On becoming, on belonging, and on the beautiful strangeness of following your calling

I want to start with a wooden carving. I found, or perhaps it found me, which feels more accurate, standing tall, weather-worn, with ivy threading itself through the cracks in its surface. Beautiful in the way that only old things with history can be beautiful. I knew immediately it was significant. That particular knowing that arrives before the reasoning does.

I looked deeper. The connections led me to Indian temple art, to the possibility of a celestial nymph, and then, yes, I'm fairly certain, to Saraswati. The Hindu goddess of learning, creativity, and wisdom. The one who brings order to the universe through knowledge, who inspired the Sanskrit language, who holds the veena, graced by Swans and Peacocks and the lotus as symbols of art, learning, and spiritual purity.

And here she is, this worn white teak wood, ivy-covered, cracked and beautiful figure. I'm drawn to every one of those cracks. I think they're the point. She would be extraordinary in the sanctuary at Reiki Divine Therapy. I can already see her there, amongst the established garden where the birds fly freely, the squirrels pass through and the peacefulness shines on.

The cracks are where the history lives. The ivy is where the life found its way back in.

This small story, the carving, the recognition, the research that followed, is actually a perfect encapsulation of how this whole journey has felt. Something catches my attention. I know it matters before I know why. I follow the thread. And it leads somewhere that makes everything a little more coherent. Mudras, sacred geometry, Sanskrit, the lotus. I keep learning. I vow to never stop.

What I want to try to articulate today, though, is something that's been sitting with me rather differently. I have evolved. I am aware of this. And over the last few years especially, it has been ramping up, as I've taken my mission, my purpose, into surrender and built Reiki Divine Therapy into what it is now. I am blessed to work on this full time. I feel at home here in a way I have never felt at home in anything else.

The healing, the therapeutic conversation, the Reiki, the Spinal Flow, the ever-expanding knowledge that keeps arriving and making sense of itself, archetypes, archangels, crystals, sacred geometry, ancestral healing, past life regression, the divine feminine and masculine, the goddesses whose stories are finally being told. These are not separate interests I have accumulated. They are a coherent map. My map. And I read it more clearly every day.

I had a long corporate and creative career before this. A workaholic's career, driven, determined, built with real effort and genuine skill. I thought for a long time that it was my destiny. And in a sense, it was it was the road that built me, that gave me the discipline and the resilience and the professional rigour that now underpins everything I do here. I don't dismiss it. But this is different.

I didn’t leave a career to find myself. I found myself, and this is where I landed.

And here, finally, is the thing I hadn't quite articulated until recently. How do the people around me, the ones I love dearly, catch up?

I hadn't thought about this for a long time because I've been so absorbed in the path itself. When you are navigating your own transformation, you tend to be looking forward, or inward. You're not always looking sideways at the people who love you and wondering what this looks like from where they're standing.

And then it struck me. Of course they have to navigate this too. The ones who knew me as always at work, always giving businesses everything. The ones who remember the career-builder, the high-achiever, the person who operated in a very different register. I can’t say that people understood what I did then, let alone now. Who have I turned into? What is this spiritual connection I speak of? How can someone change so completely, crave such peace, talk about energy, Reiki, Souls, Divine, archetypes and past life regressions as if these are simply ordinary things?

I think of my daughter, who is extraordinary, genuinely gifted in ways she perhaps hasn't fully claimed yet. I think she might sometimes look at me and find it hard to locate the mother she knew in the person I'm becoming. Not because I've gone anywhere. But because I've arrived somewhere new, and I got there gradually, and she wasn't necessarily on every step of the journey.

And I want to say to her, and to anyone who loves someone on a path like this: You don’t have to understand it. You don’t have to believe in it. You don’t even have to follow it.

What I ask, all I ask, is that you trust that I know who I am, and that this is it. That the peace you might find strange is real. That the people I sit with in the healing room leave changed, in ways that matter. That the work is serious even when it looks like nothing more than a quiet room and a pair of hands.

You can walk away from a conversation with me and think I’m completely bonkers. That is entirely okay with me. I mean that. But if you’re curious, if some part of you wonders, then the door is open. It always is. I love you the same either way.

I've been sitting with a question: is it judgement, or is it just catching up? And I think, honestly, it's mostly neither. I think the people who love me are simply getting their bearings. They are navigating a version of me that is different from the one they built their understanding around, and that takes time. It might not even cross their mind. It isn't a criticism. It's a recalibration. And I've had years to recalibrate myself, why would I expect them to do it overnight?

What I've realised, in sitting with this, is that I don't need validation. The work speaks for itself, in the faces of clients who leave lighter than they arrived, in the sessions that go somewhere unexpected and profound, in the accumulating evidence that this is what I was built to do.

But I did need a narrative. A gentle, honest way of saying: here is who I am now. Here is what I do and why it matters. Here is the through-line from who you knew to who you're looking at. And here is the invitation, not a requirement, just an invitation, to step into my world a little, if you want to.

I don’t need you to catch up. I just wanted you to know where I am.

The sanctuary at Reiki Divine Therapy is a living thing. It grows. The garden is established and joyful and full of its own ecosystem of creatures. I have plans, perhaps outdoor dining, the expansion of the healing space into nature as well as room.

And now, perhaps, a weather-worn figure of Saraswati, ivy in her cracks, standing as a reminder that wisdom arrives at its own pace, in its own form, often battered and beautiful and found by accident at precisely the right moment.

I am still learning. I am always learning. The sacred geometry, the mudras, the Sanskrit, the goddesses whose stories are finally being told, all of it feeds back into the room, into the sessions, into the conversations I have with the extraordinary people who find their way to me.

That is the privilege. That is the whole point. So, to my dear friends, family, my clients, and the people who love me and are still figuring out what I've become: I'm here. I'm well. I'm more myself than I have ever been.

The door is open. The kettle is on. The birds are flying freely in the garden, the squirrels are doing whatever squirrels do, Welcome to Saraswati, and the energy and wisdom she brings, as she stands proudly with her peacock, likes she’s always belonged here

With love, always, Nici

 Reiki Divine Therapy  |  24 High Street, Whiston, Rotherham, S60 4HH

07545 053 129  |  nici@reikidivine.co.uk  |  www.reikidivine.co.uk