The story of awakening to my soul mission (so far!)
As I write this blog, I am reminded that it was only a year ago that I learnt the term Lightbearer in a transmission from my guides and was told that I am a Lightbearer myself and that I would be helping fellow Lightbearers on their journeys too - much to my surprise. I also learnt that I had agreed on a specific soul mission to support humanity's collective shift in consciousness like the other Lightbearers.
Now, my guides have been nudging me to write my own story of awakening to my mission. Personally, for me it feels too early to be writing about it as I feel I am only in stages three and four of The five stages of the Lightbearers path - actualisation and expansion! However there is only so long I can ignore the cosmic nudging and pestering, so I will share with you my journey to date in the hope that it might inspire you.
Young person, ‘old soul’
I remember telling my husband that at about the age of 4 or 5, I started asking the question ‘what is the meaning of life?’ That by the age of 10 it was the first thing I thought of when I opened my eyes - but he was doubtful and didn’t think it could be true. It wasn't until our daughter reached the same age and was asking the same big, curious questions, that he one-day said ‘I believe you now, I see it in Isla, she is asking those questions, she thinks like you’.
Along with this, I've always had this intense sense of urgency, that life is short, and there was a lot of learning and growing to do and that I wasn’t to waste the opportunity. So existential questioning and desire for a deeper sense of purpose started early and I felt very alone with that as my peers were not interested - and neither was school.
Knowing and questioning
I also had this nagging feeling that there was ‘something’ I was meant to be doing… Like I had forgotten something important. It kept coming up again and again in my 20s. However, each time I checked in with my with myself and my guidance through channel writing I would get a very playful ‘oh just enjoy yourself!’ which conflicted with my inner sense and felt a bit confusing.
When I look back now, I realise that I was being given the opportunity to explore and question the world, without any real pressures or responsibilities. I was really trying to ‘discover myself’. During this time, a question that kept arising for me was, how do I make decisions? Many people I talk to about it, find it a very odd question. ‘Well you just do, you just know!’. However as a chronic overthinker, I could turn things around in my mind in multiple directions so decision-making felt very, very hard. It was this question that had plagued me together with a relationship break up that led me to exploring my own intuitive awareness in my mid 20s.
Lost and discovering
In my 20s, I felt ambitious. I still didn’t know what I ‘really’ wanted to do, so I picked something that I thought would satisfy my quickly bored (if unchallenged) mind and with a desire for something new, aimed at theatre project management. I did make some headway in the theatre world and worked with wonderful people and interesting projects, but I began to discover - I didn't care enough. It wasn’t going ‘deep enough’ for me, I wanted to be involved in personal transformation through different means so I was going to have to make a change.
That change came about quite dramatically. When I broke up with my long-term boyfriend and left the city where I'd been living for 10 years. I became a boomerang child and moved back in with my Mum. I had no idea what I was doing next, I was 28. My friends joked that I was going through a quarter life crisis - I was frighteningly lost, and had lost any grounding I had. Not long after I had an injury to my arms that stopped me being able to work full time for several years and had no recovery date.
Cremation grounds of becoming
Little did I know that my world was falling apart for a reason, this was all part of the learning and becoming. That I was entering waves of ‘healing crisis’ periods that would include clearing trauma symptoms which would last a decade. During this time, I started studying and practising Buddhism and Shiatsu - then EFT, hypnosis and so on. I was learning about the mind and consciousness, energy, and the body, the quantum view of the world.
I was making new friendships and meeting new mentors who spoke ‘my language’ and trained me or held mirrors up to me. I was receiving an incredible amount of love, support, healing and learning through what for me was a difficult inner process. I was exploring different training, healing modalities, reading, trying to find the answers to heal myself but also land at a more authentic and intuitive understanding of the esoteric reality. I was a piece of coal in the earth under pressure - hoping, unknowingly, to gradually become a diamond.
Journey, journey, journey - Interests, wounds and gifts
What I didn’t understand at the time, that I see clearly now - (because I am not in it!) was that most of the work of a ‘Lightbearer’ is BECOMING the person you need to be to do the work. It is NOT ‘trying to figure out the niche, or the project, or the modality and so on’ (which is what we can get fixated on) - it’s healing your own wounds and cleaning up your own personal mess that leads you to your own life philosophy and skills that you then have to be able to teach or offer others.
A key part for me, as I'm covering my soul mission has been to keep following my questioning and healing path which has led me to discover new teachers, new fields of interest, new trainings and so on. Hearing Tad Hargraves talk about your niche being a blend of your wounds, gifts and interests or passions were really clarifying for me when I heard them in relation to my soul mission. I thought - Ah! I see this is what I have been refining and understanding all this time.
Learning about myself and my wounds, realising I am dyslexic, I am highly sensitive, I am an intuitive, I had experienced narcissistic abuse so struggled with boundaries and this caused trauma symptoms which I needed to heal from, and all the learning that came from that process I could share. Refining my skills and gifts as a healer and soon teacher through following my philosophical interests as well as doing training got me to a different point. All of this TOOK TIME. None of it could have happened overnight. No one was there giving me the answers. All of this knowledge and skills I felt I needed to share.
Following a feeling
We love to know what we're doing. For me at least, this journey has been about following a feeling and having absolutely no idea what I was doing or where I was going. I think I'm lucky because I'm naturally confident and self assured in many ways (I am also human and positive feedback goes a long way!). So following an intuitive feeling and taking a risk or a leap into the dark (even when it was scary and unknown or I lacked faith) never felt like there was another option I could take - whether that was living a career or a long term relationship etc, I just had to listen. Each time it was clear it was the better decision, my confidence grew in my intuitive intelligence to do it again. I think people have learnt to trust me with it as I have trusted myself and the universe.
I have always had this feeling that ‘something really good is coming’ or ‘this is going to work out really well’ - and the closer to that I have gotten, the more people around me can feel it too saying ‘I have a really good feeling about this business’. I have also had a very opposite and basic response to situations or methodologies that I had reached the end of the road of, a voice would say ‘not quiet this’. It never tells me ‘the answer’ - but I just know this isn’t the whole truth for me, there’s more to learn, which is why I stopped practising healing modalities - developing my own and left Buddhist ordination training to explore mysticism.
Stability vs flow
Our ego wants stability, the known and honesty - to play small. Our higher self wants growth, to be challenged to learn and to meet our potential. In the material world with its linear expectations, I think this unknown and messy figuring it out; when everyone else seems to have ‘life’ sorted out it can look insane. I have never felt like ‘a fuck up’ - to me that looks like wasted potential, but I do feel kind of ‘behind’ in my career because of this journey. However as my wise friend Tasmin kindly said ‘you need life experience and self knowledge in your field which takes time, before you have something to share and teach’.
So even in the mess of it all - the power of intention is great and I had a sense ‘it would come together’, it was possible and I could heal and find my way. This isn’t a logical journey, it's a creative and dynamic one. If you're taking this work seriously, you're not able to stay in situations that are stagnating. Even the good ones that have been incredibly helpful and nourishing, but they have reached the limit. So an important part of this process has been about recognising endings. Whether that's difficult relationships that are draining your energy and you need to cut ties, or spiritual communities that have given you so much, but you need to find your own path now. It doesn't necessarily mean all is lost. Friendships can be kept and mentors maintained - but what that looks like might be different to what you expected and that's okay.
‘Trailblazing’
There is no career map for this journey as a lightbearer. You are by nature, trailblazing your own path. It unfolds as you walk along it. My whole journey has felt like I've been in the dark with a torch and the inner compass of my intuition has been guiding the direction, but that sense hasn’t always been clear. Your personal development is so key to it all. Personally I think I am also lucky on this path to be a nonconformist and each time on my journey I was told I can’t do something - like ‘change your mental programming’ I thought ‘you’re wrong’ and I was determined to prove them wrong.
You may be lucky like me to be supported by visions. In my early 30s, I started having flashing visions of the potential future which made no sense to me at the time and I took to be a metaphor. Now I have the same visions - as though I am completely in the vision now, because it is much closer - currently I see crowds of people and a stage I teach on. It can feel a bit mad, as I am still doing mainly one to one’s as I write (in mid 2024) and it’s not happening yet! I only just ran a beta test weekend workshop to friends.
Clarity and the dark
A friend and colleague of mine, book coach Leah Kent has this beautiful description of the rhythm of intuitive information and hits - that it's like the sun rising, we think ‘Oh hooray suddenly I have this amazing clarity and I can see everything, I know what I’m doing…’, but then, as we plunged into the night and darkness - we cannot see, we can begin to feel lost again, and uncertain losing our clarity. This has really been my experience of this journey, moments of great clarity, and then being plunged back into the dark - thinking what am I doing again?!
It’s normal to feel you do not know where you’re heading or what you’re meant to be ‘doing’. The journey will be different for each of us, depending on our nature. However for me as someone who is very logical and likes to have a plan to map things out, I have been drip fed information by my guides - because they know what I am like and I would plan too far ahead, wondering off down the wrong track and miss the key work I was meant to be doing internally. I have had to learn to trust, have faith and deal with my doubt - everyday (in this journey intuitive signs can feel supportive at times). Just because you develop a strong sense of intuition, doesn't mean that you are without doubt. Just as someone who courageously goes into battle is not without fear. Just take the next step.
Support in changing and transforming
Part of the process for me has been continuous and also ‘spontaneously being worked’ and receiving healing from my guides - be it spirit guides, angels, faeries (!), source, bodhisattvas or goddesses and so on. I diligently work on myself - receiving regular healing and mentoring in different forms be that channelled support, shamanic shiatsu, bodycode, theta healing, EFT and so on. If I don’t make space for this work to happen in the mornings it happens in my dreams or spontaneously in the day when I am busy in the ‘normal’ world so not always convenient or explainable why I am dizzy or ‘feeling weird’. Sometimes this work is much more intense during certain periods. So this might be happening to you however you’re not yet conscious of it.
We are always being helped and supported by the unseen world. They are privy to much more than our conscious mind is, as it is our higher self. Now the response from my guides has changed, as I'm at a different stage in my life. Instead of ‘sure try anything’, when I decided, I wanted to try running a group sending healing intention - the immediate response was - no, this is not your purpose, which was a shock at the time. I think that happens to many of us as we hit the perimenopausal zone of our lives - what is of value and what is needed comes into focus. Which is the counter cultural tour of session with success from a young age.
Divine timing
I've had such a powerful experience of divine timing. ‘You’re ready now, now it’s time to teach’ and I have had to trust in that. Sometimes I have a strong sense of something on the horizon, which to logic would make sense to start now, but I know the timing isn't right somehow, I don’t feel ready or have the lived answers I need, i.e. it’s time to develop my own style of healing, time to start group teaching, time to leave this team and so on. Even when I know the timing is right, I can still have to work on emotional roadblocks to make it happen, but I don’t let that stop me - I work on them.
Right now, for example, the message I keep receiving is ‘in four or five years everything will be different’... ‘They are coming’ (people who will learn with me) ...intuitive movement… which can sound a bit daunting to be honest, ha ha! Yet, I don't get all of the details even though I am a channel. We can't know everything. If we give our child the answer to a maths problem, without giving them the tools to solve the problem themselves and the chance to work it out, they won't learn. We are the same in life. Let's be honest, if someone sat down and charted our whole life for us - well, it would all be kinda boring... life is an adventure and half of the excitement is not knowing what is round the next corner yet sensing the possibilities.
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