” You are here to lead humanity into the new earth.”
I still remember the day those words came to me.
It was over ten years ago, and I was sitting on a bed in a room in my mom’s apartment looking out the window.
My son and I had moved there temporarily because his father and I had ended our relationship after nine years together.
I was the one who made the final decision to end the relationship, even though we both knew it wasn’t going to work.
When I decided to leave, I also gave him everything we owned, including our apartment and everything in it. So, I didn’t have a place to stay and no money or belongings. But I needed to move forward, and I had my son, and that mattered most to me.
My son lived with me almost full-time for the first five years after the separation, and the first year, we lived in an apartment I was renting temporarily. But when the lease ended, I couldn’t find another place, so we had to move in with my mom for a time.
It wasn’t easy to stay there, but I had no choice since I had given everything away. And even though the choice to let go of everything made my life quite difficult in several ways in the years afterward, I didn’t regret making the decision.
I needed to move forward, and I had known it for a long time.
My old life had also become so uncomfortable that there was no way for me to continue. And it wasn’t just the relationship. It was almost everything.
Eight years earlier
Eight years before the day I was sitting there on the bed receiving the message about my life mission, my life had changed abruptly when I experienced a trauma where I could have lost my three-week-old son (we were hit by a car).
I have written about the trauma in other articles, so I will not go deeper into it here, but it was the worst experience of my life.
In time, the trauma led to my spiritual awakening, and that is something I am very grateful for. So, even though the event and the time afterward were really difficult it also led to one of the best things that can happen to a human being.
The awakening opened me to a new reality and to looking at life differently. It opened up a new dimension and depth in me that I had not been aware of before.
When that first awakening happened, I realized there was so much more to life than I had experienced before. I became aware of a larger reality beyond the physical world and my thoughts and feelings, and that reality made life so much more vibrant, alive, and precious.
There was also space around my thoughts and feelings, and they didn’t seem as important anymore.
In the years that followed my first awakening, I kept moving toward the feeling of lightness and inner peace I had experienced in the first weeks after the awakening.
I read spiritual books, practiced meditation, and went to a life-changing retreat.
Daily life started to catch up again after a while, but my spiritual journey had begun. And as the years passed, I would dedicate my life more and more to the awakening.
A new way of experiencing life
The first awakening was wonderful, and it was an opening to a new way of experiencing life.
I was (of course) not able to stay in that state of being and live there all the time, but I kept practicing meditation and being present in my daily life.
I started with the small things, like being present with my son when we were out in the park. It was a beautiful practice, and so many moments of awe and happiness came with being here fully, in the moment, and not somewhere else in my thoughts.
I also practiced being present with what was happening in my inner world, even with difficult emotions, and did a lot of inner work.
Facing the inner world
The first year or years after experiencing the trauma, I still had a lot of fear inside me from the event. That fear could surface suddenly without any apparent reason on the outside. Every time it happened, it was a complete onset of fear and dread that came over me, and it really scared me.
The fear didn’t come alone. It also came with all kinds of scary thoughts about what was happening or what would happen if I didn’t stop the fear or run away. And I imagined a lot of catastrophes before I was able to work through the fear and heal.
It wasn’t easy to face the pain from the trauma, but that was what I had to do to become free. It also took time. But I gradually learned to stay even with those really difficult emotions.
In the more acute stages, about the first year after the trauma, I faced that fear in therapy. I also visited the place where the trauma happened with my therapist, and while there, I had to walk with my son in the stroller in the same way I had done the day we were hit by the car and in the same place, as part of the therapy.
Even though I intellectually knew that it would most likely not happen again, my body and mind reacted as if it would, and I was terrified. But I had to keep walking there over and over again until the anxiety and fear lessened a bit, and after many times, it did.
I stayed in therapy for about a year, and all the work I did there helped a lot. It helped me function “normally” again.
But there was still emotional pain from the event left inside me even after that, even if it wasn’t as acute. And I faced that pain on my own later by being intensely present with it when it was activated.
That was what ultimately resolved it. After doing that for a while, the fear went away completely. So, my spiritual practice helped to get me all the way to freedom.
Facing the outer world
I also used the difficult events I experienced in my life as fuel for awakening. So, instead of reacting in my old ways or trying to escape when painful events happened, I allowed them to take me deeper into the present moment.
I experienced a betrayal by one of the people closest to me at a time in my life when I was at my lowest point after the trauma, which was very hard for me to even take in. But, since I had my practice, I allowed whatever I felt to be there. I also allowed it to take me through and beyond that pain and deeper into the moment.
I also lost both my grandparents during this period, and they both passed away within only a few months.
When it happened, I was not at all ready to feel everything I was feeling. It was too soon, and the grief needed its natural process. But I sat with the grief later when I was ready.
Sitting with grief was both beautiful and painful at the same time and so heart-opening. I got to experience the beauty of reality in its purest form.
At the reception after my grandfather’s funeral, I also experienced a moment of profound stillness and peace. I was looking out the window toward a hill on the other side of the road, and suddenly, I felt such peace and lightness coming over me. It was as if everything stood still, a timeless moment.
In that moment, I knew that everything was okay. I also knew that life was so much more than what we can see and understand and that there is something larger than us, something that is always here and at peace, even in moments of deep grief.
It was a beautiful moment.
Facing the outer world and being pushed toward my destiny
A few years later, I was bullied by some of my colleagues at work. I was working in communications, which is my old profession, and they were in my closest group of colleagues, so I had to be around them a lot. I also had to collaborate with them on a project I was leading, and some did their best to make it difficult for me to finish it.
Every time I received even the slightest attention for the project, the bullying also got worse, so I was also very afraid of attention – and since it was a big project that many people had their eyes on, it was difficult not to have it seen. It was up on almost every meeting.
Today, I would have acted differently in that situation, but as my old self, I tried to fix it on my own for a long time, and I put up a mask to show that I was handling it better than I was. But I was really not handling it well at all, and it also affected my personal life.
(I told my boss later, and he also apologized to me in front of the whole group for not seeing it and doing something about it earlier. I also quit that job later).
But the bullying led me even deeper into my spiritual practice. Trying to be present wasn’t enough in that situation because I had strong reactions, and because the bullying was ongoing and happened daily. So, I had to look further and found Metta and Tonglen meditations that helped me handle what was going on internally with fierce love.
These painful circumstances also led me to sign up for a retreat with Eckhart Tolle in Assisi, Italy. During that retreat, my awakening deepened, and because of what happened there and afterward, I know it was my destiny to be there.
So, my painful daily reality and my practice that no longer fully worked pushed me in the direction of my destiny. It made my life and inner reality so painful that I needed to seek something more. Something in alignment with a deeper reality.
My outer world had not kept up
By staying with and experiencing life in its fullness in this way and following my inner guidance, I gradually built an inner strength that allowed me to stay even with difficult emotions and experiences and to be here for life.
Life had handed me quite a few events to build that strength, and all that practice really changed me. Eight years after the trauma, I was living in a new reality, and I wasn’t the same person anymore.
But even though I wasn’t the same person, my life on the outside had not changed that much. I had been acting differently in my life and relationships due to the awakening and the inner work, but I had still been living the same life with the same partner and friends, who had not had the same experiences and had no interest in spirituality.
It didn’t matter that much to me at the beginning of my journey. I was just so amazed at how wonderful life could be, and I didn’t mind going on that journey alone. But in the last few years, the awakening had become more and more important to me, and the distance between me and my old relationships had started to become more apparent.
I had started to feel more and more like an outsider in my life. I felt like I didn’t belong there anymore. The more inner work I did, the more I also started to wonder if I had ever really felt at home in that life (which can happen when we awaken and start coming back to who we are).
I was also receiving some negativity from some of my close people about my spirituality, to express it mildly, and it was really starting to get to me.
I had changed so much in the past eight years, and it started to become clear that I had outgrown my current environment.
But my outer world had not kept up with the changes in my inner world and who I had become.
Until now.
Returning from Assisi
About a year before I received the message about leading humanity into the new earth, life decided it was time for me to move forward even in the external world.
When it happened, it happened very quickly. It was as if changes that could have occurred years ago had gathered together and been waiting, and now they were all happening simultaneously.
I had just returned from the retreat with Eckhart Tolle in Assisi, Italy when I started to receive the first signs of change.
Almost as soon as I got home again, I knew it was time to leave my relationship. It didn’t come out of the blue, and things had been happening long before this that led to the final breakup, but the decision became crystal clear then. I knew there was no way to move forward and that the relationship was over.
What I didn’t know then was that I was also going to walk out of my old life completely and that it would happen within a year.
Only a few months after returning, I would also experience a profound and permanent shift in consciousness that would change my perception of reality so completely that I would even leave my spiritual path behind…
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This article is the first of three articles where I share the moment I first received my life mission, the years of awakening and inner work that led up to that day and the years that followed.
These were some moments from the first eight years of my eighteen-year-long journey of transformation.
I will publish the second article on October 31st.
