A Testimony: From Spiritual Wandering to Grounding in God

I have been thinking about writing this blog for a while, but it took some time to fully form.

First, a little backstory.

I grew up in a household with a wonderful mother and father I adore immensely. They are still together and still bring much joy to my life and my family. I like to think I have my mother’s heart of gold and my father’s fierce loyalty, belief and faith. 

Like any childhood though, I had some challenges being raised by my parents simply because of who they are. My Mom is a people pleaser and validation seeker. She is very creative and over the years growing up I watched my mother pour her heart into everything she did hoping she would be seen and praised for her job well done by anyone around her. This was a product of her upbringing that she took on subconsciously.

My Dad was raised by perhaps the fiercest woman I’ve ever known who was part of a Catholic-based religious cult that required almost all your funds go to them. He grew up having Catholicism pushed on him and guilt driven into his bones anytime he did something bad. As a result, he wanted us raised without any religion or faith of any kind. He also went looking for his own faith in all kinds of places. Even as a child I remember being confused about what faith we belonged to, Dad was trying them all on. No matter what though, he always loved God and Jesus.

I grew up unknowingly repeating my mother’s patterns of people pleasing and seeking validation. Looking for love and praise for being myself in every area of my life. Boyfriends, friends, teachers, social media… you name it. If there was some form of a “stage” I could perform on to receive love for what I did, I did it. I, very sadly, did so many things I now regret out of desire to be validated and seen as worthy of anything good.

I also grew up knowing about God but never truly knowing God. I knew that God created everything in the universe and that you could sometimes pray to God but for the most part God was this elusive being to me. My Dad ended up taking me to a new age shop when I was around 10 or 11 and that spoke to me so much. I loved the crystals, the oracle cards, the pocket angels and every other little trinket that somehow meant that something was on my side and trying to help me. See, I loved God before I even knew I did.

The only other exposure to faith was through one of my childhood friends who brought me to Vacation Bible School in the summer (which I loved and still remember songs from), and from my Grandmothers who brought me to church randomly and told me to eat the sacramental bread even though I knew I wasn’t supposed to because I wasn’t baptized. It was all very confusing to me as a youngan.

These two things would become paramount to my work over the years when I started encountering countless women who were people pleasers, validation seekers and looking for love, guidance and support in all the wrong places. Women who knew something better was waiting for them “out there” but they just couldn’t root themselves in anything. Women who, like me, would spend years as spiritual wanderers looking for the support from God they desire but never finding it.

Fast forward now to the last few years.

Since I started shifting my work from heavy new age practices to a firmly rooted God-led teaching format, I’ve had so many assumptions thrown my way and I want to share more about how this process unfolded for me to create some clarity for you. 

Clarity in the sense of you choosing if you resonate with what I’m sharing, if you want to continue tuning in and even if you want to be involved with my work in any capacity (following, sharing, on my email list) or not.

As I shared above, for most of my life I have done what I thought would give me praise, validation and some sort of feeling of success. This overflowed into my business in a really harmful way (harmful for me). As a people pleaser, this meant that for the most part, I did what other people told me would be good for me and what they wanted from me. I’ve had probably over a dozen businesses and business models since I was 17 and the current one is the only one I’ve ever actually enjoyed. Many of them were started and completed based on someone telling me to do them.

Driven to be seen, heard and understood by anyone and everyone, I burnt myself out multiple times. Not just “I’m too tired to function” burnout… I’m talking “I can’t remember anything that happened in my day, let alone the last hour” burnout. There are blocks of my life that I can’t recall anything from because I was running on fumes. Movies I watched with my husband I can’t recall, stories of sessions previous clients tell me about that I’m a little stunned were with me and even just outings with friends I can’t recollect ever occurring.

In 2018, at the end of one of the busiest weeks of my life - balancing massage, doing workshops and spiritual healing work - while folding sheets for the umpteenth time, I heard the softest whisper from my heart telling me there was something more for me. It just happened to land at exactly the right time and I listened to it with ferocity.

I slowly made the arrangements to close my business down within a year and vowed to never return to massage again. (That last part was the scariest part)

Closing that down came with the hefty price of life slapping me in the face as hard as it could… because once I closed it down, life served me up a nice, hot, sacred pause - which I now term my “power pause” - and everything that was ruining me on a soul level and silently running the show came to the surface. 

It was no longer hidden from me in the corners, caves and cavities of my subconscious, it was in plain sight.

I cried for days… weeks… months. Holding on by nothing but a thread of hope that something good was coming from all this pain I was feeling in my heart. Self-hatred, self-abandonment, zero faith or trust in myself or God. I had spent all those years ruining myself to discover I was in a grave of my own making. 

A corpse, going through the motions and attempting to find meaning even in the moments that should have been exhilarating.

I began the long, arduous task of sitting with all of these parts of myself… reclaiming, forgiving, softening and mothering myself back from feeling fragmented to feeling whole again. What followed was years of bitterness, years of feeling like I was fighting life, years of feeling like absolutely nothing I did helped. 

Momentary reprieve came from my spiritual practice, from serving others and from time spent laughing with my husband - thank God he’s literally the funniest person I know. But for the most part - this shadow work, this adversity that stung right into the heart of who I was never really softened.

I did everything I could. I tried to meditate, manifest, heal, reiki, card pull and everything in between that I had always turned to. These practices that were once the richest part of my work and my life began to leave me with tiny moments of joy and reprieve followed by the same dread and soulful agony that I felt was bringing me down. 

My husband and I got to have some time away from my parents home we were living in, which had been a hostile living environment for months. In that time away we felt safe, we clarified what we wanted and we finally chose to move out. God responded in kind with a windfall that gave us all the funds we needed to act - and fast!

Within a month, we were out. Freedom tasted sweet. I softened. I relaxed. I felt calm for the first time in months. I started to get this repetitive message that said some variation of “your foundation is the most important”.

My husband and I were on cloud nine together. We were laughing, smiling, enjoying our meals together at the table we got on facebook marketplace (we had resorted to a lot of car meals to enjoy a meal together alone out of the house, so this was a big deal!) and for the first time in years I felt safe enough to dream. To look ahead with excitement instead of fear of what could be. 

I had the audacity and courage to ask God: “What now?”

6 weeks after we moved, I fell pregnant with the wonderful little soul who is my sweet son, Fox. That moment changed everything for me.

My husband woke me up spontaneously in the night to make love to me - something very uncharacteristic of him - and I had a vision of all these stars vibrating in the room. Moving into my womb as we made love. My legs tingled unlike ever before and I knew there was life inside of me. A baby was here.

I drifted off into sleep and had the most vivid dream I’ve ever had of Jesus handing me my baby. A little boy who looked exactly like Fox! I woke up and knew without a doubt that I was with child and that this child was a gift from God to us.

This was the moment where God called me.

You see, for years I had Jesus come to me in many healing sessions I did for others. Telling me what to do in my sessions and telling me specific information they needed to know. It was often for my Christian clients, but not always. I always figured He was there for them but now I know for sure He was there for me too.

The moment I conceived Fox and had that dream right after, answered a call in me that I didn’t fully anchor until that moment. Jesus called me. I answered. I woke up and became a follower of Christ that day. 

Naturally, having run a predominantly new age business until this time came with some things to face in my work - for both myself and my students. 

God was ready to refine me and my life.

Funnily enough, I had started asking Timothy for the last few weeks what it meant to him to “do God’s work” and what that would look like for him. I told him that I felt I wasn’t there yet, and I didn’t know what would take me there. 

I started to notice that I was trying all that time to make my faith and my approach digestible to others. I thought I needed to be for everyone, always. As a result I ended up being appealing to few. This one thing created actions in me like using “the universe” and “source” in place of God. When in my mind and heart I always used God. That’s just one example of many.

I also found myself only teaching from what I had learned. Not from experience. Which is another way to just destroy your business before you begin. You are drawn to someone because they’re unique, not because they’re a clone of the curriculum. I regurgitated reiki manuals, systems, practices, rituals and words of others out of fear of being my own teacher and walking my own path.

All this time I thought I was building something to free myself… and I was still boxing myself in! All in ways I couldn’t see until Christ entered my life.

Many people now make assumptions about my work and I want to clear something up here. My work is to help you find your foundation in God again after years of spiritual or soul wandering. If you’ve been trying everything for so long and getting nowhere, then it’s likely you need to root yourself in God again.

Naturally, my beliefs as a follower of Christ will play into my teachings, but I’m not here to convert you to any religion or belief system. That’s between you and God and I do not feel that it is my calling to do this for anyone. If it organically happens that you get called by God or by Jesus in what I share then so be it, but that is not my deepest intention here. 

My work is here for people who want to love God again, want to root themselves in His love and support so they can finally feel held by the divine once more. It is here to help you discover that God gave you everything you need within to guide you onwards in life - wherever that leads and however that looks.

I want women to know the immense power of being held by God. To know the capacity of trusting themselves again. To rest in the softening of their feminine nature. These are the foundation of my intentions for you.

Everything I did before has not been useless. I haven’t found myself needing to throw it all away, instead I just explore it with an open heart, I talk to God about it and I understand whether or not it is still meant to be a part of my story or not. Some things I’ve let go of entirely and other things have just deepened and become so much richer. It’s quite the beautiful process!

If you’ve arrived this far then I want to say thank you for reading. Maybe you’ve come this far out of curiosity or maybe you’re walking a similar path, whatever the case I honour you for taking the time to read my story.

I’m excited to see where and how my work continues to expand, and how God will continue to call me.

God bless,
Emily