This is a guest post by Bridget Cooper of piecesinplace.com
Like with most journeys, I believe that I was on the path before I recognized the stones that lay before and behind me.
Six years ago, I found myself unexpectedly but excitedly pregnant with my second child. I was working from home raising my first born – a little girl – and finding it challenging to balance earning an income and making a life as a wife and mother. I had a lot of stress in my life, and I was very sick for the first five months of the pregnancy. When I was six and a half months pregnant – four days before the anniversary of my father’s death – I had a stroke.
The neurologist did not initially conclude that it was a stroke, first investigating if my symptoms were the result of a brain tumor, multiple sclerosis, or lupus. In my precocious and somewhat controlling fashion, I made it clear to the doctors that I was voting for “stroke.” When friends called me in the hospital after the verdict was in, I happily announced that I had a stroke. Because, I knew, that it was a medical blessing of sorts. I was unaware that the episode itself would become a transformational blessing of its own.
The doctors watched me, and my unborn child, very closely for the remainder of my pregnancy, knowing that my life or my pregnancy could end at any moment. We made it through the pregnancy, but then the delivery day arrived.
It was a fast birth, and my body was not equipped to handle it. I hemorrhaged and was not staying conscious very long, even with medical intervention. Because of the stroke during my pregnancy, the doctors did not want to give me a clotting agent, but they were running out of options. Luckily, my body and the medicine and treatments worked together and I came out of the woods and was finally able to hold my baby daughter. In that moment, I knew that something in my life was going to change – something profound and long-lasting. It was going to be a fork in the road: full of new beginnings and endings.
Over the next few months, I left myself open to discovering what job could allow me to continue to work from home and have infrequent separations from my children.
After watching an organizing show, I was inspired to investigate that career. I spoke with professional organizers in my market and decided that this would be my best option given the demand for the services and my potential income for minimal hours worked.
It became readily apparent that I was doing so much more than organizing in my work with my clients: I was helping people to realign their relationship to “things” so that they could more fully embrace their relationship to themselves and to other people. I discovered that I was a relationship coach and clients started referring friends and relatives to me to coach them in all aspects of their lives.
I found that the common element to my work with each client was bringing them to recognize and attend to their “essence” – the characteristics that made them who they were. In that process, they could then discover what activities and experiences made them passionate about life and that translated into their purpose in life.
I began teaching “strategic life planning” to audiences big and small, with the intention of getting the message of discovering one’s life purpose as an essential element to living any kind of life on this planet.
This was a new beginning for me: a time when I was becoming who I was meant to be and able to offer my true essence to my clients. As with any beginning, it marked the end of something as well. It led to the end of my marriage.
My medical scare during my second pregnancy brought me to value my life in a way I never had before. And, my new career was allowing me to appreciate myself in a new way, as well. This combination provided a sharp contrast to the abusive and suffocating marriage I had committed my life to, knowingly from the beginning. But, I had made a decision to live the life I was meant to live and to honor God by loving myself and others as He loved me.
This forced a choice – to leave and take all the risks that a divorce presents, or stay and slowly let my spirit die.
It took me years to come to terms with this, but I did and I left and I stayed gone. Every time I feared I had made the wrong decision, I reminded myself that I could not remain in a marriage that would suffocate the life I was meant to live. This gave me peace, as did my clients who wrestled with change decisions of their own and then used our work together to transform their own lives into intentional, passionate, and purposeful ones.
For the past few years, even amidst a very protracted and conflicted divorce, I am clear every moment of every day that I am doing exactly what I was put on this Earth to do: to educate, to inspire, and to love.
In my former jobs and in my marriage I could not do any of those, or to such a minimal level that they weren’t worth doing at all. With this clarity, I can make purposeful decisions and take passionate actions to follow my path wherever it may lead me. All the while, I know that the beauty of this is that the journey is the destination.
For more about Bridget, visit her at http://www.piecesinplace.com
