The Thing That Lights You Up Is Not a Luxury. It’s a Lifeline.

On vitality, aliveness, and the sacred necessity of doing what feeds your soul

There is a question I find myself returning to again and again with the people I work with, and in my own life. Not what do you do? or what are your goals? but something quieter and more essential than either of those:

‘What lights you up?’

Not what you’re good at. Not what you’re supposed to want. Not what looks impressive or makes sense on paper. But the thing — or the things — that make you feel genuinely, unmistakably alive. The ones that make time disappear. That leave you fuller than when you started. That connect you, however briefly, to something larger than the ordinary business of getting through your day.

This is not a small question. And finding your answer to it is not optional.

Your soul needs this. Not someday. Now.

I want to say something directly, because I think it often gets lost in the noise of productivity culture and self-optimisation and the endless list of things we’re supposed to be doing:

What lights you up is your lifeline.

Not a reward you get to after everything else is handled. Not something to schedule when the kids are older or the work slows down or life gets less complicated. Right now. In the middle of the grief, the caregiving, the overwhelm, the season that isn’t going the way you planned.

Especially now.

Because what feeds your aliveness is also what keeps you buoyant. It is what gets you through. It gives you deeper access to your own soul, to the energy of the world around you, to the guides and light beings that are here — always here — supporting your journey. Whether you connect to that through your higher self, through nature, through the body, through creative expression because the channel looks different for everyone. But the current is the same. It is life force. And you need it flowing.

What does it actually look like?

It doesn’t have to be grand. In fact, the most powerful version of this is often quietly, stubbornly ordinary.

It might be a favorite song that moves you, the kind you can’t listen to sitting still, that releases something in the body you didn’t know was held. It might be an hour in the garden with your hands in the soil. A long walk where the trees do something to your nervous system that nothing else quite replicates. Your dog. Your horse. The kitchen on a Sunday afternoon when you’re cooking something that takes time.

It might be writing. Painting. Knitting. Baking bread. A creative project that has no audience and no deadline and exists entirely for the pleasure of making something with your own hands. It might be calling the friend who always — makes you laugh until something loosens in your chest. It might be a favourite dress and a hat that make you feel like yourself. Moving your body. Asking your guides for guidance and then going quiet enough to hear.

Whatever it is: do it every day. Not for an hour necessarily. Sometimes ten minutes is enough to shift everything. But every day. Make it non-negotiable the way water is non-negotiable. Because that is what it is.

But what if you don’t know what lights you up?

This is where it gets interesting.

Many people I work with arrive at this question and go quiet in a particular way. Not the quiet of someone thinking. The quiet of someone who has been telling themselves a story for a long time.

‘I don’t know.’ ‘I’ve never really known.’ ‘I’ve tried things and they never turn out to be what I thought.’ ‘It’s just not something I’ve ever been able to figure out.’

I want you to look at those sentences carefully. Because they are not questions. They are conclusions. They are statements dressed up as confusion and what they are actually doing is closing doors before you’ve even tried the handle.

‘I don’t know’ is not an open door. It is a full stop. And when you say it to yourself, when you repeat it often enough, you are no longer describing your reality. You are creating it. You are programming your awareness to stop looking, stop noticing, stop receiving the very signals that might lead you somewhere new.

Here is what I know about the human mind, about consciousness, about the way the universe responds to us: we find what we are genuinely looking for. Not what we say we want while simultaneously insisting it’s impossible. But what we actually, openly, curiously seek.

The power of the open-ended question.

This is the doorway. Not generating answers, asking questions. Specifically, questions that don’t have a conclusion already built into them.

Have you ever noticed that when you are in a genuinely dark mood, walking down the street, absorbed in what’s wrong, reality seems to cooperate with your misery? The headlines are terrifying. Someone cuts you off. You spill your coffee. Everything confirms the story you’re already telling. And when you walk that same street open, curious, in a good mood, you notice the puppy tumbling in the park, the child’s laugh from an open window, the stranger who smiles at you for no reason, beauty seems to arrange itself around you.

This is not coincidence. This is how consciousness works. We don’t see reality and then feel a certain way. We feel a certain way and then see the reality that matches. Which means the lens you choose to look through is not a passive thing. It is an act of creation.

Open-ended questions change the lens.

Instead of ‘I don’t know what lights me up’ — a statement, a conclusion, a closed door — what if you asked: ‘What have I always been curious about that I’ve never given myself permission to explore? What did I love as a child before I learned to be practical? What would I do with a free afternoon if no one was watching and nothing needed to be justified?’

These questions don’t demand an answer immediately. They open a search. They put your inner wisdom — your higher self, your soul, your chief How-To Officer to work on your behalf. And that intelligence, once activated, will start bringing things to your attention. A book that catches your eye. A conversation that opens something. A memory that surfaces at an unexpected moment. A quiet pull toward something you’ve been walking past for years.

You won’t find what lights you up by concluding that you can’t. You’ll find it by staying genuinely, persistently, lovingly curious about yourself and what is possible.

That curiosity is the light. Follow it.

If you’re ready to stop waiting for life to feel more alive — to actually discover and step into what feeds your soul — this is the heart of the work I do. Let’s find it together.