It was a little over 2 years ago when the voice from my higher self came loud and clear when I asked her what it is that I truly deeply desire.
“Freedom.”
But what did that mean? I was living a life that most people would be satisfied with. The white picket fence lifestyle. I had the house with the mortgage and 2 big garages, I had a fluffy dog running around that backyard, I was working part time at a bank and full time at home doing online fitness coaching, and I was in a long term relationship with someone that treated me pretty good for the most part. I ho hummed about what this word freedom meant to me, and decided I need to be doing more activities that created joy for me.
A couple months later, I hopped on my first ever plane ride at age 23, flying down to Nashville for a work event. This is the first time I experienced the awareness and perception shift that happens when one travels. I quickly fell in love with that extremely high vibe, free spirited energy that I was experiencing while in Nashville.
When you travel, you snap yourself out of your state. This means you are no longer in the environment that anchors you to the vibration that is keeping you in your paradigm. Suddenly, you have the courage to do things you normally wouldn’t. You are talking to strangers that you normally would never have crossed paths with. You feel so joyful, playful and in complete flow. Creative ideas are flowing freely to you and you are seeing circumstances in your life with a different perspective…a more expanded and wiser lens of awareness. Massive shifts in oneself happens when you are in this state.
On my drive back home from the airport, I was reflecting on the trip and how much fun I had, and a heaviness began to creep over me as I got closer to home. Back to reality. A reality that suddenly didn’t feel good enough. It was an okay reality. It was a reality that I could live for the next 40 years knowing exactly how each day was going to play out because it was the same. Within an hour of me being home, a massive argument erupted and that’s when I realized, I don’t need to be here. Just because we have a mortgage together, doesn’t mean I am stuck here. The thought of being single and travelling the world liberated me. The thought of knowing exactly how our lives were going to turn out, day after day of the same thing over and over again, staying in a relationship that was just okay, that felt so incredibly painful.
A week later, I put my dog in my SUV, packed my personal items, and I left. I left to chase freedom to find out what it meant to me.
It meant going to Vegas by myself, when the friends I was supposed to go with ended up backing out. Rather than cancelling the trip as most people would, I said F it, and I went alone. I had the most amazing time meeting people on my own and following exactly what felt good to me in the moment rather than worrying about appeasing everyone else. That’s the beauty of travelling alone, you get to create what your day looks like based on what YOU want to do.
It meant going to 3 tropical paradises within 4 months of each other. Mexico, Cuba, and Dominican. Mexico is where I got to experience seeing and being in the ocean for the first time. Living landlocked in Alberta all of my life and having never really travelled before, the ocean was never something that I had the opportunity to get to see before. I fell in love. Hard. With the ocean that is. I learned how to surrender while being in the ocean. Surrender is a state of allowing it is to be what it is, and trusting that everything’s going to work out the way it’s meant to be. Being thrown around by waves and allowing yourself to bob around without putting up a fight, and trusting that even though this massive energetic being could kill you, you trust that she won’t. That’s surrender. It was there after that I allowed this act of surrendering to be applied in all areas of my life. Let things flow, let things go, and be in the moment. Trust.
Cuba. Ohhh Cuba. Fully in my feminine being, dancing to latino music, playing in the ocean all day, drinking an endless supply of cocktails, you can say that my free spirit and feminine energy was at it’s peak while in Cuba. Booking a last minute tour into the town of Matanzas because we were going stir crazy in the resort, I had no idea that that bus ride would change the course of my future. Waiting on that bus was my soul mate. We got onto the bus and walked down the aisle and sat across from a man sitting on his own. He looked over at us and said hello in an Irish accent. This Irishman, would later be the man that puts a ring on my finger under the Eiffel tower.
And then Dominican. Dominican was beautiful. White powder beaches. Warm crystal clear waters and a string of drunken nights dancing and late night swims in the ocean. We were there for 2 weeks which gave us time to completely decompress on the beach. Normally when I travel I mingle with the locals and get to know the real way of life. We had been warned against doing this in Dominican, so we decided to play it safe and kept to our resort. I was pondering the methods that I was going to be launching my life coaching practice when I got home. How am I going to serve people to the best of my ability? And then it happened. The last resort we were staying at ended up being incredibly unsafe for female travellers. My friend and I were targeted by security and management to be swallowed up in the underbelly of paradise. A prostitution ring was being ran out of the resort, and according to staff, we weren’t supposed to be going home on our check out date. I have grown through the experience, learned how to live my life with PTSD, and, I now life coach women through trauma, through balancing the masculine and feminine energies to create more flow and freedom in their lives, and igniting their self worth to help them overcome the circumstances in their life that are making them feel stuck. You can say that this trauma was exactly what I needed to catapult me into the level of coach I desired to be to serve the level of women that I do.
After Dominican I flew to Europe for the first time to visit my new found love who I had met in Cuba to explore that connection that we felt under the full moon in the glass waters of paradise. I was whisked to Venice, Ireland, and around Salzburg, one of the most romantic European cities where I now call home. I came home knowing that I would be moving my dog and myself over the ocean one day. Even if it didn’t make sense to anyone, I had to follow the pulls of my heart and continue to chase that which lights my soul on fire aka freedom.
Since, there’s been New Orleans, Munich, Brighton Pier, traveling around Canada, and finally, Paris where I was asked to be his forever.
I am writing this from Salzburg, Austria, the day before we leave for Croatia for a week, my dog is snoozing back home in the apartment while I enjoy a latte in the garden of a coffee shop.
So what is this freedom that I was chasing? It’s not feeling tied down. It’s following the calls of my heart and aligning with my soul to feel out what path feels right and to avoid those that don’t.
This kind of life isn’t for everyone. Some people crave stability and they need to know exactly how their day and life is going to work out. But for the rest of us, we crave adventure. We crave new environments. Fresh energy. We are in our flow in these places.
I want you to be inspired after reading this blog to take that leap even though you don’t have it all figured out yet. The net will always appear to catch you, even if you don’t see it when you do take that jump.
No matter what it all works out. Sure it’s going to be messy, and chaotic. I can tell you that 2 years later, I still have the mortgage with my ex and that’s not by my choice, I fought to cut all ties but that’s not the way that the cookie crumbled and I’ve learned to be okay with it and surrender to it. It no longer is an energy leak to me because something like that is not going to hold me back from living my best life.
It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows the past couple of years. The trauma in Dominican fucked me up sideways for months, but such a beautiful, strong, resilient, leader emerged out of it as a result.
Everything truly happens in our life for a reason. The people that come and go from our lives are sent to us to grow us, shape us, teach us something, and challenge us. Some stay a chapter, some stay the whole book. There is a lesson in everyone. The shitty circumstances that are sent to us, are sent to us to teach us and grow us. Rather than being in the victim mindset of, “why me,” shift your energy to, “what is this here to teach me?”
I lived each day one day at a time, focusing on finding and embracing joy. I shed that which was keeping my ego feeling anchored to being “stuck”, and embraced a completely different lifestyle to make travelling a priority because of how addicted I have become to that “state shock”. My best work comes from this place. My best self operates in this place.
So how can we find that freedom in our day to day lives when travelling isn’t happening?
We take ourselves on dates to new places in our city.
We find new coffee shops. We find new restaurants. We find new environments that feel good energetically so that we can get into our creative place.
We create spontaneity in our week by leaving space for “flow times” or “flow days”. This is where you don’t make any plans other than to flow, so that you can tap into and follow what you feel you need and want in that moment. If you want to go out for a glass of wine on the patio, you got the space to do that. If you want to have a nap on the floor in the sunshine with your dog, you can do that. If you want to call your girlfriend up and have an impromptu BBQ, you can do that.
So many of our lifestyles are structured to be on the go ALL THE TIME. This is not healthy for our soul health, mental health or physical health.
Start saying no, drop a half day or a full day of work a week, make doing things that you WANT rather than NEED to do a priority on the daily, and outsource what you can. That means asking for help! From family, friends, hire a house cleaner, hell have your house cleaner do some meal prep for you, hire a nanny even if it’s just for one day a week, if you hate designing your website hire someone to do it, ask your hubby to walk the dog so that you can get to that yoga class you’ve been talking about going to for months.
It’s about finding those pockets of joy of enjoying that glass of red wine and some dark chocolate without feeling guilty about it. It’s about having a sensual bath with romantic saxophone music playing in the background while you are surrounded with candles, rose petals in the salt bath, and having a plate of apricot crumble next to you that you are nibbling on. It’s dancing around your bedroom in front of the mirror naked, embodying your feminine curves and the rhythm of your energy. It’s about setting boundaries so that the people in your life honour your energy as much as you do. It’s about taking time everyday to meditate to connect with yourself and moving your body in a way that feels good. Whether it be dancing, yoga, going for a run or even doing a weight session, move your body in a way that HONOURS it rather than beats it up because you are trying to keep up with the latest #fitspo post.
It’s about being okay with letting go of that which no longer serves you or doesn’t bring you happiness anymore. We are transformative beings. What made us happy last year may no longer be in align with you are today. Letting these things go creates space to call in fresh energy.
Freedom. It doesn’t have to be travelling the world and living minimally to do so. Freedom is something we all can embrace day to day, just by keeping things light, spontaneous, and continue to step out of our comfort zones by trying something new.
Our feminine beings crave transformation. We desire fresh energy. Creativity wants to move through us. Us women have an ocean inside of us, ebbing and flowing. By denying the ocean within us, we are denying our true nature.