Ah, and so the Sage’s Journey has begun. This is the beginning of a new chapter for me. This is a return to the beginning of my inner journey. But that does not mean it is a backwards step. Oh no. This is a spiral path that I am walking as I do this inner work. It may continually take me back to the beginning, but with each iteration, it is taking me deeper into myself; it is taking me deeper into the well of wisdom that lives within me.

I’m not trying to reach the bottom of the well; there is no bottom of the well. The well is infinite, it is the void, it is the field of pure potentiality that lives inside each of us.

But I am getting ahead of myself!! Where I am right now is back at the beginning of a journey, and what is important is not the destination; what is important is every single step on the way.

Each step opens me more; each step brings more love into my conscious life. The love is there, just like the self-worth is there, just like the field of pure potentiality is there, in all of us. We just have to walk towards it. We just have to be open to it at every step of the way.

And so here I am, beginning this journey, and I am going to take you along with me.

This week I have embarked on the Sage’s Journey with Richard Rudd and the Gene Keys Team64. This is a return to the beginning of my Activation Sequence in my Gene Keys journey. This is the fourth time I have walked through my Activation Sequence. I did it one to one with Hayley Curtis, my phenomenal Gene Keys Guide, then I did it another twice with her in two different group coaching programmes (Destined and Devoted).

Right from the get-go of working one to one with Hayley, my life started to change. Digging into my Gene Keys has given me so much more understanding of myself, and with each iteration of the Golden Path, I have taken that understanding even deeper. I have had explosive breakthroughs that changed everything in an instant. I have had great sweeping waves of breakthroughs that have built over months and years to wash onto the shore of my being with softness and gentleness.

Just as journaling changed my life when I started to do it back in 1998, working consistently with my Gene Keys has changed my life in ways I could never have predicted. It’s a wild ride! It’s illuminating. It’s life changing. It’s new and it’s fresh and it holds wisdom that is as old as I am, or maybe as old as the earth itself. It’s boundless and it’s timeless.

But there I go, getting ahead of myself again!

interiority
the beckoning of inner truth, followed through with commitment, revealing inner treasure
Richard Rudd, The Sage's Golden Path Retreats

And so, this is how my Sage’s Journey opened … with an exploration of my Life’s Work line. I have Gene Key 39 here, the Shadow of Provocation, the Gift of Dynamism and the Siddhi of Liberation; with a Line 1, which is The Creator.

Interiority

A clever play on words from that master word-trickster Richard! Interiority is my life encapsulated in one word. For all those dark decades before I began this inner work (and after, for a long time, if I’m honest), I thought the truth of my life was “inferiority”. I wore my inferiority complex like a name badge. I was telling everyone, with my mien, my demeanour, my body language, my words, my actions, my choices, that I thought I was “less than”, that I thought I was nothing, unworthy of love, unworthy of any attention at all.

But here is the word that truly describes me and my life … “interiority”!

Interiority! Oh my god. I want to sing it out loud. I want to write it on a tee shirt, tattoo it to the back of my hand.

Interiority … my gift for going inside.

Interiority … my gift for doing the inner work.

Interiority … my genius for creating this vast world inside myself, where I get to be the hero riding into a battle for love, with my sword of truth, and my fiery initiating energy.

I was born to create worlds inside myself.

I was born for this inner quest.

All those years of doing the inner work were my solitary initiation into this world of my interiority.

And then came the Gene Keys. Three years of Warrior School to prepare me for this quest, this Journey of the Sage. And I am ready!!

Interiority encapsulates that thing that I am best at … diving into this inner world of mine.

Interiority is my special gift that I get to bring to the world. It is the ability to walk into my interior world and find the treasure there. It is the ability to move beneath the surface of love.

Isn’t this what I’ve been practicing all these years?

Isn’t this what I have been preparing for, for nearly thirty years?

A journey deep into my interior.

An expedition to explore my inner world? Oh yes!! This is what I am here to do. This is my life’s work indeed. I have honed my craft over decades. I have learned that there is treasure inside me.

And here I am, right at the beginning of a new expedition!

The Sage’s Journey, where I not only have all of my own innate wisdom to call on … I have Richard’s, I have the Sage walking beside me!!

the beckoning of inner truth

Of course, this is what it’s all about!! Not just this Sage’s Journey, not just my Gene Keys journey; not even just the last thirty years of inner work … but life itself!

Inner truth is the whole damn point of life itself.

Inner truth is all there really is.

For we have no control over the exterior world. We may think we do. We may think that we have everything tightly wrapped in our control.

But we haven’t. We have no control whatsoever over the outer world. We have no control over world leaders, politics, the economy. Not as an individual. We may as well try to control the sun, or the wind, or the tides.

What we do have control over is our inner world.

What we do have control over is the story we tell ourselves, the choices we make, the attitude we bring.

What we do have control over is the truth we tell ourselves in the quiet stillness of our inner sanctuary.

Ever since I opened my first journal back in 1998, I have been determined to tell myself the truth.

Oh, how I love that phrase “the beckoning of inner truth”. That is what this whole journey of mine has been about. I didn’t start journaling and BAM! I was telling the truth in every word. No. The journaling opened a door into my interior world and I began the slow, slow unpeeling of layers of false beliefs and self-loathing-self-lies. But the truth was always there, beckoning me on. A will-o-the-wisp, a whisper, a fleeting flash of insight, a tiny glimmer of light that held the promise of fire, of sunlight, of hope.

The beckoning of inner truth is what kept me showing up for myself, day after day, year after year! Like glimpsing the hem of a cloak as a wise one walked ahead of me! The beckoning of inner truth keeping me going, keeping me moving, keeping me peeling back the layers.

For truth is so often hidden from us.

But I did not give up. Even when every day was dark, even when the glimpses of light were only memories. There was something inside me that kept me going. I know now that this was my inner warrior energy. I didn’t know that in the dark days. I didn’t know I was a warrior. I only knew that I had to keep going.

And so that brings me to the second phrase of the sutra …

followed through with commitment

That is what I brought to my interiority. That is what I brought to the inner work, right from the beginning, right from the first day that I opened The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron and picked up a pen and a journal. (You can read more about that part of my journey here or here!)

And I have stayed committed. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote.

I wrote myself out of bad situations.

I wrote myself a life-raft in the years when I was drowning as a dirt-poor single parent.

I wrote myself fucking happy!

I wrote myself into a life filled with love and joy and creativity.

I kept on writing. I kept on following the beckoning of inner truth. I kept on peeling back layer upon layer of obfuscation and false narratives that I’d used to keep me safe.

And then the Gene Keys came into my life, and my commitment grew even stronger. For eighteen months I travelled my Golden Path and showed up every day to dig deeper and deeper into the Gene Keys and into myself.

And then I started again, with Devoted, and I travelled my Golden Path, again, only even more deeply.

And my commitment grew. Now it wasn’t just me and my journal, or me and my guide, it was me and twelve women diving deeper than any of us had ever dived before. It was hundreds of Voxer questions, dozens of Retreats. It was four big journals of deep diving.

And it was exhilarating! Not just the work. Not just the truths that were uncovered. Not just the commitment, which was intense. Not just the breakthroughs that changed EVERYTHING.

It was exhilarating to know that I was utterly devoted and committed to this inner work.

It was so obviously the truth of who I am and who I am meant to be … I am meant to be doing this work. I am meant to be making this journey into my interior world.

That feeling came up in me again and again. Not just that this inner work is important to me, but that it’s important to the collective. That I am meant to be doing this inner work for all of us. I am meant to do something with it.

Not everyone has this genius for interiority. That Line 1 energy asks so much of oneself. It asks one to move beyond the external world, for the truth does not lie there. It asks one to trust one’s inner compass and to go on a journey of the uncharted interior darkness, in order to find the light.

It asks that of me, and I shall oblige. I will make this inner journey again and again, and I will continue to bring my treasures … my truth … back to the surface to show everyone what they have inside themselves.

What an awesome gift to possess … the fortitude and commitment to make the journey into the darkest parts of myself.

My commitment to this work is me; it is my Line 1 Creator in action.

I have a genius for interiority!

revealing inner treasure

Oh, and there is so much treasure in my interior world! I spent decades seeking answers in my outer world, pinballing from belief system to belief-system in my thirties and forties, trying to find something I could believe in that would make sense of my inner world, that would make sense more importantly of my outer world.

I lived in a life full of chaos and loss, suffering and grief. Pain, struggle, no self-esteem. And at the centre of that maelstrom was me, a broken girl who grew into a broken woman. A chaos magnet to whom only bad things happened.

I spent decades trying to find something that would fix me, that would make the suffering go away, that would make sense of why my life was a catalogue of pain and grief.

Because there had to be something wrong with me, otherwise why would all these bad things happen, right?! Why would I be so badly treated by other people?!

I was always looking for something out there to fix me.

And then I discovered the inner work; I discovered the absolute joy of finding answers inside me.

My commitment to the interior work took me into the darkness. It kept me going, even when the darkness was terrifying, even when I thought that I would go through all this work only to find that I really was worthless. That I’d walk into the Shadows and find a broken woman cowering there who couldn’t be fixed. Or worse, that I would find a woman who wasn’t even worth “fixing”.

It can be a scary place, that interior world.

But I went.

Again and again, I dived deeper; I went further.

And my commitment paid off!!

For what did I find on my journeys of interiority? I found treasure. I peeled back layer upon layer of darkness, layer upon layer of false beliefs and untrue stories.

What did I find? My own treasure.

No wonder I could never find it in external people or belief systems. It was here all along. Right here.

It was hidden from view, but it was here.

And I must have known in some dark recess of my being that it had to be here. Otherwise, why would I have kept up the commitment to keep digging? Why would I have shown up, day after day after day, delving deeper, asking myself the hard questions, going after the truth?

Because I knew there had to be more.

More to me, more to life, more treasure.

revealing (MORE) inner treasure

All of my interior work, from the very beginning, has been the most glorious treasure hunt. Of course, in the beginning, I didn’t know there was actual treasure to be found inside me. I thought I was a boring nobody, and those initial forays into my inner world were all about fixing energy.

I truly believed I was broken. A broken woman who could never be put back together again.

But there was something in me, a spark of life and light that I was determined to follow. There was a part of me that believed I could be fixed, and that I was the only one who could do the fixing.

So, I started the inner work. The dream was to be able to feel good about myself. The dream was to be able to stop hating myself. The dream was to gather the shards of my self-esteem that had been shattered over and over and over again, to try and rebuild myself.

That felt like it would be good enough. If I could only get to a place where I could feel good about myself, where I could hold a modicum of self-belief, it would be enough. If I could just stop hating myself for being a monumental fuck up, it would be enough.

And so I started the journey into my interiority, with these high hopes, but with pretty low expectations. And I stayed there, on that outer circle of the path for a long time, edging closer to myself as the months and years of inner work went on.

But if I’m honest, which I have had to be all the way, and continue to be, there was a part of me who was doing all this work so that I could find a way to be acceptable to other people. There was a tiny voice telling me that if only I did enough work on myself, I would be rewarded in the external world.

revealing (yet MORE) inner treasure

So, what exactly is this inner treasure that I am revealing? Oh, there is so much.

The true treasures that have been revealed to me through this inner work have been greater than I could ever have imagined possible. And they are nothing whatsoever to do with being accepted or rewarded in the external world.

Self-worth

I now know that I am good enough, just the way I am.

I now know that my worth is not based on external attributes. My worth is innate, like every person’s worth. I was born worthy. It is not dependent on what I do, or how I look. It is based on the innate goodness of my heart. I am good enough. I am worthy of love and respect. And those things start within me. I must love myself. I must respect myself. I must build my self-esteem from the inside out.

This has been a long excavation to get to this treasure, and I know there is more to be uncovered (which is why I am here, on this Sage’s Journey, at the beginning of my Golden Path again!). When I have those moments of self-doubt, when I have those moments of beating myself up for my mistakes; then I know there is more self-worth to uncover, because hasn’t this work taught me that there is no such thing as making a mistake?! There are only opportunities to learn more!

Self-love

The greatest treasure of all! The treasure that all others flow from. Self-love! Learning to love myself has been the greatest reward for all of this work. Not just here in my Life’s Work sphere, but in every sphere, the ember of self love is what sets me on fire! Love is the quality of the connection I have made with myself. Love is the gossamer fabric of the connections  between all of my spheres and Gene Keys. Love is the fire that burns in my belly. 

Love is my Dynamism!

I have found so much love buried inside me. And it excites me to be beginning this Golden Path again, to read those words of Richard Rudd’s … that my Life’s Work is to go inside and reveal my inner treasures!

Oh, there is more to be revealed. I feel the same excitement now that I felt when I started my Golden Path the second time round in Devoted, knowing that it would hold more for me.

Only this time, I feel even more excited (if that is possible!!). There is new wisdom to be relished, new treasures to be found.

I felt so bathed in self-love by the time I got to the end of my Golden Path. Imagine the treasures I will uncover now, with the light of my self-love to guide me through the dark places.

Trust

This is an inner treasure like no other! This one was hard-won. I had to dive deep. I caught glimpses of it when I did my Golden Path the first time, but the second time … wow! I tapped into the motherlode of trust, and she led me even deeper into myself. Here was trust, not only in myself, but in life itself; trust in my path; trust in this Gene Keys work; trust in my Dharma and my heritage.

And now I get to begin the journey into my interior world with this cloak of trust wrapped around me.

Safety

Who knew that safety was a treasure that I would find inside myself?! Safety, that elusive state I’ve been seeking all of my life; that promised land where I used to think nothing bad could happen to me. A Utopia where I was protected, and where nothing painful or hurtful or threatening could enter. I used to think of safety as a fortress world, where I could barricade myself away from all the pain and suffering, all the loss and the grief. I never thought of safety as treasure, but rather as a Nirvana I was trying to reach … “If only I do this thing or that thing or this other thing, I’ll be safe”. And those “things” I thought I had to do all involved cutting myself off from the world or handing my power to someone else. They all involved me either finding sanctuary behind walls and doors, that no one and nothing bad could ever breach; or finding someone to form that protective barrier around me.

This work with the Gene Keys has taught me that safety doesn’t lie behind walls or in another’s hands’ it is to be found in my interior – my inner world is the safest place there is!

And the part of me that keeps me safe is my wide-open heart. The part of me that keeps me safe is the treasure that shines in my open heart, sending out pulsing light.

I don’t need the protection of walls or isolation or of another. I only need love. I only need an open heart. You cannot hurt an open heart, because it is here for all of it! It can allow pain and suffering to be there, right alongside the love.

And the love keeps me safe.

“Interiority” is inviting me to go even deeper. Interiority as a compass is guiding me to even more deeply hidden parts of myself. I know that there is still more for me to discover about myself; I know there are yet more layers to be peeled back; I know that there are more treasures of love and trust and safety to be found, if I have the courage to sit with all of my pain and discomfort, if I have the courage to use every Provocation and Struggle as portals into deeper understanding and healing.

“Interiority” is the perfect word to write at the beginning of this new chapter of my story.

Buried Treasure

My Life’s Work Line 1 Creator is built for this task of seeking inner treasure!

Ever since I took my first tentative steps into the inner world in the pages of my journal, I have known that here, in my interior world, is my true home. Here is the place I am most at ease. Here is the place I feel safest.

And now, through years of embracing my Line 1 energy, I find that this inner world is full of treasure!! Oh, so many years I spent seeking answers in the external world; searching for someone or something that would make me feel whole and home; feeling lost and disconnected; yearning for another to tell me that I am loved and wanted and good enough.

And what have I discovered? That the answers, that the love and acceptance, that the home of my heart, is right here, in my own heart, beneath my own feet!

Richard Rudd uses a parable of an old wise one, spending a lifetime seeking answers to life’s great questions (Who am I? Why am I?), only to find, on their dying day, that the treasure, the Grail, had been buried under the vegetable plot they had tended every day!

What this story tells me is the great paradox of the Gene Keys … that the magic of life is to be found in the mundane. That the treasures we seek are to be found in our everyday life. And oh! Doesn’t that just make life so much easier?! Doesn’t that just take off all of the pressure?! I do not need to go on a great external quest. I do not need to turn my everyday, ordinary life upside down and run off to an ashram, or follow a guru, or join a Buddhist monastery!! No!! My monastery is right here, in my heart. My guru is me.

My quest is right here in my everyday, ordinary life. My epic adventure is inside me. It can live right alongside my life and my relationships. It is my life and my relationships!

I am the hero of this great story that is my life. And the glorious thing about doing this inner work with the Gene Keys, the awesome truth about using my Gene Keys to access my own genius and magic, is that I am doing it NOW!! I am inside the greatest adventure. I am living and breathing it. I’m bringing the Art of Contemplation into every waking moment, harvesting pauses, noticing when Shadows are pinged, revelling in Gifts showing themselves.

My Gene Keys are alive inside me. I’m not waiting for a death-bed revelation. I’m stepping forth on my own path now, in this moment, in the next moment, in every moment. I am asking myself in every situation, what can I learn here? What treasure does this circumstance (joy, pain, suffering, fulfilment, creativity, grief) have to show me? How can I open my heart more? How can I return non-love with love?

And it’s not always easy, but with an open heart and trust in my path, I can approach every moment with an attitude of ease, I can approach life with an attitude of acceptance, and I can find all the treasures buried beneath my feet!

All of the photographs I have used in this essay were taken with my new camera!! I decided to up-level my photography, which is part of my outer creative work,  as I moved into this Sage’s Journey, where I am up-levelling my inner creative work. These were all taken on my first outing with my fancy new Sony! If you’d like to see more of my photographs, you can find them on my Flickr page.