How Life Made Me an Aligned Shifter
A life story of moves, losses, and the quiet shift from doing to being.
I spent 50 years following the rules, crossing countries, losing homes and even my children, only to finally discover a softer transition, from doing to being. This article marks my first big step outward.
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.
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Je t'aime fort ma fille love 😍