My Story
I didn't set out to find a different way of living.
For much of my life, I did what many of us do. I worked hard, took responsibility, solved problems and got on with things.
Looking back, I can see there was another quieter part of me there all along. I simply hadn't learned to listen to it yet.
Perhaps the clues were there from the beginning
I grew up as the only girl with three brothers. I was a happy tomboy — happiest in jeans, climbing trees, playing football and joining in with whatever the boys were doing.
Being the only girl also meant I had something my brothers didn't: a bedroom of my own. I didn't understand its importance at the time. It was simply somewhere I could retreat from the busyness of family life, where I could read, play music, look out of the window or just be quiet.
Looking back now, I wonder whether those moments were my earliest experience of something I would spend much of my adult life rediscovering.
Space.
Then life became much busier
I spent 37 years working in financial services. It was a world of responsibility, targets, decisions, problem-solving and doing, and I became very capable within it. For many years, that capability became part of how I understood myself.
Like so many people, I could keep going for a very long time, until eventually I began to notice the cost of always going.
I didn't have the language then for stress, nervous-system regulation or the relationship between our inner and outer worlds. I simply knew that something was asking for my attention.
Sometimes the path changes before we understand why
Leaving a career that had defined so much of my adult life was frightening. I wondered whether I was making a terrible mistake.
What followed wasn't a perfectly planned reinvention. There were different directions, different choices and plenty of learning along the way.
For a time I worked outdoors, running a lawn-care business. I loved being closer to nature and meeting people, even though eventually the physical demands showed me that this wasn't where I was meant to remain.
I began to understand something that has stayed with me ever since: a choice doesn't have to last forever to have been the right choice at the time.
Sometimes it simply takes us to the next place we need to be.
Learning to listen differently
Reiki entered my life in 2012, although at first I couldn't have known where it would lead.
Over time it became much more than something I practised or taught. It created opportunities to become quiet, to observe myself and to notice the difference between what my mind was telling me and what I could sense more quietly within.
That curiosity continued. I studied, read, trained and explored coaching, energy work, Soul Realignment, sound and many different ways of understanding ourselves.
For a while, even seeking became another form of doing. Eventually I began to wonder whether the answer wasn't in learning more, but in listening more deeply to what I had already learned.
And then there was Sandra
There was another journey happening quietly alongside all of this.
For much of my life I had been comfortable with identities: the corporate suit, the business uniform, the organisation I worked for. Even when I began teaching Reiki, it felt easier to introduce myself through the centre where I worked than simply to say:
“I'm Sandra Goodman.”
When circumstances eventually required me to step forward under my own name, I noticed how uncomfortable that felt. It made me curious.
Who was I when I wasn't standing behind a role, a uniform, a qualification or an organisation?
I don't think that question was answered in a single moment. I think I have been answering it ever since.
Looking back, the thread is much easier to see
The corporate career, leaving what was familiar, Reiki, teaching, writing, sound, coaching and all the quieter experiences in between once seemed like separate chapters of my life.
Today, I see something different.
They were all teaching me to notice, to question and to listen. To become a little less interested in who I thought I should be and a little more willing to discover who I actually was.
I didn't know I was looking for a path home.
Looking back, I can see that I had been walking it for much of my life.
Where I am today
I am still walking that path. I don't believe we reach a point where we have ourselves or life completely worked out.
Life continues to show us things. We continue to notice and to change, and perhaps we continue to come home to ourselves in ways we couldn't have understood before.
My work today — whether through teaching, writing, Reiki, sound, coaching or simply conversation — grows from that understanding.
I don't want to tell people who they should become. I am much more interested in helping create the space in which they can hear themselves again.
The Path Home
Perhaps we are not becoming.
Perhaps we are remembering.
Over the years, certain observations have returned again and again — about awareness, stillness, acceptance, listening and what happens when we stop fighting ourselves.
Together they have gradually become what I think of as The Path Home.