A Travel Essay from the Inner Journey

The Siddhi of your Purpose is special. It is like a gift given to you by the gods so that you may bring it to the earth.
Richard Rudd, The Sage’s Golden Path Retreat

Oh my goodness! When I read those words, “a gift from the gods”, it filled me with joy, it filled me with delight, and it suddenly made the whole concept of my Purpose Siddhi crystal clear to me.

I just love the idea of my Siddhi of Wisdom being a gift from the gods. I am not a religious person, I don’t believe in just one god. But I rather like this notion of a whole pantheon of gods (or fairy godmothers, or goddesses, or fae spirits!) bestowing gifts upon me to bring to earth with me. I rather like this notion that, of all the people on earth, I am part of a special cadre chosen to bring Wisdom!

I imagine that everyone who read these words, “a gift from the gods” in The Sage’s Golden Path Retreat felt them on a deep level, with a sense of recognition. For each of us, as we reach this Purpose Gene Key in our Golden Path journey, to be given this understanding that the Siddhi is a gift from the gods, well, that knowledge is itself a gift!

I have to tell you that it blew my mind! It cracked my mind and my heart wide open. For several days after I read those words, I was on a high; I was floating through my days, giddy with this understanding. Laughter and smiles and tears were never far from the surface. I felt light … light-hearted, light-headed, light-footed. I felt alive. I was thrumming with life. I felt like I was falling in love with my glorious Gene Keys chart all over again!

An Extraordinary Ordinary Life

To step back from the nitty gritty of being a human being, living in a time of such great turmoil and horror as we are now, and to look at my life through this lens of Wisdom being my “gift from the gods”, allows me to see that my life is more than just this stepping through of the daily minutiae of life. My life is bigger than that. My ordinary, everyday life is, actually extraordinary. My life is so full of love and riches.

And Wisdom! It is full of Wisdom!!

Oh! If that is the gift that those gods bestowed upon me to bring to earth, how lucky am I?!

When I first came upon the Gene Keys and began to see the impact it was having on my life to have this map of my inner world, there were times when I was resentful of how many years I’d wasted not knowing about this work.

But this statement that my Siddhi of Wisdom was what I was destined to bring to earth, well, that just releases any vestige of resentment. Not one moment of my time was wasted. The whole journey I took to get here, even the painful years of Struggle, was like attending a school, where I learned the skills I needed to tap into this Wisdom.

I needed to walk this path for 60 years, so that I was strong enough to be able to dive into that ocean of Wisdom inside me. I needed to face challenges in order to learn how strong I was. I needed to face suffering in order to learn how much joy there is in me and in my life.

This is not me being fatalistic, nor am I gaslighting myself about how fucking awful the suffering was. This is me acknowledging how fucking amazing I am, to have gone through it all, to have experienced all of that pain and struggle, and I have come out stronger, tempered by the fire, and with the fortitude and ability to tap into this Siddhi of Wisdom.

The Purpose of this Gift is Always Healing

When I read Richard Rudd’s words … “the purpose of this gift is always healing”, there was another one of those sighs of relief … oh, there has been so much sighing on this Sage’s journey!

Ahhhh, and this gift truly is all about healing! I spent so many years, decades, looking for answers to the pain and suffering in my life. I sought healing externally. I thought I would find it in relationships. I thought I would find it in different healing modalities and alternative medicines.

But nothing healed the wounds in my heart.

Until I really started doing this inner work! When I started that inner journey to reveal the truth of who I am, I slowly, slowly began to heal.

The inner work opened me up to real love, and so the healing continued.

And then, when I discovered the Gene keys, my healing grew exponentially. Discovering that I have all the answers to all of my questions, right here, in this unfathomable well of Wisdom inside me, has been one of the greatest breakthroughs of my life.

And some might say, ah, but you are still seeking answers externally, if you are using the Gene Keys! But that is not what the Gene Keys are about. They are teachings, yes, but they are not dogma. There is no guru or leader, even though there are sages and wise ones.

The Gene Keys are a map and compass; they guide you into your own interior so that you become the sage, you become the guru and the leader in your own internal world.

The Healing is not Just for Me

I am deeply affected by the horrors and atrocities that are happening in the world. I don’t think you can be a normal human being and not be affected by what is happening, not if you have a shred of compassion in you, not if you have the smallest drop of humanity. I cannot talk about any of it without crying … Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, the systematic stripping away of human rights, of women’s rights, the abuses of power, the sickening parade of wealth porn by the billionaire class … all of it rips at my heart.

But I can also hold the belief in the Wisdom that says we can all find the answers inside. I look at the people of Gaza, and what I see in them is not only the pain, but also the compassion, the care, the community. I cannot heal all of the world’s pain, but I can heal my own. And then I can send ripples of that healing out into the world.

This Wisdom is not just for my own healing; it is for the world’s healing. This is why I know I’m meant to share my work, this is why I know that I am meant to keep telling my story. To squander the privilege I have to be able to do this work would be to wrong all those people who simply can’t do it, because they are under the boot of war and oppression.

And the story I am telling is not just my history, it is my present. For the healing continues, as I uncover more and more layers of wounding. It never stops. It cannot.

This Siddhi Underpins Everything That I am Here to Do in Life

My Wisdom is innate. I did not accumulate it, like the facts and information and knowledge I have gathered. I am uncovering it, piece by piece, layer by layer. Every time I heal a small part of myself, a little more of the light of my Wisdom is revealed.

Wisdom is ancient, we carry it in our DNA, we have to unlearn much, in order to get to it.

We have to unlearn the negative self-belief, the negative stories we’ve told ourselves.

We have to start loving ourselves back to life and back to the Wisdom that is our birthright. Only we know what is right for us. Only we know the answers to our questions.

All of my inner work of the last twenty-eight years has been leading me here, to this place, to this deep knowing … that it is alright NOT to know. All of this work has been leading me to this point where I know in my bones that only by surrendering to the unknown and falling into the well of my own being, will I find the Wisdom I have sought for so long.

It is a great paradox that only by accepting the unknown, may our own truths become known to us.

This is what I’m here to do. It’s why I have interiority as my Life’s Work; it is why I have sincerity as my Evolution. I am meant to go inside and tell myself the whole truth, even if it takes work, even if it reveals my own weaknesses. For only by walking that path will I ever come to my own Wisdom.

This Siddhi is the Very Heart of My Genius

Every sentence in the Sage teachings for this Purpose Siddhi has blown my mind!!

It was really quite humbling to read that Wisdom is the very heart of my genius.

Wisdom … it is what we all hope we will have one day, isn’t it? Not knowledge, not an accumulation of facts, but Wisdom.

From my trusty Thesaurus (of course!) …

Wisdom … abstract thought, imageless thought, conceptual thinking, thoughts, ideas, thoughtfulness, meditation, deep thought, contemplation, pondering, introspection, love, learning, sagacity, ripe wisdom, wise understanding, mature understanding, sapience, profundity of thought, deep, oracular

If Wisdom is at the heart of my genius, if Wisdom is my gift from the gods, then it is completely understandable that I would not be ready to know this until now, until my crone years, until I had lived a life of suffering and deep joy, until I had travelled this inner road long enough and had deeply contemplated my Shadows and my Gifts, to be able to say with absolute certainty that the answers we seek are all inside us.

I could not have accepted that Wisdom was the heart of my genius unless I had done all of the work on myself that led me here, to this precise point in history, in my story; to this place of deep self-acceptance and self-love, in order to be able to see the truth in it.

I know that I hold all the Wisdom I need in order to grow and evolve as a human. I am not saying I know everything; don’t worry! I am not that arrogant!

And I also know there is a lot more that is unknown than is known.

But what I do know is that I hold all that I need in order to play my piece in the collective puzzle, right here inside me. I hold all the Wisdom to answer all of my own questions.

I just have to be willing to drop into my heart and be patient.

And this is the Wisdom I am here to share.

Not my answers to my life’s questions, but the understanding that everyone has access to their own answers, if they are willing to make the journey.

That is the first step towards your own Wisdom … willingness to take the first step!

Are you willing?!

The photographs in this essay are all of ordinary days on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire. It’s a place that we visit again and again (it’s just a couple of miles from home). It is a vast wilderness in the heart of Wiltshire, Army land that is uninhabited by people, but which teems with life. Nature holds sway here.

I wanted my photographs for this essay about an extraordinary Siddhi to be an illustration of my extraordinary ordinary life!

If you’d like to see more of my photographs, you can find them on my Flickr page.