On fate, destiny, and finding your soul's path when you feel lost.

Far more of your life is yours to make than you have been told. You have real power here, real agency, a real say in how you build your life, choice by choice and day by day, and that includes the power to forgive yourself for the things you are getting wrong, and to trust that you are not doing any of this alone. You, and your guides, and the fabric of the universe, source, the love light itself, all of it has your back. It is always there. It is always urging you forward and showing you a way.

One

Fate, as I mean it here, is the storyline society writes for you before you ever get a say. It is the path set for you by your name, your class, your race, your religion, the town you were born in, all the facts you arrived with, and it is what the culture assumes you will do with them. I can tell you my own. I was born a girl in a working-class family, in a depressed mining town, at a time of union fights and protests, when one of the first lawsuits in this country brought by women against a company for how it treated them was moving through the courts. That was the world I came into. And the story it laid out for me was clear enough: use school to reach a steady job, marry, raise a couple of children in the Midwest, save for retirement, and one day hold my grandchildren. That is a good life, if it is the life your soul actually wants. It was never the one I wanted. I always dreamed bigger, and I could feel the pull of it from somewhere deep, some part of me that already knew the assigned story was not mine.

Two

Destiny is the other path. It is the path of your soul, and it does not run straight. It winds. You get lost on it, often. There is drama on it, and it is never boring, and it is never safe, not the way fate is safe, because you are always stepping onto new ground, into new versions of yourself, into things you have not done and cannot yet see. It never finishes unfolding, and I have come to think that is the point, because we are making this path as we walk it. We are co-creating it, with source, with our higher self, with the people who love us, and with our own choices. My favorite film is The Matrix, and what it names is this exact feeling, the quiet knowing that something is wrong with the story the world gives you, because that story is not rising up from the depths of you. Destiny is what rises up from the depths of you.

Three

I was shown to teach this with a walk in the woods. Not a groomed trail with wood chips and signposts, but off-trail, bushwhacking through a real forest, because something happens out there that is hard to find anywhere else. When you walk off the path, deeper and deeper into the trees, it gets easier to hear the voice of source in your own head, easier to catch the images that drop in like daydreams and show you the next thing, easier to feel the small nudge that says, go this way. And before you go, because nature is powerful and our minds are not as clever as we like to think: do this with a plan, with water, with a compass, with someone beside you, somewhere you will not end up stranded. Do the sensible thing, and then let yourself get a little lost on purpose.

I learned the power of it the hard way once. My husband and I, early on, went out for what was meant to be a short walk on the Washington coast in winter, and the trail flooded, so we went around it, and then we were genuinely lost, for hours, in dense rainforest, wading through water that came up to our thighs. We had no compass. We had two phones with no signal and a small bag of crackers. It could have gone badly. The one thing we could do was listen for the ocean, because we knew the beach would lead us out, but the sound bounced around the trees and seemed to come from everywhere at once, and the sky was so overcast we could not find the sun to steer by. So we felt our way. We kept checking in with each other, and we kept feeling into ourselves, into the land, into where we were being pulled, and almost every time we agreed, which made no sense, because we had no way of knowing. We reached the beach after hours. And when we finally had a signal and looked at the map and traced where we had started to where we came out, we had walked an almost perfect straight line. That is how accurate the pull was.

That is the practice, whether you do it in a real forest or only in your mind. As you move through your life, keep feeling back into source, and keep asking of each choice, is this bringing me toward the person I want to be, toward the work, toward the life my deepest self is calling me to. You will not know exactly where it ends. You are not meant to. You carry a sense of the light you are walking toward, and you make the rest as you go.

Four

On the path of destiny, something happens that can feel terrible, and it is worth naming plainly. When you really lock into alignment, when you sync up with source and start moving from that deepest place, the things that do not belong on that path begin to fall away. Sometimes it is a job. Sometimes it is a hobby, an interest, a whole version of your life. And sometimes it is people, friends and colleagues who mattered to you, who drift off for reasons that feel outside your control, that you did not choose. That can feel like rejection, and it can feel wrong, and it can hurt, especially when you are someone who loves people and finds it hard to let anyone go. But when you are walking your destiny, this falling away is not the disaster it feels like. It belongs to the path. So when things start to loosen and leave, and everything in you says this must be wrong, there is a question worth asking. Does this feel wrong because I have stepped off my own path? Or does it feel wrong because I have stepped onto it, and the old structure, the assigned one, is simply losing its grip on me?

Five

And through all of it, the getting lost and the finding, the falling away and the building, one thing steadies everything. You can come back to center. Even when it feels like something is deeply wrong, you can slow down, in the shower, on your commute, for two minutes with your eyes closed, and come back into your body, feel its weight, feel where it meets the ground, breathe, and recognize that in this exact moment nothing is actually wrong. This is one of those true and difficult paradoxes. The feeling that something is wrong and the fact that you are safe can live in the same moment. When you cannot tell which way to go, stop trying to see the whole path, and put your attention on what is already working, because that is life showing you where the invitation is right now. The answer is coming. It always comes, sometimes as a clear knowing and sometimes as a slow one, and your part is to trust that it is on its way, and to keep coming home to yourself while you wait.

You were never bound to fate. You are making your destiny as you live it, one choice at a time, and never alone. Come back to center, feel your way, and take the next step.

Join the Community

— Juli Martin, The Love Lady