We live under this quiet but relentless pressure to get it right to have a calling, a direction, a clear and confident answer to the question of what we’re here to do. And I’ll be honest with you: the idea of being somebody, of having it figured out, is a trap I have fallen into more times than I can count. One I’ve had to climb out of, slowly and usually humbled, over and over again.

If you’re a sensitive or intuitive person, I think this pressure lands differently for you too. Because meaning isn’t just nice to have - it’s essential. We’re drawn to depth, to causes that matter, to lives that feel real and purposeful. We notice what looks right to the world around us, and we feel the gap acutely when our own life doesn’t match that picture.

And yet and this is the part that gets me so many of us do the purpose we thought we were called to. The career, the relationship, the family, the vision we worked toward. And underneath it all, something still feels hollow. Like we’re missing something we can’t quite name.

That feeling is what I want to talk about today.

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Purpose is not what you think it is

For most of my life I thought purpose was external a mission, a calling, something I was meant to live out in the world. And while that’s part of it, I kept finding myself deflated even when I was doing exactly what I’d always wanted to do. Inspired for a while, then quietly empty again.

The truth is, when we attach purpose entirely to an external outcome — a job title, a role, an achievement — we’re only seeing half the picture.

The Bhagavad Gita, which I return to again and again as a spiritual compass in my life states:

“When you move amidst the world of sense, free from attachment and aversion alike, there comes the peace in which all sorrows end, and you live in the wisdom of the self.”

Real purpose, according to this ancient text, isn’t found through the work or the job. It’s found in how we move through the world — how we show up, how we express ourselves, the quality of awareness we bring to each moment. Not the meaning we construct. The meaning that was always already there.

The two kinds of purpose nobody talks about

We are obsessed, as a culture, with outer purpose. The first questions we ask strangers, colleagues, dates: what do you do, where are you going, what are you becoming? And while direction matters, it becomes quietly dangerous when we attach too much of our identity to things that are, by nature, impermanent.

What happens to your sense of purpose when your children grow up? When you’re made redundant? When the thing you built falls apart or simply changes? If your purpose lives entirely outside you, it leaves when those things leave.

There are two kinds of purpose, and knowing both is what makes the difference.

Your outer purpose is what most of us mean when we use the word: career, relationships, contribution, the work you put into the world. For sensitive people this usually needs to be values-aligned and genuinely meaningful — we can’t phone it in. But it is changeable. It will evolve. It is not the whole story.

Your inner purpose, as Eckhart Tolle describes it, is simply to awaken — to be present, to be in alignment with life. Not to do any particular thing, but to bring a quality of consciousness to whatever you’re doing. To be here, fully, rather than perpetually arriving somewhere else.

The painful irony is that you can achieve everything your outer purpose demands — the business, the recognition, the life that looks right from the outside — and still feel like something essential is missing. That’s not ingratitude. That’s what happens when inner and outer purpose have come apart.

The Bhagavad Gita calls this svadharma — your own nature, your own path, the particular way you are called to move through the world. Not the most impressive path. Yours. Even an imperfect life lived in alignment with your own nature is worth more than a perfect imitation of someone else’s.

So many of us have spent years excelling toward goals that were never really ours, wondering why it still feels like we’re wearing someone else’s clothes. I know I have.

Inner purpose isn’t found at the end of enough searching. It’s what opens up when you stop performing, stop striving to be a different version of yourself. It’s the quality of presence you bring to your relationships, to your work, to an ordinary Tuesday. It’s a continual returning choosing presence over perfection, again and again.

How to start living your gift

To start living your purpose, you have to stop looking for it outside yourself and learn to lean into stillness. It isn’t found by accumulating more wisdom, collecting more experiences, or striving harder. It’s found by listening to what’s already within you.

Living your gift is a return. A return to who you are beneath the labels, the jobs, the milestones. Goals aren’t the enemy but they can become a way of hiding, another layer of busyness that keeps us from the quieter truth of who we actually are.

I’ve never struggled to identify my outer purpose. But as a sensitive high-achiever, I always felt I was searching for something more. When I stopped asking what looks impressive and started noticing what made me feel genuinely alive, I started moving closer to my truest self.

Purpose can never be performed. It can only be inhabited.

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If you’re trying to find your way back to yours, start small:

• Notice what you keep returning to — not because anyone rewards you for it, but because something in you won’t let it go

• Ask: where do I lose track of time? Where does effort feel like flow?

• Pay attention to what drains you and what restores you. Your sensitivity is data, and it’s been pointing somewhere all along

• Before meditation, sit with the question: who am I beneath all of this? Not to answer it — just to let whatever is true surface quietly

Your gift was never something to find outside yourself. It’s who you are when the career is gone, when the relationships shift, when the noise finally settles.

Connect with yourself first. The rest will follow.

If this landed for you, I’d love to know — hit reply and tell me where you are with this right now. Are you clearer on your outer purpose or your inner one?

The most powerful words we speak are not those that are uttered in a language we understand. They are the words that come in forms of sensations, impulses and a quiet knowing.

Our world has conditioned us to believe that everything must be rationalised, reasoned and thought about. But underneath this, we have lost the ability to discern what we really want, from what we think we should want, or what we have built ourselves in our minds to be.

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There is a vast amount of information on social media which I think has created a generation of people who feel confused, because they think they need to be or behave a certain way to be happy. We only need to open social media, and we’re bombarded with noise, advice and people preaching what we think we need. But what if what we think we need is quite often different from what we actually want.

We tell ourselves we need to look a certain way to be spiritual, we tell ourselves we need to have the car to feel accomplished, we tell ourselves we need to tick life off in ‘order’ to feel like we made it.

But do we actually want these things? Or have we thought our way to wanting them.

Albert Einstein once said, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

We find ourselves scrolling, searching and endlessly reaching for the next bit of inspiration to help us piece together our lives, make decisions and find who we are. But how many times have we done this and continued to feel dissatisfied, because the answer we are hunting for is already hidden in plain sight.

Anxiety screams. Intuition whispers.

And yet we keep turning the volume up on everything around us, hoping the answer will arrive from the outside. As someone who has a strong sense of self, but has also dealt with an unhealthy dose of perfectionism, finding my intuition has often felt like following a map with no direction. So many times I have bypassed the deep knowing within, because I mistook the anxious mind to be me. Thich Nhat Hanh once said, “Thinking is at the center of everything we do. But thinking is just thinking — it is not reality.”

The Body Doesn’t Lie

Intuition is not a mystical concept. It is not something only the most spiritual among us can find — it is something that lives in everybody. Intuition lives in the nervous system and it speaks through the language of the body. Before it uses words, intuition leaves clues in the sensations of the body. This could be a tightness in the chest, a lump in the throat, or a gut feeling that lingers consistently.

But how can we discern between intuition and anxiety, when both show up with similar bodily sensations? The difference for me is that anxiety is often tight, contracting and dull — and intuition feels expansive, like growth - it feels light.

Coming Home to Yourself

So if we cannot find our intuition through thinking, analysing and acquiring more knowledge — how can we access it when it is deeply elusive? One of the simplest things we can do is to sit. Sit in the stillness and allow the message to arrive.

Stillness is not something that comes easily, but it can be cultivated and practiced. I have found that taking silence first thing in the morning, before my mind is filled with to-do lists, is the best time to tap into it. This is called liminal space — the space between waking and the present moment — and it creates a deep opening for this kind of listening. We might bring to it a question we have been sitting with, or a difficult decision that is waiting to be answered. The voice of intuition often arrives in one sentence. It does not loop around answers or argue with pros and cons. It simply arrives, quietly and steadily.

And when it does arrive — that quiet, clear message — the invitation is not to analyse it. It is simply to trust it. To take one small step in its direction, and notice what opens.

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For most of my twenties, I didn’t trust myself at all. I outsourced decisions to friends, partners, and occasionally strangers on the internet. I mistook everyone else’s certainty for wisdom and my own quiet knowing for naivety something I’ve since learnt is incredibly common for sensitive people.

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It took years of doing the inner work and qualifications I now share with my clients to understand that self-trust isn’t a personality trait you’re either born with or without. It’s a practice. And for highly sensitive people and empaths, it might be the most important practice of all.

Because here’s the thing: when self-trust is missing, everything feels harder. Decisions feel impossible. Relationships feel uncertain. Life starts to feel like something happening to you, rather than something you’re actively creating. Sound familiar?

Self-trust can, however, be earned, and the more we practise it, the stronger it becomes. Like any skill, it’s a matter of hours invested.

Understanding Self-Trust vs Self-Confidence

Self-trust shapes all your relationships, and I firmly believe that you will struggle to truly embrace trust in your outer relationships if you cannot first trust yourself. Self-trust is about knowing yourself on a deeper level — listening to the deep wisdom within you, the voice of your intuition rather than your mind. More on this later.

We often get self-trust and self-confidence confused, so here’s a simple distinction:

• Self-confidence is about believing in your skills and abilities

• Self-trust is about knowing yourself more deeply and listening to your innate wisdom

Self-trust is the foundation upon which confidence is built. You can fake confidence, but it will always feel inauthentic if it isn’t coming from solid foundations.

The Importance of Self-Trust

Self-trust is vital for living a fulfilling, genuine life one that truly lights us up. It allows us to make decisions that work for us, rather than those that simply please others. This can be difficult for sensitive types, because we have learnt to become emotional barometers for everyone around us, bypassing our own needs to keep others happy.

When you lean into trusting yourself, something quietly shifts. You stop seeking permission from others and start giving it to yourself. Relationships improve because you show up more honestly less performance, more presence. And gradually, the things that don’t align with who you are begin to fall away, not through force, but through a growing clarity about what actually matters.

How to start trusting yourself as a sensitive person

Building self-trust is really about practice — the more you do it, the more natural it feels. Below are the six key areas I work with, beginning where I always begin: the body.

• The Body

• Building Boundaries

• Accountability

• Intuition

• Compassion

• Feeling the Fear

• Mindfulness

The Body

As a somatic practitioner, I believe that self-trust cannot fully be grasped unless we learn to listen to our bodies and work on regulating the nervous system. If our nervous system is in a state of chaos, no meditation or boundary work will fully land. This is why my teachings and philosophy always begin with a body-first approach.

As Bessel van der Kolk writes in The Body Keeps the Score, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way their bodies interact with the world around them — because “physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.”

This is at the heart of the work I do. Using expressive movement, somatic tracking, and practices that help release stored fear, we create the conditions in which self-trust can actually take root.

→ My 1:1 coaching uses somatic tools to help sensitive people build deep self-trust.

Building Boundaries

Boundaries are one of the most powerful — and most overlooked — acts of self-trust. This isn’t just about saying no to others; it starts with the boundaries you set with yourself. For example:

• Switching off your phone at a set time each evening

• Protecting time and space that is genuinely yours

• Asserting your needs kindly but clearly with loved ones, friends, or colleagues

This has been a lifelong journey for me. As a sensitive person who was eager to please others, a lot of my younger years were spent without boundaries. Boundaries can feel unsafe for those of us who are deeply attuned to the needs of others — but they are one of the most powerful acts of self-trust there is.

Accountability

Doing the thing you said you were going to do — even when you don’t feel like it. This is a deceptively powerful way of building self-trust. Some examples:

• Following your morning routine even when you’re tired

• Taking that lunchtime walk even when it’s raining

• Keeping the commitments you make to yourself, not just to others

The more we follow through, the more we signal to the unconscious mind that we trust ourselves — and the more likely we are to make future decisions that truly align with who we are.

Intuition

Highly sensitive people and empaths are deeply intuitive — but when we lack self-trust, our intuition is often confused with anxiety. On my own journey to self-trust, I’ve found meditation enormously useful. Meditation allows us to shift our brainwaves to alpha and theta— theta being a state in which we can access the subconscious mind, insight, and emotional wellbeing.

I’ve created a guided visualisation on Insight Timer — Guided Visualisation for Clarity & Self-Trust — designed to help you access your inner voice.

Compassion

All of these practices carry an element of compassion within them. But to truly trust yourself, that inner dialogue needs to become a friend, not an enemy. Gently reframing negative self-talk with words of loving kindness helps to reprogramme the unconscious mind.

A few ways to practise this:

• Morning affirmations spoken out loud — there is real power in voicing things, in the act of saying them

• Noticing your inner critic without judgment, and consciously offering a kinder response

• Treating yourself with the same warmth you would offer a close friend

Check out my Insight Timer track: Morning Affirmations for Sensitive Souls.

Feeling the Fear (and Doing It Anyway)

A famous book title by Susan Jeffers — and the message is everything. This is, perhaps, what it truly means to dare greatly. It’s about putting ourselves in situations that make us uncomfortable, because staying within the same narrow parameters keeps us small and stunts our ability to become who we are truly capable of being.

Aim to do one new thing a week. It doesn’t have to be big:

• Striking up a conversation with a stranger

• Sharing an opinion you’d normally keep to yourself

• Saying yes to something that excites and terrifies you in equal measure

The more you do it, the easier it becomes — and the more you build the self-trust to know that it’s okay to do the things that scare us.

Mindfulness

One of my favourite ways to build self-trust is through living mindfully — and I want to be clear that mindfulness is not simply about sitting down to meditate. It’s about living with open awareness: noticing your reactions, your instincts, your patterns, and choosing to respond from a grounded place rather than a reactive one.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, who developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, identified trust as one of the nine core attitudes of mindfulness — the idea that learning to trust yourself, your feelings, and your own authority is fundamental to living authentically, rather than constantly looking outward for validation.

For sensitive people, this is particularly hard. We are wired to read the room, to attune to others, to take our cues from the world around us. And in the age of social media, that pull towards external validation is relentless. It’s partly why I stepped back from posting regularly on Instagram. I noticed it was quietly eroding my own sense of self, creating a low-level dependency on outside opinion that I had to consciously choose to interrupt.

Mindfulness gave me that interrupt. It doesn’t have to be formal or complicated it can be as simple as pausing before you react, checking in with your body before you answer, or noticing when you’re about to outsource a decision that was always yours to make.

What next?

As you can see, there are several key ways to build self-trust. Without a solid foundation of it, we’ll constantly outsource our decisions to others — and life will feel more like something happening to us, rather than something we are actively creating.

If you struggle with self-trust and want more clarity on your life direction, I offer 1:1 coaching that builds on everything explored here.

I’d love to know if this article was helpful — leave a comment or a review below.

Namaste, Rachel X

What purpose actually is (and what it isn’t)

For most of my twenties, I thought purpose was something I was supposed to find. A milestone, a career path that finally felt right a relationship. And for a long time, I kept waiting for it to arrive, as if one day something would click into place and I’d finally feel like I was living the life I was meant to be living.

While lots of people find purpose through these things, I’ve come to realise we’ve been getting purpose completely wrong…

Eastern philosophy teaches ‘Dharma’ which is not about fulfilling material status or satisfying the ego - it’s about fulfilling your truth, your inner duty, without attachment to outcome. You could be living your purpose through helping, teaching, or raising a family — in the Gita’s eyes, this is purpose, and it looks different for each of us.

To live a life of purpose, you’re working not just because you love it and you’re in flow, but because you have fallen in love with the work itself — and this kind of love benefits far more than just you. It radiates out into the world.

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This might sound vast, even abstract. But stay with me because whether or not you consider yourself spiritual, you have likely felt a moment when you were in flow, or felt that something just fit. Where all time and space was suspended. This is because, for that moment, you were doing something that aligned with your values. Work didn’t feel like work. This, my friend, was a moment of purpose.

An important step in identifying your purpose, if you have no idea where to start, is to think for a moment about your values.

How do you find your values?

Your values, simply put, are the core beliefs you hold to be true — the ways you want to live your life and how you want to show up in the world. They might be:

• Kindness

• Integrity

• Family and deep relationships

• Teaching or sharing knowledge

• Joy and creativity

• Service to others

• Freedom or authenticity

Whether you’re conscious of them or not, these values shape your life, your decisions, your friendships and your goals — and they play a key role in how you identify your purpose.

Why living in alignment with your values matters so much for HSPs and empaths

For sensitive people, the cost of living out of alignment with these values is high. We have easily overwhelmed nervous systems, finely tuned instincts, and untold amounts of empathy and compassion sometimes to the detriment of our own health, but that’s a post for another time.

The thing is, we need to be doing something or at least enjoying aspects of our lives that connects to our values and purpose. Otherwise our nervous systems suffer and we struggle to find meaning behind the work we do. The work always has to have a point. That’s why so many HSPs and empaths are healers, teachers, and carers. We’re often crushed and deeply bored by corporate environments — though I’m sure there are a few exceptions to that rule.

How your sensitivity is your greatest guide, not your greatest obstacle

If you’re a sensitive person stuck on your purpose, your sensitivity is the biggest guide you’ll ever have. You just need to learn to lean into it, rather than mask it.

A lot of my earlier life was spent burying my sensitivity, not knowing who I was underneath all the performing and people-pleasing. So many of us sensitives can relate to not wanting to let others down choosing the “right” thing over what we actually want, again and again.

I was lucky enough to feel my purpose the first time I walked into a yoga class at university, nearly fifteen years ago. And yet, despite my body and my heart knowing this was my path, I pushed it away — until eventually, not following my purpose led me to anxiety and workplace burnout. The truth is, your purpose will always find a way of catching up with you. There comes a point where you are given the choice to change direction, guided by something deeper — some of us take the leap, and some of us stay stuck, continuing a life that almost fits but never quite does.

The clues your life has already been leaving you

Tune into yourself and your environment enough and you’ll realise that your life has already been leaving you a trail of breadcrumbs. It might be in the work you currently do, the passion project you lose yourself in for hours each evening, or in the everyday ways you show up for friends and family without even thinking. Ask yourself — what do people always come to you for? What could you talk about or do for hours without noticing the time pass? If you sit in the stillness long enough, you’ll likely realise your purpose has been there all along.

What gets in the way for sensitive people specifically

The biggest block I see — in my past self and in my clients — is the deep, unwavering fear that if we live our purpose, we’ll let others down. Or that we’ll somehow be disliked or judged for our true talents and interests. While that fear can feel very real, it is deeply rooted in people-pleasing, and it keeps us stuck, safe, and small.

Purpose doesn’t have an expiry date either. David Attenborough, who recently turned 100, is perhaps the greatest living example of what happens when someone commits fully to their dharma — and the world is richer for it. Imagine what becomes possible when you stop letting fear make your decisions.

You don’t find your purpose — you remember it

This is one of the most important takeaways from today’s post. We don’t find purpose it’s already within us. It’s something we’re born with. You might not recognise it as purpose yet, but there is a dharma we all carry, no matter how small. And it still has meaning.

If you enjoyed this post, let me know in the comments below. I’d love to hear about your experience with purpose.

Help spread the word and send this to someone else who needs to hear it.

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You need to get comfortable being uncomfortable…

The past me would have waited until everything was perfect before posting — because as a highly sensitive high-achiever, perfectionism ran most of my life. I’d wait for the perfect idea, the perfect font or the perfect time I was feeling inspired to write. The truth is perfect never comes, it’s just a lie we tell ourselves because we’re scared of the outcome.

Writing publicly can bring in all sorts of fears — you show up, you put effort in, and often crickets. But building a business, especially as a sensitive person, has taught me you’ve just got to feel the fear and do it anyway — at least, if you actually want to change that is.

And that’s exactly why I’m building this space — because I know I’m not the only person who has let fear, perfectionism or other people’s needs keep them from their own life.

My one wish is that through this writing, those who have played small or who have shrunk to fit their sensitivity find the courage to take the reins of their own lives and live purposefully, boldly, on their own terms.

That they have the courage to dream, to dare and to deviate from the path that looks right to the path that IS right.

On rewriting the HSP narrative…

The internet has a story about sensitive people. One that is littered across chats, forums and Reddit posts. That nervous systems are weaker, that life is a struggle, that we’re perpetually overwhelmed.

I’m not saying being sensitive doesn’t come with its own unique challenges — but it’s become a ceiling we hit, a way of stunting our dreams, keeping ourselves small, and yes, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This is a space that inspires sensitive people to step into the agency of their lives, to dream of more, and to allow their gifts to shape their lives, rather than hinder them.

I’ll be shedding light on my own journey, sharing ancient wisdom that has helped direct my path, and rewriting the narrative. One post, at a time.

This space is for YOU IF…

This space is for those who identify as sensitive, HSP or empath — but are done playing the victim, done living life through the lens of other people’s needs, and are ready to step into a life that is truly their own. A life where their gifts don’t just survive, but shine. This is a space for people who want depth, community and genuine connection — no 3-second viral reels, quick hacks or endless ads here.

What to expect…

Every week, you’ll find something inspiring waiting for you here. No noise, no constant nervous system regulation posts just honesty and truth written from experience and my own trainings.

Posts will draw on personal essays and honest reflection, ancient wisdom and philosophy, and practical tools shaped by my trainings in body-based healing, yoga, breathwork and Mindfulness.

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