It’s 2018 and I am stuck in my doorway.
I’m literally standing there. It’s 7:00 in the morning. I’m wearing my freshly ironed pants, a new crisp collared shirt. I’m holding a travel mug of coffee in one hand, my keys in the other. I have a big handbag of all my onboarding materials for my new job on my shoulder, and I cannot get myself to walk out of the door for my first day of work.
I had spent the previous two weeks doing training at this new workplace, showing up not super enthusiastic but at least showing up. And prior to those two weeks, I had spent lots of time job searching. But there I was in the doorway, completely frozen.
With my heart racing and feeling incredibly embarrassed, I called my new boss. It’s probably 7:15 by now, and I explained that I was not going to be coming into work today or ever, and that I quit.
Obviously, my heart was racing. I felt so embarrassed. But I also felt the biggest sense of relief—like when I sat down on the couch and took off the button-up and put my t-shirt back on, it just washed over me that I was free and that I had chosen something else, even though I didn’t quite know what that was yet.
When Your Soul Says No (Even When Your Bank Account Says Yes)
If it’s not clear already, this moment wasn’t just about quitting a job. This was about reclaiming my life. And I didn’t know it at the time, but I’m convinced that was Isis’s wings holding me back, saying “No, no, no, no, no. There’s something else going on. There’s something else for you.”
When I say this, I don’t mean it as if there was some predetermined fate or destiny at play for me. I mean that Isis came in and asked me to choose myself, to bet on myself in a way that maybe I had experimented with in my life up until that point, but hadn’t fully committed to.
Sometimes the internal chaos we’re going through when it comes to our career—what we want to do with our life, our skill development, our future—all that internal chaos sometimes gets really tired of masquerading as a search for stability. Because I think that a lot of us actually aren’t in search of stability. We are in search of meaning.
The truth is, transformative leadership comes a lot better to us when we think about magic. And spiritual, ambitious dreamers cannot stay in golden handcuffs forever. At some point, you need to take the magnificent risk.
When I sat down on the couch after quitting that job and felt that rush of relief that I didn’t have to go, I was immediately overwhelmed with fear because now I had to figure something out. I had less than $1,000 to my name. I had a visa that was going to expire in 30 days. I needed something to renew my visa with within 30 days. I had no money for a flight back to the United States.
But something deeper was happening. That urge to choose myself over security was an abundant act in itself.
Isis’s Lessons on Sacred Economics
Let’s return to the goddess Isis and think about what we can learn from her as the great mother and lifegiver. One of my favorite things to read is The Golden Ass, where Lucius goes through an initiation and meets the goddess Isis. She introduces herself covered in rainbows and says basically that she is all other goddesses—that those are all just personifications of her, that she has 10,000 names but the true name is Isis.
What I find most interesting is that thinking of Isis as this cosmic goddess, as this source of all life, as the great mother, creates a beautiful contrast to some of the activities she engaged in when she moved through the world as a woman in poverty. When she would sit with women and teach them how to weave, she was and is a teacher of practical skills.
Alongside teaching magic and healing, she was also teaching reading and agriculture. And those were the practical skills that got you through economically back in ancient Egypt. During our agrarian human past, you needed to have a craft. You needed to have a farm. Subsistence agriculture was the norm.
Today, we are in a different system—a wage labor system. But I think our gods and goddesses, and Isis in particular, are still willing to sit down and teach us the skills we might need to navigate the economy. Ultimately, they want us to survive and thrive. We have this implicit assumption that the gods are invested in human flourishing so long as we stay within a sustainable and regenerative context as stewards of the planet.
For those of us interested in creating a better economy, creating a better world than the one we’re living in right now, the gods are probably very available to us. It would make sense that they would want us to bring back a nature-based or regenerative-based world, a circular economy.
The Spiral vs. The March: Why Career Growth Isn’t Linear
What’s also interesting in Isis’s stories is this continual pattern of being very present and active in the world, engaged with people, and then withdrawing for a while. It’s also true for spiritual development. It’s normal for us to go into a spiritual place and then return to the mundane life recharged and refocused, perhaps with new skills or a new resolve to see results from our labor, to see our work be purposeful and meaningful.
I think this is a helpful metaphor because it allows us to step away from visualizing our careers and our life and our achievements as this steady linear progression forward. Like we’re not marching to some end goal. What we’re actually doing is spiraling—coming out from everything we’ve learned and gathered, making choices, trusting things, doing new things, and then coming back in.
These periods where we need to step away from the workforce or parts of the workforce that we used to identify with a lot—that’s part of that spiral. We can do this through going back to school, taking medical leave, taking a different job in a completely different industry that just pays the bills, through maternity leave, taking a year off to just be a mother. That was a very different type of labor, a very different type of job.
We have built this society that runs on the worship of money and the pursuit of wealth as the end goal, and it’s not sustainable. Focusing on that rips us away from all the time we need to integrate the lessons we learn, the skills we build.
If we’re going to build a better economy—a regenerative economy that works for everyone—we need to build in psychologically this expectation that we need periods of rest from certain types of work. We need the opportunity to explore different types of labor, change careers, get education at untraditional times.
The Difference Between Spiritual Calling and Financial Recklessness
Let me be clear: I’m not endorsing just quitting your job right away because, as I said at the beginning, we’re not interested in being irresponsible here. But we are interested in recognizing when our souls need a break. Not just a rest from a job because of burnout, but a rest because of misalignment.
What happened to me in that doorway was different from other times in my life when I was financially constrained. There was one time when I was reliant on a very toxic, unhealthy relationship in order to eat because I only made $700 a month. At that time, I was also experiencing spiritual growth in terms of understanding myself, my boundaries, my needs—seeing that I believed there was more for me than what life was offering.
But the kind of thing that I went through at the door was quite different. It was literally having that salary, that stability, that visa in one hand and saying, “Something feels off and I can’t accept this. This is a beautiful gift and I somehow know it’s not the one for me.”
The months that followed were hard—absolutely hard. I remember not being able to afford to buy new clothes, even go thrifting. I was wearing clothes that just didn’t fit me well, feeling constantly self-conscious in my body because I couldn’t dress it the way I wanted to. I got a once-a-week bartending gig and feeling so stressed before my shift—not about dealing with drunks until 5:00 a.m., but because I didn’t know what to wear.
We can’t romanticize financial constraint because it is a real struggle. At the same time, I don’t think we should shy away from discussing the very real resilience and self-belief that can emerge from being in those situations. When you learn to make things work, when you learn to show up anyway, when you develop administrative skills over your life as a result of having less—and I think if that’s a choice, sometimes there’s power in that.
Building Resilience for an Uncertain Economy
Our financial security, our career, our ambitions—what money means intersects with our spirituality. It intersects with our personal development. It can define for us what we think is valuable, what we think is worth doing. Our spirituality can influence what we’re interested in in the first place, and it can guide decisions because it gives us a sense of having or hearing a call.
I froze in that doorway because I heard a call to a different future for myself, a different reality.
I am very critical of the whole abundance mindset stuff because scarcity isn’t just a mindset. Scarcity is a reality because we’re trapped in an economic system that is extracting more and more wealth from every wage worker. Financial constraint takes away our creative life force.
But I also think there’s a pattern among people who are most oppressed in these systems who are still able to tap into that creative life force anyway. In the ways that we look at mystery schools, at The Golden Ass, at the goddess Isis as this death and rebirth figure, we see a pattern where you are asked to dissolve, to die, to let your old dreams or your old ways or your old self-doubts die to make room for the next thing—for opportunity, for potential, for self-belief.
The lesson from Isis is that we need periods of constraint and setbacks because of the way they spring us forward. And if we can take advantage of those times, the kind of work we can do when we bounce back is so much more powerful. The kind of work we can do when we bounce back might be dismantling the very systems that are holding so many people back in the first place.
If we thought things were bad over the last 10 years, the next 10 years are about to be much worse. As grants from the federal government and funding have been cut, as more nations face poverty, we’re seeing population decline and surges in other countries. We’re going to see migration because of lack of water and reliable food.
If you want to participate in solving these problems, you need inner resilience. And that’s going to come from accepting that sometimes you are going to have setbacks.
But what a lesson, what a gift to be given the opportunity to strive, to push forward, to bet on yourself, to learn, to take a magnificent risk. Because I don’t see that the alternative is really all that worth it. These pathways we were sold of the corporate life that leads to more corporate life, where you have to be quiet about systems of oppression and environmental extraction and discrimination in order to keep your job and protect your own 401k—what spiritual depravity is that? That is heartbreaking.
We have to build something different.
Your Sacred Invitation
Because of that decision I made that exact morning, certain opportunities came to me that otherwise wouldn’t have. That series of events gave me the entire life I have now—the skills, the experiences, even my children.
If you’re ready to transform your relationship with soul-crushing corporate life and instead choose something that is souled and soulful, I’m creating something for you. I’m working on a gentle, transformative email course led by the goddess Isis, guiding you through career transitions and the death and rebirth we have to face again and again in professional life.
This course addresses the specific stings we’ve experienced—maternity discrimination, bullying and harassment at work, being the only woman in a call of 15 people, various types of corporate wounds—and transforms those into moments of medicine and learning, allowing us to use that experience to help create something better.
The future is up for grabs. We can’t let the wrong people have it.
If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear about a time when your intuition redirected your career path. Isis works through our inner knowing more than we realize. Drop me a comment or pop over an email—I read every message.
And if you’re at a crossroads of your own, I help ambitious, creative changemakers navigate major career transitions, new projects, and business decisions through Tarot and business advising. Book a reading here.
Leave a Reply