31: On Locking Into Purpose

I spent years unraveling, falling apart, rebuilding my nervous system, and slowly finding my footing again. Now, I feel the ground beneath me... and the momentum.

On my 31st birthday, certainty finally settled in: a quiet knowing that I’m exactly where I need to be.

Not the forced confidence I used to manufacture, not the spiritual bypassing of “everything happens for a reason,” but an actual, embodied knowing.

The last few years had been a long unraveling: Saturn Return, Kali, the Year of the Snake, all of it. TLDR: I quit a “stable” finance job without a next step, embracing a nomadic life that took me across countries, through retreats, and into countless trainings. At first, it was exhilarating. Then sitting with myself oscillated between uncomfortable and soothing. After a while, my lack of direction, my stuckness in “the void,” became unbearable… I didn’t know which way was up. Who was I, and what did I come here to do?

In the midst of my ego death, the place where I was living went to war. People I knew were murdered. Everything that had been “my life” collapsed overnight.

I returned to the states at 28, depressed, living in my parents’ apartment. It wasn’t pretty.

Indeed, my life needed to be razed to the ground before I could build new foundations (Hello, Kali).

To find my footing, I worked the front desk at yoga studios, meditated constantly, and explored every healing path that called to me: astrology, somatics, bodywork, womb healing, qi gong, tantra, you name it. I even toyed with studying acupuncture (still might) and enrolled in a holistic health certification, paying $8k before realizing I was studying on a screen what years of lived experience had already taught me.

Throughout it all, I was in therapy twice a week, healing the PTSD I had carried across continents.

At 29, I had no idea what I was doing with my life.
At 30, I began to understand my shift was from seeking to service.
At 31, that understanding finally locked into my bones.

I’ll always be a curious student of the world. But somewhere in all that searching, the knowledge I’d been accumulating had become wild ivy that needed a trellis to grow, somewhere to give back.

Under the guise of growth and development, I realized I was hiding; I had gotten addicted to learning, to receiving, to feeling like I was improving simply because I was consuming more information.

There’s a dark side to this kind of accumulation, even in the name of self-development, when the ever-ongoing receiving of knowledge becomes avoidance of actually being in the world.

I kept gathering tools, but at a certain point, they weren’t asking to be studied anymore, they were asking to be embodied, used, implemented.

The harder initiation (the one no course could teach) was stepping forward and offering it. Messy action is good action - and this was difficult to digest and act on as a recovering perfectionist.

Finally teaching my first yoga class (after four teacher trainings). Finally letting my voice be heard… I am just now starting to share my singing voice with the community. Finally showing up as me, and many times that looks messy. Finally, accepting the okay-ness, the “safety” in the mess.

Becoming a psychotherapist and working with people in recovery, helping them find their way back to themselves before drugs and alcohol, feels like a homecoming.

Each day, I use the same tools that once helped me find my way: meditation, breath, sound, gentle movement, and honest, vulnerable discussion.

On weekends, I teach yoga at a fancy hotel. The setting and demographic may look different, but their nervous systems are just as overstimulated, just as overwhelmed, just as desperate to exhale.

The work I teach invokes the feminine principles we’ve been systematically conditioned out of: safety, softness, feeling, intuition, connection, community. These tools are the scaffolding that holds us when everything else falls away. At 31, I feel grateful to be a steward of this work.

Thank you for reading and engaging; I hope my writing inspires you to be messy and be you.

With love,
Madeline

Me, this year, on my birthday. It was a perfect day of teaching yoga (and chanting for the first time in my class) and enjoying the beach and meals with friends and family.