Have you ever imagined the perfect life? Or at least watched others, envious of what they have? The constant comparison plagued me, has plagued me since I was old enough to envy my best friend’s rock and roll skirt, that spanned out in all directions as she whirled around our kitchen. I stood back and envied that twirl. I grew up in the eighties, where fingerless gloves adorned every slim, young set of hands. Where florescent socks were a must and the higher you could fold your fringe, the better. I would look in the mirror and see all the things wrong with my face. Too pointy, too angular, to pimply. But it wasn’t just how I looked, it was who I was. I was never happy with what I had, because of how I felt about myself. Then as I grew into an adult, I developed a belief that said to me, that sang to me as though it were a truth with a capital T, those who have lovely things, home, life are more evolved than you. I had spent a great deal of my twenties searching, learning, completing healing courses, meditating and the main idea that came from this was, what you manifest reflects where you are in your growth as a soul. I saw that the woman who had the stall with clothes from India hanging from her rack as lifetimes more advanced than I. The lady behind the counter at the new bookshop as a guru. It became a problem.

As I grew into myself I felt a lacking in my ability to earn money, to work. Well if I am completely honest I hated the restrictions a menial job placed upon me. I despised the lack of freedom and, as we do at times, I worked in jobs that meant nothing to me. Then when I finally obtained my degree, I landed my dream job. But still I believed I was lacking. I had a house, on a very lovely piece of land, small but beautiful. I had family that filled this house making it a home. For this I was grateful. But still I yearned for the life I thought I was spiritually destined to have, a life that reflected my growth as a soul. When I looked at my life, my home, I saw the cracks in the walls, the unvarnished kitchen floor. When I considered my job I saw the endless emails from demanding parents, the lack of personal freedom. When I looked at my marriage I saw control and a lack of passion.

I kept trying to create a life of freedom, beauty, peace. But I was never satisfied. I kept comparing, kept expecting myself to get there one day. That ‘one day’ looked like a healing business, maybe a shop, a house with a view into a beautiful garden, but it had to be up high. I wanted to earn money from the healing work I did that would keep me afloat and allow me to give my children what they needed. I wanted to feel at peace in my work, rather than feeling constantly hyper-vigilant. But most of all, aside from wanting health, happiness and wellbeing for my family, I desired to find my soulmate.

Then the unspeakable happened, my first born left home. I saw what it meant to be an empty nester. There I stood in my not so nice house, watching with anxiety my life begin to shrink. Soon my second born would leave and I would be left behind. I had never been in love with my husband and even though there was happiness despite the hard times, I always felt there must be more. If I was at all evolved I should be able to attract this perfect life.

So what is the perfect life? My spirit guide Lobsang had told me ‘There is no ideal life,’ and despite intellectually understanding this, it was a concept only. You see I could not shake the feeling, the thought that those who had the life I envied, of peace, comfort, security and companionship, were more evolved than I. It was an insipid belief system set up within me that; were I more evolved, the life I lived would be near perfect, rounded, peaceful.

Then it happened. I was sitting on the bed. Snow was falling outside the window. We had just arrived at the ski resort I grew up in. A message had been left unread on an app. So I read it and from that moment my path shifted completely. I the chose a path that not many would dare step onto. Despite great personal loss at not being near my family, I took a leap of faith and found myself in the arms of my soulmate. Not just my soulmate, but my twin flame. This was the perfect life I had been searching for. With him, everything would be just right.

The balcony was small, hot, but high enough to allow a soft breeze to move consistently past and through my new swinging egg chair. It was black with a grey cushion that was just that little bit too thin. I would push against the balcony rail that was often wet from the rains and swing back and forth a few centimetres. I write ‘rains’ in the plural because where I now found myself, in a remote area of Australia, was for three to four months of the year, wet with constant rain, cyclones and flooding. The flooding from the rains, made it impossible to leave the little town as the roads were more often than not, covered by river waters that flooded. Within these rivers hundreds of crocodiles went about their business. Since I had moved to the town, I dreamt of crocodiles at least once a week.

My first week as a resident I had been told a man was walking along the river bank outside of town with his family. The bank gave way and his wife watched as he waved her back, floating towards a huge croc, who took his life before the eyes of his terrified family. So my fear was not unfounded. The beaches were beautiful but it was ‘at your own risk’ that you would casually walk along them. If the water and waves were unclear, there was no way of telling how close the crocs were to the shore. I was told by a work colleague that they ran like dogs when and if they wanted to hunt down their dinner. So I dared not walk the beach alone, or at all.

The main supermarket of the tiny, remote town was small. Really everything in the town felt small. It wasn’t uncommon to walk in and find the vegetable shelves bare, no milk, no fruit. I would drift from aisle to aisle hoping to see at least one product I used to buy back in my imperfect life, in my old town. It seems remote Australian towns do not do Rooibos tea. There was one interesting shop with incense and the like. This shop had given me hope and try as I might I attempted to build the perfect life I had dreamed of, because I had found true love.

A year passed and still I waited. Maybe we would move? Can we move, I nagged and nagged and nagged. It became a problem. I could not reconcile the fact that I was with my first love, someone who would be my last love and yet the perfect life still eluded me. I hated the town. I would drive down the main drag and think how did I wind up here? Why did he have to live in this isolated, remote area? It just felt like a cruel joke. I turned to spirit begging for answers but they were silent. I could not hear them anymore. My meditations grew shorter and my restless heart grew more resentful.

I had lasted a year and had resigned from a very challenging job to be replaced by an amazing job. At least my guides were still communicating through the medium of tarot, as it predicted this new employment and so I jumped in with both feet thinking, here it is at last, I have my beloved and despite missing my adult children desperately I thought, things are going to be perfect now!

‘No ideal life’….the words haunted me. Two weeks into my new job, I found myself at the airport. I had been working weekends and nights to get ready for the trip. I had all the lesson planning done, but still I knew it was not enough. Within two days of travel I stood on the ski slopes of Japan. A dream one might think. I felt like I was floating on my skis as we journeyed to the bottom. Despite the freedom of movement I could not escape the feeling that I didn’t belong. I begged my soul to please catch up for this was it, the life I had ached for and yet, I had not seen my children in so long I had begun to forget the feeling of their presence. To be with another person’s children when you miss your own is not easy. I was so used to being the one turned to for advice and companionship with my own, that in this situation, in another family, it was not needed, so I felt I was not needed.

The cold of Japan was not unbearable. I took my goggles off and watched as they all boarded down the slopes. I thought if I slipped to the left, off the run, to be lost, it might go unnoticed. I might go unnoticed. I waited…..

…… followed silently. Sat silently, watched the family jokes, the laughter. I had nothing to say, I did not know how to be a part of their closeness. Then disaster hit and my love fell, breaking his foot. Four days the two of us watched as his adult children came and went. We watched the skiers head out to the slopes. He could hardly walk and I withdrew into my own inner chaos. I resented that we had not been skiing together the day it happened. We had been separated by a tiff.

The trip home was a heavy one. Then on our arrival back in that remote little town, I felt even more trapped. Again resentment crept in, the silent relationship killer. It sat on the stairwell and watched me withdraw, this resentment. It hovered over me at night in the dark, filling my mind with thoughts that maybe, just maybe, if I created the perfect life, in a perfect town, with the perfect job, everything would fall into place, and my perfect love would follow. I pulled out the cards, I would get work, but the Tower sat next to my king, and although at the time it did not register, I was to feel keenly later how much the actions I was about to action would near destroy any chance we had at happiness. In unison, it would break the heart of the one person who had loved me without reservation.

The car was packed. I took a photo I will always regret taking, of the both of us as I prepared to leave him. He stood leaning on his crutches, wanting me to find happiness at the expense of his own. I thought I would draw him to me, down there, where there were shops, and people, and markets.

It took me four days to arrive. I was to live in a makeshift shed, glamoured up to feel like a home. It sat on my landlady’s huge lawn in the middle of nowhere like a dolled up mad person grinning into the quiet. It’s before photos I’d found on an old real estate site, showed a dark and depressing granny flat. Dark corners, dark walls and in this previously dark shed I sunk into darkest moment of my life.

On the fourth day I walked through the crowds of people. It was late Easter. All around me were families. All kinds of families. I had driven to a market, full of food and smiles. Green avocados sat in baskets, red capsicum and rows of herbs on wooden tables. Coffee caravans and large pretzels were proudly propped up to hungry mouths talking with loved ones. I had been one of those mums with young kids, laughing and exchanging joy. I bought fresh veggies for my new fridge and smiled at the strangers. I was, in this beautiful local market, in a stunning suburb near the beach, the only person walking alone. I had created the perfect life, had work in a beautiful school, now lived in a beautiful area but I had never felt more heartbroken and alone in my entire life. This perfect life was an illusion, because the one thing I realised that mattered, that made me an evolved soul, was my ability to love. It was not how my external world looked, how good I was at my job, or the place I lived. I mean I get it. I have worked with my guides for a long time and in my head I always knew it was love, but I thought that all the right things had to happen to prove I had this. Wrong!
The illusion became evident and in that moment, in that horrifying moment sitting in my car alone, the smell of basil infusing the interior, I knew I couldn’t stay. I had to return to him, to the life that held love in it, despite the roughness and harshness of the place I had run from.

As I drove back to the granny flat, I felt it, the terror. Had I become so deluded by my obsession for the perfect life that it was too late? How far into darkness had I gone? And it was here that the lesson really sunk in, like an epiphany at an AA meeting or a realisation in prayer at a temple; I had not followed the light. I had been delivered a lesson from the pits of darkness.

Rama my spirit guide has told me since I was young that the darkness is our greatest teacher. When we go into the depths of darkness, when we stare into the abyss that we have created through idealism, illusion or denial, it is through this contrast, the absence of light, that Spirit shows us the truth. We build the illusion, and the response to being in the dark, the sheer feeling of it, allows us to be receptive to the truth. I saw the truth, that I had not left to create the perfect life, I had left because I was chasing an illusion, and the life and love that mattered, was where I had left it.

In tarot this is the Tower Major Arcana card. The Tower represents the illusions of perception we hold, that create high walls we sit on top of feeling self righteous, justified, arrogant and self involved. We sit up in our tower with an attitude that justifies its grand creation. We perceive the negative illusion as necessary and usually this dark illusion does not help us to live freely. But it is necessary and it is reality. All we experience is reality, in unfathomable, multiple forms. The illusion we choose to sustain is free will in action. It is the freedom we have been given within creation. We have the free will to go through and create anything we choose, be it dark or light in quality and experience. Spirit does not judge, it only wants itself, us, for it is us, to expand in consciousness. I have been taught, the purpose of human life, is to experience all things so as to have an ever growing expanded consciousness that evolves higher into light, opening us up to become experts at creating through matter.

But when in a dark time that I’ve created, what I have discovered is, if we are open to it, there is always a way out and a way through. This is the first step to expanding our consciousness: finding the way out. We can experience whatever we want, live whatever illusions we wish to create, but in the end, when we are called to expand our consciousness, lightening hits our tower and we wake up to a way out of the dark.

In my tower moment I saw truly what Lobsang, my calm, quiet spirit guide had said to me, that there was no ideal life. My consciousness expanded so much, I truly saw what I had left behind. I now was faced with finding a way out. I cannot express how urgent the feeling was in me. I felt timing was now in play. If I did not act fast enough, the sense that was too late would take hold and then it would be too late.

I reversed into the driveway, got out of the car and began my feverish exit out of the illusion. This decision to return did not come without a cost. There were consequences to my actions. Leaving the isolated granny flat was not hard though, as I had set in motion the change. I was like a tsunami of change and all the debris forged a path for me to make it back. I drove 22,000 kilometres in two days. Late at night on a desert road I believe I could have died. Twice in the dark I almost hit large wildlife. It was only seconds away from happening both times and in the outback of Far North Queensland there is no phone reception. But I made it back. In through the door I went, back to my love who would take time heal.

A month later I lay on our bed, breathing in the cool air of our safe little flat. Everything had fallen back into place and each time I woke up I felt gratitude at being with my beloved. There are times when I have to remember I did leave for what I thought was a good reason. But I know that when we live in a state of gratitude for what we have, not what we think we should have we live the ideal life. It is ideal because we have created it with every breath we take each day.