A quiet morning, a sudden knowing, and the moment I stopped running from the sacred.
I didn’t choose this path. Or perhaps it’s more honest to say — I tried everything I could to avoid it. For years I had walked the edges of something I couldn’t name, feeling its pull like a tide moving under still water, insistent and patient and utterly indifferent to my resistance.
“The sacred doesn’t announce itself with trumpets. It arrives quietly, in the crack of an ordinary morning, and waits.”
It was an unremarkable Tuesday. I remember this clearly because unremarkable Tuesdays are exactly when life tends to rupture open. I was sitting at my kitchen table, coffee cooling in front of me, watching the light move across the floor the way it does in early autumn — slanted and golden and somehow already grieving. And then something shifted.
Not dramatically. Not the way the movies would have you believe. There was no vision, no booming voice, no light from the heavens. There was simply a knowing — the kind that settles into your bones before your mind has any words for it. A deep, quiet, unmistakable sense that I had been running from something that had always been mine.
What Initiation Actually Looks Like
We have inherited a mythology about spiritual awakening that involves dramatic rupture — the burning bush, the road to Damascus, the thunderclap of enlightenment. And sometimes it is like that. But far more often, initiation is the slow accumulation of small surrenders. It is the moment you stop arguing with reality. It is the grief you finally let yourself feel. It is the morning you look in the mirror and decide, at last, to be honest.
My initiation had been building for years. Through the betrayals I hadn’t yet named as teachers. Through the caregiving that stripped me down to something raw and essential. Through the losses that left me with no performance left to give. By the time I arrived at that kitchen table, I had been initiated many times over — I simply hadn’t had the language or the courage to call it that.
“Loss is one of the oldest initiatory technologies. It removes what we thought we were, so we can discover what we actually are.”
The Moment of Surrender
That morning I stopped fighting. Not in defeat — in something closer to recognition. I recognised that the path I had been resisting was the one that had been holding me all along. That the shamanic work I had circled for years, the coaching I had always felt drawn toward, the writing that had lived inside me unexpressed — these were not coincidences or distractions. They were the shape of my life, waiting for me to inhabit it.
I want to be careful here not to make this sound tidy. It wasn’t. The weeks and months that followed were full of doubt, full of the particular loneliness of becoming someone new while the old self is still very much in the room. But underneath all of it — steadier than anything else — was that original knowing. The one that had waited so patiently for me.
If you are reading this and feeling that same pull — that quiet, insistent tide — I want you to know: you don’t have to have it figured out. You don’t have to be ready. You only have to be willing to stop running long enough to feel what’s actually there.
“You are never alone. We are always being divinely guided.”