Pilgrimage: When the Soul Calls Us Elsewhere

I stopped writing for a long while. I had relocated to Brisbane, Australia, in January 2025. Everything was new. I got busy focusing my energy on doing and creating, starting life in a new city, starting a new relationship, falling in love, finding a freshwater spring to bathe in, finding places to commune with the Mother.

With hindsight—our insightful friend who always comes late to the party—I feel I was trying to finally find something, somewhere or someone that might hold me long enough to never let me go.

I was halfway through my next book at the time, before the words just stopped flowing; a river run dry. I tried everything except dancing for the rain to come.

I bought myself a writing desk, took myself away on mini writers’ retreats, cleared my calendar, set myself the very simple milestone of just 1,000 words a week. My partner encouraged me, my mum encouraged me. But no matter what I did, the words just weren’t coming through. The rains had stopped.

After beating myself up about it for months, I fell into a feeling of acceptance. Okay, Universe, I surrender to whatever is happening right now that is stopping these pages from forming.

I had a feeling that my writing was out of my hands, literally. I’d learned by then that when things don’t go our way, it’s not always about us. Something else is at play, something grand—energy, Spirit, circumstance, a reason no earthly words can really understand.

I began to wonder whether I was being called to live out another part of the book that could only be written once I had lived and breathed it. I had, after all, signed a cosmic contract on the dotted line that I would embody everything I was writing about. Reclaim Your Power is the title. Had I reclaimed mine, or was I still living as a prisoner of the inherited stories about who I was and my place in the world? Had I stopped hiding parts of myself behind relationships, roles and versions of me that felt easier for the world to receive? Had I remembered the magic, life-giving portal that I was—the woman who could create, choose, speak, leave and begin again? Or was I still living from a nervous system that couldn’t discern whether she was 8 or 39?

I wondered.

As much as the year was magical, it was also hard—really hard. Life hadn’t turned out exactly as planned for me. I moved to Brisbane with big intentions. I’d longed so much for roots after all these years. I was tired of flying. I wanted to rest my wings somewhere. I wanted to watch the seasons change from the same window, to know where the cups lived in the cupboard, to plant something and still be there when it flowered. I wanted, perhaps more than anything, to finally belong somewhere.

The thing was, my roots never seemed to grow deep enough to hold me. Every time a storm came, I felt myself being pulled from the ground again. I dug myself in deeper, trying to hold on, trying to find the ultimate stability. But I was fragile, and toward the summer of 2026, the storms just kept coming.

Conflict in my relationship increased, largely driven by financial and home pressures. I was living inside a pressure cooker of expectations and responsibilities, trying to find sovereignty inside a society determined to domesticate me. Trying to make a business work, trying to make a relationship work, trying to make a home work, trying to make myself work within a culture that consumes people and spits them out. A culture that promotes productivity over rest, convenience over patience, separation over community. One that has pulled us away from the village, from the land, from our elders, from one another and from Source, and then wonders why we are all lining up for the next prescription of SSRIs.

You must be strong to live here in the basin of Western capitalism. It will eat your spirit if you let it, and it almost ate mine.

And on top of trying to survive like a wild animal inside a cage, my own little world was falling apart too.

I had two pregnancies that ended in miscarriage. The community centre I had poured my whole heart and soul into was financially unsustainable, events cancelled, bills rising, making barely enough money to cover the rent. My relationship was falling apart, and home didn’t feel like home anymore. It was as though the Universe—or Spirit, or whatever name we give the great intelligence beyond ourselves—was saying, uh uh. Not right now. There is something else your soul has planned.

I didn’t want to hear that. I wanted things to turn out the way I thought they would. I had tried so hard to make everything work. Even when I wasn’t trying, I was. So… frantically… trying... I wanted to know the outcome. I wanted certainty. I needed certainty.

But it wasn’t there. In certainty’s place was just immense grief and suffering, the kind I wouldn’t wish upon anyone. The kind that brings you to your knees, calling for salvation, for something—anything—to reach down and pull you from the depths of yourself. And I did call. I called out to the Goddess, to the Mother, to Spirit, to the ancestors, to anything that might hear me. And for what felt like the longest silence of my life, there was no answer on the other end of the line.

I had reached the end of myself. There were moments when the pain became so immense I felt as though I could die, as though a human heart could only hold so much before it simply gave way. And I almost did. Just take me then. I have nothing left but to surrender to whatever you want. Just take me. I cannot try anymore. I cannot do this anymore.

I fell to the cold hardwood floor, with no energy to stand. No energy to hold myself up. I had no choice but to let go of all expectations, all hopes, all control, and let myself fall.

Perhaps that is what death feels like: the moment you can no longer hold together the person you have been trying so desperately to keep alive. There was a strange relief in it. For the first time in a long time, there was nothing left for me to hold on to.

So I stopped trying.

I let go of the ropes.

I let go of the known.

And started opening myself up to receive the unknown.

If I am not meant to be here, then take me elsewhere, I prayed, all the while feeling something in me dissolving—my ego, my attachments, my ideas about everything I thought I would be, own, know and become.

And somewhere inside that surrender came a call I knew well.

Go.

Pilgrimage.

There are lands that call your name, Bianca.

The voice was familiar. I had heard her before, long ago, in the wilderness of change.

The places calling me were far from where I was, places I didn’t even know if I could afford to reach. I had less money than I’d had in years, and yet, almost as though my guides knew I needed just enough to keep moving, a few clients appeared for me to fund my travels. With hindsight, I think I may have left anyway, with pennies in my pocket, because by that point the trust had become so unwavering that I could not turn back.

No one truly understood what was happening. It wasn’t logical. I barely understood it myself. But I knew I had to journey.

And perhaps this is why pilgrimage has existed for as long as we have been searching for meaning, healing, revelation or ourselves. There are moments when the answers cannot be found inside the life that created the questions. Sometimes we have to leave the familiar landscape entirely. We have to go to the mountain, into the desert, into the forest, into the cave, into the underworld.

The old stories knew this. Inanna descended through seven gates. Persephone descended into the underworld and returned changed. Psyche was sent on seemingly impossible journeys before she could be reunited with Love. Again and again, these stories tell us something about the necessity of descent, of leaving what is known, of being stripped of who we thought we were before we can return as someone else.

Humans have always understood this in our own ways. We walked pilgrim roads, climbed sacred mountains, entered temples and caves, fasted, wandered into wilderness, undertook vision quests, sat with sacred plants, crossed oceans to kneel before relics, rivers, stones and shrines. Not always because the sacred existed more there than it did at home, but because leaving home changed the person who was looking.

I knew how to travel. I had spent years travelling, moving through countries and cultures and sleeping in more beds than I could possibly remember. But pilgrimage felt different. Travel asks, what can I see here? Pilgrimage asks, what must I leave behind in order to see differently?

I wasn’t going somewhere to tick another place off the bucket list or sip on a piña colada by the beach (although that does sound nice). I was going because something in me needed to be changed by the journey.

There is something about removing ourselves from the mundane, from our routines, our roles, our possessions, the people who know our stories, even the bed we wake up in every morning. The unknown creates a kind of birth canal. For a while, we belong nowhere. We become the wanderer in the desert, going somewhere we do not entirely know, without knowing who we will be when we return, until somewhere along the way we meet the thing we needed to find, and the Light returns.

This is the importance of pilgrimage. We think we are travelling towards a sacred place—a temple, a mountain, a cave, a river—but somewhere along the way, stripped of our routines and certainty and all the things we thought we needed to know, we begin to realise the place was only ever leading us towards something else.

Something we could not find while standing still.

Something we may not yet have words for, but the soul has known all along.

Maybe that was why my words stopped flowing. Perhaps there were no more pages to write from the woman I had been. She had taken me as far as she could, and whatever came next could only be written by the woman I was becoming. I had thought the river had run dry, but maybe it had only redirected, carrying me somewhere I could not yet see.

Maybe I wasn’t meant to find the words.

Maybe I was meant to be reborn into the woman who could write them.