I was walking in the park earlier this week when I stopped walking. Not because anything dramatic happened. Just because something landed in a particular way and I needed a moment with it.
I was listening to The Soul’s Code by James Hillman. He was talking about the daimon — the ancient Greek idea that each of us enters the world already called. Not into a career. Not into a role. But into a life that has a particular shape to it. A unique image, already written into us before we knew how to read it.
He calls it the acorn theory. The acorn already contains the oak. You don’t have to create what you’re meant to become. You have to stop covering it over.
I stood there on the path and felt something shift in my solar plexus. A kind of unnamed recognition. Not quite discomfort. Not quite excitement. Something in between that I honestly couldn’t put into words.
And I think that sensation is actually the point.
There’s a question that lives at the back of many people’s minds. Most of us don’t say it out loud because it sounds ungrateful, or dramatic, or like something we should have sorted out by now.
The question is: Is this it?
You might recognise it. It surfaces at odd moments — not usually in a crisis, but in the quieter ones. Looking at the calendar. Driving somewhere familiar. Waking at 3am when the house is silent and the usual distractions have gone to bed.
Is this it? Is this all there is?
And immediately — almost before the question has fully formed — something steps in to shut it down. A reminder of how much you have. How ungrateful it sounds. How you’ve handled harder things. How you’re in your fifties, for goodness’ sake, and you ought to know yourself by now.
That last one is the one that interests me most.
I ought to know by now.
Because underneath it there’s a particular kind of shame — the shame of being accomplished, competent, someone who has navigated decades of complexity — and still not knowing, at the deepest level, what you’re here for. Still feeling the question.
But what if the question isn’t a sign that something has gone wrong?
What if it’s a sign that something is finally ready to be heard?
Hillman’s idea — the one that stopped me on the path — is that the soul comes in with a calling. A specific image. A particular shape that it’s trying to grow into. And when we’re not living that calling — when we’ve spent years being very, very good at a life that was shaped by what was needed, what was expected, what was safe — the soul doesn’t go quiet.
It speaks.
Not always in words. More often in that unnamed sensation. A restlessness you can’t account for. A flatness at the centre of a full life. A strange grief that arrives when you watch someone doing something that looks, from the outside, like a smaller life than yours — and feels, somehow, like more.
The solar plexus — what the yogic tradition calls Manipura, the third chakra — is the seat of personal will, identity, and purpose. It’s the fire centre. And when we ask is this it? and feel that strange, unnameable sensation right there — beneath the ribs, in the middle of the body — I don’t think that’s anxiety.
I think that’s the soul registering a mismatch. Gently, persistently. In the only language the body has.
I think of May Day differently this year. The ancient Celts called it Beltane — a fire festival. Not a rest festival. Not a productivity festival. A fire festival.
The point was to rekindle something.
And that word — rekindle — has been sitting with me.
Because when I ask myself honestly: do I want to rekindle what I had before? I notice something unexpected. A slight hesitation. Almost a resistance.
And I think I understand why.
What I had before — what many of us had before — was energy, yes. Drive, yes. But underneath it was also a kind of relentlessness. A self that had learned to produce, to hold things together, to be the person everyone else could rely on. A self that was, if we’re honest, running quite a sophisticated performance.
I’m not sure I want to rekindle that.
What I think I actually want — what I suspect you might want too, if you let yourself finish the question — is something different. Not to go back. But to go underneath. To find what was there before the performance began. Before the decades of being capable, dependable, on top of it. Before “fine” became the default answer to every question about how you actually are.
The Beltane fires weren’t just about warmth or celebration. They were believed to purify. To clear away what had accumulated over the long winter so that what was genuinely alive could be seen again.
Not rekindled. Revealed.
And that is a different thing entirely.
Rekindling suggests you’re trying to restart an old flame. But what if the old flame was already borrowed — already shaped around what was needed, what was expected, what was safe? What if what you’re actually looking for is something that was there even earlier than that. Before you learned to be so thoroughly useful to everyone else.
Something that is simply, quietly, recognisably you.
What’s still alive in you that hasn’t had air for a while?
That’s the Beltane question. Not: how do I get my energy back? But: what in me has never actually been extinguished — just covered over?
You don’t have to answer it this weekend. You don’t have to answer it at all, right now.
But if you’re someone who has spent years being competent and capable and quietly, privately wondering when it gets to feel like yours — I want you to know that question is not a problem. It’s not a sign that something has gone wrong.
It’s a sign that something is ready.
This is exactly what I’ve designed the Radiant Life Retreat around — and why I’m taking a small group to Bulgaria this September.
Not to rekindle the version of you that was running on obligation and performance. But to create the conditions — the space, the stillness, the right questions — for what was always underneath to begin to surface.
We’ll be there from the 5th to the 12th of September. A small group — six to eight people at most. The kind of size where nobody gets lost and the real conversations actually happen.
If is this it? has been living quietly in the back of your mind, and part of you wonders whether September might be the moment — simply reply to this email (hello@realradiantlife.co.uk). I’ll send you the details and we can have a conversation.