe can be terribly annoying and irksome when she is right.

Fast forward to early last year and this time the date came to me in a different way. I was planning to travel to Italy again but I couldn’t feel into the best time to go. I just knew I was going and waited for more information to present itself.

A while later, I had a night disrupted by spirits and my guides discussing things in my house. Doors were opened and shut, and I caught random words and phrases as I traveled in and out of consciousness. They seemed to be organising things (who knows what) but all I felt was irritated. I repeatedly asked them to take their discussions elsewhere because I wanted to sleep without interruption. They paid me no mind and kept at it.

As I woke in the morning, a date was clearly in my mind. It didn’t mean anything to me though and there was no accompanying image of a ticket or any other information. Perhaps I needed to know the date for some other reason?

I Googled, researched and asked friends if the date had any significance. But I came up with nothing. Eventually I accepted what probably should have been obvious from the start – I booked my plane ticket for that day and the people I subsequently met and the experiences I had on that trip have set me up for my eventual relocation to Italy (post-Covid-19 crazy).

I don’t have a departure date for my next trip but after my vision yesterday, I know the Universe will let me know when the time is right. I have trust in that. It’s hard not knowing but, the Universe tells us what we need to know, when we need to know it. That’s how it works.

This is how I function in the world – I have one foot here and one in the ether. It’s a balancing act that has sometimes been difficult to maintain.

Early in my psychic awakening process, I was so ungrounded and my connection so strong, that sometimes it felt like I was being pulled out of my body. That’s what happens when you have a powerful gift that’s unmanaged and it’s one of the reasons I do my mentoring work now. I understand how it feels to be ungrounded and strongly connected, and I know there are ways to manage things better. So I teach others what I’ve learned along the way.

Receiving insights and premonitions during yoga classes and during the night are just two  ways the Universe sends me information. It’s all part of the weird, freaky world of being a psychic channel.

Welcome to my slightly crazy and definitely unusual metaphysical party!

If you’d like to learn ways to harness your intuitive gifts and live your purpose, please book in for a free chat. I can tune in and help you map out a way forward that is right for you. Or check out my courses and sessions on my website.

Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash

Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Our Lack of Progress

Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Our Lack of Progress

Earlier today, I learned that feminist icon Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the stalwart Judge of the US Supreme Court had passed over. Just days ago, she told her granddaughter, “[my] most my fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.” The Universe had other plans and now it’s possible the Trump will replace her with a conservative judge who will continue the rolling back of individual rights including those bestowed through Roe versus Wade. The rights of women to decide what happens to their own bodies is under a very real threat.

Instagram later showed me an interview with Glennon Doyle who said white women learn early on “that we will accept our proximity to power and all the comfort and safety and belonging that will get us but in exchange we will never ask for any real power. We will stay quiet and grateful and accommodation.” Glennon is a keen observer of a common female reality.

Then an old work colleague rang me out of the blue and we talked about how women still struggle with self-worth, give their power away to their male partners and need to be vigilant about their safety in ways men never have to be. Women still need to be aware of their surroundings when they go out, watchful of who is around them, wary of walking at night, and consider their personal safety and how a man might react if they reject him. Women still need to do this, even after all the time that has passed since the 80s when my colleague and I were in our teens and 20s.

We talked about how every second woman we know has experienced some form of abuse as a child or an adult, at the hands of a man.

After all of this, I can’t help but feel tired, sad and disheartened. How much more do we have to fight for rights that are so fundamental? Why are there still discussions about what women can and can’t do with their bodies? It’s not as if anyone ever talks about mandatory vasectomies for men? Can you imagine the uproar if someone tried to legislate such a thing?! Still, it seems women’s bodies are still somehow public property while men’s bodies are not. One 87-year-old judge in the US Supreme Court was the last bastion standing up for a woman’s right to choose versus a government’s move to dictate a woman’s decisions regardless of her own personal desires and autonomy. Now RBG has departed, the threat to women’s legislated rights to choose is very real in a country that has, until recent times, been a leader of the free-world.

Meanwhile, the truth of Glennon’s words stay with me because I know women give away their power every day – we frequently give it away more than it is taken from us. We give it away because we desire those feelings of safety and belonging that Glennon talks of. We give it away because we have become so convinced that it is the normal thing to do. We watched our mothers do it, our friends do it, celebrities do it, and so we have done it too. We ignore the red flags and accept less than we’re worth. We are too often taught not to use our voices stridently to ask for and claim what is rightfully ours. Instead we are taught to ask nicely and be nice at all costs or otherwise face rejection.

My former colleague and I are children of the 70s yet we see women in their 20s still dealing with the issues we thought we had fought through and trounced so they would never have to. But still they struggle to unthread the patriarchal ties passed down from mother to daughter and indoctrinated through cultural tropes in film, music, social media influencers and reality TV. You only have to watch a few minutes of The Bachelor to understand how little we have moved forward.

The not-good-enoughness, the I must “help him” at my own expense and the excusals of behaviour and red flags with the age-old “but I love him” continues. And even though on one level, social media provides so many opportunities for individual expression it also strangely, drives strong messages of conformity. How can women rise if we are still trying to fit into a norm that we helped create and exist in, while trying to create something new that is not yet realised?

It’s September 2020, RBG has died and it feels like we aren’t moving forward.

Tomorrow is a new day and I’m sure my optimism will return. My drive and belief that we can change things for the better has not left me. It just feels a little subdued today. I can only hope that, somehow, we change things over the coming decade so that the girls being born today will not have the same experiences in their 20s that this generation is having.

Seeking honest and practical advice about the things that matter – love, relationships, coping with life, choosing your path, managing stress and anxiety? Lucretia provides free advice at DearLucretia.com. It’s time to take the filters off and have a real conversation about life! Note, your name will be changed before your question is published to ensure you remain anonymous.

What is Corona showing us this week?

What is Corona showing us this week?

“If you look at our prime minister at the moment where he has $270 billion to invest in missiles to displace people, why doesn’t he have billions to house people with dignity and safety? Why isn’t that part of the Covid-19 stimulus package? … here’s your chance to do two things, put billions into social housing, keep Jobseeker at the rate it is now and don’t return people to poverty. Because if you’ve got no way out, if you’ve got no income security and no housing security, that’s how you get those high-rises. They shouldn’t even be there anymore, should they?” Kon Karapanagiotidis, Asylum Seeker Resource Centre commenting on the lockdown in Melbourne’s public housing high-rises on The Briefing podcast, Thursday, 9 July 2020.

If you’re in Australia right now, the Corona situation is starting to feel shaky again. With much of one state on lockdown, many of us are wondering, will it be our turn next? Certainly, in the global scheme of things, Australia has suffered very lightly indeed, so far. Can we continue to be the ‘lucky country’ when it comes to Corona?

At the moment, I sometimes find myself unconsciously holding my breath then unexpectedly sighing it out. It’s a reminder of the stress I’m carrying in my body – a stress I know is not exclusive to me during these unpredictable times.

Some in the spiritual community talk of this as a time of rebalancing the planet and we have a few more years to go yet. When my mind grapples with that concept I feel…challenged…despairing…resolute…hopeful? My feelings shift like the sands on a windy beach.

Then the Universe steps in and sends me a gentle reminder of where I should focus my attention. Today it came through the words of Kon Karapanagiotidis – he was interviewed on The Briefing podcast earlier this week about the public housing lockdown in Victoria. For those of you who don’t know about Kon, he is a community leader who supports and advocates for refugees in Australia. He founded and still runs a charitable, not-for-profit called the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre which is entirely community-funded and has never taken a cent of government money – this is a deliberate strategy to ensure their advocacy remains uncompromised.

I have no doubt that Kon makes many politicians shift uneasily in their well-padded seats. He and his team, along with supporters and partners within the refugee advocacy sector, successfully lobbied for the Medivac Bill which guaranteed people seeking asylum (human beings) transfer to the mainland for medical treatment when assessed and referred by doctors. I still find it gobsmacking that in our ‘lucky country’ we needed a bill to ensure sick people could receive the medical assistance they needed…as instructed by doctors. Equally appalling is the fact the government couldn’t wait to repeal the bill when they had a chance. But let’s face it, even a cursory look at how successive Australian governments (from both sides of the political spectrum) have treated refugees for decades is enough to show just how low politicians will stoop for easy votes and out of sight/out of mind expediency.

I’m sure many politicians would love to dismiss Kon as just another bleeding heart but they couldn’t sustain this argument for long because he is also a well-educated, articulate pragmatist. And that makes him difficult to dismiss or silence.

I wasn’t surprised to hear that he and the ASRC team had stepped in to provide food for the people on hard lockdown in Melbourne’s public housing high-rises. I also wasn’t surprised to hear him encourage people to donate to other local charities for this cause instead of than the ASRC. He feels that supporting the organisations who work with the affected communities in the long-term will have a greater impact. To hear the head of one charity diverting donations to another charity is highly unusual, even in a sector based on giving.

As someone who has long-worked with low socio-economic communities, Kon has used his platform this week to point out one of the issues that Corona has starkly unveiled – the inadequacy of public housing in Victoria. While I don’t live in that state, I don’t doubt the legitimacy of his statements because the evidence seems to indicate he is right.

More broadly, I think Corona is exposing many of the social problems that have been unaddressed for far too long across Australia.

Up in my hometown of Brisbane, a friend says many children from a local school did no work during the last lockdown here – they had no internet at home and their parents either couldn’t get to or couldn’t be bothered to travel to the school to pick up the hard copy work sheets. Some children did no schoolwork for many weeks. This highlights existing socio-economic problems where teachers and schools provide a lifeline for kids who otherwise slip through the cracks. This is not a new problem and reminds me of when they added fluoride to the water here in Brisbane. The government told us it would help prevent rising levels of tooth decay in children and the community. Certainly, over the years, I’ve heard horrific anecdotal stories from dentists who practised in some of the areas most affected. But adding fluoride to the water felt like a bandaid measure. The government added another unnecessary chemical to our water supply instead of addressing the underlying issues of poverty, education and lack of community support.

All these thoughts and many others ran through my head as I listened to Kon’s words and I took away the following Universal message.

When we feel like things are darkest and we don’t know what is coming next, turning our attention to how we can help our communities is one of the most important things we can do. Doing this takes our anxiety and uncertainty and channels it into action to make the world a better place. Find the causes that you feel called to, then find a way to help – donate funds, give your time or increase awareness by talking about the issues on your social media channels. Do whatever you can.

We have a lot of social problems that need to be sorted out. They aren’t new and they aren’t very sexy. But they need to be addressed. Covid-19 and the lockdowns are simply exposing in sharp relief the problems that many were choosing to ignore for too long.

Whatever you are struggling with right now, there is always someone else who is struggling too. Perhaps this time of upheaval is showing us this more clearly so we reach out more often and live more in alignment with that saying, “We’re all in this together”. Our ability to pull together in this way, to make things better for everyone, is what makes us the lucky country.

We need to be feminists

We need to be feminists

When I was a teenage girl, I read almost every copy of my mother’s collection of Georgette Heyer novels. Set mostly in pre-1800 England, the romantic tales included balls, confused women with love in their hearts, and sometimes ruthless men who softened in the end. It depicted a fantastic world full of chivalry, silk and honour. It was light years away from my very ordinary 1980s life in Australia.

In a most contradictory fashion, my late teens saw me increasingly outspoken about feminist issues. I was and am still a woman who believes passionately in feminism. I believe in equality. Women would not have the rights we do, without feminism.

It has been 30+ years since I started reading Heyer and learning about feminism. In some ways, things have changed a lot during that time. In other ways, not so much.

As an adult, I realise that Heyer’s romantic stories veiled a time when women were usually nothing more than chattels with few, if any, rights of their own – if you’d like a horrifying look into that world, I recommend you watch The Duchess, a film about the life of Georgiana Spencer (let me know if you notice any similarities between Georgiana and the life of her later relative, Diana).  

My teenage self thought women would have equality by 2020. I imagine her beside me now – she has disappointment written all over her face.

There is still a long way to go before the scales are equally balanced. Women are still treated as property in many countries throughout the world. Too many women are still treated like that in Australia too – take a look at the domestic violence statistics for the evidence of this.

Women still don’t have equal representation at the top levels of industry or government – we are still greeted by a sea of mainly male faces leading major companies across the globe and dominating our parliaments. Why are women still such a minority? And don’t tell me it’s because women have to leave work to have babies because Jacinda Ardern has busted that myth wide open. In her case, instead of trying to conform to a way of doing things that was established to suit the needs of men, she’s adjusted things to equally suit the needs of a woman.

Despite the evidence that we have a long way to go, I often hear women say they do not identify as being a feminist. But if you want equality for women, by definition, you are a feminist – please visit a dictionary if you don’t believe me.

But the word ‘feminist’ feels too radical for some, it seems. It’s too disruptive. It conjures up…oh, I don’t know, images of screaming women, burning their bras. It also comes with images and stories of women being targeted and harangued by enraged men seeking to maintain the status quo through covert and even overt threats.

If you are a woman and you want equality, smiling nicely and playing within the existing structures and according to the rules and structures that we didn’t create, is unlikely to get you there. It hasn’t got us there yet – why do we think doing things the same way will change anything?

I’m not anti-men and I’m not anti-romance either. I still love a good rom com film and highly value chivalry in a man.

But if you believe feminism isn’t needed, you’re not looking at the truth of the way things are. If you want equality for women, then you are a feminist. This means you also need the tools and support to allow you to speak up, stand out and be disruptive. Because, yes, you will need to disrupt the way things have always been to create a world where power is more evenly distributed. We need to create new ways of doing things that don’t just support the way things have always been done.

We need to be feminists.

Feeling stuck? I can definitely relate!

Feeling stuck? I can definitely relate!

It all started in the early hours of New Year’s Day when a very tall and very wide bloke (you could say he was built like a brick shi!house) decided he give out free hugs in the nightclub. He said he’d had to bulk up so he could “keep up with the boys back home”. Then he proceeded, in his rather inebriated state, to lean all his bulk into me while he hugged me. My spine curved into a C-shape backwards and I felt a tugging sensation in my lower back. My stilettoes were more than three inches high and didn’t give me a solid base. Later, as I stood in the inevitable line waiting for a cab, my back felt a little sore.

Over the next few weeks, I had a bit of physiotherapy and then continued on with my life as normal. I was in a full-on, senior role in a high-pressure work environment and had a frenetic social life that matched a single woman in her 30s who loved to meet people, dance and have a good time.

Then, somewhere between ANZAC Day and Easter, I bent over in the shower and felt a sudden, sharp and very painful feeling in my lower back. I could barely stand back up again and can remember feeling fearful and panicky. Aside from my much-loved cat, Super Puss, I lived alone. I called in sick and somehow managed to lever myself into the car to drive to see my physiotherapist, Anne. I remember the look on her face when she came into the waiting area to greet me – she knew something was very, very wrong. I was in so much pain.

It turned out I had a desiccated disc in my lower back. As someone with hyper-flexible hips who danced Latin but didn’t have much core strength, my back didn’t have enough support. I was also highly stressed. That guy and his hug had triggered a weakness and begun a trajectory that led me to Anne’s office.

Ironically, I’d never really understood when people said they had back pain. I mean, I was compassionate to a point but a small part of me always thought maybe it wasn’t really that bad. Ha! Turns out I was definitely wrong – thanks Universe for that lesson.

I had to give up all the things I wanted and valued – my yoga, my dancing, socialising, my stilettoes (going to work in sandshoes everyday felt humiliating by my standards). I went to work, came home, went to physio, came home and that was about it. Most movement was painful most of the time. Getting out of bed was a challenge that required strategic thought and concentrated coordination. Anne was incredibly supportive during this time – every step of the way, she encouraged me, propped me up and was firm when needed. She was a godsend.

However, I wasn’t always gracious and accepting of my situation. It’s incredibly hard when your body decides to do something you don’t want it to do. There were times when I felt so resentful and frustrated. I can remember being halfway through a rehabilitation Pilates class for people with back issues and thinking, “I don’t belong here with these back problem losers!”. I felt so full of anger that I started to cry. I got up (slowly) and left. My exit was a concern to Anne and later, when I told her what was going on in my head at the time, she didn’t say a lot but she didn’t recoil from me either. It wasn’t my finest moment but I guess she’d seen people caught in the lows of the healing process before. It sucked.

But while I was in all this pain, stuck mostly at home, feeling, resentful, lonely and wondering if I would ever get back to where I wanted to be, something interesting happened.

For years I’d been talking about writing a book. I’d written ideas and anecdotes on random, scrappy pieces of paper, post-it notes and in notebooks. They were shoved them into a box in my office and left there. Then were also notes in journals and on my computer. I was going to write a book…someday. People told me I should definitely write a book. But it never quite happened.

Suddenly being forced to stop, be still and stuck at home with nothing else to do, I found myself wanting to pull all those notes together. At the very least, I could compile everything into a single Word document.

Over the following weeks and months, Super Puss and I spent a lot of quality time together as I sifted through all those random thoughts and typed them into the computer. But hey, it’s not as if I had somewhere else to go. Being stuck meant I had nothing else to do – so I moved on something long overdue.

Eventually it was all in one document and eventually too, my body started to heal and I was on the road to recovery. Dancing still wasn’t really on the cards but my sexy stilettoes were back on my feet.

A year or so after that awful day in the shower, I was fortunate enough to obtain a lucrative voluntary redundancy. I could be self-funded for a year and in my mind were two things – I could finally tutor at the university part-time and write my book. I did teach at the university and completed the first draft of my first book, The Men I’ve Almost Dated, just after my birthday in October that year.

Why am I sharing this story now? Honestly, I’ve been feeling very resentful and irritated. I am here in Brisvegas when I had planned to relocate to Italy by now. By 30th June I would have obtained my 12-month student visa to study Italian and would be moving into my apartment in Florence. But due to Covid-19, I am not doing these things and instead, I feel stuck. Freaking incredibly and frustratingly stuck.

I’m in the process of accepting that I won’t be moving there for at least 12 months. Of course, I am grateful to be in this country, safe and with all the bounty we have here. And I know a lot of people are in far more desperate situations than I am. I recognise that I am lucky, so very lucky. But I am fighting an internal rebellion with my Soul – she longs to be in Italy and is always called back there. Unfortunately, 2020 has a plan and an energy of its own that, let’s face it, is turning everything we all planned and hoped for, on its head.

I was musing on my frustration and feelings of stuckness this morning and then recalled that time when I hurt my back. That injury led me to take my writing and my book seriously. If that bloke hadn’t pushed all his weight onto me, I may never have written my book at all. One thing leads to another and another but it doesn’t always lead to what you plan for or necessarily want at the time.

I know I’m not the only one who feels stuck right now. We’ve all got things that we want and can’t have at the moment. Sometimes I feel like a bird locked up in a cage – all I want to do is fly.

But when I recall how my first book came together, I’m reminded that the Universe will often force us to pause when we don’t choose to do it for ourselves. In these times, the Universe is saying, “Wait. Now is the time to focus on all the things you’ve delayed because you were too ‘busy’ before. Wait. There are more things that need to shift first before that other thing can occur. Wait. Be patient. Focus. Just wait.”

I’ve got books to finish and a business to keep building. I will get to Italy, just not when I planned to. This breaks my heart. But I realise there is always a reason for the unplanned and unwanted delays we experience.

We just have to be patient and wait for the Universe to reveal the answers when she’s ready.

You can get your copy of The Men I’ve Almost Dated at all good online bookstores or via Lucretia’s Book Store.