I’ve been back in Tasmania now for two weeks and I’ve found more peace, more connection, more happiness in my life here than I did in the thirteen months I spent living in Queensland. I have been focused on treasuring the moments; on building memories and forging bonds with my beautiful niece, diving into past connections, building new connections at work, enjoying the teacher lifestyle, nursing Luna (my dog) through the settling period and giving myself space and grace to myself to process the last year and the journey that lead to my homecoming.

There have been moments where I’ve caught myself expressing tears of happiness and awe, and then an element of relief because I have a sense of peace and happiness settling within me again. But there have been moments where I’ve felt the stirrings of restlessness. I’ve realised that I carry patterns of behaviour, patterns of thinking from last year. Some of those patterns are from my childhood, but were exacerbated by last year. I also carry the emotions in my body, those that I have been reluctant to face and to open a path for them to flow through me. I’m caught between two states – one is telling me to just push on, while the other is calling me to deal, to process, to allow myself the opportunity to let the emotions flow through me.

I know which one is better for me.

It would be so easy to slip back into the push energy I encountered in 2023. It was one of many reasons for my emotional and professional state of burn out that led me to leave Tasmania in the first place. There’s a push energy within me that creates the restlessness that I feel bubbling to the surface every now and then, and it contradicts the voice telling me to go with the flow, to allow the Universe to create opportunities, rather than relentlessly hunting them down and forcing them to happen.

I have been home for two weeks and already I’ve started to look into my what next – do I enrol in a Counselling course? Should I already be laser focused on my writing? Do I need to look for a spiritual community to continue where I left off with my learning and development? Maybe I need to create a space? Do I need to do a workshop to set me back on the path of self-growth? What do I do now that I feel as if my mentor and the communities he’s building are moving away from me? Becoming inaccessible to me? Do I look elsewhere? I have every Friday off, I should be using it better, I should be focused and motivated and working hard to step to meet the intentions I created for myself at the start of 2025.

I acknowledge the pressure I’m feeling, the pressure I’m putting on myself is habitual. I have a habit of falling into push energy. I need to have something to work towards, or I start to feel a little horizonlessness creep into my own life. I start to feel restless. Practising the pause, giving myself time and space and letting things flow through me and through my life is something that I find difficult.

Since I started my spiritual journey, I have felt a pressure to do more, to learn more, to tackle the next task that will release some of the pent up energy and emotions stored in my body, to let go of the next thing, to tackle the big gestures like retreats. Now, it feels much quieter, much more reserved. It feels like I’m being called to relax into it and allow myself time and opportunity to put what I’ve learnt into practice and into being in my own life. I’m being called to be instead of to do. But it’s not a state that I find comfortable, and it doesn’t sit well within me. My nervous system is on edge, and I’m not sure that it knows what to do with the sense of peace and happiness that’s settling within me.

The spiritual journey, the path of self-growth and awareness is a powerful one, and the one that I have been on has been transformational, but it’s also been hard work. It forces you to wander through your shadows and your trauma and to begin to heal and open yourself up again. But we can become stuck in the cycle of “what’s going to come up for me next? What do I need to do to deal with it?” And unless you take time to allow that to settle, time for your body and nervous system to adjust to the changes within, you can become drawn into this cycle of perpetual motion, of always having your finger on the trigger.

I think this is where I’m at. I have this push energy inside of me, that causes me to feel restless. I have these feelings of peace and happiness that my nervous system doesn’t know how to process yet. Yet, I have this voice within me urging me to “go easy,” to “let it rest. Let it settle. Give yourself time to catch up. Breathe and be. Let it flow. Take your finger off the trigger and heal.”

Maybe there’s a time to push and a time to rest and allow it to flow? I know one thing’s for sure – we can’t stay in push energy. It isn’t healthy and it isn’t sustainable. There has to be a balance, an opportunity for things to settle within you.

This is my opportunity.