The Shift isn’t about doing less. It’s about building from a place that doesn’t require you to leave yourself behind.

This is the Shift that so many of us are craving but don't yet have words for. In her article, Laura names what happens when we stop treating success as something we survive and start treating it as something we grow into. Whole. Embodied. Honest.

Thank you Laura Wieck for your light and supporting women building a business in alignment.

Embodied Coaching w/ Laura Wieck

What if your body was your greatest business strategy?

For a long time, I resisted calling myself an entrepreneur. Not because I wasn’t building a business. I was. But because the version of entrepreneurship I saw around me felt deeply disembodied…

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7 days ago · 4 likes · Laura Wieck

✦ Shift’s Voices Quotes ✦

“The Aligned Shift is…” is a series of short, living definitions of The Aligned Shift. A sentence, an excerpt, a moment that already defines it in the words of others who are already embodying the Shift.
Because the Shift does not belong to us. It reveals itself through voices we recognise, admire, and that are already tracing the path. The more we see them, the more Shifters we become.

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I found this shell still fully attached to the coral. Its resilience in the face of turbulent waters is truly awe-inspiring to me.

I came across it at low tide, during that brief window when the ocean retreats and reveals what usually remains unseen. Scattered around were fragments of broken coral and empty shells, remnants of past tides that had come through with force.

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But this one remained.

Its surface was rough, irregular, beautifully weathered. Shaped by years of salt, movement, and pressure. Tiny holes marked it, like the coral below, as though they had grown in dialogue with each other.

I reached down and pressed my fingers against it, expecting it to give, to detach easily like so many others. It did not move. It felt anchored.

We often think of resilience as strength against. Against pressure. Against chaos. Against change. But standing there, it felt clear that this shell had survived not by resisting the ocean, but by being in relationship with it.

Not rigid. Not immovable. But anchored in something deeper than the surface-level turbulence.

It made me question how often we exhaust ourselves trying to hold everything together, bracing against forces that are, by nature, meant to move.

Because when the waters rise, and they always do, what matters is not how hard we fight the current, but whether we are anchored to something that can hold us through it. For me, that anchoring has often been faith.

In the most painful moments of my life, fighting only broke me further. At one point, I remembered my trust that there is a larger intelligence or order at work, even when I could not yet see it. I began to accept what I at first felt unthinkable, and then something in me began to heal.

I have learned, slowly, that transformation itself can be a form of grace. That what first feels like surrender is sometimes the beginning of alignment.

And today I am writing it down so it anchors itself in me like the shell to its coral.

And I share this moment and what it inspired me publicly hoping that it may meet someone else at the exact moment they need it so that they pick up the story like I picked up the shell, and get inspired to anchor any learning it may inspire.

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Audrey ✨ lives between worlds, languages, countries, outer and inner territories. A life spent crossing oceans, countries, collapses, rebirths.

Today she is building The Aligned Shift, a collective space for Shifters. It begins with a magazine, a bridge to support all those navigating these times of extreme transition.

✨ Her personal newsletter: beinglyaudrey.substack.com

You too have a story looking for its voice? The Aligned Shift is a collective space, not a single voice but a bridge. Write with us.

« Travel the world and the seven seas. »

These words arrived one evening in August 2009, in Saint-Tropez, while visiting my mother. At a party on a yacht, my friend Hope handed me a candle, asking me to make a wish. I closed my eyes, and I heard. Not a thought. Not a reflection. A clear voice, from somewhere else, or perhaps from deep within me, a place I had never visited.

For sixteen years, I believed this wish was about traveling. About seeing the world. About filling a sabbatical year with discoveries, landscapes, encounters.

But the wish already knew what I had yet to understand.

It didn’t say “go see the world.”
It said journey: cross, explore, discover.
But not continents. Yourself.

I obeyed without knowing it. The very next day, everything fell into place. My Amsterdam apartment found tenants for a year. I suddenly had an entire year to fill. Then a friend told me: “You have to come to Israel. You have Jewish roots, you need to see this country.” Honestly, my first reaction was: “What the hell would I do in Israel?”

But I started with a trip to Morocco and Tunisia with my mother, a return to roots, to origins. Then I went anyway. December 9, 2009.

And everything changed.

2. The Surface Intention

Israel. The unexpected.

From the plane, around noon, I saw Tel Aviv for the first time. I had done no research. No guidebooks. No Lonely Planet. I arrived completely blank.

I fell in love with this city by the water. Even in the middle of winter, the climate filled me, the streets charmed me. And above all, I recognized my family in the faces around me. My father, and my grandfather in particular. For the first time, I let that Jewish part of my identity exist in the open. Then the welcome stunned me.

A deep feeling of being home.

I found an apartment in five days. I learned Hebrew, a language “backwards.” I left Holland. At the end of 2010, I met the man who would become the father of my children. Thirteen months later, we married. A year after that, my daughter was born. Two years later, my son.

From the outside, they said: “Finally, she’s settled down.” New country. Marriage. Children. Stability.

The surface intention was fulfilled: I had found my place.
Inside, it was more complicated.

3. What the Wish Knew That I Didn’t

« Travel the world and the seven seas. »

For five years, I believed I had fulfilled this wish to the letter. I had traveled. I had found a country. A language. A husband. Children. A larger family.

But strangely, I felt an inner emptiness, as if there was still something left to journey through. Yet I had traveled the world, taken planes, crossed borders. What could possibly still be missing?

Today, I believe I hadn’t understood the wish in its full depth. « Travel the world and the seven seas. » Yes, it was literal. The world, the continents, the oceans. But what I hadn’t seen is that the world to journey through wasn’t only the one on geographical maps. There was another world inside me waiting to be explored, and that one had no visible borders.

Because the truth is that even in the life I had built, and perhaps especially in that life, I didn’t feel at home. Not really. Not in my husband’s family, of Iraqi Jewish culture, a world so different from mine. Not in the role of wife I tried so hard to inhabit. My children: I wanted them. Every day, I loved them. It wasn’t them I wanted to leave. It was the suffocation of a relationship going nowhere.

I married for love, yes. But also out of fear: fear of being alone, fear of being betrayed again. This man would never let me down, I was sure. What I hadn’t anticipated was that he would never let me go either.

As early as 2013, the signs were there. And by 2015, it was already clear: I was unhappy in my marriage and it would only get worse. It’s not that I didn’t try. I did everything to save it. But every response I got boiled down to: “Yes, okay, I heard you.” Nothing changed. I felt increasingly alone, in distress, abandoned, lost, and finally, imprisoned.

But how do you leave a life that looked so much like what was expected of me? How do you admit that you built, piece by piece, a golden prison? With your children inside?

So I stayed. Trying to leave “well.” Without destroying my children. Without destroying my ex. Without destroying the image of myself I had spent ten years building.

In September 2018, I started psychotherapy. To find the courage to know what I already knew. And perhaps also to find the courage to leave, because I didn’t have it yet.

The wish, meanwhile, was waiting. It knew I hadn’t finished journeying that inner path. It knew that the greatest voyages don’t happen by changing countries, but by crossing your own shadow.

4. The First Collapse

In January 2020, my lawyer told me: if you stay, your husband can legally keep you here until your son turns twenty-one. He was four and a half. My daughter was seven.

I left overnight.

Not by choice. By survival. Because staying meant never being able to rebuild. Never finding my children elsewhere. Never being free.

I left them. Not out of abandonment. Because the only way to keep a chance of getting them back was to leave.

Arriving in France, at my mother’s house, I rebuilt myself at a speed I had forgotten I possessed. In six weeks, I had three dream job offers, a small house near a school in Gassin. Hope was being reborn: to rebuild and offer my children a framework where I was the example I wanted to be for them. My children were coming. I was going to get them back.

Gassin was not an escape. It was a reconstruction plan. Proof that I wasn’t giving up, proof that I was fighting to start being myself again.

5. The Second Collapse

And then the world stopped.

In March 2020, COVID hit. And with it, everything I had barely begun to rebuild collapsed almost overnight. Given the tourist nature of the opportunities I had found, none of the jobs started. The house in Gassin became an empty dream. Schools closed. Borders too. My children were stranded in Israel.

Was this one of those “providences of life,” as they say? Those invisible forces that push in a direction, even when you think you’ve finally found the right path.

In the moment, I experienced it as yet another betrayal. After everything I had been through, despite my ability to create a stable situation at breakneck speed, despite betting everything on Gassin... the world was saying no.

I could stay in France. At my mother’s. Without a job. Without a project. Crying for my children.

Or I could choose not to collapse.

I left for Slovenia, to join my new partner. There was one last plane: a direct flight from Nice to Ljubljana, an hour and a half. That route never reopened after COVID. As if it had only existed to allow me this passage. Not a great journey. Not a grand adventure. Just a door opening in a wall that was growing.

Was it running away? Maybe. But it was also surviving. Once again.

I didn’t yet know this country. I didn’t learn Slovenian, or rather, I had no will to. At forty-five, everything is harder, especially a language that has nothing in common with the ones I had learned. To keep from sinking, and above all to keep from losing my mind facing the hatred, aggression, and harassment I endured daily from my ex, I found work. I looked for something to do with myself to distract from my tears, my pain.

And yet, it was here, in this in-between, in this country I hadn’t chosen, that something began to grow. Because when you stop chasing a perfect life that doesn’t come, what remains is life as it is. And sometimes, that’s enough to start again.

6. The Six Years

All in all, it took me six years to recover. I lost my legal battle, and my children never came back to me. Today, they come during holidays, but their lives are being built there, with their father. These are the hardest words I will ever write.

For six years, I held on. Not always well. Not always straight. But I held on.

There were days when the only victory was getting out of bed or not crying. Work kept my hands busy and distracted my mind. Nights spent replaying every decision, wondering if I could have done things differently, if I was simply someone who gives up.

My relationship took me four months on a boat in Fiji. I discovered AI, an infinite new playground. I tried to launch RedPill, I’m still trying. I explore, test, fail, start over.

In 2017, I had posted my very last word on a Facebook page opened for my coaching profile. Then silence. For nine years, I had no desire to share anymore. Because deep down, I was so unhappy that I couldn’t anymore. How can you share positive things when you’re not positive yourself?

During those six years, I was forced to look inside myself, to be face to face with myself. To continue and deepen the reconstruction. And above all, perhaps, to project an image of myself to myself that felt right, before it could be projected outward. When a lighthouse light doesn’t work, it cannot guide any ship.

Today, it’s done. Not completely, not perfectly, but enough. I find myself in a psychological place where I am well. And I want to share again.

A Dutch friend had described me at the end of my studies as “a bridge.” I think she was right. What I’m building today is not just for me. The Aligned Shift is a bilingual magazine with multiple authors, conversations, interviews. Maybe an app one day. It’s not my voice. It’s a space, a link, a passage for others.

Six years later, I can say it: I didn’t flee. I crossed. I didn’t hide. I rebuilt myself, slowly, from the inside. Not by changing countries, but by crossing my own shadow.

7. The Shift

So, what is the shift?

Years earlier, a friend had told me: « Tu n’as rien à faire, Audrey. Tu as juste à être. » — “You have nothing to do, Audrey. You just have to be.”

(I tell this story in my welcome message on Substack.)

At the time, I didn’t understand. I was too busy doing. Building, traveling, achieving, proving. A life of doing, doing, doing. And through all that doing, I believed I would eventually arrive at being. Being happy, being free, being myself.

On one side, my friend’s wisdom. On the other, the wish pushing me to travel the world. Two messages that seemed to contradict each other: one said “stop doing,” the other said “travel, explore, journey.”

For sixteen years, I lived in this contradiction without seeing it. Until the day I understood they were saying the same thing.

The wish wasn’t asking me to travel around the world. It was asking me to journey through my own inner territory. And for that, I first had to be. To be present to myself. To be solid enough to cross my own shadow. Before I could guide anyone, the lighthouse light had to work.

Doing Beingly.

It’s not about accomplishment. It’s not a checklist. It’s not a life you build piece by piece, hoping that one day it will look like what you wanted.

It’s the opposite. It’s inhabiting each stage fully. It’s crossing your own shadow without bypassing it. It’s letting the wish journey through us, rather than believing we have to journey through it ourselves.

Today, I live in Slovenia. I still don’t speak the language. I don’t know exactly where my life is going. But for the first time, I’m not trying to know.

I’m not building The Aligned Shift to become someone. I’m building it because it’s what I am. Not a voice, but a bridge. A passage between worlds, between languages, between beings.

Doing Beingly.

The wish knew it all along. It knew that the seven seas weren’t those of the oceans. It knew that the real journey is the one we take inside ourselves. It also knew that this journey never truly ends.

It was simply waiting for me to be ready to understand. Ready to live beingly.

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Audrey ✨ lives between worlds, languages, countries, outer and inner territories. A life spent crossing oceans, countries, collapses, rebirths.
Today she is building The Aligned Shift, a collective space for Shifters. It starts with a magazine, a bridge to encourage all those navigating these times of extreme transition. ✨ Her personal newsletter: beinglyaudrey.substack.com

You too have a story looking for its voice? The Aligned Shift is a collective space, not a voice, a bridge. Write with us.

Find out here how to contribute

It sat heavily in my chest and mind, like something that had gone quiet but never really left me. It wasn’t sharp or overwhelming, just a dull heaviness. Days turned into months, yet nothing shifted inside. I wasn’t unhappy in any clear way; I was simply stuck, as if life had moved on without me and I hadn’t noticed.

The night before blowing the candle, I felt it more in my body than in my thoughts: a stillness that wasn’t peace, a waiting without conditions. A pressure to know where to go and what to do, and at the same time an immense emptiness born of having no direction.

It had been a few months since I left my dream job at Cartier. The breakup was still very painful, and I needed to rebuild myself. I was looking for something without really knowing what. Perhaps a healing process, in hindsight.

In St. Tropez, on the French Riviera, I feel good. I always see possibilities there. In 2009, everything revolved around my coaching business, and it was in the South of France that my first project was born.
At the beginning of the year, while visiting my mother, the idea came to spend the summer there and create a coaching concept I called the “Awareness Walk’shop.”

So, when summer arrived, I went back to St. Tropez to stay with her and launch this project. I hoped to return to Amsterdam with a clear sense of what September 2009 would bring: would I settle under the sun and start my coaching business there, or would I return to my life in Amsterdam?

I was already preparing this project back in April. On my website, the presentation page stated:

On my “About me” page, I wrote about faith, about letting go, about trusting life to bring me what I needed. I wrote: “I decided to just be and let it be.” Something was already brewing in the Universe without my knowing; I could feel its vibration and was beginning to give it words.

But writing about letting go and actually living it are not the same. That summer, I was still trying to do something to soften the heaviness of my recent breakup. I was searching for the shape my new life would take.

Despite the original idea behind my project, nothing was really taking off. The momentum was there: the preparations, the sharing, the printed flyers… but it all fizzled out under the weight of failure. If I’m honest I know I didn’t do everything I could to make it work. And I think (in fact, I’m certain now) that it stemmed from my visceral fear of being seen. So, in the middle of that summer 2009, I found myself back in the same place: emptiness, and the pressure without direction.

Then one evening, at a party on a yacht in Saint-Tropez, everything changed. Without me even realizing it yet. In the whisper of a single sentence.

There were three of us, standing at the bar, waiting for our drinks. Suddenly my friend Hope turned around. She was holding two small candles in glasses that were sitting on the boat’s bar. She handed one to each of us, turned back to get one for herself, and simply said, “Blow out the candle and make a wish.”

Completely out of the blue.

A wish? Ummm… I didn’t know what to wish for. Really. There was nothing planned, nothing thought out. And then, for the second time a few seconds, out of the blue again, I heard:

I didn’t choose it. I heard it.

The next morning, I woke up with that phrase still there.
I went to my mother and said, “Listen, Mom, last night I was asked to make a wish, and all I heard was: travel the world and the seven seas. So I think that’s what I have to do.”

It was a phrase. Not a plan. Not a carefully considered decision. Simply a sentence heard in the silence of a deep whisper. And that phrase, quietly, rearranged everything. The shift had occurred.

As always when I find myself in a flow state, everything started moving at lightning speed. That’s when the decision becomes clear, as if it had always been there, just waiting to be seen so it could manifest.

So the next morning, I told my mother that I was going to travel to follow that whisper. She immediately embraced my idea and together we decided that the trip would begin with a “return to my roots.”

The first two destinations came easily: we would travel together to Morocco, where she was born, and then Tunisia, where one of my grandmothers was born. What would come next? I would start sketching that out a few weeks later in Amsterdam.

Back in the Netherlands, I had to get organized: put my apartment up for long-term rental, store my belongings in a storage unit, and buy the first tickets. And how long would I be gone for? Once again, I let life decide: the length of time my tenants wanted to stay would be the length of my trip.
It turned out to be a year.

One day in September, I went for coffee with Georgi, an Israeli friend I had met that same summer in St. Tropez. I told him about my plan to return to my roots. For him, it was obvious: given my Jewish heritage, I absolutely had to add Israel to my list.

Seriously! Why should I go there? For me, that place was the symbol of unjustified death and, above all, the fundamental reason why I couldn’t be myself in this world. Because one day, people decided that a label placed on others could justify their murder, Israel had come to represent, in my eyes, the decree of my difference.. Times have changed, of course, but when I was ten and wanted to do what my classmates were doing, like go to catechism, my parents told me: “You can’t go, we’re not Catholic, we’re Jewish.” But what exactly did it mean to “be” Jewish or Catholic?
I didn’t understand, and I still don’t fully, especially since this “identity” was given to me based on a lie, one I didn’t know about at the time… but that’s another story.

So, Georgi invited me to stop by Tel Aviv, and I accepted, because in the end he was right: this land was also, in some way, part of my origins.

And there you have it: Morocco. Tunisia. Israel. No travel plan, just a thread to follow.

It was on this path that circumstances fell into place, giving my life its new direction.

My mother and I left on November 14, 2009, and nine months later, after sixteen years spent in the rain, I no longer wanted to leave this new life in the sun I ending up having after the beginning of that sabbatical year. I sold my apartment in Amsterdam and decided to see what life had in store for me from that moment on, in Israel, or elsewhere.

What this wish set in motion was something I could never have imagined back on that boat in August 2009. The shift propelled me into a new country, made me learn a new language, and, though I didn’t know it at the time, it would also bring me my greatest joy: motherhood.
And my greatest loss: not being able to be a mother in the way I had imagined.
Above all, this shift marked the beginning of a long period that would ultimately prove to be a return to a strength I didn’t yet know I possessed.

All of this, in a single overheard phrase. Not chosen.

That is the magic of a true wish, the kind that carries the seed of a profound shift: it does not come from you. It comes through you.

About the author:

Audrey ✨ lives between worlds, languages, countries, outer and inner territories. A life spent crossing oceans, countries, collapses, rebirths.

Today she is building The Aligned Shift, a collective space for Shifters. It begins with a magazine, a bridge to support all those navigating these times of extreme transition.

✨ Her personal newsletter: beinglyaudrey.substack.com

You too have a story looking for its voice? The Aligned Shift is a collective space, not a single voice but a bridge. Write with us.

Discover how to contribute here

Subscribe now

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For as long as I can remember (and that is half a century!), I have tried to find my place by playing by the rules. Parents’ rules, family rules, school rules, society’s rules, the rules of the modern world, career rules... rules, rules, rules. And despite being very good at following them, I never felt at home.

In France, I felt like I had to fit into a box, and I did not like being judged by someone else’s definition of what those boxes meant. As a child, I met Dutch people during the holidays I spent with my grandparents in a campsite in Spain, year after year. I really liked those Dutch people. It did not matter how you dressed (between my cousins and me there were lots of Mohawks, black clothes, and black-and-white checkered patterns), whether you were more into sportswear or beach barbecues, or what our parents did or where they came from. I always felt they loved us for who we were. So at 19, I left my family circle in France and moved to the Netherlands as an au pair. I learned Dutch. I worked. I went to university. I got my first job there as a management trainee, and that is where I first discovered the world of personal development and coaching.

During those early years, I also lost my father, the first great tragedy of my life. I was lucky to be surrounded by truly wonderful people, my colleagues, my partner at the time with whom I stayed seven years, and his family, who I still hold in my heart, and they helped me a great deal to move through that pain. A few years later, I got my dream job: Communication Manager for Cartier International for the Benelux region. I can say that life was treating me well, overall. Until my partner left me. My heart broke, and my world fell apart for the second time since my father’s death.

A song helped me at that time. It came on the radio one evening:

I heard the lyrics which went:
“It won’t change the world
That you change houses
The world will go on
And it will be right
(...)
It won’t change the world
It won’t bother it
The world is the same as before
It’s only you who has changed”

It was also around that time that I first discovered a spiritual adventure novel by James Redfield called The Celestine Prophecy. A teaching story about personal and collective awakening. This book speaks about synchronicities, energy, and intuition, spiritual awakening and the idea that humanity is undergoing a major evolutionary shift in consciousness. It spoke to me so deeply that for the first time, I recognized myself in a “box”: this spiritual, energetic way of seeing life felt profoundly familiar.

After the breakup, it did not take long for me to burn out and leave my dream job, and that is when I decided to become a life coach. I wanted to do something that felt more real to me. Losing my stability had cracked something open in me, and that spiritual, energetic way of seeing life suddenly became impossible to ignore.

Paradoxically, what felt most real to me was this invisible side that many people would call unreal. Yet even as a teenager, around 12, 13, or 14, I remember helping kids my age who turned to me as a trusted confidante. They would tell me their stories, and I could see things they could not see. I would ask questions that helped them look at what was happening from another angle and understand why they perceived things that way. It was as if I was being guided to help them find their own answers. After experiencing coaching myself during my management traineeship, and recognizing that this work was ultimately what I had always done naturally, enrolling at the International Coach Academy to get my certification became the obvious next step.

As I was giving my life a new direction with this coaching training, I also decided to take a sabbatical year. I was on holiday in Saint-Tropez at my mother’s when, at a party, a friend handed me a candle and asked me to blow it out and make a wish. I blew out the candle, closed my eyes, and I heard:

“Travel the world and the seven seas.”

It was August 2009. That moment decided what would happen for the next fifteen years. In September, I put my Amsterdam apartment up for rent with no fixed period. I decided to let life decide for me: however long the tenants wanted my home would be the time I would spend traveling. I found a couple who took it for a year. I suddenly had a whole year to fill.

I chose to start my trip with my mother and go back to my roots, visiting Morocco, where she was born, and Tunisia, where one of my grandmothers was born.

While I was preparing this trip with my mother, I met up again in Amsterdam with a friend I had met that summer in Saint-Tropez. He told me I should come and visit him in Israel, since I also have Jewish roots. Honestly, my first reaction was: “What the hell do you want me to do in Israel?” He insisted that Tel Aviv was an amazing city, that Israel was very beautiful, and that if I was traveling I should not miss it. So after two weeks of traveling with my mother, that is where I went. I landed in Israel on the 9th of December 2009.

Israel. The unexpected.

From the plane, around midday, I saw Tel Aviv for the first time. I had done no research, had no idea what Tel Aviv or Israel even looked like. No Lonely Planet, no guidebook, nothing. I was arriving completely blank, with only one motivation: to accept my friend’s invitation and let him show me his country. His motivation was simple: to help a Jewish friend, already on the path of discovering her roots, reconnect with a part of herself.

“You have Jewish roots, you have to come to Israel,” he had told me in September.

At the time, I remember thinking, “Sure. As if being Jewish and Israel automatically had something to do with each other,” in total ignorance. But since I was already traveling and the whole world was open to me, why not stop there and see for myself?

I had not really informed myself about Israel before arriving. To be honest, I had not informed myself much about my friend either. I just knew he worked for the family business and that they had buildings and hotels. That should probably have told me a lot already. The first beautiful surprise: my friend’s apartment was right on the seafront, on the top floor of one of the family buildings, the famous Opera Tower, a duplex penthouse. What a place to land!

And the surprises did not stop there. I fell in love with this city by the water. Even in the middle of winter, the climate filled me up, the streets and neighborhoods charmed me, and the possibilities it offered amazed me.

This visit to Israel, this discovery, was one of the deepest returns to my roots I had ever experienced, and I did not expect it at all. I recognized my family in the faces around me, especially my father, and for the first time I allowed that Jewish part of my identity to exist in the open. I did not know it yet, but this place would shape the next years of my life in ways I could not imagine.

This trip felt like a reunion with myself. Finally, I was in a place where I could let that part of me be present. Being in the middle of these faces that brought me back to my family gave me a deep sense of home.

My mother had fifteen days of holiday starting mid-February. “Why don’t we meet in Israel and visit the country together?” she suggested. Why not, indeed. So before leaving for my next destinations, I told my host I would come back. The next steps were Thailand, a week of vipassana meditation in a Buddhist temple in Koh Samui, then some volunteering in India with an organization recommended by Malika Chopra, Deepak Chopra’s daughter. That was the plan.

Thailand became an end of a cycle: the end of the year and, in many ways, the end of that first phase of my journey. One week of silence. One week with myself, trying to quiet my thoughts. One week of rest, of nature, of reconnection. Then ten days of holidays surrounded by Israelis before flying to India on the 7th of January.

At least, that was the plan.

At check-in in Bangkok on the 7th, the hostess told me that without a visa I could not enter India. “Take your luggage back and come again in a week with your visa.” Seriously? A week waiting in Bangkok? I really did not feel like it! So I canceled my trip to India, as I could not see myself staying a week or more alone waiting for a visa in such a noisy city after a week of silent retreat.

I walked to one end of Bangkok airport with my bag, sat down away from the noise, opened my little ANWB atlas to the map of the world and looked at the countries on the double page. And... nothing.

I could not find an answer to the question: “Where do I go now?” I saw Bali, Australia, the United States, South America, all these places I could visit or revisit, but none of them called to me. And there, in a desperate sigh, I looked up from my book, and right in front of me, on the lower floor, was a travel agency. Oh, perfect timing! I went down to see them.

“Bali?”
“Why not.”
“Your return date?”

My what? A return? I do not even know where to go, how does he expect me to know when to return with 10 months ahead of me?

The next planned step was to visit Israel with my mother in February. So I decided to go back there. I will spare you the details leading to that decision, perhaps I will share them here one day. In any case, seven hours later, I was on a plane to Tel Aviv.

Then everything happened very fast. I found an apartment to rent in 5 days when everyone told me I would never find one, I learned a language written backwards, I left Holland, and at the end of 2010, I met the man who would become the father of my children. Thirteen months later we married. A year after that our daughter was born, and two years later our son arrived. From the outside, it looked like I had finally “settled”: new country, new language, marriage, children.

Inside, it was more complicated. And it would be the dawn of the greatest tragedy of my life. Of course, it did not happen overnight, but by 2016 it was clear: I was deeply unhappy in my marriage. The desire to leave, to go home, was growing, not just to leave the relationship but also Israel, with my children. Unfortunately, it did not work. For reasons I will not burden you with today, my lawyer at the time told me that if I did not leave Israel from one day to the next, my husband would legally keep me there until my son’s twenty-first birthday. He was four and a half. In a way that was absolutely dramatic and traumatic for my children, my ex, and myself, I escaped alone, leaving my children behind and returning to my mother.

In France, I immediately tried to rebuild, to start a new life with my children that I was hoping to get back. Within six weeks I had found three absolutely wonderful job opportunities and even a small house near my children’s school. And then COVID hit. Because of the pandemic, none of the jobs started, and once again I fled, this time from a situation that would have been unsustainable if I had stayed in France crying at my mother’s, and I went to Slovenia to live with the man I had met. That is where I still live today.

I lost my legal battle, and my children never came back to me. Today they visit me during the holidays, but their lives are being built there, with their father and grandparents. That is the pain I carry every day, an absence I do not believe I will ever be able to fully put into words.

And yet, here I AM.

I just put thirty years of my life here. Life is messy, painful, and not linear at all. It never looks like what you imagined. Yet it shapes who you become. When I say that life makes you who you are, I mean that it forces you to remember who you are. You have to go through the highs and lows of pain and joy, and then pain again, to remember.

I did not write this to show that I have endured everything and can therefore tell you how to act. I wrote it to let you know that I know what it costs not to lose yourself in your own story. I wrote it to tell you that, despite the pain, the tears, and the losses, I have always found a way to come closer to myself.

It took me nineteen years to grow up, sixteen to rise and crash, ten to flourish and fade, and six to recover. Nineteen years in France finding my bearings. Sixteen in Holland and beyond, building and undoing. Ten years in Israel, loving and losing. Six years to find solid ground again. That is how life made me who I am today: an Aligned Shifter.

After all of this, I knew I did not want to keep these stories and insights to myself. But I had not yet found a way to share them that truly felt like mine. For a long time, I had stopped sharing my life on social media. Why expose the misery? And those platforms had evolved into something I was rejecting more and more: selfies, very short formats, the pressure to appear increasingly fake while pretending to be authentic. These new boxes did not suit me at all.

Then I discovered Substack. Here, I felt an invitation to share with sincerity and to show vulnerability. That feeling slowly shifted into a desire to create a space where people like you and I could bring the reality of their journey, the beauty and the mess, and be seen in it.

That is why I created The Aligned Shift Magazine. If you recognize yourself in my story, in the moves, the losses, the invisible shifts, the moments where you almost forgot who you were but found a way out, you are undoubtedly an Aligned Shifter too. And this is the kind of story you can share here by becoming a contributor, or simply read by subscribing: not a perfect success story, but the real path of how life has helped you remember who you are.

About the author:

Audrey ✨ lives between worlds, languages, countries, outer and inner territories. A life spent crossing oceans, countries, collapses, rebirths.

Today she is building The Aligned Shift, a collective space for Shifters. It begins with a magazine, a bridge to support all those navigating these times of extreme transition.

✨ Her personal newsletter: beinglyaudrey.substack.com

You too have a story looking for its voice? The Aligned Shift is a collective space, not a single voice but a bridge. Write with us.

Discover how to contribute here

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Whether you already write or carry inside you an intuition waiting to be shared, this is your place.

You may already write. A blog, a journal, captions, letters to friends, long posts on Facebook or elsewhere. Or you may have never published a word, but carry inside you an intuition that wants to be shared. Either way, this call may be for you.

The Aligned Shift Magazine is a new space, just opening its doors. It is being built as a collaborative space: not the voice of one founder, but a circle of voices weaving wisdom together. Reflections on intuition, alignment, inner peace, conscious living, and the quiet courage it takes to walk a more aligned path.

A Shifter is someone navigating a deep transition. An awakening, a transformation, a life change. Someone who knows their words can have a profound effect on the human Shift unfolding around us. A Shifter knows that sharing our intimate, deep, purely human experiences may be a key that has the power to spark even a tiny light in one person, and change their life forever. This magazine is designed for you if you recognize yourself in that. It is also designed for those who dare to walk a more aligned path.

2. What does it mean to be a contributor?

You keep your voice, your ownership, your recognition.

A contributor at the Magazine is a Shifter who shares their own essays, stories, practices, or reflections under their own name, keeping full ownership and full credit for their writing.

• Your articles remain your property.

• Your personal notes appear on the publication’s Notes page, giving you more visibility.

• You benefit from an audience and a community gathering around a shared vision, rather than starting from zero on your own page.

It is the difference between writing alone in your room and stepping onto a stage with a group, for an audience that shares the same values, while keeping your voice and your story your own.

You can contribute as often or as gently as you wish: a single piece, a recurring column, an occasional whisper.

3. What kind of voices are we looking for?

If any of these describe you, your voice may belong here:

• You are a coach, mentor, guide, therapist, healer, or light worker, and you have wisdom to share that does not always fit into a session.

• You are a seeker walking your own path of alignment, and your reflections might help someone else find theirs.

• You teach, write, or hold space through breathwork, meditation, energy work, somatic practice, journaling, ritual, or any other gentle craft.

• Or simply, you have lived a personal transformation and want to share what you found on the other side.

4. The right moment

The portal has just opened. Your voice can help shape what it becomes from the very start.

The first contributors will set the tone. Later ones will find a space already humming. Right now, your voice can help shape its rhythm, its tone, its early identity.

5. What this space is not

So this space stays clear.

This is not a place for:

• Hard sales pitches, multi-level marketing, or programs disguised as essays. (Sharing your work and offerings in your bio is welcome; writing as advertising is not.)

• Content that diminishes others: readers, traditions, communities. We hold space, we do not claim space over.

• Spiritual prescriptions or “the only way” thinking.

6. How to join

Three steps to becoming a contributor.

1. Reply or send me a message.
If we do not already know each other, tell me a little about yourself, your path, and what you might want to write about. A paragraph is enough. I will respond, answer your questions, and invite you.

2. Share a sample.
A link to something you have written, a draft, or even just an idea sketched in a few lines. And if you have nothing yet, that is okay. The intention is what matters most.

Leave a comment

3. We talk.
If this call answers the one you have been sending out to the universe on your side, then I invite you. You will receive an invitation email, create a Substack account if you do not already have one (or a separate one for articles appearing in the Magazine), and accept.

From there, contributors receive access to publish on the portal, soft editorial support if wanted, and a community guide that keeps this space aligned for everyone.

Community Guide in the About page

With love and light, and see you soon,
Audrey
Founder and co-contributor of The Aligned Shift Magazines

Send a message here or write me an email → hello@TheAlignedShifters.com

If you are reading this during the early days of The Aligned Shift Magazine, you may have arrived because I added you to my mailing list, or because someone you know sent you the link, or simply through that kind of algorithmic coincidence that puts the right people in the right place at the right time. Either way, thank you for being here.

Have you ever felt that inner whisper, that call to go further? Like a deep longing for inner peace, a clearer path, a life in harmony with yourself. I have felt this for a very long time. I was reading just this morning a message I wrote to a friend in 2014: “I am at the dawn of creating my next journey: a truly bewildering moment where everything inside me that cries out to be shared with the world must become clear and find its way to express itself.” Well, that dawn lasted 11 and a half years.

In a world that is often loud, chaotic, designed to keep us prisoners of systems and demanding that we conform simply to exist, this whisper was my inner compass. It guided me toward a change of harmony. For a long time, I felt like I was navigating a maze, even a “dark system” that left me exhausted, overwhelmed, and above all, disconnected from my true self. I was taught to seek external validation, to conform, to dim my own light to fit in. I am sure you understand what I mean after all, we live in the same system.

I do not know about you, but I was very good at following the rules this system taught me. But I also always knew there was another way. One day, someone I deeply love told me:

“You have nothing to do, Audrey. You just have to be.”

I was 25. It seemed logical and simple, but still. How do you “be” when you are supposed to “do” all the time?

Deep down, I knew my whole being was made for something lighter, vaster, and profoundly more joyful. But in the end, it took me another 25 years to fully grasp its meaning.

These past few months, I have been working on a project that is very close to my heart: this very same The Aligned Shift that you are reading a part of today. Since I have been dedicating myself to it (a website, reflections, debates, brainstorming, ideas for an app, a newsletter, a podcast, a magazine, creating publications, images, podcasts), I am so happy, so alive. Of course, because the more you do what you love, the more alive you feel.

That is the very essence of The Aligned Shift. It is stepping out of the darkness of confusion into the soft golden light of your own inner wisdom. I will not say that The Aligned Shift is a destination. Because sometimes our actions are fully aligned with our intentions, and sometimes they are not. That does not mean we stop being actors of change when it happens. But when we are aligned, everything feels easy, synchronicity is present, happiness and joy fill the moments more than worries or doubts.

For example: when I set out to create this space, to build a community of Shifters, I discovered that “The Aligned Shift” was available as a username on almost every social media platform. It was as if the universe itself was telling me, “Yes, this path is meant for us.” And even though the domain thealignedshift.com was already taken, instead of being an obstacle, it became a sign. Because what really matters is not just the change itself, but the path we walk together and the community we build along the way. That is why thealignedshifters.com was available. For me, this is a true sign that I am fully living my vocation as a Shifter. I call this living in harmony with yourself.

From confinement to transformation

So, what does it mean to be a Shifter? Well, it is simply recognizing that you are not merely a product of your environment, nor doomed to remain trapped by external pressures or outdated beliefs. A Shifter is someone who consciously chooses to move away from systems that no longer serve their well-being and to embrace a lighter, more conscious way of living. It is about creating your own reality, guided by your inner truth, rather than reacting to the dictates of the outside world. And actually, it is above all about being human, simply: there will be failures, nothing is easy, we will all make mistakes. But as a Shifter, at least it will happen while living fully.

It is not about escaping reality, but about transforming your relationship with it. It is about cultivating inner peace and clarity in the midst of the storm, finding your anchor when the waves rage. It is about understanding that true power lies not in control, but in harmony. When you are aligned, mind, body, and soul, you become an unshakable force, a beacon of light in your own life and for those around you. As my favorite quote by Edith Wharton says:

Finding your inner compass: Cultivating peace and clarity

So, how do you cultivate this inner peace and clarity? It all begins with a gentle return to yourself. It is about:

• Listening to your intuition: Paying attention to that inner voice that knows your deepest desires and needs.

• Clearing your inner space: Releasing thoughts, beliefs, and emotional burdens that no longer contribute to your fulfillment.

• Embracing stillness: Creating moments of calm in your day to reconnect with yourself, whether through meditation, conscious breathing, or simply being present.

• Honoring your authenticity: Showing up fully, letting go of the masks and expectations imposed by others.

Imagine a life where decisions flow with ease, where anxiety gives way to deep serenity, and where every step carries meaning and authenticity. That is the reality that awaits you when you live your aligned shift.

So, it all starts to become clear: if you do what makes you feel alive; if you feel joy and gratitude; and if you smile when you see what you are creating, then you are aligned, you are truly alive. If you are tired, impatient to finish just to move on to something that might bring more happiness, well, that is not it. Recognizing what brings you joy and what does not, that is what should define how you live fully. In English, I call this living Beingly.

And you, are you a Shifter ready to become a co-Shifter?

In a world that moves fast, true words and shared experiences are a precious antidote to isolation and fuel for our own transformations.

Do you want to walk through the radical changes ahead together with me and other Shifters, rather than alone? The journey starts now, with the courage to shine your own light alongside others. I know mine has begun, and I hope you will join me.

I am opening The Aligned Shift Magazine on Substack. And I am reaching out to other Shifters, inviting you to contribute to its creation by becoming co-signatories of its content, co-authors of this journey. Would you like to write with me too?

If a small inner voice whispers to you, “Yes, I might want to write here too,” I have written you a more detailed letter explaining what this means and how it could work.

See my Call for Contributors here

Of course, you can also simply subscribe and read the upcoming articles to stay inspired and connect (or not) with other Shifters and co-Shifters.

All of this makes me understand why my favorite song has always been Imagine, by John Lennon. That line has guided my life throughout its journey, and today, it resonates with meaning. I know you will join me.

“You may say I’m a dreamer but I’m not the only one.
I hope someday you’ll join us, and the world will be as one.”

With love and light.

Audrey

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Do you want to share your insights and become an author in The Aligned Shift Portal?
Let me know!

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