The Soul’s Purpose

If you’ve ever been through trauma, and you would like to shine a light on it, even if you think you already have..

Read on, because I’m about to open up another window for you.

(And if you haven’t been through trauma, then you are lucky, but maybe this might help someone else you know.)

I’d spent decades of my life believing that love meant sacrifice.

That to prove I cared and that I was worthy, I had to carry it all ~

..pain, chaos, confusion, blame.

If anyone was ever mad, it must be my fault, either that or it must always be my job to fix them.

If anyone crossed a line, I’d let them and hope that them unleashing onto me would bring them peace.

And I’d put up with that for the quiet that might come after.

I believed if I just held things together for long enough, it would all be okay.

But it wasn’t.

All it did was drain me.

And somewhere along the way, I stopped recognising myself in the story.

I didn’t put up with disregard because I was strong.

I put up with it because I was afraid.

Afraid of being misunderstood.

Afraid of being abandoned.

Afraid of being blamed for everything that ever went wrong.

So I always did what I thought was best,

I took the blame and put it on my back.

I carried it with me and let it weigh me down just to keep the peace.

Just to avoid the portrayal of guilt.

Just to prove I was good enough, worthy, safe.

Just to avoid being blamed for anything and everything, and to avoid feeling like a failure whenever I wasn’t able to fix everything for everyone else around me.

But that kind of behaviour is built on self-abandonment.

And that kind of ignorance of our own needs slowly becomes a prison.

I didn’t realise that fear and love can wear the same face because of spending my life being taught that one meant the other.

We are not helping ourselves, or anyone, by carrying that belief.

Avoiding confrontation.

Avoiding rejection.

Avoiding the guilt that comes with disappointing people who never make space for who we really are. The ones who don’t see us. Or maybe they do, but don’t like it because it shines a light on who they are not.

It’s exhausting.

I spent too long keeping quiet when I should have spoken.

In relationships, in hard conversations, difficult situations, and in moments that mattered.

Even when I knew what was right.

Even when I knew I needed to speak up.

Even when it was tearing me apart inside to say nothing. Fear kept me small.

I thought I was doing the right thing.

But all I was doing was disappearing.

Literally… disassociating into a fog outside of my own body.

And at some point everything started to change,

in a slow realisation that came to me like a whisper at first, and then in a roar I couldn’t ignore.

It wasn’t just one situation that brought me to my awakenings.

There were so many.

But it was always the same pattern, showing up in different dynamics.

Different faces, different contexts, but always the same feeling.

Me ~ overgiving, staying quiet, shrinking myself, having zero boundaries, and trying to fix things that weren’t mine to fix.

It was a spiral I kept walking, each time thinking maybe this will be different,

until I finally reached the centre of the spiral 🌀

and realised that no matter what the story was or how it began, it never got fixed and I was always losing myself by the end of it.

It was all the mornings I woke up with a knot in my stomach for the millionth time.

In the conversations where I found myself misunderstood, quietly blamed, or turned into the villain.

The silence that followed when I needed support and none ever came.

It was the weight of walking on eggshells in my own life,

and finally realising the ground underneath me would never be steady until I chose to stand in my own power.

But after the peace came, the trigger to finding the deeper meaning showed itself ~

My nervous system!

It was never at rest even after the battle was over.

My body was always braced for something ~ rejection, blame, attack.

Even with peace in my mind, my body lived like I was preparing for war.

So I started digging.

Not into symptoms, but into why I had been carrying so much for so long, and what on earth it was that I was here to do with it?

Why, even after figuring out the root causes, was my body still living in flight or fight?

Why I couldn’t rest? Why, even if I had done everything for the day and had time to relax, I would be scrolling my phone or writing to-do lists or thinking up another project. I couldn’t allow myself to just be!

Because by resting it proved I wasn’t doing enough, that I was useless, a disappointment, and a failure.

Words given to me that aren’t me or mine to own, and never were.

I needed to know why I stayed silent when I should’ve shouted.

Why I kept calling it “love” or “loyalty” when it was just fear wrapped in a fancy bow, for show.

Finding the root of things didn’t happen overnight, I have dug into the depths of my soul to find these answers.

I’ve asked question upon question ~ torn apart the answers, only to uncover more revelations that demanded even more questions.

It’s been layered, like an onion.

Painful. Eye-opening.

And along the way, I learned something else I was not expecting..

After peeling back more layers than I care to remember, I knew there was still something stuck in there like a splinter that had broken off and I couldn’t quite get at it.

So I dug some more.

And I realised that it’s not actually enough to uncover why things happened or who was to blame, because getting to the root of it isn’t actually the cure.

You have to ask why your soul needed to walk through it.

Because buried inside THAT question is a soul’s purpose.

A calling.

A truth that the story alone won’t reveal.

Beneath all the wounds, you’ll find something else you’re here to do.

Not a career.

A soul purpose.

For me, I figured out that I was here to transmute energy. To take a bad vibe, bury it, and let something good grow in its place. To alchemise bad experiences into something beautiful, and useful. To influence and inspire. To show people it’s possible to save themselves. To turn every buried truth into light, hold a torch for those who can’t yet see.

To walk out of the dark and create a way of existing that might remind others how to live in their own light and peace, too.

To show that abandonment by others shouldn’t mean abandoning yourself.

To prove that you don’t have to live in chaos to survive, and that you don’t have to make yourself small for other people to feel comfortable.

To show others that a calm, mindful and joyful life IS possible, no matter how the story began.

It may not seem like much to some, but it may mean something huge to others.

And they are the ones I shine the torch for the most.

And I know how huge it can be, because it’s the torch I shone for myself first.

That’s why I’m writing this.

Not because I need to tell my story, I don’t.

I’m the only one who needs to know the depths of my own story. But I’m writing this because someone else might need to figure out theirs.

So if you’re carrying something heavy, my advice is this…

Don’t just skim the surface. Don’t just go back to the root cause and figure that out.

Even if it’s generational, that’s not even deep enough.

Dig again.

Dig until you find the reason for the trauma or the pain, and what the lesson was.

Then dig until you figure out what kind of person that lesson turned you into, what superpower it gave you, and decide what you’re going to do with that now.

Your soul chose a path to walk before you took your first steps into this world, and once you know why, you’ll begin to exhale.

You could ask yourself…

“What has that lesson given me, that I would have never been given without it?

What do I now understand about people, pain, or healing that I couldn’t have understood any other way?

What light do I shine now that only exists because I walked through the dark?

And what is it about me now, that has the ability to make changes for others or for the world, that I’d have never been able to do had the trauma not knocked on my door?”

Because the moment you understand that piece of the puzzle, you’ll pull out the last bit of splinter, and the wound will begin to close, and stay closed.

And then you’ll be a beacon of light for someone, or something else that the world needs.

You’ll hold a torch for those still wandering in the darkness.

And that’s why we’re here.

With love, healing, and all the revelations of life,

Leanne