July 14, 2017. The first sight

A warm holiday night in Morocco, by the sea. Festive ambiance for a French holiday celebrated in a French resort with champagne, music, and carefree dancing under the stars.

After midnight, I saw him standing beside the dance floor. Simply observing the dancefloor with a calm that felt almost out of place in the noise around him.

I had never met him before in my life. And yet.

I walked straight toward him and said: “I know you.”

He looked amused. “Oh really? From where?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m sure I’ve met you before. Perhaps in another life.”

We spent the rest of that night together. Everything flowed, everything felt natural. I was leaving the next morning. We exchanged numbers loosely, the way you do when you half believe you will never use them.

I would not have believed anyone telling me that nine years later, I would still be in touch with him.

November 2017. The road trip

Four months later, the pull and longing became as unbearable as it was inexplicable. I had to see him again. Ten days on the road, just the two of us.

What happened between us that week is difficult to describe in ordinary language, because it did not operate in an ordinary register. We were too shy to speak about it openly, so I kept those feelings and impressions to myself and my journal.

I still remember the stinging sensation on the plane back from Casablanca, as if part of my flesh had been ripped from me violently as I said goodbye. I told no one, because no one would have understood. It made no rational sense.

Back home, my rational Self chose to categorize it safely, in a separate box, almost unreal, not compatible with my daily life. The danger of losing myself in this was very real. I was barely recovering from my divorce, still very much in therapy.

2017 to 2022. The invisible thread

We were not in a relationship, yet there was not nothing. Loose contact, occasional calls, the quiet knowledge that the other person was somewhere on the planet and that something invisible kept pulling us in an unusual way. My soul kept screaming for him. My adult Self, together with my therapist at the time, kept the distance. Looking back, I was not strong enough yet, nor ready, for this type of soul relationship.

2022. The return

In August 2022, five years after that first night, we “randomly” started talking again. The pull was instant and intense, as soon as I heard his voice and saw him on the screen.

I was in a different place by then. Stronger, more stable, ready to take risks again. That year I had also deepened my meditation practice significantly, and for the first time in my life I had felt my heart, physically. It became very clear that this was exactly where my work was: leaning into it, opening it, listening to it, following it. So very consciously, almost analytically, I decided to just GO FOR IT. Follow my heart. For the very first time in my life. See where it leads. Go all in. Almost as an experiment.

In September, we took another road trip, ten days through Southern Morocco. This one was different on every level. Deeper, more real, more charged. We could finally speak freely and honestly about what was happening between us. Putting words, at last, onto our incredible experience.

When we kissed, when we touched, it felt less like two bodies meeting and more like two fields of energy recognizing each other. We could literally feel each other’s blood flow inside our veins, and a very powerful vortex of energy forming around us.

Birds gathered outside the window when we were together. I noticed it the first time as coincidence. Then it kept happening. I stopped calling it coincidence.

There were four of us in this relationship. Our bodies and our souls. We would hold each other in silence, unable to release the embrace, as if our souls still had something to say that the bodies had not quite finished transmitting.

A part of me could feel the danger of fully immersing myself in an intensity with no bottom in sight. Deep down, I believed I did not deserve this kind of love. It was not from this Earth. How could I even imagine deserving this level of love, full acceptance, merging into ONE?

On January 2, 2023, as I was leaving, he said: “I see you.” I immediately understood and felt in my body what he meant. Not the social seeing. The kind of seeing that goes all the way through: through the performance, through the adaptation, through all the careful management of how one presents oneself to the world, and finds, underneath all of it, the actual soul of a person. Unedited. Recognized. Embraced as a whole.

We also said to each other, “I feel you.” Even across the distance, we knew how the other was feeling. Once, back home, I burned my stomach with boiling water while cooking. He called minutes later to say he had felt a sharp pain in his stomach at exactly that moment. I have no rational explanation for this. I only know it happened.

Summer 23 in Turkey. The tarot card that jumped.

One summer night in Turkey, we were sitting outside our room in the warm evening air, Sina already asleep inside. I asked if he wanted to draw a few cards on our relationship. He agreed.

The first card that jumped out of the deck was “Trahison”. Betrayal. The image of a knife in a back.

“Hum,” I said. “Interesting. What could this possibly mean?”

He swore he would never cheat. Said that if he ever wanted to, he would tell me first.

I sat with that. I thought: if only he would confess right now, I could perhaps forgive him. He didn’t.

The next day, the proof arrived anyway. I stayed calm. I took screenshots. My hands were steady but my heart felt like it had been butchered wide open.

I ended our relationship the next morning, then continued the road trip with Sina, by the sea. And still, we spoke on the phone every day, him in Istanbul, me somewhere on the Turkish coast. Not because I had forgiven anything, but because I needed to scream, I needed to feel him despite the betrayal, to speak to him, to try to make sense of something that made no sense at all. Only days before, I had been ready to start a whole new life with him. Moving in together. Perhaps even a child. Now every part of me was in excruciating pain, my body, my heart, my mind, every single day. The sea was beautiful. I could no longer see it.

February 2023. The body’s warning.

The relationship had been asking something of me that I was not yet able to give myself: the willingness to trust what my body was telling me, and act on it without needing external permission.

At some point, my body made this impossibly clear. For two weeks in February 2023, I could no longer urinate. The body had simply decided to block it. As though it was saying: protect your territory. This is not safe. I ended up rushing to the emergency room in a level of pain I can only describe as exceeding childbirth. The doctors mechanically relieved the symptom but found no medical explanation. The psychological explanation, which came later, was precise: my body was drawing the boundary my mind was still negotiating.

When I finally understood what it meant, the symptom resolved on its own. The body knows. It always knows. It will not keep quiet until the mind catches up. But knowing and obeying are not the same thing. My body had already drawn its conclusion in February. It would take me two and a half more years to finally act upon it.

Summer 2025. Nothing left to lose

After Turkey, we kept in touch. Despite the devastating heartbreak, I could not resolve myself to block him, to remove him entirely from my life. So much love, so much potential, simply wasted. I could not accept it. The longing was still real. I was also going through another low in my own life, tired, depleted, lonely, my core wound of having to carry everything on my own reopened by acute stress. Speaking to him, who sees me and feels me so well, felt like a welcome relief.

We met again for ten days. The confession sessions across those days were, in their own way, a form of grace. He had nothing to lose anymore, so he told me everything. His full truth, finally, without editing.

There had been others. Not one moment of lies but a pattern running the entire length of what I had believed was a genuine committed soul love relationship. Each confession landed somewhere between pain and relief. Pain because it confirmed what I had feared unconsciously yet refused to see. Relief because deep down, I already knew. My body could finally exhale: it had been right all along.

During those days he also told me, for the first time, about his early childhood. He delivered it casually, almost as an anecdote. What I heard stopped my heart. He had never named it as trauma. He had simply absorbed it and continued.

In that moment I understood, completely, why he could not be faithful. Not as an excuse, there are no excuses, but as a psychological fact. His wound was real. The awareness of it was absent. He could not change without healing it first. And healing cannot begin without awareness. It was not mine to give him, and it was not mine to wait for.

The intimacy between us during those ten days was still extraordinary. Still otherworldly, with a sense of travelling somewhere else entirely. That particular alchemy seemed to exist independently of everything else: independent of the betrayal, independent of the future we would never have, independent of what I now understood about who he actually was. That was its own kind of information. The soul connection was real. Still there, untouched. But it was no longer enough for the life I wanted to inhabit in this reality.

August 2025. The message that came from clarity

A few weeks later, I was in Portugal. The same August nights that brought the panther dream, the same hollow grief by the pool, the same beginning of everything that became the DreamWorks series.

I had started working with my dreams in earnest. And they were showing me, with a precision and repetition I could not dismiss, that something else was possible for me in love. A different kind of relationship. A different kind of man, with different qualities kept appearing. Already waiting, somewhere, in a form I had not yet seen but could feel the outline of.

From that clarity, I finally found the strength to write him what I felt was a definite goodbye:

“Despite our soul attraction, which remains undeniable, I don’t think you can give me what I expect from a partner in my life at this precise moment.”

I kept that first line. Because it was true. It will always remain true.

What I now understand in 2026, with a Jungian lens

There is a concept in Jungian psychology called the animus: the inner masculine dimension of the female psyche. When the animus is not yet fully integrated, it seeks a carrier in the outer world. It finds a man onto whom it can project its full charge. And when it finds the right carrier, the experience is overwhelming. Magnetic. It feels like recognition. It feels like destiny. Because in a sense, it is. Only the source of the recognition is primarily interior rather than external.

What I was loving in him, I now understand, was not only him. It was the part of myself I had not yet claimed. His ease with life. His capacity to live fully in the present moment. His physical presence, the way simple things nourished him completely. His quiet confidence that existence would provide what was needed. His tenderness. His relationship with the body, rest, pleasure, nourishment, met without drama, without guilt, without effort.

These are not qualities I lack. They are qualities I had outsourced to him rather than developing in myself. And the intensity of my longing for him was proportional to how much of my own inner life I had placed in him.

Here is the distinction it took me nine years to make. Soul recognition, projection, and partnership are three different things. The recognition was real: two souls did meet on that dance floor, and it remains one of the most real things we both have ever experienced. The projection was also real: it did not fabricate the experience, it amplified it and partially mislocated it, placing in him what belonged to me. And neither of these, not even both together, qualifies a person for partnership.

In my dreams across those years, he appeared constantly. I used to interpret his presence as a sign that we were meant to reconnect, that our love transcended reality and time. I now understand it differently. He appeared so frequently because the process he represented in my psyche was not yet complete. The dreams were never about him. They were about the parts of myself he was carrying for me.

What remains

I do not regret a single moment of it. All of it was necessary. All of it was teaching me something I could not have learned any other way. And so many moments, incredible, unique, intense, that I would relive in a heartbeat.

What I learned is this: the most powerful love of your life may not be the love that is meant to last. It may be the love that is meant to transform you. The one that shows you, through another, what you could never have seen alone. That was the projection’s gift.

“Despite our undeniable soul attraction.” It remains. It simply no longer binds.

I am free again.

An invitation. What are you loving that belongs to you?

If this story stirred something in you, sit with these three questions. Answer with the first thing that rises, before the mind starts editing.

1. Which qualities in your partner feel magnetic, almost intoxicating? Are they alive in your own daily life, or have you given them to your partner to carry for you?

2. If this person disappeared tomorrow, what exactly would you lose access to? Peace? Aliveness? Feeling seen? Whatever you name is a part of your own inner life you have placed in their keeping.

3. How does this person appear in your dreams? As themselves, or playing a role? Ask what part of you they might be personifying, and what it wants from you.

Withdrawing a projection does not kill the love. It purifies it. What remains after you reclaim what is yours is what belongs to the two of you.

And if these questions open more than they close, this is exactly the territory I work in. Reach out. We’ll look together.

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About the author

I’m Cécile — an Inner Dialogue coach and writer. I work with accomplished people who have built lives that look right and feel wrong; people standing between two worlds. Through inner dialogue and DreamWork, I help them hear what their deeper Self already knows and align their outer life with it. The work is rigorous, intuitive and deeply personal. We work with what is already alive in you, and we follow its lead. These essays are the living record of that practice — mine first.

https://cecileburghard.substack.com/p/welcome-to-aligned-from-within

And if this essay stirred something, chances are it will stir someone you love. Send it to the friend caught in a love too big to explain and too painful to leave. Not to tell her what to do. Just so she knows she is not the only one.

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A joyful lunch in Alsace

It was early March 2026. I was having lunch in a traditional Alsatian restaurant with a dear friend, an art therapist and weaver of inner transformations, talking happily about my coaching business. My ideas. My next steps.

I was also doodling. On the paper table set — the kind you find in restaurants like that one.

I wasn’t designing. I was playing. My initials, C and B. The number 33, and the infinity sign, which have been following me for years. I was turning them over, trying to fit them into one another, the way you turn puzzle pieces without really thinking.

Then I turned the C ninety degrees. It was no longer a letter; it was a crescent, open to the sky.

I liked it immediately. I kept drawing around it for the rest of the day, and I went home with the table set in my bag.

What was already in it

Months later, I turned that little sketch into a proper graphic version. And that is when the meanings started arriving. Not new ones. They had been there since the first evening. Just not consciously. Not yet.

Look at it. The C and the B are both there. So is the 33 — assemble the two 3s correctly and they become an 8. And the 8, standing upright, is the infinity sign. Everything I had been playing with that day was already inside it. I had simply not decided any of it.

It was intuitive drawing. A part of me already knew all of it. It took my conscious Self a few more months to arrive at the same place.

You can read more about The Infinity Loop that kept finding me.

The solid half and the dotted half

Look closely at the base of the symbol. One half is solid. The other half is made of small dots.

The solid side is the B. Strong. Anchored. Fully formed. Declared. That is the identity you display to the world. In my case: the strategic mind, the sharp McKinsey brain, the one that structures, analyzes, decides, delivers. Very masculine energy. She is real. She is earned. I am not letting her go.

The other half is dotted. Still forming. Still gathering itself. A dotted line is how we draw things that are real but not yet visible. That is the emerging identity — the one that already exists but has not been fully claimed.

Carl Jung had a word for the lifelong work of moving from one to the other: individuation. Becoming who you actually are. Who you were always meant to be.

My symbol, I realize now, is the individuation process, drawn.

And it is exactly what happens in my coaching sessions. You arrive with your solid side — the one on your LinkedIn profile. And together, dot by dot, we make the other half visible. Emerging. Present. Allowed.

The crescent, open to the sky

Then there is the C. Turned 90°, upwards. A moon crescent. Open arms, or open cup - ready to receive. New insights from the sky, the Universe, the unknown.

The moon is my feminine side. Receptive. Intuitive. The one that listens to dreams, reads between the lines, senses before she knows. A crescent opening upward is also a cup. A vessel. Something shaped to receive. I have always been drawn to the moon; during my Vision Quest it became something close to a guide.

And this is where my coaching becomes mine, and only mine. I bring both sides into the room. The solid B and the open moon. Strategic sharpness and soft, intuitive receptivity. Most coaches choose one. I simply refuse to choose, and it turns out I never had to.

The threshold in the middle

Now look at the base again: between the two halves there is a line. A threshold. A mirror. I had colored it differently, in gold. To stand out. To shine. From the center. The middle. Aligned.

Now I also see a veil in it.

Between the seen and the unseen. Between the conscious and the unconscious. Between a current identity and an emerging one. Between Light and Shadow.

That last pair comes from Jung. In simple words: the Light is everything we show the world. The Shadow is everything inconvenient we have pushed out of sight. And no — the Shadow is not necessarily dark, or bad. It’s not your defects or bad traits. Very often it holds talents, desires and truths we learned to hide because at some point, somewhere, they did not fit. Jung believed we only become whole when we turn toward the Shadow and reclaim what we find there.

A threshold is not a wall. It is the one place where crossing becomes possible. The eye of the needle.

Because coaching is also this. When you align between Light and Shadow, you can finally start to receive, fully, everything that has been waiting for you. Coaching uncovers emerging identities, thoughts, patterns. And it asks for openness. Open to see. Open to hear. Open to receive insight. Open to change. To evolve. To transmute.

From within. Alignment always starts from within.

The burn

Less than two weeks after that lunch, I burned my forearm badly while cooking. When the pain settled and I finally looked at the mark, I gasped. A moon crescent. With a dot. My symbol, drawn a second time on my arm, by the pressure cooker.

I heard clearly: this is your logo. Claim it. Own it. At the time, I was really not sure yet of the drawings. They didn’t feel like truly mine yet.

The mark faded over the months, as the skin healed. Then this week, as I was preparing to publish this essay, my summer tan brought the symbol back. Darker. Sharper. A tattoo I never chose and yet would not remove. And it happened after the total solar eclipse of August 12: a moon, revealed by the sun, both of them meeting in the sky. Shadow, made visible by Light.

You can see whatever you wish in this. I’m sharing what I choose to see.

Teal

Of course the symbol is teal. My color. My obsession.

It arrived quietly, over the last three years. First, small objects in my kitchen. A tray. A tea cup. A mug. Then, after moving back from Switzerland, the whole new dining set. The pillows. The bedsheets. Then a few t-shirts and dresses I could not resist, bought for the color alone.

Last year I repainted most of my house turquoise.

They say turquoise is the color of truth spoken out loud. Of the bridge between the heart and the throat — between what you feel and what you dare to say. In the chakra system it sits exactly there, between the fourth and the fifth. I did not choose it. It kept choosing me, until I surrendered to the evidence.

And I smile now, thinking of those small teal objects arriving one by one. Exactly like the dots in my symbol. One small dot at a time, until a whole Self takes shape.

The gold seam

Which brings me back to the gold.

Jung spent years studying the old alchemists. They were not really chasing gold as a metal. Gold was their symbol for the true Self — the treasure hidden inside the raw material. In my symbol, the gold sits exactly where the two halves meet.

The treasure is at the threshold. The gold is found precisely where your solid side and your emerging side finally meet.

That thin gold seam is where I work.

Think of the Phantom of the Opera. As long as the mask stays on, he can only be loved partially. In the dark. In hiding. It is only once the mask is lifted that he is whole. Complete. Naked. Authentic. And that is the only place from which anything true can ever be built.

So here it is. My symbol. Still revealing itself, I am sure. You will be seeing a great deal more of it in the coming weeks and months.

Before you go:

What do YOU see in this symbol?

People keep finding things in it that I had not seen. I would love to hear yours.

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If the gold seam is where you are standing

If you recognized yourself somewhere in this essay — holding an identity that still works while something else quietly asks for room — that is precisely the coaching work I do.

I do not hand you answers. I help you hear what your deeper Self already knows and trust the next honest step.

The first conversation is free, and there is nothing to prepare.

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Prefer to look around first? Here is how I work and what working together looks like.

About the author

I’m Cécile — an Inner Dialogue coach and writer. I work with accomplished people who have built lives that look right and feel wrong; people standing between two worlds. Through inner dialogue and DreamWork, I help them hear what their deeper Self already knows and align their outer life with it. The work is rigorous, intuitive and deeply personal. We work with what is already alive in you, and we follow its lead. These essays are the living record of that practice — mine first.

One dot at a time. Subscribe and follow the next ones.

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And if this essay stirred something, it will stir someone you know. Send it to the person who keeps noticing signs and does not quite dare to say so out loud. Sometimes permission arrives through a friend.

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The Dream

One night in May 2026, I dreamt I was at a McKinsey & Company office, wearing my leopard dress.

I saw someone I’d started my consulting career alongside in 2008, not the senior executive he later became, but the younger version of him I first knew back then. In waking life, he’d climbed every level of the organization in record time. In the dream, none of that seemed to matter. He was relaxed and detached from the corporate race, simply waiting for the right moment to retire once his tax situation was optimal. The important thing was never the money; it was his detached attitude. He no longer identified with achievement.

The moment he recognized me, he was drawn toward me. He suggested we dance right there in the office while people worked around us. He took me into his arms and we floated through the space, laughing and playing, almost suspended in a light, joyful state. It felt effortless and alive, and I remember feeling profoundly happy.

Then, for reasons I couldn’t explain, I changed outfits. The leopard dress became a corporate pink dress, with a white jacket similar to one I actually own. The moment I changed, something shifted in my mind. I remember thinking, very clearly:

“If I wear this for too long, people will think I’m someone else.”

At some point, one of the first boys I dated in high school appeared. I sat on his lap in my old baggy skater jeans, laughing openly at his jokes and flirting lightly, completely carefree. There was no strategy and no Self-monitoring. I was simply spontaneous. Yet after a while, the same fear returned:

“If I stay too long in this version of myself, my consultant colleague might lose interest in me.”

The dream continued through the office, and it slowly began to feel like an endless series of tests, situations in which I had to perform correctly and adapt appropriately. Internally, all I longed for was to return to my leopard dress.

Then I saw the three women who’d been my closest friends during my early McKinsey years, sitting together in casual corporate clothes. I felt disconnected from them, as if they were speaking a language I could no longer hear. I felt excluded and almost grieving. Then a voice in the dream told me, simply:

“You just need to speak from here, and they will hear you.”

And I understood. The connection had not disappeared. I did not need to return to the language I once used in order to reach them. I needed to speak from my own truth, from a place deeper than the adapted version of me.

1988 to 2009: The First Adaptations

It took me time to understand what the dream was showing me. I did not begin with a neat interpretation. I began with associations. The corporate dress led me to the professional Self I had learned to inhabit. The dancing led me to the part of me that had slowly disappeared inside my marriage. The high-school boy brought back a freer, more innocent Self. The three women raised a different question: could I remain connected to people from my former life while speaking from my own truth?

As I followed those associations backwards, I found an older pattern that was not present in the dream itself. It led me to 1988, to the first adaptation I can remember.

I was four years old.

Every morning, as I got ready for kindergarten, my mother would lay out one of the lovely dresses she’d bought me to choose from. Every morning, I refused them and chose the same overalls instead. They were more practical and better suited for playing with the boys, my two best friends at the time.

I did not think of the overalls as a costume. They simply made sense. They let me move freely and they let me belong.

This was the first adaptation: choosing the version of myself that made belonging easier. The strategy worked so well that I carried its logic forward, largely unconsciously, for decades.

By the time I arrived at McKinsey in 2008, the adaptation logic was second nature. I was surrounded by brilliant, singular people. We worked hard and partied equally hard, and strong friendships were born there. Yet there were almost no feminine role models at senior levels, at least not the kind who brought their full feminine presence into the room alongside their intelligence.

The ideal consultant toolkit was unmistakably masculine: data-driven, decisive and airtight. Intuition was not on the scorecard. Deep sensing was not a competency. There was little room for ‘perhaps.’ The implicit message was clear: competence had a gender, and it was not particularly leopard-print. So I played it like the boys around me because that was what got rewarded.

The real cost was not the dress code. It was who I became to fit the mould. I thought was protecting performance.

I grew harder and more categorical, with less room for nuance or feelings. I struggled to imagine that some truths could live between the slides of a deck, with no data to prove them and still be essential.

That same year, at the company Christmas party, I was already wearing a leopard dress. The part of me I would eventually have to recover had been there all along.

There is one more layer, and the dream signals it with a single detail. The consultant does not appear as the senior executive he later became, but as the younger man I first knew in 2008. The unconscious is rarely accidental about such things. It seems to be pointing me back to a specific moment, as if something was left behind there.

In February 2009, I began a relationship with the man I would eventually marry. Slowly, without ever making a conscious decision, I began to adapt again. I began to moderate my light, my spontaneity and my visibility because my full expression seemed to unsettle the relationship. I contained myself and reached for a safer costume, one that was less instinctive and less leopard.

I did not yet recognise that I was shrinking. I only knew that something in me had to shrink so that his sense of worth as a man could stay intact. I thought I was protecting love.

Among everything I gave up in that gradual contraction, one of the most bodily was this: I had loved to dance for hours, almost in trance, the kind of dancing that does not think about itself and simply moves because the body knows how. That woman almost entirely disappeared inside that marriage.

Only now, slowly, as I relearn how to shine fully and undimmed, is that feminine, instinctual side allowed to return.

Corporate Dress vs. Instinctual Skin

The leopard dress is not just a dress. It has become a symbolic skin, and the psyche knew exactly where to find it. This was not her first appearance. She has been finding me for twenty-five years, long before this dream, and I told that fuller story in When the Unconscious Starts to Roar.

Less than a week before the dream, I had worn it for a night out with a friend. Something shifted in me that evening. I felt free, feminine and alive in a way I had not felt in a long time. There was a quiet magnetism and an ease that did not feel performative. It felt embodied.

Leopard imagery carries something instinctive: sensuality, confidence, erotic vitality and unapologetic visibility. What matters most, however, is not the visual symbol. It is the state of being attached to it: free, playful, socially fluid and alive inside my own body.

The leopard is not another personality to perform. She is the part of me that does not edit herself for approval.

The same part that felt alive and carefree with her first boyfriend.

The pink dress and white jacket are the counterpoint. They represent a socially acceptable femininity that is polished, contained and appropriate. The moment I put them on, life becomes performance again, with tests to pass and roles to maintain.

Why “For Too Long” Matters

“If I wear this for too long, people will think I’m someone else.”

What is remarkable is the precision of that sentence. The dream does not say that the pink dress is wrong. It says that the danger lies in wearing it for too long.

In Jungian terms, this is the persona: the face we develop to meet the world. It is necessary. We need different registers for different relationships and environments, and much of adult life depends on our capacity to adapt. The problem begins when adaptation hardens into identity, when the costume stops being something we wear and becomes the only Self we know how to inhabit.

The scene with my high-school date shows the fear from another angle. Even while I am carefree, laughing and spontaneous, I worry that the accomplished consultant might lose interest if I remain there too long.

The question was not really whether one man would remain interested. It was whether the accomplished, controlled version of me had become so central to my sense of desirability that I no longer trusted a more carefree self to be enough.

Dancing in the Office

The setting is essential. The dream places the leopard qualities inside McKinsey. It does not ask me to leave the professional world to recover my aliveness. It brings both into the same room.

The consultant now represents something which has evolved in me: not an inner authority driven by judgement and pressure, but a grounded masculine presence capable of welcoming my feminine vitality. He’s delighted to dance with my aliveness, not despite it.

The moment with my three female friends carries the same movement towards integration. When the voice tells me to speak from “here”, it is not offering a technique. It is pointing to a register beneath the adapted professional language I had learned to speak fluently. The dream seems to be telling me that I do not need to return to an old version of myself to remain connected to people I deeply care about.

Both scenes suggest that emotional connection is not restored by recreating the old persona. It is restored by speaking and moving from a place that is whole, authentic and alive.

Daring to Show Up Whole

The costume was never the problem. None of these adaptations deserves contempt; each one once protected belonging, performance, or love. The strategies worked. That is precisely why I kept using them. But each required me to leave something at the door. The settings were different, but the bargain was the same. I could belong, succeed or be loved, as long as I arrived in an edited, partial, controlled form.

The deepest cost was not that I became someone false. It was that I became fragmented. Different rooms knew different acceptable parts of me, while the full woman remained out of sight. That is what the dream wanted to show me.

The resolution is integration, not rejection. The dream is asking me to recover authorship of my choices: to wear each version consciously, to know what it allows and what it costs, and to take it off before it becomes a prison. Not to reject ambition or perform a new identity called the leopard, but to let practicality and femininity, intelligence and instinct, safety and dance, enter the room at the same time.

If the danger is not adaptation itself, but forgetting that we are adapting: how do we recognise when an old costume is no longer serving us, and has begun to replace us? Looking back at my own dream, these are the five signs I would pay attention to.

5 Signs Your Old Costume No Longer Fits

1. You feel fully alive, and then quickly retreat.
A more spontaneous, instinctive version of you appears for a moment. Soon afterward, you reach for the identity that feels safer and more familiar. The swing back is often faster than the swing forward.

2. Being more fully yourself feels strangely dangerous, almost shameful.
You are not only afraid of change. You are afraid of what remaining in this new identity might cost you: approval, belonging, security, love or the way others have always understood you..

3. The old strategy still feels safe, but it no longer feels true. Something is missing.

It may continue to earn recognition, maintain harmony or help you perform well. Yet something in you knows that familiarity is no longer the same as alignment.

4. You can see the younger Self who created it.
The identity was not false or foolish. It was built intelligently, often very early, to help you belong, stay safe or remain loved. You can honour why it emerged without allowing it to define you forever.

5. Other people are beginning to see the new you before you fully claim her.
They notice your energy, confidence, freedom or presence. Their response reflects something that is already emerging, even while part of you still hesitates to believe it belongs to you.

🪞Reflection Prompts

• What are the costumes you’ve been wearing?

• What did they once protect you from, and what are they costing you now?

  

About the Author

I’m Cécile, an Inner Dialogue coach and writer. I work with accomplished people who have built lives that look right and feel wrong, people standing between two worlds. Through inner dialogue and DreamWork, I help them hear what their deeper Self already knows and align their outer life with it. The work is rigorous, intuitive and deeply personal. We work with what is already alive in you, and we follow its lead. These essays are the living record of that practice, mine first. I also share the journey on Instagram.

Let’s Connect

Not every initiation requires a desert. Some begin in a dream you cannot shake, a costume you keep returning to, or a pattern that repeats until you finally turn to face it.

If you are standing between an identity that still works and a Self that wants more room, this is precisely the work I do. I do not give you answers. I help you hear what your deeper Self already knows and trust the next honest step.

If the costume has started to feel too tight, book a free 30-minute Alignment Conversation. We will explore what your inner life is already trying to show you.

Book a free 30-min Alignment Call

If this essay stirred something in you, chances are it will stir something in someone you love. Share it with the person who keeps talking about a change they have not made yet, the one still wearing a costume that no longer fits. Sometimes the call arrives through a friend.

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The Call

In 2017, I attended my first shamanic initiation weekend with Gilles Wurtz. At some point he said something that fascinated me: “the traditional rites of passage will call you. You will simply know which one to start with”. I had no idea this was even possible. A rite, calling you?

He was right. Some rites triggered an instant, full-body “no way” in me. The rite of Dismemberment and Re-memberment was one of them. It would take six years before that rite finally called me, and before I was ready to answer.

The Vision Quest was different. I knew instantly: this is what I need.

During that same initiation weekend, the very first power animal that came to me was an eagle. A beautiful, strong, powerful eagle. Eagles are known for their sharp, clear, strategic vision. They read an entire landscape from high above and still catch the smallest movement in the grass below. Perspective and precision at once. The capacity to rise above the noise, see the whole picture, and know exactly where to land. The first thing I saw appearing was his eye. A piercing, golden yellow eye. I knew instantly what he had come to share with me: his quality of Vision.

And the moment Gilles described the Vision Quest, which at the time took place in a canyon in Arizona, the image of the eagle appeared again, overlaying the image of the rite in my mind. Seamless. Logical. Without any rational explanation.

The rite itself is disarmingly simple, and it can be held anywhere in nature: a desert, a canyon, a forest. You isolate for three days and three nights. Seventy-two hours. Fasting. Doing absolutely nothing. Those are the only instructions. There is nothing to do; that is the whole point. You see no human being for the entire duration. You speak to no one. You retreat within, surrounded by the sky, the moon, the stars, the sun, the wind, the rain, the rocks, and the animals who live there.

Many people at that initiation weekend found this rite the most frightening of all, because of the long isolation combined with the fast. To me, it sounded just perfect. Isolate. Go within. Receive visions and clear answers about where my life was meant to go next. Where can I sign up?

Two years later, in September 2019, the time had come. Days before leaving for Arizona, a dear friend gifted me my first Oracle deck: Native Spirit.

I did my first draws, very sceptical at first about Tarot and Oracles in general. The Vision Quest card appeared twice in those very first draws. Confirming both that this rite was the key next step on my inner journey, and that Oracles are not completely random after all. The call was confirmed from every direction.

Canyon de Chelly, Arizona — September 2019

I wrote in my journal on the plane, somewhere over the Atlantic:

The day has finally arrived. A strong mix of emotions — excitement, curiosity and apprehension. But I am clearly determined, and I can hear the clear call from my guides — from my life. This feels aligned.

We hiked down in silence into Canyon de Chelly, a sacred Navajo reserve in northeastern Arizona, entering only because Gilles — who never calls himself a shaman — had once met the Medicine Woman of the Navajo tribe living by Spider Rock. As they spoke about their respective practices, she saw that they were almost the same. And so she had done something almost unheard of: she invited him to bring groups to her sacred land, to practice in this millennia-old tradition.

Everything that followed was entered in that spirit. Deep gratitude. Humble posture. Nothing taken for granted. Zero control possible in this kind of work.

The land itself commands humility. A desert canyon, dry and hot, wild and protected, a natural reserve where no one enters uninvited. The heat presses down. The silence is total. Nothing here is designed for your comfort, and nothing cares about your plans. The environment demands what the rite demands: complete surrender.

Spider Rock rises 230 metres from the canyon floor — a single sandstone spire, ancient and solitary, the colour of rust and fire. For the Navajo, it is not a landscape feature. It is a living site. The home of Spider Woman — the weaver deity who created the universe from thread, who taught humans to weave, who embodies the truth that reality itself is a web of relationships. She has two faces: creator and enforcer. Teacher and cosmic law. She weaves beauty into existence, and she holds the order of things together.

I did not know any of this when I arrived. I only knew I was there to ask questions I had not yet found the language for.

I wrote down in my journal what I was seeking:

To free myself from my past, and from the past of the generations before me. To free myself from my fears: fear of loving the wrong person; fear of being hurt in love; fear of lacking money; fear of not making the most of this experience of life on Earth. To free myself also from any remaining block standing between me and living my life according to my highest path.

The rite required nine days inside the canyon — a preparation phase, then the crux: three days and three nights of complete isolation. Fasting. No phone, no watch, no book, no journal, no activity. Not leaving a five-metre circle around my sleeping bag. Doing absolutely nothing. Gazing at the rock formations, the olive trees providing shade, the animals roaming freely, the stars at night. Wild horses. Bears seen on the mountain across our campsite. A whole Bambi family appearing at dusk.

When the three days of isolation ended and we returned to camp, we reintegrated the group in complete silence. No words, no stories. To respect and honour what had just happened in each of us. Seeing human faces again after three days and three nights alone is deeply disturbing. I was no longer the same person who had walked out of camp. Neither were they.

I noted something in my journal that I could not explain: five of the first names in our group of twenty-five were also people in my mother’s family. François — my grandfather. Isabelle — my mother. Françoise — her oldest sister. Hélène — her youngest. Mathias — my brother. The only one missing was Jeanne, my grandmother. I wrote: why is Jeanne not there?

I didn’t know what to do with that. I simply noted it, as I had learned to note the things that arrive without explanation. Meaning can come anytime — sometimes years later.

The themes that emerged during this Vision Quest were matriarchal, cyclical, feminine: family, nesting, relationships, babies. The Navajo are a matriarchal society. The canyon itself is feminine energy. Spider Rock is the grandmother spider.

I had spent my adult life running on one kind of energy: ambitious, fast, high-performing. The energy that builds careers in banking. The canyon was pointing me toward another one. Older, maternal, moving in cycles rather than straight lines. The energy of my feminine ancestral line, of the moon, of the body I had never been taught to listen to.

The Request

During that first night alone at my spot, I made a request to the universe.

I had been reading a book about the feminine menstrual cycle, where I discovered the four seasons a woman moves through each month, the ancestral tribes who synchronised with the moon, and the profound connection between the feminine body and the rhythms of the natural world. I literally had no clue about any of this. Nobody had ever taught me that my own body carried this intelligence. Reading it was not just beautiful, it was an opening. A deep realisation that there is a primal link between our physical bodies and Source, always there, always available, waiting to be remembered.

And I asked, not as an experiment but as a genuine, open request, whether it was possible for my cycle to synchronise with the full moon.

I will be honest: I had made that request almost like a test. I was committed to the Quest, humble, serious — but not yet fully convinced. Some part of me was still asking: how could three days and three nights alone in a canyon provide clarity about a life? I was willing. I was present. But I was not yet certain that any of this was real.

There was something else underneath that doubt too, something I recognise now as very me. The rite was demanding. Intense. I had given up two weeks of my life, away from my daughter, flown across the world, to fast alone in a canyon, in the middle of nowhere, bored to death, thinking about food all the time, with wild black bears roaming around. The part of me that had spent years in banking, optimising every hour, measuring every outcome, wanted confirmation that this effort would be worth it. That even here, in the canyon, in ceremony, in surrender, I had maximised the experience.

The universe does not joke about this kind of request.

The answer arrived the next morning, quietly and unmistakably, in my body. Right on time for a glowing Harvest Full Moon. Completely outside of the “normal” timing. And it was not a one-time event. The whole cycle shifted, permanently, to align with the lunar calendar.

Though I noticed something else over time: when I returned to stress, to overwork, to the pace of ordinary life pushing too hard, the synchronisation would slip. The cycle would slide out of alignment. It became its own signal. Not a punishment. A message: slow down. Come back. You are drifting from yourself. You’re moving away from the connection.

The moon, it turns out, is an excellent life coach.

Source exists. It always listens. And it operates outside our rules of space and time. Its answers arrive instantly, with a power and a signature that cannot be made up. After that answer, I never again needed to question the reality, nor the power, of Source.

Coming Home

As soon as I got back home to Luxembourg, we celebrated my birthday, which had passed while I was away.

Sina had made me a gift.

She was six years old. I had been completely unreachable whilst in the canyon — no phone, no messages, no photographs sent or received. She had no knowledge of where I had been, what I had seen, what had happened. She had stayed with my mother, in the ordinary routine of home.

She displayed a 3D paper construction she had made herself, next to my cake. Figures cut from paper, folded and assembled into a three-dimensional form.

I stopped breathing.

It was Spider Rock. Right there.

Not a copy — she had no image to copy from. But the same unmistakable vertical form, the same singular rising shape, the same quality of something that reaches upward from the earth toward the sky. I pulled out my phone to show my mother the photographs I had taken in the canyon. I needed external confirmation that I was not hallucinating. I was not hallucinating.

I asked Sina what she had made. She said:

“This is for you, Mummy, for your birthday. This is the tower that controls all the elements — the water, the Earth, the wind and the sky.”

She had listed three elements. She had not mentioned fire.

I had just spent two weeks working with the spirits of each of the four elements in that canyon.

She was six. She had never been taught about the four elements. Neither her school nor my mother had given her this.

I have not found a rational explanation for what she knew. I have stopped looking for one.

The Rite of Shedding - May 2022

Three years after the Vision Quest, I felt a clear call to continue the journey inward. The Rite of Shedding — a purification and rebirth initiation — consisting in nine sweat lodges, representing the nine months in the Mother Earth’s womb. The heated stones brought inside from a sacred fire, to purify whatever is ready to return to Source. Pitch dark inside.

What happens inside is not mine to share. What I can tell you is how I came out of the first one. I staggered to the cold river, trembling. I lay down on my front, face against the stones.

And I heard a message, clearly:

“I am alive. I made it.”

I lay on the riverbed, shivering in the ice-cold water. Then I felt the need to sit in the grass, still trembling. Tears came — grief, pain, suffering that had been stored in my body like a pressure cooker on the point of exploding. All evening and into the next morning, I needed sacred silence to process what I had just lived through. And then, gradually, it lifted.

What changed after that rite was not dramatic. It was quiet and irreversible. A clarity arrived that had not been there before — not in my mind, but in my body. I understood that I needed to stop my banking career. Not as a vague aspiration. As the next actual step.

I began asking the question out loud: how do I find the courage to leave? How do I surround myself with people who are doing the inner work? How do I build a life shaped by depth rather than performance?

Later that year I attended two week-long meditation retreats and found a community of soul friends who are still in my life today. I tried to launch as a coach — but there were still too many blocks. Fear of being seen. Fear of the leap. I built a website, developed a full positioning around alignment, and never hit publish. I have come to accept that this too was part of the journey. Not a failure. A rehearsal.

And several months after the Rite of Shedding, I opened my heart to love again. For the first time in a long time, I followed it rather than my head. I experienced something I had not known before: soul love. Out of this world, no words are powerful enough to describe how incredible it feels, yet so real. And I learned, through that relationship, that soul love alone is not enough to sustain a healthy relationship in 3D. Some lessons are only earned at a high price. I would pay it again. For the intensity of the feeling, and for the certainty it left behind: this level of love exists.

The Rite I Initially Said “No Way” To — End of July 2023

Six years after that instant, full-body “no way”, the Dismemberment and Re-memberment finally called me. And this time, I was ready. I was once again changing lives, moving back from Switzerland to Luxembourg. The rite knew the timing better than I did. They always do.

The spider was my power animal for the entire rite. They appeared frequently, each time with an instant, clear download of information. Four years earlier, I had stood at the foot of Spider Rock. Now the grandmother weaver was working with me directly.

The eagle came back too. He appeared in one of the sweat lodges, unmistakable. I did not understand his message then. I am not sure I fully do now. Some visits are not meant to be decoded on the spot.

One night, I dreamt I was swimming in a large, clear bay of warm turquoise Caribbean water. A dolphin in the distance. I expected him to swim away; instead, as I came closer, he stayed. I could feel his presence right beside me in the water, his vibration moving through me, transmitting something good. Bliss, happiness. He had found me again, the same presence from my journey around the world in 2019.

Another night, the dream was stranger, and I woke up knowing it was potent: I had spider eggs freshly laid in the corners of both of my eyes.

Some of it I understood immediately. The eyes: the organ of Vision, where the eagle had left his gift six years earlier. The spider had chosen to lay her eggs exactly there. And eggs meant something was coming. Alive, not yet hatched, not yet visible. Something incubating at the very edge of my sight, in the periphery, where things live before we are able to look at them directly. A new vision was being born. But I could not yet see it.

The final message of the rite, when it came, was almost disappointing:

“There is so much beauty and power in simplicity.”

So vague. So abstract. I have been discovering what it means ever since.

Messages like this one are not riddles to solve. They are seeds that open slowly, in their own perfect timing.

Less than a month later, the spider eggs hatched. Information about my relationship surfaced, completely unexpected, out of nowhere. The relationship I had followed my heart into, the one with serious plans of building a life together. Once I saw what I now saw, there was no other possibility. To respect myself, and to respect the value I hold highest in any relationship, integrity, I ended it.

Only later did I understand the last detail of the dream. The corner of the eye is where tears form. The new vision arrived with grief attached, and the dream had known it, had carried the tears to come. It was clearly not the vision I wanted. It was the one I needed.

The Third Activation — October 2025

I used to call them rebirths. I understand them differently now. Each one was an activation: the unlocking of the next level of growth, the next depth of individuation. Each arrived uninvited, exactly on time, going deeper than the last. And each demanded the same price of admission: an Ego death first. A period of pain, sorrow, emptiness that feels like loss but is actually underground preparation.

The first activation came in 2015, crawling out of depression and burnout, slowly, back toward Light. The Ego death lasted over nine months.

The second came in May 2022, face against cold stones, hearing three words rise from somewhere below thought: I am alive.

The third arrived in a coaching session on October 17, 2025. Two months earlier, the familiar heaviness had returned. Not sadness exactly, more like the grief of something old preparing to leave. This time it lifted within a week. The Ego deaths grow shorter. The descents lose their terror once you know what they are: preparation.

In that session, I physically felt an enormous weight lift off my body. An old soul contract, finally seen, honoured, and completed. I shared the full story of that session in my essay on values, because what crystallised in the days that followed became my Core Values Statement. Five values and a closing line I did not plan: Freedom. Growth. Soul-level connection. Peace. Integrity. And through it all: Presence. This is how I come home to myself.

This is what years of deep inner work produced. Not a framework. A homecoming.

And here is what I have learned about the path itself. As much as I set clear, precise intentions, most of it unfolds by itself. Through synchronicities. Through dreams that hatch a month later. Through rites that call when it is time, and not before. Guided, I believe, by the Higher Self, which sees the whole landscape the way the eagle does: from high above, catching the smallest movement in the grass below.

The Vision Quest did not give me answers. It was an initiation. An invitation to release my expectations and surrender to divine timing. Coming home with nothing but a handful of key words I could not yet decipher felt, at the time, like a poor return. The ROI was questionable on the surface. But what it really ignited was the slow, profound, most perfect path to my Self.

What has been calling you? A place, a change, a person, a conversation, a retreat?

You will know it by one sign: it keeps coming back.

How to Create Your Own Initiation

You do not need a canyon in Arizona. You do not need nine days, a shaman, or a Navajo Medicine Woman.

What you need is a will stronger than your distractions: the will to dedicate a few hours alone, in nature, doing nothing, and to hear what calls you underneath the noise. Here is a first version. A few hours instead of three days. The instructions are just as simple, and just as non-negotiable.

1. Choose a place in nature where you will not be disturbed, and where you will not see other human beings. A forest, a field, a riverbank, a quiet corner of a large park if that is what you have.

2. Block four hours. Tell someone where you are going and when you will be back. Then switch your phone off completely. Not silent. Off. It stays buried in your bag, for emergencies only.

3. Bring water. Nothing else. No book, no journal, no music, no snacks, no camera, no pen. At most, a simple watch or an old alarm clock to tell you when the four hours have passed.

4. Choose your spot and stay within a few metres of it for the whole duration.

5. Then do absolutely nothing. That is the entire instruction. No meditation, no yoga, no tai chi. No inventing little games with stones or wood sticks, no building, no collecting, no arranging. The mind will try anything rather than nothing. Watch the light change. Listen. Feel boredom arrive and stay with it. Boredom is the doorway; everything interesting is on the other side of it.

6. When your time is complete, leave slowly. Stay in silence a while longer if you can. Only then, back home or in your car, open your journal and sit with the prompts below.

🪞 Reflection Prompts:

• What came up when there was nothing left to do?

• What did I keep reaching for?

• What thought, image, or memory kept returning?

• What did I see or observe around me? What did nature show me, and did anything feel like a message?

• What question could lie underneath all the others?

• And what is one thing I now know that I did not let myself know before?

Do not force meaning. Note everything, even what makes no sense. Meaning can come anytime, sometimes years later.

About the Author

I'm Cécile — Inner Dialogue coach and writer. I work with accomplished people who have built lives that look right and feel wrong: people standing between two worlds. Through inner dialogue and DreamWork, I help them hear what their deeper self already knows — and align their outer life with it. The work is rigorous, intuitive, and deeply personal: we work with what is already alive in you, and we follow its lead. These essays are the living record of that practice — mine first. I also share the journey on Instagram

Let’s Connect

Not every initiation requires a desert. Some begin in a dream you cannot shake, a power animal that keeps returning, a pattern that repeats until you finally turn to face it. If you are curious about what yours might be trying to tell you, I would love to explore it with you.

And if you find yourself at a threshold, between the life you have built and the one trying to emerge, this is precisely the work I do with people. Not to give you answers. To help you hear your own call and trust it. Let’s chat and we will see, together, what is asking to be seen.

Book a free 30-minute Discovery Call

What’s next: Mauritania Is Calling

And for those who feel the call of the real thing: I am preparing something very close to my heart.

A very intimate, private circle for a desert initiation in Mauritania, early 2027. Silence, sand, starry night skies, and the kind of work that cannot be explained, only experienced. Not a three-day isolation. A different way into the silence, gentler in form, no less deep.

If something in you stirred while reading this essay, if the desert has been calling you, reach out. I will share the details as they take shape.

Not a rite of passage. An initiation: a coming home to yourself.

And initiations call too. You will simply know.

If this one is calling you, write to me.

If this essay stirred something in you, chances are it will stir something in someone you love. Share it with the person who keeps talking about a change they haven’t made yet. Sometimes the call arrives through a friend. 🤍

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If you’ve been reading me for a while, you know the essays so far have followed my inner journey: how I encountered my soul, how I learned to hear my inner voice. This one marks a turning point.

For 25 years, the same animal kept appearing in my life. At a Mexican market stall. On a puzzle box. And finally in a dream so vivid it made me realize it was time to listen to my dreams. This is the story of how I finally recognized her, why it took so long, and how she led me to my daily practice of working with dreams.

This is DreamWork, a new essay series. My living practice, shared here to encourage you to start your own, if you feel the call.

The Wooden Leopard — Mexico, 2001

In the spring of 2001, on my very first trip to Mexico, a two-week family holiday on the Riviera Maya, I bought a small wooden leopard at a local market. Hand-carved, painted in the vivid colours of Oaxacan craft tradition, the kind of object that catches the eye without explanation.

I did not know then why I chose it. I only knew I had to.

He travelled back home with me and has lived with me ever since. Through countries, through marriages, through the shedding of entire lives. His tail broke off in one of my many moves. I cannot remember exactly when.

In early 2026, as I reshuffled my home office to mark the end of a corporate chapter, I repaired the tail with superglue. He belonged in the room. Repaired. Present.

Shortly after, my cleaning lady placed him on top of my dream notebooks, the Moleskines where I record my dreams each morning. Without being asked, without knowing what they were. As if she knew.

I have been thinking about that coincidence ever since. The wooden leopard, bought in 2001, guarding the dream notebooks in 2026. Twenty-five years of waiting for his exact position.

The Facebook Cover — 2012

In 2012, two days before Sina was born, I was spending hours online, browsing aimlessly, feeling like a whale ready to pop at any moment. And that is when I found an incredible photograph. It simply appeared out of nowhere.

I made it my Facebook cover picture immediately. Not as decoration. As declaration. This is me.

I did not have words for it then. I didn’t know about power animals, had no Jungian vocabulary, no DreamWork practice. I only had an absolute certainty of recognition: the feeling of seeing something that had always been true about me, suddenly made visible.

Looking back now, the timing feels precise to the point of eerie. Two days before giving birth to my daughter, at the threshold of one of the most primal transformations a woman undergoes, the psyche offered this image. The instinctual, sovereign, fiercely protective feminine. Looking directly at the camera. Unapologetic. À l’affût, by day and by night. There is no exact English word for it: on the watch, ready to leap and intervene at any moment.

I recognize now that I lived in that state myself back then, though in me it was still raw survival instinct, not yet made conscious. Her alertness and mine were the same, but mine was still running in the dark.

I did not realize then I was being shown my Self.

The Puzzle — 2018

In March 2018, the animal arrived again, this time as a 2,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. The image on the box: a leopard drinking at the edge of a jungle pool, its spotted reflection perfectly mirrored in the water below. The animal and its mirror image: two faces of the same creature, though I could not have seen the symbol back then.

It took me months to complete. Evening after evening at the dining table, piece by piece, until August 15, 2018. What followed, in the weeks after completion, was something I can only describe as resolution, in both senses of the word. Because something had been quietly maturing in those meditative evenings: a decision that had felt too daunting to face head-on. Putting a whole life on hold for four months to circle the globe with my six-year-old daughter. By the time the last piece clicked into place, so had the decision. Clear. Firm. Mature. No longer scary: simply mine to execute.

At the time, I called it a hobby. I understand now that the puzzle was putting me into a meditative state: the hands occupied, the analytical mind quieted, the deeper intelligence finally given room to surface. And all the while, the leopard’s spirit was accompanying me. Unknown to me.

What the Tradition Says

In shamanic traditions across cultures, from the indigenous peoples of the Americas to Mongolian Tsataans to Celtic shamanism, the power animal is not a pet, not a totem chosen consciously, and not a metaphor. It is understood as a genuine spiritual ally: a non-human intelligence that accompanies a specific soul at a specific time, offering protection, guidance, and access to particular qualities of instinctual wisdom.

Depth psychology says something strikingly similar, in its own language. Carl G. Jung observed that images like these rise from a layer of the psyche far below the personal — autonomous, not invented by us — carrying qualities we haven't yet claimed as our own. And they tend to appear at precisely the moment we need what that creature embodies.

The leopard carries a specific psychological freight: sovereignty, instinctual intelligence, the capacity to move between Light and Shadow, embodied power that does not perform itself, beauty that does not apologize for being seen. It is not an animal of the herd. It moves alone, at its own pace, entirely itself.

When such an animal begins appearing across years, in dreams, in random photographs, in objects chosen without knowing why, the tradition says: pay attention. Something is trying to reach you. Something that knows, before you do, what you are becoming — and comes bearing the qualities to help you get there.

Spring 2025: The Animal Names Itself

In the spring of 2025, I sat with a Human Design practitioner for the first time. Human Design is a synthesis system that integrates astrology, the I Ching, the chakras, and quantum physics into a precise energetic blueprint of the individual. When he described the way I naturally navigate the world (I am a Manifestor, like roughly 10% of the overall population), he named the animal that best represents my profile without hesitation: the panther.

The panther sees life differently. She feels and senses things very quickly, before they manifest. She observes from a height before acting, and combines stillness and clear vision with explosive precision once the timing is right. She moves alone, at her own pace.

A few months later, she leapt straight into my dreams.

Portugal, August 2025: The Unconscious Starts to Roar

There are moments in a life when the unconscious stops whispering and begins to roar. August 2025 was one of those moments, though I didn’t fully know it yet.

I was in Lagos, Portugal, sitting by a sunny pool surrounded by children’s laughter, and I felt utterly, inexplicably hollow. Sad. Disconnected. No taste for life despite a beautiful villa, sunshine, stunning beaches nearby, and my closest friends around me, my “family of the heart.” A dark cloud I didn’t want to chase away. I wrote in my journal that I only wanted to linger in the sadness, read the signs being sent to me, and let things unfold.

Something in me knew this wasn’t depression. It was grief. The grief of an old Self already beginning to shed its skin, a costume that had grown too small. I didn’t know then how precise that sentence was.

It was in those same August nights that the first significant vivid dream arrived.

A panther. Beautiful, all black, powerful, deliberate. Leaping toward me, choosing me, wrapping itself around me in a fierce and total physical embrace.

A power animal making direct contact. In shamanic tradition, when a power animal touches you, it is not symbolic. It is a call for your attention. It carries a transmission for you. And the body remembers what the mind might later doubt: I felt it deep in my bones, even inside the dream — this was a threshold.

This was not a dream about a large cat. This was a dream about a force in me that had been waiting in the dark to be acknowledged — and had finally, after decades of circling, decided to come out of the dark.

Then, in another dream that same week, I found myself speaking face to face with Gilles Wurtz, the man with whom I had worked in Celtic shamanic tradition that spring. And I heard myself say, with a clarity I had never touched before, even waking:

“I feel like I am right between two worlds. The first world, I no longer truly fit in or belong to anymore. The other, I don’t feel fully ready for yet.”

He nodded. And I woke stunned. Not by the content, but by the quality of the knowing. Something very deep was already unfolding. And there was no way to stop it.

Shortly after those dreams, as I had asked for guidance on how to approach my next steps, I received a clear answer in a lucid dream: pay more attention to the signs. When I asked for more clarity, I was shown, simply and unmistakably, one instruction.

That was the day I began my daily DreamWork practice. A Moleskine notebook by the bed. And every morning, before anything else, writing down whatever the night had left behind.

Same Animal, Different Coat

The more attention I paid to my dreams, the more leopards appeared in them. A quiet confusion settled in: was it the panther that had a message for me, or the leopard? The Portugal dream had been unmistakably a panther. Everything before it, the wooden figure, the cover photo, the puzzle, unmistakably a leopard.

So I did what I always do when something won’t resolve itself: I looked it up.

What I found stopped me. The panther is not a separate species from the leopard. They are the same animal. The black coat is simply a genetic variation, a different expression of the same underlying creature. Same DNA. Same instinct. Same intelligence. The spots are still there on the panther’s skin, visible only in certain lights, at certain angles, to those who look closely enough.

I had not been visited by two different animals across 25 years. I had been visited by one — showing me its two faces.

In the shamanic and Jungian traditions, the panther is understood as the Shadow aspect of the leopard power animal: the dark, nocturnal, interior dimension of the same sovereign energy. The leopard moves in daylight, spotted, wearing its pattern openly. The panther moves in darkness, carrying the same power but in a register closer to the unconscious.

In my first vivid dream encounter, it was a panther that came to me. The Shadow Self making direct contact first, as it so often does in initiation dreams. Then the leopard, spotted, wearing her pattern openly, as if the psyche was moving from Shadow into Light.

La Panthère — November 2025

In early November 2025, I walked into a Cartier boutique. A ring had caught my eye, and I went in simply to try it on. But once it was on my hand, it didn't speak to me.

I was already mentally heading for the door when the salesman smiled and asked, very politely, whether he could perhaps show me something else. Something he thought might delight me.

He came back with a panther ring.

The Cartier Panthère, one of the house’s most iconic and timeless pieces, introduced by Jeanne Toussaint, Cartier’s first female creative director. A woman of such fierce and singular personality that Louis Cartier himself nicknamed her “la panthère.”

“I allowed myself to show you another piece, very different, but I truly believe this one fits your personality.”

I tried it on. Of course it fit perfectly. I knew immediately.

The woman who inspired this jewel had been nicknamed the panther for the same qualities I was, in those months, slowly learning to reclaim as my own: sovereign presence, creative authority, unapologetic feminine power, the refusal to be diminished by environments that preferred her smaller.

A stranger in a shop handed me the symbol I had been living with for decades. As if he knew too.

The Dream Where I Was the Leopard — Early 2026

Early in 2026, in the deep winter of my inner transition, came the dream I consider the most psychologically precise of the entire series.

I had a kind of invisible ointment on my body. And as I rolled and stretched freely on the ground, without restraint, the ointment left luminous patterns on the surface beneath me. Golden, oval shapes, varying in size. Like panther spots. But luminous. Appearing as living light wherever my body made full contact with the Earth.

Not shed skin. Not marks of damage. Imprinted light.

In virtually every sacred tradition, anointing prepares the body for consecrated action: priests, kings, healers. The body is made ready to carry something beyond ordinary selfhood. And here, the pattern left by that anointed body was the leopard’s own signature. Golden spots of light, appearing only at contact, only when the full weight of the body met the ground without holding back.

The dream seemed to be saying something I am still learning to fully receive: you don’t illuminate through intellect, through achievement, through performance. You illuminate through embodied contact. Through the full weight of your presence meeting the world.

The leopard’s pattern was not something external being projected onto me. It was emerging from me. As though it had always been there, waiting for the body to stop holding itself slightly above the ground.

The Dream Where I Finally Looked Up— March 2026

The next dream arrived in March 2026. I was walking along a path with a young girl, telling her about something, an activity I had seen described but not yet tried. And mid-sentence, she stopped me.

“Look: they are everywhere!”

I looked up. Leopards. In the trees along the pathway, perched above us. Several of them, most sleeping peacefully, draped over branches in that boneless, utterly relaxed way large cats have when they are completely at home. Not threatening. Not hidden. Simply present, and previously unseen.

And they were everywhere. They had been there all along. I had simply not thought of looking up before.

The dream’s meaning arrived with the force of something obvious that had taken years to see. The qualities the leopard embodies — grace, sovereign power, the capacity to be utterly still and explosively capable, beauty that does not apologize for itself — had never been absent from my life. They had been present throughout. Sleeping in the trees above me. Waiting to be seen.

I had been searching for them, longing for them, trying to earn or construct them. And they were already there. They were always already there.

My inner child saw them first. As she always does.

The Painting That Needed Four Months

A friend once looked at a photo of me beside a leopard mural and wrote back:

‘Hey Ms. Leopard! Can hardly see where the painting ends and you start.’

He could see something I was still learning to claim.

In December 2025, I finally picked up a pencil and sketched a leopard. My own, for the first time. But I did not feel the urge to paint it. Something was not ready. The image existed in outline; I knew it would be painted someday, but not yet.

Finally, at the end of April 2026, it felt almost like a call: go paint NOW. And so I did.

Same Animal. Different Coat.

The power animal does not arrive. It reveals itself.

The panther came first: dark, initiatory, making contact in the night.

Then the leopard emerged: spotted, unapologetic, wearing her pattern for all to see.

Same animal. Different coat.

Both fully mine now.

Five Ways to Recognize Your Power Animal

You cannot force this recognition, and you should not try. Here is how I would begin, knowing what I know now:

1. Take inventory of the objects you couldn’t leave behind. Walk through your home. Which animal has quietly accumulated there, in figures, prints, images, jewellery, bought over the years without explanation? The things we choose “for no reason” are rarely chosen for no reason. My wooden leopard waited 25 years to be understood.

2. Notice what you claim as “this is me.” Profile pictures, cover images, pinned images on Pinterest, the print you keep reaching for in your wardrobe. When an image produces that jolt of recognition rather than mere liking, pay attention. Declaration precedes understanding, often by years.

3. Notice what keeps appearing in the most random places. At a red light, you glance up at a billboard, and there it is. On your kid’s cereal box at the breakfast table. In the first ad that opens on your social media feed this morning. Once is nothing. Twice is coincidence. But when the same creature keeps finding you through channels you never chose, stop dismissing it. The unconscious does not send registered mail; it works with whatever surface is available.

4. Watch for the animal arriving through other people. A practitioner who names it, a friend’s nickname, a stranger in a shop who hands you the animal without knowing what he is doing. The unconscious is not confined to your own skin. When the same creature reaches you through several independent voices, the pattern is speaking.

5. Research the creature only after the pattern has appeared. Once the same animal has shown up three or more times, look it up. Its biology, its habits, its place in shamanic and symbolic tradition. Notice where the description reads like your own portrait. And remember my confusion between the panther and the leopard: your animal may be showing you two faces, two coats of the same underlying creature. Shadow first, very often. Then Light.

🪞 Reflection Prompt

Every gift you carry has two coats: the one you wear openly in daylight, and the one you keep in the dark — shown only to your most intimate circle, the one you would blush about if everyone found out.

Which of your qualities is still living in that second coat? What would it take to wear the pattern openly? And what is it already costing you not to?

If this stirred something in you, that stirring is worth listening to — I offer a free 30-minute alignment conversation for exactly that.

Start the conversation

Next in the Series

More leopards kept appearing in my dreams. There is an upcoming DreamWork essay about one in particular: a leopard dress, and a dance in the McKinsey office. Subscribe so you won’t miss it.

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And if the power animal thread resonated with you, you might enjoy The Voice You’ve Been Ignoring, where another animal made its first appearance. That period in my life was all about the dolphin.

About the author

I'm Cécile — Inner Dialogue coach and writer. I work with accomplished people who have built lives that look right and feel wrong: people standing between two worlds. Through inner dialogue and DreamWork, I help them hear what their deeper self already knows — and align their outer life with it. The work is rigorous, intuitive, and deeply personal: we work with what is already alive in you, and we follow its lead. These essays are the living record of that practice — mine first. I also share the journey on Instagram

Let’s Connect

If this essay sparked your curiosity and you’d love to uncover what your own dreams, power animal or recurring patterns might be trying to tell you, I would love to explore that with you. And if you find yourself at that threshold, between the life you have built and the one trying to emerge, this is precisely the work I do with people.

You don't need a clear question to come — most people arrive with only a feeling that something is shifting. That's enough.

Free 30-min Alignment Conversation

A like or a comment always means a lot — but the greatest gift is sharing it with one person you sense is at their own threshold.

Sometimes an essay arrives the way a sign does: passed along by someone who cared enough to notice.🤍

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Aligned. From Within.

Essays on inner dialogue, DreamWork, and the strategic intelligence we’ve been trained to ignore.

By Cécile Burghard

Hi, I’m Cécile. And if you’ve landed here, something in you is probably already seeking a different kind of truth.

Not advice. Not another framework. Not a five-step plan.

Something quieter. The signal underneath — the one that’s been there all along, waiting for you to stop long enough to hear it.

That’s what my work is about.

What You’ll Find Here

Aligned. From Within. is a space for essays on inner dialogue, DreamWork, and the strategic intelligence we’ve been trained to ignore.

I write for people who have outgrown the life they worked hard to build. People who are successful on paper, but privately asking what’s next? — or who sense that something no longer fits, without yet being clear on what.

If that’s you, you’re in the right place.

I publish every two weeks, on Thursdays. It’s free — I’d love to have you here.

Subscribe now

Start With These

If you’re new, these three essays are the best place to begin:

✨ The Voice You’ve Been Ignoring On spreadsheets, control, and the quiet signal that refuses to disappear. This is where it all started — for me, and perhaps for you too.

✨ Gannat On unconditional love, unexpected teachers, and the gifts hidden inside what looked like failure.

✨ This Is How I Come Home to Myself On shedding performance for authorship — and how to identify the core values that make up your inner compass.

If You’re Ready to Go Deeper

I work with a small number of private 1:1 coaching clients. My work sits at the intersection of inner dialogue, values alignment, depth psychology, and DreamWork.

Not to help you think more clearly for its own sake — but to help you come home to who you truly are, so your choices, relationships, and life begin to reflect what is deeply true for you now.

The first step is a free 30-minute Alignment Conversation — a safe, confidential space to explore where you are, what feels misaligned, and whether this way of working is a fit for where you are.

No pressure. No hard sell. Just bring yourself, honestly.

✨ Book a free 30-minute Alignment Conversation

Yes, I'm ready

A Little About Me

I’m Cécile — born and raised in Luxembourg, half French, half German. I’ve spent most of my adult life crossing borders: I’ve lived and worked in Dubai, Zurich, Paris, Prague, London, Brussels, Barcelona, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Libya, Kuwait, Bogotá, and Abu Dhabi. I speak five languages, and have travelled to 79+ countries — so far.

I came to this work not from theory, but from my own threshold.

An abrupt divorce in 2014, a burnout in 2015, and a severe depression that cracked me open — and eventually became the doorway to my own spiritual awakening. I rebuilt my life from scratch, overnight, in a new country, as a single mother to a two-year-old, while working 70-hour weeks in a demanding, high-pressure job.

What kept me standing wasn’t certainty — it was a growth mindset, and a quiet, stubborn conviction that everything happens for a reason, and that we are the creators of everything that unfolds in our lives.

I bring together a background in strategy, leadership, and transformation with a deep interest in Jungian psychology, inner dialogue, dreams, and the process of becoming more fully oneself.

I coach from having stood on my own threshold — not from above it.

If you want the longer version of that story, I wrote about it here: The Voice You’ve Been Ignoring.

You can also read more about me here:

About Page

Share Aligned. From Within.

In my 20s, success had a very clear shape.

Party hard. Work hard. Travel everywhere. Climb the corporate ladder fast. Fall in love deeply, often. Buy many houses. Make many friends. Upgrade my wardrobe.

By 30, I had reached every single one of those goals. With divorce as an add-on.

By 40, they had become completely irrelevant to the person I had become.

Not because I failed them. Because I outgrew them.

None of those goals speak to my soul. None of them would matter if I disappeared tomorrow. And that realization — quiet, undeniable, impossible to ignore once felt — changed everything.

In this essay, I’ll share the five core values that make up my inner compass – and how you can find yours, too.

— — —

Whilst most of my previous goals could have been listed on a bucket list — things to acquire, to own, to achieve — I had slowly evolved into valuing something else entirely. Experiences over possessions. Depth over performance. Sharing moments with close friends, in the sun, in the mountains — moments that mattered in my body, not only on paper.

In 2026, I no longer have a “wish list”. I have a single, well-thought-through intention: to fully honour my truth. To move from endurance into authorship of my own life. To stop performing. To keep unfolding into my true Self.

In October 2025, in a coaching session I could not have planned, something shifted that had been preparing to shift for months. I physically felt an enormous weight lift from my chest — the image of a wide white elastic band wound around my ribcage, the part of me that over-gives, that holds everything together, that cannot stop. It had believed its mission was unlimited. When it was finally seen and named — when it was told: this contract is honoured, you did it, you can let it go — something in the room shifted. I came out of that session different. In the days that followed, something crystallized that had been forming for years. I sat down and wrote what I now call my Core Values Statement. Five values arrived, and a closing line that surprised me:

This is how I come home to myself.

Not a framework. Not a productivity tool. A map back to the Self — for the days when I lose the thread, when the noise gets loud, when I forget who I am underneath all the doing.

Here is what it says. And, more importantly, what it means.

1. Freedom

Creating my life, guided by curiosity and courage — shaping my own path following my inner voice, my own truth.

New Year’s Eve, December 2014. Zurich. A friend’s apartment, a party, too much champagne. And then — a wall, a marker, and my hand moving before I could think.

I wrote: Live your life!

I don’t remember deciding to write it. My hand moved alone, as if guided. I was in profound distress at that time — barely a few months out of a marriage that had slowly suffocated something essential in me, newly returned to Europe, standing at the edge of a depression I didn’t yet have a name for. January would bring the first big dark wave.

But that night, something else was also present. A wild, terrifying sense of possibility. A voice that whispered: you can dream big again Cécile.

My first real rebirth came in 2015, crawling out of burnout and depression like a person learning to walk again. The second — more violent, more consequent — came in May 2022, at a shamanic initiation called the Rite of Shedding*: nine sweat lodges representing nine months in the womb of the Earth, pitch dark, sacred fire, heated stones. What happens inside is not mine to share. What I can tell you is how I came out. I staggered to the cold river, trembling. I lay down on my front, face against the stones. Three words rose from somewhere below thought: I am alive. I sat in the grass still shivering, and felt tears arrive — grief and pain that had been stored in my body like a pressure cooker finally releasing. What changed after that rite was not dramatic. It was quiet and irreversible.

Jung wrote, in his Red Book: “Soul, where are you?” It is the question at the heart of what he called individuation — the lifelong process of becoming who you actually are, rather than who the world shaped you to be. My soul did not answer that night in Zurich. But it left an important message on the wall.

Freedom, for me, is not an external condition. It is the ongoing, sometimes brutal, always necessary work of choosing my own highest path — over the expectations of others, over the fear of being too much, over the comfortable cage of a life that looks good from the outside.

I am not seeking freedom anymore. I am slowly embodying it.

2. Growth

Welcoming each experience as an invitation to learn, heal, and expand into the highest version of myself.

In 2018, during my coaching certification, we did an exercise I have never forgotten — and have since offered to many clients I work with.

You take a large sheet of paper. You map the last seven years of your life across key areas: career, health, finances, love, friendships, spirituality, learning. You mark the significant moments — the peaks and the falls, the arrivals and the losses. Then you step back and look at the picture.

What I saw, running like a red thread through every single area, through the good years and the brutal ones— was growth. Not linear. Not comfortable. But always present in a meaningful way. Insatiable, almost. An orientation toward the next understanding, the next book, the next conversation that would crack something open. Intellectual, emotional, spiritual.

I did not choose growth as a value that day. I recognized it as something that had already been choosing me for years.

Growth, for me, is not self-improvement in the productivity sense — it is not optimization or performance or becoming a better version of a metric. It is a way of moving through the world: genuinely curious, sometimes humbled, always oriented toward what I do not yet understand.

Growth mindset as a lived philosophy — and the belief, held in the body as much as the mind, that potential is infinite. That I am always, in every area of life, still becoming.

3. Soul-Level Connection

Honest, vulnerable bonds — with people, with nature, with myself.

There are people you meet, and there are people you recognize.

Sina is the latter. The moment we met, something in me went quiet in the way that happens when you arrive somewhere you didn’t know you were looking for. We have spoken, more than once, about the sense that we have lived alongside each other before — in other forms, other times. We are both certain she was my mother in another life. Our souls, when they find each other in this one, rejoice immensely at the chance to resume an incredible soul connection.

Soul-level connection became a named value for me as my spiritual path deepened — as I learned to sit in meditation and feel, however briefly, the enormous love that seems to exist at the level of the soul, beyond personality and history and preference. As I learned to recognize, in certain people and certain places and certain dreams, the unmistakable quality of something very genuine.

It is what I want more of. It is what I am no longer willing to sacrifice for connection that is merely convenient, or merely comfortable, or merely familiar.

I want bonds that are honest and vulnerable. I want conversations that go deep. I want to meet people — where very few people are able to meet them.

4. Peace

Cultivating calm within and around me — choosing safety, softness, and balance. Inner peace is gold.

For a long time, I associated softness with weakness. The world I came from — corporate, high-performance, always-on — rewarded hardness. Resilience as armor. Rest as something you earned, not something you deserved.

Peace arrived in my life not as a revelation but as a subtraction. I began, slowly, to remove the things that cost me more than they gave. People whose energy depleted rather than restored. Environments that required me to perform rather than simply be. Obligations I had inherited rather than chosen.

Each subtraction created a little more space. The space, over time, became something I recognized as peace — not the absence of difficulty, but a quality of ground beneath my feet. A steadiness that does not depend on external conditions being good.

I now understand that ease is not laziness. Softness is not weakness. Safety is not smallness. These are the conditions under which I do my best work, love most fully, and think most clearly. They are not indulgences. They are core infrastructure.

Inner peace is gold. Ultimate luxury. The most radical thing I have built.

5. Integrity

Living and working in full alignment with my values, my intuition, my soul.

Integrity isn’t a value I chose. It chose me — in the moments when I could have looked away and found I couldn’t.

I have always strived to tell the truth at work, even when it was not what people wanted to hear. I have always kept my word — to clients, to friends, to Sina, who know that when I say something, I mean it. I cannot stand lying or cheating. My tolerance for it is zero, and always has been. This is not a virtue I cultivated. It is a frequency I was born on.

What has deepened, over the years, is the understanding that integrity is not only about how I treat others. It is about how I treat the inner work. It is why I am choosing to pursue Jungian psychanalysis training — not because I need a credential to feel legitimate, but because my integrity will not allow me to work at the surface of something I could go deeper into. Love without depth has never worked for me.

Integrity, at its most fundamental, means that the outer life and the inner life are recognizably the same person. That I do not perform depth while living shallowly. That the compass I offer others is the one I actually use.

And Through It All: Presence

Showing up wholeheartedly — for myself, for other people, for the infinite generosity of this life.

Presence is not a sixth value. It is what becomes possible when the other five are lived.

When I am free, I stop performing. When I am growing, I stay curious. When I am in soul-level connection, I actually see the person in front of me. When I have peace, I can be still enough to listen. When I am in integrity, there is nothing to hide — and nothing hidden means nothing between me and the moment.

Presence is the result. The fruit of the whole thing. The reason any of it matters.

These five values — and the practice of presence they make possible — are not goals. They are not things to achieve and tick off.

They are my inner compass.

They are how I come home to myself.

Every time. Without exception.

— — —

How to find your values

You may have read this and felt something stir. A recognition or a quiet ache that sounds like: I don’t actually know what mine are.

Below is how my values crystallized— distilled into five steps you can do with nothing but a notebook and an hour of honest attention.

Step 1 — Look at your highs.
Think of 2-3 moments when you felt completely, unmistakably yourself. Alive. Proud. At home in what you were doing. Write them down. Then ask: what was present in those moments? Not what you achieved — what felt alive in you?

Step 2 — Look at your lows.
Think of two or three moments when you felt genuinely hurt, outraged, or quietly devastated. Not disappointed — violated, in some way you could not quite name. What was being ignored that should not have been? What mattered, that was being treated as if it didn’t?

Anger is one of the most honest compasses we have.

Step 3 — Find the words.
From both lists, write down the values that keep appearing. Not a long inventory, not aspirational. Just the ones that feel true to you. The ones that were already running things in the background, whether you named them or not.

Step 4 — Narrow to five.
Look at your list and ask: if I had to choose only one, which would I choose? Then the next. And the next. Until you are left with five that feel non-negotiable — not because they are impressive, but because living without them would cost you something essential.

Step 5 — Put them in your own words.
Not dictionary definitions. Your words. What does freedom mean in your body, in your life? What does integrity ask of you specifically? Write one sentence for each. Let it surprise you.

You don’t choose these values. You recognise them — as things that were already shaping every important decision you ever made.

🪞 Reflection question:

Is there a decision you made recently — or are avoiding right now — that you could look at through the lens of your values? What do they have to say about it? And what shifts, if anything?

If this essay opened something for you — a question, a longing, a sense that something is ready to shift — I’d love to hear from you.

I’m opening a small number of one-to-one coaching slots. The work I do sits at the intersection of inner dialogue, values alignment, and depth — the kind of coaching that doesn’t just help you think more clearly but helps you come home to who you truly are.

If you feel ready, you can book a free 30-minute Alignment Conversation.

Free 30-minute Alignment Conversation

Subscribe now

In April 2019, I was visiting an aquarium in Auckland with my six-year-old daughter.

We had been there all morning. By lunchtime, we were hungry. The aquarium had a café. It was right there. We were tired and happy and hungry.

And I almost didn’t buy us lunch there.

My brain — efficient, optimising, completely automatic — had already started running its usual calculation. Aquarium cafés are overpriced. The quality is never worth it. Five minutes on Google Maps and I could find something better, healthier, tastier, more justified.

And then something caught.

I was hungry. My daughter was hungry. There was food. Right here. Right now. I bought us lunch.

And that night, I wrote in my travel journal: Bravo Cécile!

I gave myself a standing ovation — in writing — for buying a horrible sandwich with fries (which my daughter loved of course).

I want to tell you about that, because I think it might be one of the most important things I’ve ever written down.

The optimisation that wasn’t optimisation.

Let me be precise about what was actually happening in that aquarium.

It wasn’t frugality. I wasn’t short of money.

It wasn’t efficiency. The Google Maps calculation — finding the better café, the more justified meal — that wasn’t saving me anything. It was costing me something. The present moment. The simplest possible answer to a simple problem: I am hungry. There is a simple solution right in front of me. Indulge. Make it easy for yourself.

What was actually happening was this:

My needs had to be justified before they could be met. Hunger alone was not sufficient reason to eat. The food also had to be worth it. Efficient. Optimal. Deserved.

I had been running this silent calculation at the back of my brain my entire adult life without ever noticing it was a calculation — on pretty much every single decision I made daily. How exhausting.

The hoodie.

Three years later, in April 2022, I was in Santorini.

It was colder than I had anticipated. April in Greece sounds like warmth and sunshine — and the days were beautiful. But at night, the wind comes off the sea with a sharpness that surprises you. I had packed for a warmer version of that trip.

And yet — I loved being out in those evenings. Walking the winding streets after dinner, the village lit up and lively, eating outdoors despite the chill. I just happened to be genuinely cold.

The old calculation was already running. I have plenty of jumpers at home. The shops here are overpriced. Just sit through it.

In Santorini, something shifted. I found a shop in the village. A simple cotton hoodie. Warm. My size. Beautiful — white, soft, exactly right, saying “Santorini. Greece” in golden letters. Not a compromise. Something I actually needed and wanted.

I bought it.

I wore it that same evening for dinner. I was warm. I was comfortable. I was present in a way I hadn’t quite been the evenings before — because I was no longer managing the cold. I was simply enjoying the night.

I still have that hoodie. I still love it. Not because of the fabric. Because every time I wear it, I remember what it felt like to give myself something I needed, on the spot, without waiting until I was back home and it was more convenient and more justified.

But where did the calculation come from?

For months, at the end of every therapy session as I was recovering from burnout, my therapist would say the same thing.

« Prenez bien soin de vous. » Take good care of yourself.

I nodded every time. I had no idea what she meant.

Literally. I thought it meant: wear a coat when it’s cold. Drink hot tea when you’re sick. Get your eight hours. I was a strategy consultant. Self-care was another item on my to-do list — something to optimise and tick off efficiently, like everything else. The minimum viable dose to ensure the engine runs.

It took me years — many years, and many small moments of finally choosing the direct route to my own needs — to understand what she was actually saying.

Taking care of yourself means knowing and acknowledging what you need. In real time. And giving it to yourself without requiring a justification first. Not the optimal version. Not the most efficient version. Not the version you’ve earned. The version that’s available right now.

Self-care is not a reward system. It is not something you access after you’ve performed well enough. It is the baseline. The non-negotiable starting point.

And most high-achieving women I know have never been taught this — because most of us learned the opposite before we could articulate what we were learning.

The child who learned to be quiet.

I learned very early that my needs were not the priority.

Not because I was told this directly. But because the environment I grew up in required something specific from me: be quiet. Make no mistakes. Create no waves.

It was a survival strategy, built in childhood, in response to a home where the wrong sound at the wrong moment had consequences. I became very good at compressing myself — my needs, my hunger, my discomfort — into the smallest possible space.

And then I grew up and took that strategy with me into boardrooms and consulting firms and marriages and motherhood. And I called it discipline. Efficiency. Resilience.

It was only much later that I began to understand what I had actually been doing: managing my own needs the hard way, as I had managed everything as a child. Minimising them until they were not justifiable. Until they disappeared. Until they were small enough not to disturb anyone.

Including myself.

The child who learned to be quiet grows into the woman who optimises her hunger. Who sits through the cold rather than buying the layer. Who treats her own needs as a problem to be solved efficiently rather than a signal to be heard immediately — and met with love.

What I know now.

I want to be honest: I have not arrived. This is not a before-and-after story.

The understanding came gradually — through years of therapy, through career breaks, through coaching, through a thousand small moments of choosing the direct route to my own needs instead of the optimised one.

At the end of 2025, something shifted even further. I stopped working in a corporate role and gave myself a single instruction for the first two months: only do things that spark joy.

Not things that are useful. Not things that are efficient. Not things that can be justified. Things that spark joy and give me pleasure.

Those two months taught me more about what it means to take care of myself than the previous decade of knowing about it intellectually.

Because knowing is not the same as living it. And living it — fully, in the body, without the justification — is an ongoing practice. Not a destination.

I still catch the old calculation sometimes. The automatic scan for the better, more optimised solution. And when I catch it, I ask the simplest possible question, in a kind and patient inner dialogue with myself:

What do I need right now?

And then — without optimising, without justifying, without waiting until I’ve earned it —

I give it to myself.

Bravo Cécile.

If this resonated —

What are you sitting through right now that has a simple, immediate solution you keep talking yourself out of?

And if you recognise the child in this essay — the one who learned to make herself small, to compress her needs into invisibility, to wait until she’d earned the right to be met with kindness — I’d love to hear from you.

Ready to go deeper with me ? Book a free 30-minute Alignment Conversation.

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Then. And now. Still learning.

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My dear little Cécile,

I see you in this photo.

First year of primary school. Cute. A bit shy sometimes. Those sparkling eyes that already see everything.

The good girl. The good student. Already doing everything that’s expected of her. Already making no waves. Already trying so hard to be the teacher’s favorite.

I know what you’re doing. I know why.

You learned very early that love had conditions. That it arrived — when it arrived — through performance. Good grades. Good behavior. No noise. No mistakes. Be perfect and maybe, just maybe, their eyes will shine.

You became so good at being good. Contained. Controlled. Invisible when necessary. A survival strategy so efficient you’d carry it all the way into boardrooms, marriages, and burnouts — still trying to earn what should simply have been given.

What I want to tell you — what nobody told you then:

You were already enough. Exactly as you were. Before the grades. Before the performance. Before you learned to make yourself small.

You are deeply loved. Unconditionally. Not for what you do. For who you are.

It took me thirty years to feel that for the first time. To receive love with no agenda behind it. No conditions attached. No performance required.

When I finally felt it — really felt it — I cried. Because I finally understood what had been missing. And because it was so simple. So clean. So complete.

That feeling — I’m spending the rest of my life learning to give it to myself. And passing it on to every woman who, like you, learned too early that love was something to be earned.

You didn’t know yet. But I do now.

And I’ve got you.

— Cécile, 35 years later.

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Gannat means paradise. In Arabic. Garden of paradise.

I didn’t know that when I first met her. I only knew that something happened when she hugged me — something I had no name for, because I had never felt it before.

She was my ex-husband’s mother. An Egyptian woman, with Turkish roots, warm and solid and completely certain in her love. And from the very first moment — without knowing me, without needing to — she loved me as her daughter.

Not because I had earned it. Not because I had performed well enough. Not because I had been good or useful or impressive.

Just because I was there. Just because she had decided so — and that was that.

I could literally feel her love flowing through me. I had no framework for that sensation. I didn’t know love could feel like that — immediate, unconditional, requiring absolutely nothing in return.

What she did

Before every one of my visits to Cairo, she would personally make sure her bathroom had been scrubbed entirely. She would place a flowery shower gel on the shelf — the kind she didn’t use herself. She would make sure there was toilet paper — something no one else in the household ever used, the water hose being the way here — just for me. Every time. Without being asked. Without mentioning it.

She made my favorite food. She took me to the souk to do the groceries with her — two women, different languages, different worlds, completely at ease. She showed me how to stuff okra the traditional way, standing side by side in her kitchen, her hands moving with the confidence of someone who has cooked this dish a thousand times.

She sought my presence. She wanted me near her. Not to perform for her — just to be there.

She told me I was beautiful. She told me she loved me. Repeatedly, naturally, without agenda. The way you say something true because it simply is.

I want to be precise about something: my parents love me. They do — in their own way, the best they know how. But I had never felt love like this. Never felt it arrive in my body as a physical sensation, as warmth, as something that required nothing from me in exchange.

I recognized the difference immediately. I just didn’t have the words for it yet.

What the marriage gave me.

The marriage ended. Badly, suddenly, completely.

And I want to say something about that — something I understood only gradually, and then all at once:

That marriage was never something that happened to me. I chose every step of it. With open eyes, with full heart, deep conviction and with everything I had at the time.

And inside it — because of it, through it — I found two things that changed my life entirely.

The first was Gannat.

The second was Sina (meaning Sinai in Egyptian, where I met her father).

My daughter was born from that marriage. And the moment she was laid on my chest — skin to skin, her weight against my heart — I discovered something I had never known before.

This was the most love I had ever felt in my entire life.

And in the weeks that followed, I discovered what motherhood actually does — not what anyone tells you it does, but what it does in the body, in the soul, in the very center of how you understand yourself.

The center of the universe shifts. It used to be me. Now it is her. Until I die.

Impossible to explain. Only possible to live.

By following my destiny and my heart — by walking toward a marriage that would later fall apart — I met the woman who taught me what unconditional love feels like. And I brought into the world the person I now give that love to, every single day. The failed marriage was not a detour. It was the exact path.

After she passed.

Gannat passed away approximately two years after the divorce.

We had stayed close — she would message me daily, asking how I was, how Sina was. Caring for me with zero agenda, long after her son and I had separated. She knew she would likely never see me again — she was in Cairo, I was in Luxembourg, the connection between our families had been severed.

She loved me anyway.

When she died, I grieved. Genuinely, deeply — the way you grieve someone who gave you something irreplaceable. And I felt, underneath the grief, an extraordinary gratitude. That I had met her at all. That life had arranged itself in such a way that our paths crossed. That I had been loved by her, even briefly.

And then, in 2018, she came back.

I was alone in a hospital room in Istanbul. A painful eye surgery — the kind of pain that doesn’t respond to instruction or discipline or resilience. I was crying from pain without stopping, for hours. Alone in the way you are alone when your body is beyond your control and the night is very long.

And then I felt it.

An arm. On my arm.

My first thought was that someone had entered the room. I couldn’t see — my eyes were still recovering. I waited. I listened.

No one was there. Not physically.

But I knew immediately whose presence it was. The same warmth. The same quality of love — unconditional, unhurried, requiring nothing. She didn’t speak. She didn’t need to. She simply stayed.

For two to three hours, until I finally fell asleep from exhaustion, she was there with me in that room.

I have never doubted that experience for a single moment. It was as real as anything I have ever felt in 3D reality. More real, perhaps — because it arrived from somewhere that doesn’t require a body to love.

What she taught me.

Gannat taught me that love is not a transaction.

That it doesn’t arrive as a reward for performance, or as recognition for achievement, or as something you finally receive once you’ve been good enough for long enough.

It arrives — when it is real — simply because you exist. Because you are there. Because you are you.

I had to travel to Egypt, marry into a family I didn’t know, and live through a marriage that ultimately broke — before I could feel that for the first time.

And now I carry it with me everywhere.

Into the way I love Sina — freely, completely, with no conditions attached.

Into the way I am slowly, imperfectly, learning to love myself.

Into my writing — because everyone deserves to feel, at least once, what it feels like to be received exactly as you are.

No performance required.

No justification needed.

Just You. Just that. Just enough.

I used to think the marriage had cost me everything. I understand now that it gave me the two greatest gifts of my life. One is still here, asleep down the hall. The other visits me in dreams — and once, on a long night in Istanbul, held my arm until morning.

If this resonated —

Is there a relationship or situation in your life that looked like failure from the outside — and gave you something essential that you couldn’t have found any other way ?

And is there someone who loved you — freely, without condition, perhaps unexpectedly — whose love you are still carrying ?

I’d love to hear about them.

If this essay opened something for you — a question, a longing, a sense that something is ready to shift — I’d love to hear from you.

The work I do sits at the intersection of inner dialogue, values alignment, and depth — the kind of coaching that doesn’t just help you think more clearly but helps you come home to who you truly are.

If you feel ready, you can book a free 30-minute Alignment Conversation below.

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The owl and the swallow

I read a book a few years ago that changed something in me — quietly, completely, in the way only the right book at the right moment can.

It was called Why We Sleep, by Matthew Walker. A neuroscientist. And somewhere in those pages, he explained what I had suspected about myself for years but never quite had permission to say: that chronotype — the question of whether you are a morning person or an evening person — is not a character flaw. It is biology. It is encoded. It does not respond to willpower.

I am an evening person. I always have been. My mind wakes up slowly and reaches its peak sometime in the afternoon. My creativity lives in the late hours. My best thinking happens when the world has quietened. This is not laziness. This is not a lack of discipline. This is simply what I am.

I read those pages and felt something I did not expect: relief. Not triumph. Relief. The particular relief of a fact finally named — the kind that makes you realize you have been arguing with something inarguable for a very long time.

The kind that makes you look up from the page and notice, for the first time, what has always been true in nature: the world needs both its day animals and its night animals to remain in balance. The owl and the swallow. Neither wrong. Both necessary.

And if the world needs both — then perhaps so does a life.

The Road Less Travelled

Then, a few years earlier, another book had done something different. Not relieved me — reclaimed me.

The Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck. A concept I encountered there that has not left me since: there are people who see themselves as victims of their lives, and people who understand themselves as the authors of their lives. Creators. The ones who take full responsibility — not just for what they choose, but also for what happens to them. Who understand that authorship inescapably implies accountability - for the good, and the bad.

I read that and felt something click — not as a new belief, but as a recognition of something I had always carried.

If I am creating everything showing up in my life — including the events, things, people I did not want, did not plan for consciously, did not like — then I am not a victim of any of it. I never was.

But the real revelation — the one that changed everything — was the consequence:

if I created all of it — I can create anything I want. Anything.

So instead of pushing against what wasn’t working, I started asking myself different questions:

Which part of me created this? What does she need? What is she trying to protect? What does she want to tell me?

That was when I first heard the different voices. My therapist, when I described it, was calm: this is normal, she said. Everyone has this. We call them parts.

I had spent 30 years not knowing there were several of me. And the inner dialogue — that conversation with the different parts — became the most transformative relationship of my life.

Each part in us wants what every child wants: to be seen, heard, and loved before it can let go. I spent years trying to silence the difficult ones. Arguing with them. Overriding them. It never worked. The only thing that worked was turning toward them with open arms. Embracing them in love and compassion.

Performing at all costs

For years — I will not say exactly how many — I woke up before 7:00 in the morning. With great difficulty. And already, I was thinking “some people have already finished their prayers, gym routine, showered and had breakfast”. That feeling of already being late, when I had done nothing wrong yet.

Alarm rang. I got up. I performed the morning: the breakfast (even though my stomach would only really call for food around 11am), showing up at work, starting with morning meetings — the particular sequence of things that were expected of me. I was “making the most of my day”. Optimizing, I thought. But in truth, I was also, every single day, operating against my own nature.

It is a strange thing, to spend years performing someone else’s rhythm. You can do it so well that people around you don’t notice (too much). But it truly feels uncomfortable from inside. Like living in a costume that isn’t yours.

The chronic exhaustion, when I look back honestly, was never really about the hour. It was about the distance — between the life I was living and the one I was meant to be living.

Because my creative self only came fully alive after dark. That was when I exercised, painted, wrote, read — finally, briefly, permitted to be my actual Self. So I did both: followed my nature at night and complied with the corporate morning. Which is, obviously, not sustainable.

It starts earlier than the office. It starts at school — four years old, eight in the morning, already behind in a rhythm that was never yours. You learn to comply. You learn to be quietly ashamed that complying feels so hard. Some countries run morning and afternoon school shifts not for children’s wellbeing, but because the building cannot hold them all at once. The system was never designed around biology.

And then you become a working mother. You discover that your mind — the one that actually thinks, creates, comes alive — wakes up properly around six in the evening. The exact hour the nursery closes. The exact hour the kitchen needs attending to, the bath running, the story reading. My most creative hour, dissolved daily into household logistics. I am certain I am not the only woman who has held that grief in silence.

It eased, with time. Climbing up the corporate ladder meant more control over schedules –calls scheduled in the morning, creative work and problem-solving saved for the afternoon when my mind was actually awake. A small, hard-won alignment. And children grow. The nursery run ends. Though dinner before bedtime — that one remains.

I made these choices. Willingly. With my eyes open — or as open as they were at the time. I chose the corporate race, the life optimized for performance. I was not dragged there. It was even genuinely appealing in my late twenties / early thirties.

What I am saying is something more uncomfortable than victimhood: I worked hard at becoming someone I was not — and even excelled at it.

Because I wanted to belong. Because I wanted to be accepted or not talked about. And because, at the time, I did not yet know I was allowed to be just myself.

Pushing harder has its limits

Neither book had the magic recipe to solve it all.

Walker gave me permission — to stop arguing with my nature, to name what I was without shame. Peck helped me remember my responsibilities — to stop being a victim of my own life and claim authorship of it instead.

But permission and responsibility are both still intellectual. They live in the mind. And I was discovering, around that time, that a human being is not only a mind. There is also a soul. And a body. A trinity — three board members, each with something essential to contribute. The problem was that for most of my life, the mind had been running the show. Alone. And rather tyrannically.

What I needed was not a new idea, or thinking harder. I needed access to the other two board members. A channel of communication. A new habit — of tuning in and actually listening.

That channel opened, first, through therapy.

But what I discovered there went far beyond what I had expected. The inner dialogue — as I have come to understand and practice it — is not merely listening inward. It is entering into a relationship with what emerges from the unconscious: through images, dreams, intuitions, affects, spontaneous ideas. And allowing it to respond back, through thought, image, emotion, and the body.

Most people experience this as inner conflict — one part wants to move forward, another hesitates, another freezes. That language is useful.

Inner dialogue begins the moment you stop identifying with any one of these voices. Instead of saying “I am unsure”, you begin to notice: “something in me is unsure.” That shift creates space. And in that space, something becomes possible: a relationship. You are no longer inside the reaction. You are relating to it.

Not as a technique. But as a posture.

You allow what emerges to express itself — fully, without interruption. A hesitation. A resistance. A sudden clarity. And instead of overriding it or obeying it, you start interacting with it. Not to eliminate it. Not to fix it. But to understand what it is trying to reveal.

Clarity does not come from choosing the “right” inner voice. It comes from stepping out of identification — and allowing a more integrated position to emerge.

This is what Carl G. Jung described when he spoke of engaging with the unconscious. Not controlling it. Not dissolving it. But entering into dialogue with it.

Which is perhaps why Sina taught me so much.

Children feel everything before adults are ready to name it. When she became particularly difficult — unsettled, demanding, impossible to soothe — I learned to read it not as her problem, but as a signal. A mirror. Something is off with me – too much tension, I’m there but I’m not here. Her little nervous system was picking up what mine had learned to suppress.

The body, too, had always been trying to seek my attention. Migraines. Stomach pains. I had learned to live with those aches. The practice of inner dialogue taught me differently — they were parts of the unconscious asking to be heard, with a message for my Ego.

Neither the books nor therapy alone could give me what I actually needed: not more insight, but the experience of dialoguing with the various parts of my unconscious. The ability to meet myself — including the parts I had spent years performing around, over, and away from — and allowing my conscious mind to be transformed by what they carried.

The most extraordinary upgrade to that inner dialogue came to me in a dream, in August 2025. But that is for another essay.

I am not a morning person. I never was. What took me longer to understand is that this was never really about the hour.

It was about learning to stop overriding what I actually am — and starting, instead, to listen. All of it. The body. The inner voices. The dreams. The part that knew, long before I did, that I had drifted.

Coming home to yourself is not a moment. It is a continuous practice — of listening, making small adjustments, observing what changes, and beginning again. Quietly. Without drama. For as long as it takes.

What small adjustment have you made recently — that brought you slightly closer to yourself?

I was there with my daughter and a small group — trekking through the dunes, sleeping under the stars, living at a slow pace I had almost forgotten was possible.

One day, during a meditation under a wide acacia tree, a symbol appeared to me. Not a thought, not an intention — a shape. A trinity of loops, fluid and connected, arriving the way things sometimes arrive in stillness: complete, with no explanation attached.

I drew it in my journal and wrote a few lines underneath — that I had seen it during meditation, that I did not yet know what it meant, and that I felt grateful to be living these moments in the desert. I didn’t try to interpret it. I didn’t analyse it. I simply closed the journal and moved on.

Several months later, in June 2025, I was going through images on Pinterest for my Archetype board. I stopped on one image without immediately understanding why. Something in me recognised it before my mind did. It was the same symbol — the same three loops, the same fluid continuity. I felt an immediate, wordless pull toward it and added it to my board, without thinking much more about it.

End of December 2025, I felt a pull to open one of my older journals. I opened it at random and landed on the Mauritania entry. I had no memory of what I had written that day. When I saw the drawing, I genuinely felt a form of disbelief. The Pinterest symbol was there, clearly sketched, described months before I had encountered it again elsewhere.

I remember thinking, confused: this cannot be true.

I stayed with that feeling for a moment, then went back to the image I had saved on my vision board. Almost instinctively, I rotated it ninety degrees.

It read: CB.

I sat very still, placed the two images side by side, and looked at them for a long time. They were identical.

I don’t have a word for what I felt in that moment. I’m not sure I need one.

But this was not the first time. And it was not the last.

There is another symbol that has been finding me — across years, across countries, across states of consciousness — with a persistence I can no longer dismiss as coincidence.

The infinity loop.

Morocco, 2022

I was spending an afternoon with my boyfriend. At some point, absent-mindedly, I began tracing something on his arm — more a tender stroke than anything deliberate, my hand moving without instruction while my mind was elsewhere.

Then my phone rang. It was Sina, calling from Zurich, just back from school. She sounded excited. She held up her arm to the camera to show me something she had drawn on herself with a pen, the way children do.

An infinity loop. On her arm.

We both went quiet for a moment. And then we both looked down at what I had been tracing, without knowing it, on his arm — at the exact same time. Across two countries, Morocco and Switzerland, between a mother and her daughter, without either of us planning it.

We went: OMG. This is connection.

It was only after the call that we fully understood what had happened. Neither of us had noticed in the moment. The drawing had come before the recognition.

A forest in Luxembourg, 2025

During a Sunday walking meditation in the forest — unexpectedly, without asking for anything — it appeared.

Not as a thought. Not as a memory. As a vision.

The infinity loop, alive in front of me. Moving. Glowing. Like a vein with a shimmering colour flowing all the way through it, beaming with light, pulsing with something I can only describe as life force.

I hadn’t invoked it. I hadn’t been thinking about symbols or signs. I was simply walking, very present, when it arrived — fully formed, luminous, unmistakable.

I have stopped trying to explain how that works.

Early 2026 — the Abundance course

I was doing the Abundance course from Dr Joe Dispenza. At one point, we were asked to find a symbol — our own personal symbol — to represent our definition of abundance.

The instruction was simple: don’t think too hard. Let something arise.

Instantly, without searching, without deliberating: the infinity loop.

That’s it. Clearly. Completely. No other image even presented itself.

I sat with that for a moment. Abundance, for me, is not a quantity. It is not accumulation. It is a way of living in alignment with my Higher Self — with the time, freedom, and financial means to choose my highest path unapologetically. To be nourished by deep soul-level connections. To receive with grace: a steady, effortless flow of what I need, when I need it.

The symbol already knew what I was still learning to articulate.

A hot yoga studio, early 2026

I was on the mat, during a very demanding hot yoga class that had pushed me further than I’d expected. Exhausted in that complete way — the kind that leaves you loose and open, without the usual layer of mental noise.

Savasana. Eyes open, staring at the ceiling between postures. No movement.

The same morning, I was debating with a friend over coffee over an important question — whether a particular trip felt right, whether the timing made sense, whether I should go or wait. It had been sitting with me for days, unresolved.

And then I saw it.

On the metal ventilation pipes above me — formed by condensation, as if the heat and steam of the room had traced it there — a small, unmistakable infinity sign. Right above my head, resting on the mat.

I didn’t go looking for it. I wasn’t in the state of mind to search for anything. I was simply lying there, eyes open.

And the ceiling answered the question I hadn’t even asked out loud.

Yes. Go.

Four times. Four different contexts. Four different states of mind. The same shape.

I want to be careful here about what I am and am not claiming.

I am not saying that symbols are messages sent by some external force with the specific intention of guiding my life. I don’t know what they are. What I know is what I experience — and what I experience, repeatedly, is this: a symbol appears. I note it or I don’t. Time passes. It appears again. And again. In a different form, a different context, a different state — but recognisably, unmistakably the same shape.

Something in me registers it each time before my mind does. The recognition arrives in the body first — a kind of pull, a stillness, a quiet certainty — and only afterward does the mind catch up and begin to make sense of it.

What I am slowly learning is that there is an intelligence operating beneath my thinking mind. It does not speak in words. It speaks in shapes, in recurring images, in patterns that persist across time.

And it has been trying to get my attention for a long time.

The infinity loop, in particular, keeps returning — and I think I am beginning to understand why.

It is not a symbol of endlessness in the passive sense. It is not simply ‘more, always more.’ It is a symbol of circulation — of energy that flows, returns, renews, in the most natural, effortless way possible.

I drew it on someone’s arm without knowing it, at the exact moment my daughter was drawing it on hers. I saw it alive and glowing in a forest. I reached for it immediately when asked to define abundance. I found it on a ceiling when I needed an answer.

Each time, the same shape. Each time, arriving before I could have planned it.

And then there is one final thing. One I noticed only after I had been sitting with all of this for a while.

The photograph below was taken in the Mauritanian desert in February 2025 — during the same trip where the CB symbol first appeared to me under the acacia tree.

I had been walking through the dunes with no particular destination. Just walking, present, absorbing the silence of the Sahara.

It was only when I looked back at my own footprints that I saw it.

The trace of my shoes in the sand had drawn a perfect infinity loop.

I hadn’t planned the path. I hadn’t been thinking about symbols. I was simply walking — and the desert, through my own feet, completed the shape.

Everything is connected. Always. Even when — especially when — we are not trying.

I can already hear the sceptic’s voice. The one that says: if you look hard enough, you can connect any two things. And perhaps that’s true.

But I wasn’t looking. I never am. The symbol finds me. That is the whole point.

I don’t know what you make of all this.

You may have noticed something that keeps returning to you — a shape, a word, an image, a name, a particular location — without ever quite understanding why. You may have dismissed it. Filed it away. Told yourself it was coincidence, or projection, or a mind looking for patterns where none exist.

Perhaps. But I wonder: what if it isn’t?

What if something in you already knows something your thinking mind hasn’t caught up to yet — and has been using the language of symbols to say so?

Which symbol, place, image, or dream keeps finding you — that you haven’t yet paused to receive?

I want to be honest about something before I begin: this essay is not about a sudden awakening. It is not about one conversation, one message, one man. It is about what became possible after years — a decade, really — of slow, unglamorous inner work.

The trigger was recent. The recognition was not.

I was watching a string of messages hitting my phone — escalating from contempt and jealousy to shame, to turning my own past into a weapon – and something shifted.

Not anger. Not hurt. Something quieter.

Recognition.

It felt like “déjà vu”. Not just in the abstract way we talk about patterns in therapy or coaching. I mean I had lived this exact choreography. Different man. Different decade. Same moves, same sequence, same ending.

The distance grows. The woman begins to withdraw emotionally — not dramatically, not with a speech, but in the quiet way the soul hides when it has been hurt for too long. And then: the escalation. Suddenly there are new rules. A sudden urgency. Suddenly, there is a right way to live — and I am not it.

Control dressed as righteousness. Judgment dressed as care.

The first time, the words were: you must obey. You must dress this way, do as I say, this is what respect means. The message underneath, always: Melt into the shape I want you to be.

Years later, a different man — and there it was again. The same choreography, almost step by step. The same escalation the moment I left. The same rules appearing out of nowhere. The same verdict: I was not living correctly.

I want to be careful here. I’ve learned to distinguish between a belief system that holds a person from the inside — that asks, quietly: who am I being called to become? Pulling towards more light, more peace, more love — and one that is reached for suddenly, desperately, as an act of control and dominance. One turns inward. The other turns on you.

What stopped me this time was not wisdom. It was not calm: my heart was beating very fast. I felt the assault on my identity, on my past; the heat, the urge to win — to write back something so precise and final that he would have no choice but to understand exactly what he had lost a long time ago.

I wanted the last word. I wanted to be heard. I wanted closure.

And then — I paused.

Not because I was enlightened. Because something in me, some practiced reflex built over years of inner work, asked a different question almost instinctively:

Why is this happening right now?

I turned inward, asking for clarity. For something higher than the storm inside me.

And then — BAM. It hit me like lightning.

Instantly. The pattern. The whole shape of it, laid out in front of me like something I had always known but never quite seen all at once. The same levers. Different man, different life chapter, identical move.

The feeling did not disappear. It transmuted into something brighter. No longer the unfair, unacceptable wrongness of it all - but the quiet, almost awed recognition of someone who finally sees clearly.

What had felt, seconds earlier, like an attack on who I am— transformed, in one moment of turning inward, into a divine gift. The pattern was not happening to me. It was happening for me.

For the first time, I could recognize the pattern clearly — while still standing in the storm.

The most radical reaction was the absence of it. I did not explain. I did not defend. I did not craft the perfect final message.

I just stopped.

There is a version of me — not so long ago — who would have engaged. Who would have felt the pull of that final message, the urge to be understood, to close things my way.

That version of me confused closure with explanation. She thought she needed him to understand in order to free herself completely.

She was wrong.

The understanding was never meant for him. It was for her.

Cutting the last filament of energetic cord by recognizing what I had never quite been able to see before — while I was still inside it.

What I know now, in the stillness I chose instead: patterns do not repeat because life is unfair to us. They repeat because something in us — unexamined, unhealed, waiting to be seen, embraced and released — keeps recreating the conditions for them. The men change. The dynamic does not. Not until we do.

There’s no point asking: why does this keep happening to me? The only question worth asking is: what part in me is still longing for this familiar feeling?

That question lives in the body. In dreams. In the slow, unglamorous work of learning to hear what the soul is nudging us towards— underneath the noise of what we make ourselves believe.

I am no longer afraid of it.

I used to think that healing meant the patterns would stop appearing. That one day I would magically attract differently, choose differently, and the whole chapter would be behind me.

I think now it is something else. The patterns keep appearing — perhaps they always will — but what changes is how quickly you recognize them — rooted in your own center, your own knowingness — and how quietly you can step aside, at peace with yourself.

This does not happen by pure chance. It does not happen quickly. It happens because of every journal entry, every moment you chose stillness, every piece of dream material you sat with and refused to dismiss. Every time you chose to lean inward instead of echoing the past.

This work is the journey of your lifetime.

And one day — a seemingly random day, in the middle of an unexpected storm — the investment in your Self pays out.

This time, I caught it in real time. Mid-conversation. Mid-provocation.

And I thought: I know this. I have been here before. And I am done.

Just: done.

Which pattern have you been calling fate — that was always, quietly, asking to be seen?

In March 2019, during my 4-months trip around the world, I was on a cruise through Doubtful Sound in Fiordland, New Zealand.

If you’ve never heard of it — Doubtful Sound is one of the most remote places on earth. No roads lead there. You reach it by boat across a lake, then by bus over a mountain pass, then by boat again into the fiord itself. Sheer cliffs rise hundreds of metres on both sides. Waterfalls appear from nowhere. The scale of it is almost incomprehensible — the kind of nature that makes your whole life feel very small and very precious simultaneously.

I had been to extraordinary places before —Rio de Janeiro, the Amazon jungle in Peru, the deep Saharan desert in Libya. I was not easily overwhelmed by landscape. But what happened on that boat had nothing to do with the view.

At some point during the cruise, the captain made an announcement: the whole boat would take 10 minutes of silence. No phones. No movement if possible. Just silence.

Ten minutes. Announced. Deliberate. Non-negotiable. It really hit me as a surprise – I didn’t know this was part of the tour! I was alone on the deck when the announcement was made - my daughter was somewhere inside the boat.

The first seconds.

The engines cut. And the silence arrived.

It felt — strange. Intense. The first few seconds felt incredibly long in a way I couldn’t explain. My instinct was to look around at the other passengers. What are they doing with this? How are they handling it? The observer in me activated immediately — the one who has spent a career reading rooms, scanning for signals, assessing the group.

Then I caught myself. And I went in. With a childish joy: let’s try this!

What struck me first was the sound of the fjord itself — not silence at all, but a layered, living quiet. Birds communicating across the water. A waterfall in the distance. The wind moving through something I couldn’t see. The kind of sound that is only audible when everything human-made stops.

The fjord wasn’t silent. I was. And that was the first time I understood the difference between the absence of noise and the presence of stillness.

And then feelings began to arrive.

Awe. Calm. Beauty. A peaceful sensation that felt like full alignment with the reason I had taken that trip in the first place — to make space for me. For feeling. For bliss. For listening.

What the noise had been covering.

I want to be precise about something: the insights I’m about to describe didn’t all arrive in those ten minutes on the boat. They arrived over the days surrounding it — during long walks in nature, during meals eaten slowly, during drives through landscapes that asked nothing of me.

But the Doubtful Sound silence was the door. The moment my nervous system understood — at a level below language — that it was safe to let go of the frequency I had been maintaining. And once that door opened, things began arriving that had been waiting for my availability – or simply put, empty space. The rest of the trip was filled with inspiring “aha” moments.

Shortly after the cruise, I wrote down in my journal messages I could now hear directly from walking silently in nature: “The richness and abundance flowing through nature — proof that the universe is infinitely abundant. A giant crack between two majestic mountains — proof that everything is possible, that nature is capable of miracles. Happiness. Gratitude. A very strong flow of life energy.”

Another moment stopped me completely: a flash of understanding — sudden, uninvited, completely clear — about a painful professional experience I had lived through a few years earlier. I had spent months processing it as something that had happened *to* me. A situation I had endured. A chapter I was glad to have closed.

And then, walking in that Fiordland nature, the reframe arrived without warning: I needed to live that experience to discover empathy. Not as a consolation. Not as a way of making peace with it. As a precise, structural truth about why that chapter existed in my life.

I had never seen it that way before. The analytical mind — which had processed the same events hundreds of times — had never arrived there. It took silence, nature, and six weeks of accumulated spaciousness for that insight to drop in.

The most important insights of my life have never arrived at my desk whilst trying to figure things out. They have arrived when I was floating — in nature, in stillness, in the space between one thing and the next. Not because I was being unproductive. Because I had finally created enough space for the signal to land.

The fist time I truly understood it

During that trip, I was living the “power of NOW” for the first time in my adult life. Not understanding it intellectually — but living it. With my daughter. In real time. With nowhere to be and nothing to prove.

I wrote in my travel journal around that time: “I am so confident in the future, in divine timing — that everything unfolds perfectly. I am living this truth for the very first time. It feels so incredibly freeing. Liberating. Safe. Beautiful. No rush. Nowhere to go. Everything is right here, right now.”

And then the insight arrived that I had read about a hundred times and never understood: “Lâcher prise, c’est ça: ne pas avoir d’objectifs”, meaning “letting go is this: having no objectives.”

I am writing it in French because that is the language in which it arrived — and some things don’t translate without losing something essential.

For a woman who had built a spreadsheet called Life Plan — who had mapped every cashflow, every property acquisition, every projected bonus — this was not a small insight. This was the ground shifting.

I had read those words many times. I had never understood them. Because understanding was not the problem. The problem was that I had never stopped moving long enough to feel what they were pointing at.

What silence is not.

Silence is not a luxury. It is not something you earn when the to-do list is finally empty — because that day never comes.

It is strategic decision-making infrastructure.

When you run your brain at full capacity without interruption, the insights are still being generated. You just can’t hear them above the frequency of your own constant output.

You become so full of thinking that there is no room left for knowing.

There is an intelligence that cannot be accessed at the frequency most high achievers operate at. It doesn’t arrive in strategy sessions, or during the forty-five minutes of thinking-while-running that passes for reflection in a busy life.

It arrives in the gaps.

In the moment of sitting in a fjord watching a waterfall, with nothing required of you, when your nervous system finally drops below the frequency of performance and something much deeper and wiser gets a word in.

The downloads come when there is space for them to land. That is not mysticism. That is simply how this particular kind of intelligence works.

You cannot think your way to the insights that will change your life. You can only create the conditions in which they become audible.

What I do with this now.

My morning routine, which includes a meditation and writing down the dream scenes I can recall from the night, serves only one purpose: going inwards. Creating space and listening.

This is the infrastructure of my clearest thinking and most precise decision making. I have learned that I cannot manufacture insight. I can only make myself available to it.

If this resonated —

When was the last time you created 10 unscheduled, unproductive, genuinely empty minutes — not to rest, not to recover, but simply to let something arrive? Whilst being OK if nothing arrives, anyway?

If you can’t remember, that might be the most important hint you received just now.

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Early 2014, I was sitting in my rocking chair in our villa in Abu Dhabi.

Laptop open. My daughter napping. The house immaculate — the nanny had seen to that. My husband would cook dinner later. I had come home from work at 3pm, as I often did, because my job simply didn’t require more of me.

On my screen was a spreadsheet I had named — with complete seriousness — “Life Plan.”

It was meticulous. Cash flows projected month by month. Salaries, bonuses, promotions mapped out years in advance. Loan repayments. Real estate acquisitions sequenced in order. A second child, budgeted for. A future, perfectly architected.

And somewhere between one column and the next, a small voice arrived.

Quiet. Uninvited. Completely inconvenient: “This can’t be it. There must be something more than this.”

I remember my reaction: Oh. You again! What do you want? Why are you here?

And then, with the confidence of someone who has never been wrong about anything important, I thought: It will go away.

The spreadsheet wasn’t a life plan. It was a fortress. Every cash flow, every projection, every carefully mapped acquisition — a wall between me and the question that voice was actually asking.

Because the voice wasn’t asking about money, or meaning, or career direction.

It was asking me to give up control. To step into a whole new journey. Into the unknown. To admit that the life I had so precisely architected — the marriage that was for life, the future that was already written — might not be the life I was actually here to live.

But I was certainly not ready for that question.

So I did what high achievers do when the inner world becomes too uncertain: I accelerated the outer one.

The fastest way to silence your Inner Voice is to make yourself too busy to hear it.

My marriage was struggling. The relationship had become a source of quiet, grinding pain — the kind you learn to manage rather than resolve. I had started therapy for mild depression. I couldn’t see a way through.

So I made a decision that felt, at the time, completely logical and pragmatic: if I have complete blur on my personal side, I’ll accelerate the side where I’m in total control. I left a comfortable, well-paid, low-pressure job and rejoined McKinsey.

Three weeks later, my marriage exploded and I filed for divorce.

The voice had been right: there was something more. This time, I needed the universe to make it unavoidable.

This is the first thing I learned about that Inner Voice: it doesn’t get louder when you ignore it. It gets more creative. It will find a way to be heard — with or without your cooperation.

The Inner Voice doesn’t disappear. It waits.

What followed were years of rebuilding. A burnout. A severe depression. A slow, effortful return to functioning — one task a day, then two, then gradually more.

And when I was finally stable, finally functional, finally managing a demanding career as a single mother with some semblance of grace — the voice came back. Not urgently. Not as a crisis. Just quietly, persistently, the way it always had.

I was good at my job. I was present for my daughter. I had rebuilt a new life from scratch after the forced reset of 2014. But around 2018, something shifted — a restlessness I recognized. Not dissatisfaction exactly. More like the feeling of a room that is perfectly comfortable and ready for expansion.

I started a coaching certification that year — first for my own interest, then because something lit up in me during the training that I hadn’t felt in years — a spark of pure joy. When I had to describe my banking job to family at dinner — “I help optimize how the bank runs — faster, leaner, more profitable” — I felt a quiet shame I couldn’t argue myself out of. The joy I felt during that training seeded a bigger idea: what would it take to feel more of this?

The voice was asking its question again. This time, I was listening more carefully.

The Inner Voice doesn't ask you to burn everything down. It asks you to be honest with yourself. And sometimes, that honesty is the most terrifying thing it could possibly ask for.

Four months of bliss.

In March 2019, I took a four-month sabbatical and traveled around the world with my then six-year-old daughter.

The decision had been building for over a year. I had planned it meticulously — the spreadsheet instinct doesn’t entirely disappear; it just learns to serve different goals. At this point, I knew deep down I had to take this trip no matter what — if my boss had refused the leave, I would have resigned.

My daughter was about to start primary school the following year. And after everything we had been through since 2014 — a divorce, a burnout, rebuilding a life from scratch — I felt it was time for a proper break, where I would do only what I loved most for four months.

I had zero fear of any potential negative consequences. I was genuinely convinced there could be no negative consequences to doing what felt exactly right.

What I didn’t anticipate was how long it would take for the noise to stop.

Two weeks in, I wrote in my journal: “I barely think about work. I’m trying to be as present as possible — in the car, on the hike, at every stop. But it takes time to dive inward. The distractions are everywhere, because we change location every two days.”

And then, six weeks in — in Kaiteriteri, New Zealand, during a meditation session as it was pouring down rain nonstop for two days — I experienced something I had no name for.

I can only describe it as meeting my soul. My higher self. The deepest, most essential version of me that had been running quietly underneath everything — the spreadsheets, the career pivots, the rebuilding, the performing — for my entire adult life.

I couldn’t control the tears. Not from sadness. From recognition: a very new, pure emotion. Perhaps the best way to describe it would be pure love.

It took six weeks of continuous travel, daily activities that gave me pleasure, meditation, and the deliberate removal of every professional obligation from my life before I could hear it clearly. I hadn't known how loud the noise was until it finally went quiet.

The dolphin who appeared twice.

In April 2017 — two years before the round-the-world trip — I decided to indulge in my first solo luxury weekend in Tenerife, at a beautiful resort. I had just discovered Dr. Joe Dispenza’s work, devouring his first book Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself — alternating between reading and taking frantic notes, as I clearly felt this book was onto something very different, very powerful — and meditating.

I had a very vivid dream that night: walking on a beach at sunset, a dolphin emerged from the water in a vertical position and moved toward me — as if to embrace me. My first reaction was not wonder. It was something closer to disbelief: “There must be a mistake. He can’t be coming toward me.”

Looking back now, I understand what my reaction meant. Not fear of the dolphin — fear of being chosen. Of being worthy of that kind of direct, unconditional approach. Of receiving something freely, without having earned it first.

I woke up unsettled. I wrote it down. I didn’t know what to do with it. There was a very intense emotion associated with the dream — the images and sensations kept coming back repeatedly over the next few days, telling me this dream was important.

Two years later, in April 2019 — exactly two years later — I was diving in the Tiputa Pass in Rangiroa, French Polynesia.

Before entering the water, I joked with the diving instructor: “I want to dive with dolphins.” She smiled and said, “There are many dolphins in the pass, but it’s extremely rare to see them while diving.”

We jumped in. They were there immediately. Six dolphins. Two of them at our level — as if they had been waiting for us.

And then one of them turned and came directly toward me. This time, I didn’t hesitate. I opened my arms wide and held him — gently, for about thirty seconds. I could feel the vibration of his body. It was the most extraordinary sensation I have ever experienced. Same animal. Same approach. Two years apart. I had become a different person.

In 2017, I pulled back from something moving toward me with love because I didn't believe I deserved it. In 2019, I opened my arms. That gap — between those two responses — is what two years of inner work actually looks like.

What I know now.

The voice in the rocking chair in Abu Dhabi never went away.

I tried to outplan it with spreadsheets. I tried to outrun it with a new job. I tried to outlast it with years of careful, competent, responsible rebuilding. The Voice waited. Every time. With infinite patience and zero judgment.

Because it wasn’t asking me to blow up my life. It was asking me something much simpler and much harder: “Stop optimizing the outer life as a substitute for listening to the inner one.”

I now understand that voice as the most precise strategic intelligence I have. Not despite being unquantifiable — because of it. It processes what the analytical mind cannot. It holds what the spreadsheet cannot contain. It knows the difference — before the evidence arrives, before the logic catches up — between what is true and what is performance.

Learning to hear it didn’t require a sabbatical, or a burnout, or a dolphin in French Polynesia. It required pausing long enough for the noise to drop.

That’s it. That’s the whole practice.

The voice is already there, in dialogue. It has always been there.

The question is not whether you have an inner voice. The question is whether you've built enough silence to get into a dialogue with it.

If this resonated — I'd love to know: what is your Inner Voice currently asking — that you've been too busy to hear?

If this essay opened something for you — a question, a longing, a sense that something is ready to shift — I’d love to hear from you.

The work I do sits at the intersection of inner dialogue, values alignment, and depth — the kind of coaching that doesn’t just help you think more clearly but helps you come home to who you truly are.

If you feel ready, you can book a free 30-minute Alignment Conversation below.

Free 30-minute Alignment Conversation

Cécile Burghard

Aligned. From Within.

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