How I Rewilded Myself: Raw Lessons from the Year My Life Fell Apart

“Sometimes, when things are falling apart, they are really falling into place” — anonymous

When Things Fall Apart

I’m going to be honest here. Last year was horrific and up there as one of the most challenging years of my life to date. At the beginning of 2024, I got news that brought things all crashing down. The kind of news that makes your stomach drop. The universe sent a missile at the business I had spent seven years building, and the partnership that had gotten me there. A story that I don’t see as wholly mine to tell, and inappropriate to speak on publicly.

What came after is my story to share. The consequence has been a year of picking up the pieces — myself included — and really questioning ‘who am I now?’ and ‘what’s next?’.

It has also been one of the best and most meaningful years, for the profound shifts I’ve gone through. Perhaps I’m wallowing in short-term memory bias. But as a transformation consultant, this has been a baptism of fire in terms of utilising my knowledge and tools, deepening my wisdom of how change really happens and lessons I’ve learnt along the way. Lessons that have caused me to course-correct what I do in line with my felt, perceived purpose; and start afresh with a new business called Manifesto.

The Buffalo’s Wisdom: Charging Through the Storm

When calamity hit in January 2024, a friend and mentor John Quinton-Barber shared an article with me that described how American buffalo are the only herd animal to run directly into the storm, whilst cows and others ran away. This counter-intuitive approach is actually what made the buffalo ‘weather the storm’ safely — quite literally. Passing through the most violent and challenging front-edge quickly, to the calm on the other side.

This became my mantra for the year: Be more buffalo!

It meant facing challenges head-on, both physically and mentally. Like the buffalo charging into the storm, I learnt that true transformation requires confronting our shadows directly rather than avoiding them.

Five Lessons from My Year of Rewilding

I use the term ‘rewilding’ deliberately here — it’s about returning to our authentic nature, much like how ecosystems flourish when restored to their natural state while still on a broader journey of evolution. Through this process of rewilding myself, I’ve gathered insights that go beyond traditional change management theory.

1. Stop Making Rules, Start Becoming Different

Real transformation isn’t about setting new rules for yourself — it’s about becoming a different ruler.

It goes deeper than typical productivity advice, which is biased towards building external systems that try to push us into change. This approach, we all know, often fails at some point when it comes up against our habitual subconscious programming — our long-standing habits of thought or behaviour rising up again like a rip tide current pulling us back out to sea.

Dr Bruce Lipton’s work in The Biology of Belief offers a fascinating framework for understanding this process. He compares our subconscious mind to a computer’s hard drive — storing and running programmes automatically — while our conscious mind acts like the keyboard, where we actively make choices.

Most of the time (about 95%), your subconscious is running the show, operating on these stored programmes. The challenge is that many of these automatic programmes (around 60%) are actually limiting beliefs or self-sabotaging patterns.

For example, a person might consciously want to speak up more in meetings, but if their subconscious holds a limiting belief about their ideas not being valuable, they’ll find themselves hesitating despite their best intentions.

Change our limiting beliefs into ones that are conducive to the type of change we want and we evaporate these unconscious resisting forces that make it unnecessarily hard for ourselves to keep consistent in the ways we desire.

I made a commitment to myself while in that disorientating front edge of the storm, that I wanted to walk my own talk and work through my conflicting belief systems that were arising in real time. I didn’t want to bury these contradictions and have them come back and haunt me later in life. I was going to learn to understand the storm and embrace it.

2. Trust the Messy Process of Change

Real transformation rarely follows a neat, linear path. It’s more like nature’s cycles — messy, organic, and sometimes chaotic. This process typically involves three key phases:

The Essential Phases of Transformation:

1. Chaos as a Creative Catalyst — Think of evolution as a dance between chaos and order. Chaos shakes things up and sparks change, while order helps make sense of it all. Just like how nature uses disruptions to drive adaptation, we humans can intentionally stir things up through creativity and questioning the status quo. As a result of embracing the component of chaos I’ve even made it one of my core values.

2. Surrender to Transformation — The word ‘surrender’ used to make me think of lovely hippie vibes and going with the flow — very on-brand for my bohemian Bristol roots! Then my feminist brain kicked in and I thought, hang on this feels potentially problematic — should women and marginalised communities really be surrendering more in an already unequal world, or should this be targeted at patriarchal patterns only? But I’ve found my peace with it now. Instead of surrendering to external forces, I see it as surrendering to the death of old beliefs that no longer serve us — patterns that block us. Yes, it can feel like annihilation — I know because I’ve been there. I lost a business, partnerships, friendships, security, a purpose and vision for my future, and a whole load of outdated beliefs. But I had to trust that what remained would be more authentically me — just a bit more polished after the declutter!

3. Gradual Reformation — Change is like gardening — you can’t force a seed to become a tree overnight. Transformation needs gentle nurturing and patience. Sometimes you won’t notice daily changes, but look back after a few months and there’s a whole new garden growing. This lesson I learnt the hard way through experiences of change fatigue and burnout, which challenged me to trust that growth happens even in times of perceived rest.

This process mirrors natural evolution, where periods of disruption lead to adaptation and growth. Just as ecosystems evolve through cycles of disturbance and renewal, our personal growth often requires similar patterns of breakdown in order to breakthrough.

3. Embrace Your Poetic Self & Work with Your Shadow

Working with the subconscious requires a different approach than logical, linear thinking. Our limbic brain and deeper mind communicates through symbols, stories, and sensations — what Jung called the Shadow, where our automatic operating systems and limiting beliefs reside. This is where the ‘poetic self’ comes into play — that part of us that can work with metaphor, imagination, and embodied wisdom to access and transform these deeper patterns.

Our behaviours are often just symptoms of these underlying beliefs and programming.

Through my journey, I developed a really supportive practice combining:

• Archetypal work — exploring universal patterns and roles we embody, helping us understand and integrate our Shadow aspects of self (or the parts we reject).

• Somatic techniques — accessing wisdom through bodily awareness to signpost us towards the experiential sensations of our limiting beliefs.

• Creative storytelling — using metaphor and narrative to understand and rewrite our subconscious programming.

• Mindfulness practices — staying present with our experience as it unfolds, allowing us to observe our automatic responses and develop a compassion and humility in the journey.

4. Build Your Transformation Toolkit

While traditional self-help tools like journaling, meditation, and exercise are valuable, they often only scratch the surface. True transformation requires tools that can access and reshape our deeper patterns. As can be seen in the difference between environmentally sustainable solutions versus regenerative ones that not only maintain but create new life.

This is where understanding the subconscious becomes crucial. By working with creative imagination in a theta brainwave state (achieved through specific meditation practices), we can begin to rewrite limiting beliefs at their source. Or we can work creatively and thoughtfully with the imagination to the same effect.

At Manifesto, we’ve developed a comprehensive approach combining Archetype Assessments, Transformative Coaching, and Conscious Leadership Workshops — all designed to work at this deeper level of change, which can remedy the blocks in your change initiatives.

5. Embrace the Slow Unfurling of Growth

Finally, true transformation creeps up on you. While epiphanies provide the potential for spontaneous leaps through moments of clarity, allowing you to shift perspectives, real change, unfolds and integrates slowly through continuous inquiry and practice — much like a fern leaf gradually unfurling.

When we focus internally on rewiring these patterns, our subconscious mind begins to operate differently, creating lasting change at a deeper level.

Gone are the days of the deserted New Year’s resolutions that wore out your willpower.

Instead is a steady path towards feelings of alignment with oneself, increased meaning and fulfilment, and a more sustainable motivation to stay consistent.

Closing Thoughts

My journey isn’t complete. I am not the finished product.

Will I ever be?

Probably not.

But what I have learnt from the challenging, marvellous, sometimes quite lonely, and ever-clarifying year just past, is that:

Personal transformation doesn’t need to be illusive and hard to navigate or understand.

There are approaches and ways of seeing that can really help us open up the potential for the lives, businesses, communities and world we want to inhabit.

The key lies in having the courage to go deeper than we have previously — to trust in the process of transformation, even when the path ahead seems unclear. I do truly believe that what I’ve been through has advanced my practice and offering exponentially, allowing me to bring more impact and value to my clients.

Just like the buffalo, sometimes we need to charge directly into the storm to find our way through to the clarity and more meaningful alignment on the other side.

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