Following the Breadcrumbs

There is so much that this crystal healing journey has taught me about life and about myself. It's been a rollercoaster ride of saying yes to the smallest of nudges, following my intuition, sometimes completely blindfolded, and having 100% trust that somehow it will all work out.

If you had told me 10 years ago that I would be working full-time as a crystal healer, I would not have believed you. And yet, when I look back now, I can see distinct patterns. Or shall we call them stepping stones? Actually, I think they're more like breadcrumbs. Little pieces scattered throughout my life that didn't necessarily mean anything at the time, but looking backwards I can see how one thing led to another, and another.

I've always had a strong sense of what was right for me, even when family or friends questioned my decisions. Sometimes there was absolutely no logic behind it. I just knew. The first time I saw my husband, for example, I remember saying to myself, “I'm going to marry that guy one day.” I just knew, with every fibre of my being.

I've had that kind of knowing throughout my life. From a young age I was fascinated by crystals and animals, and I sensed things that perhaps didn't appear real to other people, but they were 100% real to me. There was always this feeling that there was something I couldn't quite explain. That somehow I was being guided, nudged or directed by something bigger than myself.

Music has also been a huge part of my life. I've played guitar, sung, written songs and recorded an album. For many years, music was one of the ways I expressed myself and made sense of what I was feeling. There is something about taking an emotion, an experience or even just a feeling and finding the words and sounds to express it that has always come naturally to me.

At the time, music was simply music. I certainly wasn't thinking about how it might connect to anything I would be doing years later.

But it did.

That experience eventually became another breadcrumb, leading me into creating guided meditations. Suddenly I was using my voice, words, sound and creativity in a completely different way. Today, those meditations are listened to by people all over the world.

I could never have mapped that out beforehand.

I couldn't have known that all those years of writing songs, recording, learning to use my voice and expressing what I felt would eventually find their way into this work.

But looking backwards, the connection seems so obvious.

And I think that's the fascinating thing about breadcrumbs. Quite often you only recognise them once you've already followed them.

But when I talk about following the breadcrumbs, I don't mean that I've floated through life following signs from the universe while everything magically fell into place. Far from it. Some of the most significant parts of my journey looked nothing like breadcrumbs at the time.

I first came into my husband's twin boys' lives when they were six. Then, when they were 10, my husband basically came home one day and said, “The boys are coming to live with me full-time.”

And that was that.

I was 27 years old and suddenly I was raising two 10-year-old boys who weren't my own. Not helping to raise them. Raising them.

It was a massive undertaking, and there were certainly aspects of my own life that had to go on hold because there were two children in front of me who needed me. So I showed up.

Those boys are 29 now, and when I look back at that chapter of my life, I see it very differently. They needed me, but in so many ways I think I needed them too. They kept me honest. They kept me grounded. They taught me incredibly valuable lessons about responsibility, love, patience, boundaries, family and what it actually means to show up for another human being.

They shaped me.

I've realised I'm a nurturer by nature, although if I'm completely honest, I still prefer animals! But that's another thing I've learned about the breadcrumbs. Sometimes you don't recognise them because they don't look anything like the path you thought you were supposed to be on. Sometimes they look like a detour. Sometimes they look like responsibility. Sometimes they mean putting your own plans aside because life needs something different from you for a while.

And sometimes they hurt.

I've been down in the depths of a big dark hole. I've had my life turned upside down in the blink of a second. I've experienced heartbreak and circumstances completely outside of my control. I know what it feels like to be humiliated, made fun of and to feel like the odd one out. There are things I have lived through that I would never have chosen for myself.

But they shaped me too.

I think that's something I understand much more deeply now that I'm 45. You have to live life to gain some kinds of wisdom. You can read the books, study, do the courses and gain the qualifications, and all of those things have value. But there are things life teaches you that you simply cannot learn from a book. Sometimes you have to live them.

Perhaps that's also why some of the things I've discovered about myself later in life have made so much sense. Finding Human Design and discovering that I'm a Projector was another breadcrumb. It gave me language for something I'd already experienced for years: the ability to sometimes see something in another person before they can quite see it themselves, to notice patterns and to sense what might be sitting underneath what is being said.

Then numerology handed me another interesting piece of the puzzle: Master 33, the Master Teacher. Again, it wasn't about a number suddenly telling me who I was. It was more of an “of course” moment. Another little piece falling into place.

The more I've learned about myself, the more I've realised these qualities weren't suddenly appearing. They had been there all along. The sensitivity was already there. The intuition was already there. The nurturing was already there. My ability to see things differently was already there. My fascination with crystals was already there.

And the life experience was slowly being added.

Perhaps that's why I don't think my journey has really been about becoming a crystal healer at all. Crystal healing just happens to be the place where so many of these seemingly unrelated parts of myself eventually came together.

And perhaps the biggest thing this journey has taught me is that we spend so much of our lives looking forward. Where am I going? What am I supposed to be doing? What is my purpose? What's next?

Sometimes I think we need to look backwards.

Because when I look backwards, I can see the younger version of me who felt different. I can see the 27-year-old suddenly raising two boys. I can see the woman who went through the heartbreaks and the dark holes. I can see the person who kept sensing things she couldn't explain and the woman who sometimes made decisions other people didn't understand.

I can see the person who kept following those little nudges without having any idea where they were taking her.

She wasn't lost. She was gathering the pieces.

And at 45, I can finally see how many of those pieces fit together.

I don't think I've collected all of my breadcrumbs yet either. I hope I haven't. But I have learned to pay attention to them, and perhaps that's what I would encourage you to do too.

Follow the breadcrumbs.

If you don't know what yours are, start by looking backwards. Look at the things you've lived through, the things you've always been drawn towards, the decisions that changed you, the patterns that keep repeating and even the parts of yourself you've spent years trying to hide or make smaller.

Look at the detours too. Especially the detours.

Because somewhere amongst all of that there may be a pattern you simply haven't been able to see yet. Sometimes we're just too close to our own story to recognise it.

That's actually something I love exploring with people in my sessions. Not telling someone what their path should be or where they need to go, but helping them lay the pieces out and perhaps see the threads that have been there all along.

Because maybe you don't need someone else to tell you where to go next.

Maybe you just need to find your next breadcrumb.