A Wayfinding Woman

leaving the map behind

sunlight through trees - carol neilson ©

“Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.”
~ Rumi

I read this quote by Rumi this morning, and it spoke volumes to me.

For the past few years, I’ve stepped away from guiding yin yoga and seeing clients, choosing to sit, to stay, to disconnect from leading others, letting silence reach me.

I needed space, grounding, and a rhythm that would deepen me beyond the known across the threshold into liminal spaces. The only way I knew to do this was to step away from offering myself outward and instead turn inward to meet what had become unnameable.

I found that a new energy began to flow through me, unadulterated by the external world. This welcome energy stitches me together. It offers presence, stories, and myths with no logical origin. Each story echoed solitude and retreat — an invitation, a whisper. A deliberate severance. An immersion into silence. I'm inviting wildness, dirty feet, and dirty hands as I unearth stories deep in the underground of my psyche.

Letting myself spill open into initiation. I expect to fall into beautiful loneliness as a way of staying awake.

“Every woman should know where to go when her soul needs some soothing.”
— Maya Angelou

So, I created my own Sanctum—a quiet place where I could gather and name the edges, feel the pain in my body, listen to what it wanted me to know, and understand which parts of life were being held tightly within me.

It became Story Medicine, letting narrative guide me towards understanding how my body undid me. I wrote in the day, through the night, finding words, letting them find me. Sometimes they made sense. Sometimes none at all.

To make vows.
To promise myself something real.
To learn again how to ally with myself.
To live mapless in a world obsessed with goals, direction, and purpose.

I was preparing to emerge, well-travelled through the nuances of my existence, unapologetically. To reclaim from the shadowlands the profound intuition that powers a woman's knowing. To rest my mind on the ache of comparison — and to see how it has shaped my practice, my writing, and my sense of self as a yin yoga guide.

Joseph Campbell called it the hero’s journey — the descent, the ordeal, the return. This was mine.

A descent through the shadow portals of my humanity. Meeting the silent gatekeepers. Scrabbling through the mud and silt of shadowed failures. Speaking truth to the lies I had told myself, stitching together the essence of acceptance, forgiveness, and compassion. Gathering the meaningful contributions, I still longed to offer the world.

I didn’t return with answers, but with stories.
With soil beneath my nails. A desire to guide again, but in a way that feels more authentic to who I am these days.

Don’t get me wrong — I still have a yoga practice of a kind this body can do with its autoimmune presence, and my days begin with ritual. But I came to realise: it wasn’t enough. Not for the world we’re in now. Not for the woman I’ve become.

I have been unearthing. Excavating. Burying. Unravelling.
Running away. Returning. Searching. Leaving again.
Drawn intuitively toward the wildest places within myself.

A form of re-membering, a claim to myself that all is not lost because of my absence from the world I once inhabited. There are many other ways of being in this time.

It’s been a season of wayfinding. Of forging new paths. Listening to my heartbeat. Tasting new words in my mouth. Taking risks.

And I know I am not the only one seeking a new language for a different way of being. For hunting down thresholds once hidden.

Many of us are asking:
How do we walk in a changing world?
How do we move away from the noise and return to deeper, intuitive listening?
How do we express ourselves when the language we once trusted has lost its meaning?
How do we describe what we feel when our bodies are uncertain, and our wisdom feels inarticulate?

I return again to that Rumi quote:

“Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you love.”

It brings me home.

A sanctum within which I am true to myself.

And from this wayfinding, an invitation is born.

This is a wandering, with no fixed destination.

Over the coming months, you may notice a shift in direction.

S A N C T U M | she is home is part of this, more coming soon.

What would happen if you trusted the pull of what you love?