Create the inner space now, so you have somewhere to return when life becomes uncertain.
We're taught from an early age to prepare for life. We go to school, learn new skills, make plans, build careers, start families, and try to figure out what we need to do to create a good life. In a lot of ways, this preparation is necessary. It gives us confidence and helps us move forward. But there are also parts of life we can't prepare for. No matter how much we learn or how carefully we plan, there will always be moments when we simply don't know what comes next.
I've come to understand that we can't completely remove uncertainty from our lives. It's something we learn to live with. And maybe the deeper question isn't how we can know what will happen, but how we can stay connected to ourselves when we don't know.
Motherhood begins with the unknown
As a mother, I think we're introduced to uncertainty from the very start of conception. For me, I could feel something happening in my body before I had any proof I could explain to anyone else. I'm someone who's very sensitive to my own body, and I felt when my baby was conceived. I noticed changes happening deep inside me and quickly started feeling what seemed like pregnancy symptoms. I remember having headaches and feeling unusually tired, and I was sure I was pregnant even though the test couldn't confirm it yet.
I remember how strange that experience was. I knew something was happening, but I couldn't share that knowing with the people I loved, because there was nothing yet to prove it. I was carrying an experience that only I could feel. In those early days, I found myself living inside a kind of unknown. I didn't know if my baby was going to make it. I didn't know exactly what was happening inside my body or whether everything was developing the way it should.
Even after my pregnancy was medically confirmed, the questions didn't stop. They just changed. I would wonder, Is my body healthy enough for her? Is she growing properly? Can she hear me? Sometimes I felt like she was responding when I spoke to her, and I wondered if that was real or if I was imagining it. Then one day she kicked, and I remember thinking, Oh my god, she's kicking. Is she saying hello to me?
There was so much joy in those moments, but there was also so much I couldn't know. I could feel my baby, but I couldn't see everything happening inside me. I could love her deeply while still not knowing what the future would bring.
Looking back, I think motherhood introduced me to a very particular kind of receiving. I was learning to receive something unfolding inside me without being able to control every part of it.
There is no formula for motherhood
There's no school that teaches us how to be a mother. We can read books, listen to advice, and learn from the women who came before us, but eventually we have to meet our own child and find our own way of being a mother.
And the unknown keeps going.
There were times my children got sick and I had to make decisions without knowing exactly what was happening. There were times I was the only parent home while my husband was travelling or busy with late-night work, and I just had to take care of the kids myself. I couldn't always wait for someone to come help. Sometimes there was no quick answer, no one beside me who could tell me exactly what to do.
Motherhood taught me there's no formula for getting everything right. There's no formula for motherhood, just like there's no formula for success, relationships, healing, or life itself. We learn through experience. We make the best decisions we can with what we know, and sometimes we realize later we would have done something differently.
That's not necessarily a mistake. It's part of being human.
What do we lean on when we don't know?
This is where my spiritual practice became more and more important to me.
When I first started my spiritual journey, I thought spirituality was mostly about receiving guidance and understanding what was happening beyond what I could see. Over time, that understanding changed. I began to realize a spiritual practice wasn't necessarily there to give me an answer every time I had a question. It was there to help me feel more connected to myself, so I could meet life with more awareness.
After more than ten years on this path, I began to feel like my soul had become ground I could lean on.
That didn't mean I suddenly knew what would happen. It didn't mean I stopped worrying about my kids or questioning my decisions. It meant that underneath the uncertainty, there was something I'd been building inside myself for years. A relationship with my own intuition. A familiarity with stillness. A way of listening inward when the outside world got loud.
That relationship mattered because life doesn't always give us time to prepare.
Sometimes we have to respond in the middle of the moment.
Sometimes we're tired. Sometimes we're afraid. Sometimes we simply don't know.
And in those moments, I've found that having a spiritual ground is very different from having all the answers.
We are allowed to receive support
I don't believe having an inner ground means we should do everything alone. Actually, it's the opposite. I believe we're meant to receive support. We need other people. We need friendship, family, community, and the kindness of people willing to walk beside us.
But there are moments when outside support isn't there in that exact second.
The person we'd normally call might be travelling. They might be working. They might be dealing with something of their own. Sometimes there simply isn't anyone available right away to hold the moment with us.
That's when the relationship we've built with ourselves matters.
Not because we should become completely independent, but because we can't always control when support will arrive. What we can do is start building our own relationship with ourselves before those moments come.
This is one reason I believe spiritual practice is something we build over time, not something we only reach for when life gets hard.
Create the space before you need it
We often wait until something happens before we slow down. We wait until we're overwhelmed before we listen to ourselves. We wait until we're exhausted before we realize we've been carrying too much.
But what if we created the space before we needed it?
A regular practice of stillness, meditation, reflection, or just spending time with ourselves can feel pretty ordinary when life is going well. But over time, those moments build familiarity. We become more aware of our own patterns, our emotions, our intuition, and the small ways our body tells us when something needs attention.
Then, when life becomes uncertain, we're not meeting ourselves for the first time.
We already know where to go.
For me, this is part of what soul alignment means. It's not about knowing exactly where life is taking us. It's about staying connected enough to ourselves that we can listen, respond, and move through what's in front of us without completely losing our center.
Receiving the unknown
Maybe receiving isn't only about receiving the things we want.
Sometimes it's about receiving what life is actually bringing us.
A pregnancy we can't explain yet. A child who gets sick. A decision we're not prepared to make. A season that looks completely different from what we imagined. A moment when the person we need isn't available.
Receiving doesn't mean we have to like everything that happens. It doesn't mean becoming passive or accepting things that need to change. For me, it means letting myself acknowledge what's here before deciding what I want to do about it.
There are still a lot of things in life I don't know. There are still moments when I'd love a clear answer before taking the next step. But I've learned that certainty isn't always what gives us the ability to move forward.
Sometimes it's our relationship with ourselves.
Sometimes it's knowing we can pause before reacting, listen before deciding, and give ourselves enough space to feel what's actually happening.
And sometimes it's simply trusting that we can meet the next moment when it comes.
A place to return
We can't know everything life will ask of us. Motherhood has taught me that in a very real way, but I think the lesson belongs to all of us.
There will always be things we can't predict. People may change. Circumstances may change. Our bodies may change. The plans we once felt sure about may no longer make sense.
We don't need a perfect answer for every uncertainty.
What we can do is build a relationship with ourselves that grows stronger through the ordinary days. We can create moments of stillness before we desperately need them. We can listen to ourselves before the noise gets overwhelming. We can build a spiritual practice that gives us something to lean on when the outside world can't give us certainty.
Because sometimes the greatest form of preparation isn't knowing what will happen.
It's knowing that when something does, we have somewhere inside ourselves to return to.