How Knowing Your Spiritual Path Changes Everything — Including Where You Work

Spirituality in everyday life looks nothing like what most people imagine. It’s not a Sunday morning practice or a shelf with meaningful objects on it — or at least, it’s not only those things.

Once a spiritual path is genuinely yours, it stops being a compartment. It becomes the framework everything else runs on.

The job I had to leave

A few years ago, I was working for a defence organisation. Good money. Interesting technical challenges. Perfectly reasonable colleagues.

And I couldn’t stay.

It wasn’t a dramatic realisation. It crept up on me — a low-level discomfort that I kept trying to reason away. This is just work. Everyone makes compromises. You’re not personally doing anything wrong.

But the discomfort didn’t go. Because once you’ve done the inner work — once you actually know what your values are and what you’re willing to stand on — it becomes very difficult to unknow it. My values are rooted in care, in healing, in the kind of work that adds something to the world rather than removing from it. Defence work, however well-intentioned, didn’t fit. I knew it. My path knew it.

So I left.

What spirituality in everyday life actually does

It doesn’t just give you something to do on feast days. It gives you a framework for the whole of your life — a way of making decisions that is genuinely yours rather than borrowed from an institution or a culture or someone else’s expectations.

For me, that shows up in obvious ways and in subtle ones. I choose employers carefully, with values alignment as a genuine criterion. My mornings begin with what I think of as a sacred shower — not because there’s anything mystical about hot water and soap, but because I’ve learned to use that time intentionally, to arrive in the day rather than just stumble into it. I touch the earth regularly — literally, feet on grass, hands in soil — because grounding is not a metaphor for me, it’s a practice. And yes, I ask Brigid for help with technical issues at work. She’s a goddess of the forge and of craft. She’s interested. She helps.

None of this looks like spirituality from the outside. That’s the point.

A real spiritual path is lived, not performed

The difference between a spiritual practice you perform and a spiritual path you live is exactly this — the lived path shapes the ordinary things. The work you take on. The boundaries you hold. The way you start your day. The people you allow close.

It took me years to build something like this. The Guided Path is designed to give you a structured, supported start — six months of live calls, workbooks, community, and Brigid as your guide — so you don’t have to find your way alone the way I did.

The founding cohort starts in two weeks. This is the last post before we begin.

If you’ve been considering it, now is the time.

[Find out more about The Guided Path]

Leaving Fundamentalist Christianity: Do This Before Anything Else

Many people leaving fundamentalist Christianity don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. They want to keep what mattered without walking back into something that controlled and restricted them. I’ve been in that conversation a lot lately — and I always come back to the same piece of advice..

Someone was sharing about leaving fundamentalist Christianity — the specific, particular grief of it. Wanting to keep what mattered. Not wanting to walk back into something that controlled and restricted you. The thread was full of people who recognised that exact tension, because it’s one of the most common experiences I encounter in this space.

I jumped in. Because I’ve walked this path. And because I think there’s one thing that matters more than anything else when you’re standing in that particular gap.

Yeah ok a railroad doesn't link to leavinga  fundamentalist Christianity spiritual path, but this image of leaves on a railroad that splitting in two different directions speak to me. House in the background, various trees and shrubs around the railway... It's not too regularly used, but still important.
Photo by Nicole Moore on Unsplash

Leaving fundamentalist Christianity: what nobody tells you

When you leave a high-control religion, you don’t just leave a set of beliefs. You leave a community, a calendar, a language, a way of making sense of the world. The structure was suffocating — but it was still structure. And the absence of it can feel enormous.

A lot of people respond to that absence by reaching outward. They try things. They pick up practices, attend workshops, follow teachers. Some of it helps. A lot of it doesn’t, because they’re still operating from a template that belongs to someone else.

Here’s what I said in that Threads conversation, and I meant every word of it.

Get to know yourself first

Before you commit to anything — any tradition, any teacher, any practice — take the time to know yourself. Not the version of yourself that was acceptable to the institution you left. The actual you.

Start small if you need to. What’s your favourite colour? What music makes you feel like yourself? What time of day do you come alive? These aren’t trivial questions. They’re the beginning of a much more important conversation.

Then go deeper. What are your values — the ones that were actually operating in you, not the ones you were taught to perform? What do you believe about the world, about other people, about what makes a life well-lived? What are you willing to stand on, even when it’s uncomfortable?

This is the work that changes everything. Not because it gives you all the answers, but because it gives you a foundation to stand on when you start looking for them. For anyone leaving fundamentalist Christianity, this is especially true — the version of yourself that the institution knew may be very different from the one waiting underneath.

Why this matters for your spiritual path

A spiritual path that isn’t built on genuine self-knowledge tends to become another version of what you left. Different content, same dynamic — looking to something external to tell you who you are and what you should believe.

A spiritual path built on genuine self-knowledge is something else entirely. It grows with you. It holds you. It can absorb uncertainty without collapsing.

That’s what I’ve been building at Brigid’s Forge for years, and it’s what The Guided Path is designed to support — a structured, supported six months of doing exactly this work, with Brigid as a guide and a small group of women beside you.

The founding cohort starts in two weeks. There are still places available.

If any of this is resonating, I’d love to talk. You can find out more and get in touch at the link below — or just reply to any of my emails. I read everything.

Find out more about The Guided Path

Drop a comment below if something here landed for you. I read everything, and I don’t share what people tell me.