My interest in exploring transition with you is in sharing the wisdom of our experiences. We live in a new and open moment of our evolution as a species. We have the opportunity right now – you and I – to liberate ourselves from cultural conditioning that has been oppressing us for hundreds of years. As we do that we find ourselves living more and more in the unknown and finding the answers within.

I have had many wonderful and inspiring spiritual teachers over the last few decades and I have read, and still regularly read books about spirituality and consciousness – BUT the time for looking to anyone outside the self for answers is past.

All the wisdom, all the answers and all the solutions we need are within and between us. 

So even though I am occupied now writing ebooks for Tribe in Transition about how crisis can be a doorway to transformation, and how consciousness develops, and how we can be more creatively fulfilled and empowered – I am coming to this not as a teacher – even though I’ve been a teacher all my life – but as a fellow traveller with some burning questions, a huge desire for the kind of conversations in which we meet soul to soul and open ourselves to the new, and a passion for experimentation.

Tribe in Transition grew out of an experience of psycho-spiritual death and rebirth in 2013.  In July, my soul friend, Maggie, left New Zealand to return to the UK, and I decided to use the time that opened up for me by her leaving, to write another book – or so I thought. The book was to be called, Twenty First Century Nomad, and was to be a sequel to my first semi-autobiographical book, Migration to the Heartland. I wanted to explore and record the process I’ve been in now for many years  – shedding layers of identity, material possessions, homes, jobs – all the accoutrements of outer life – in order to discover and live from the wisdom and knowledge of the authentic self.

I gave myself three months to write the first draft of this book and started with a two week retreat in one of Golden Bay’s most luxurious lodges at the far, far end of the Bay, miles from anywhere – and I should say I did this retreat with no costs involved, just as I have learned how to live a very abundant and fulfilled life on a tiny income.  I completed the draft in three months and as I was writing the final chapter, staying this time in my friend Siena’s lovely little house on the beach,  I went through what I can only describe as a death of my old identity.

I was feeling immensely tired – the kind of tiredness that goes right down to the bones. It was a tiredness of body, mind and spirit. I even wondered if I was actually dying and could only surrender to that possibility.  It seemed to me in those moments that death was simply a sloughing off of the physical body and that consciousness would continue its travels. I no longer felt attached to living in a body – even though a few years ago I was passionately attached to life – but now it didn’t seem to matter that much; I felt complete with the experiences I’ve had and wasn’t missing anything or hungry for more experiences.

Then – and it’s always difficult to describe these inner experiences in words without distorting them – I set down a burden I had been carrying all my life and maybe even for many lifetimes.  But in this lifetime it was the burden of trying to save the world. And along with this came the realization that I had carried the burden in my family of wanting to make peace between my parents – in a situation that was frequently rocked by conflict and oppressive with all that could not be said or expressed.

The laying down of this burden in my inner sanctuary, freed me from it. My identity up until that moment had been formed by the intense desire to heal, to make peace, to make right. This was woven together with an equally intense anger at the injustice I saw being re-enacted again and again between my parents – and then in the world. I had an equally strong sense of not being equal to the task of being the healer/peacemaker.

I had transferred this mindset from my family to my work in the world where I kept trying to be the heroine. Once I had laid the burden down I was liberated from the old identity – free to become a new person. I was not dying after all but being gifted the opportunity to re-create myself. 

Not long after that I began to create the Twenty First Century Nomad website and Tribe in Transition sprang into being. This is not so different from the work I was doing before – creating A Whole New World – and yet there are subtle differences in the way I am approaching the work. One of the most obvious is that I am no longer so driven to achieve; neither my self worth nor my identity are dependent on it and so I’m approaching it more as a creative experiment, learning how to co-create with the universe.

Another very nice change is that I no longer put  thought into ideas of limitation. I figure that if it’s important for me to do this work the way will become clear, the resources will become available, people will come. And if not, then I will discover who I am to be next.  I’m more self-loving, healthily self-valuing and self-nurturing. The rest I am in the process of exploring as I live and create each day.

How about you? Have you had any experiences of psychospiritual death and rebirth? Have you experienced your old identity dying?