Does this strike a chord… On paper, life looks good. You have people who love you, a home, work and plenty to be grateful for. Yet, deep down, there’s a nagging feeling that something isn’t quite right. You can’t fully describe the feeling.

Something just feels … off.

You have no idea why it’s there. It’s uncomfortable. It is getting in the way of you enjoying life fully.
And it’s driving questions around in your head like: “What’s wrong with me?” “Why can’t I just be happy?”

I know that feeling well. It is a desperate feeling, search for something you can’t even name. And a baffling one too. It’s baffling because, when you try to explain it to the people around you, they don’t seem to recognise it at all.

For years I carried an unsettled feeling deep within me without understanding why.

I had the career I’d worked hard for and enjoyed many aspects of. I lived in a beautiful home overlooking the Peak District hills. I had wonderful friends and a supportive community. There was nothing I could point to and say: “That’s what’s wrong.” And yet something inside me was telling me that not all was well.

It kept me searching. Eventually, I found myself sitting in my doctor’s surgery, trying to explain why I was so unhappy. He offered me antidepressants. I declined, because although I knew they were the right answer for many people, they didn’t feel like the one I was looking for. I decided I would keep searching.

At the time, I genuinely thought I was cracking up. I felt a real desperation. It was agonising. “Am I going mad?” I asked myself.

My head was full of questions about my purpose in life, and whether I was on the right path. I was really anxious about what was happening in the world, in particular about climate change. I was constantly chasing my tail. No matter how organised I became or how efficiently I worked, there was always more to do. I felt alone, which made no sense as I wasn’t alone as I was surrounded by people who loved me.
In fact, none of this made any sense in my head why I was feeling like this.

“I just need to get over myself”, I thought. “Keep busy, do that next thing I need to do, and this feeling will just go away.” It didn’t. That was twenty-five years ago.

Looking back now, I’m so grateful I kept searching.

The three things that matter deeply

It wasn’t until many years later that I came across an idea which completely changed the way I understood that period of my life.

Last summer, I discovered the work of psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr Iain McGilchrist. One idea in particular stopped me in my tracks. After decades of studying the human brain, he has concluded that…

… there are three things that we need to be happy:

As I listened, I had one of those moments where everything suddenly made sense. Dr McGuilchrist had summed up so succinctly what I was missing all those years ago. I reflected on how my relationship has deepened. How I now have a community that ‘gets me’ and ‘I get them’. And how important it is to have a spiritual connection - a way of connecting to the world beyond the physical reality.

However, our culture isn’t particularly good at helping us nurture these three relationships.

Modern life keeps us busy with work demands, caring responsibilities, emails to reply to, notifications pinging, social media scrolling, box sets, and the list goes on. None of those things is bad in itself. They all have their place. But I believe they leave us with very little time or energy to nurture the relationships that lead us to happiness.

It’s very easy to reach the end of another week without having spent much time truly connecting with nature, with other people, or with something greater than ourselves.

So, I’d love to ask you three questions to reflect on.

How much time do you spend building a relationship with nature?

How often do you have conversations that go to the places that really matter to you?

And when do you create space to connect with the sacred - your spirit guides, the Otherworld, that which is beyond our physical reality?

I’m asking them because they’ve become some of the most important questions I ask myself.

What happened when I followed those three things

As I continued my search to resolve the nagging feeling deep inside that something was off…
… it was a slow game. I became curious and followed that curiosity. My drive to find the answer to - What is wrong with me? – led me to trying various spiritual practices, but none of them was quite right for me.

Meditation never really clicked as I couldn’t still my mind. I trained in Reiki because I thought perhaps that would be the thing that finally opened the door, but it didn’t. I tried yoga, crystals, angelic connection… the list goes on.

Nothing was working. Everyone else seemed to take to these practices, but not me. I could understand the ideas and learn the techniques. But something never quite clicked. Then one conversation changed everything. Someone mentioned an organisation called Greenspirit, a charity exploring the relationship between nature and spirituality across different faith traditions.

This opened a door I hadn’t even realised existed.

Until then, I’d never considered that two of my interests and passions – the Earth and spirituality – could actually belong together. It seems obvious to me now, but at the time it felt like a revelation.

As soon as those two worlds came together, I knew I had found THE thing. Very quickly, I realised that guidance wasn’t something abstract, hidden in an elusive place I couldn’t access. It was already there, all around me.

A weed pushing through the pavement while I sat in traffic. A blackbird landing on the bird table as I drank a cup of tea. The oak tree I found myself returning to again and again on my walks. I didn’t need to escape everyday life to experience guidance, as guidance was woven into everyday life.

Of course, I questioned it at first: Was I imagining it? With time, I learnt to trust my own experience. The more I paid attention, the more natural it became. 

Around the same time, something else started changing too. 

I began meeting people who were asking the same questions I was.

People who wanted a deeper relationship with nature. People who sensed there was more to life than simply getting through the week and pinning their happiness on the weekend. People who were searching as well. For years, I’d hardly spoken about this side of myself because I was worried about what people would think.

Many of us carry this hidden within us, too afraid to speak it out, because the people we love don’t always understand it. It isn’t that they don’t care; they’re simply not asking the same questions or looking at the world in the same way.

Meeting those people who thought and felt as I did settled something within me. For the first time, I realised I wasn’t walking this path alone.

Looking back now, I can see what was happening. Without realising it, I was beginning to nurture those three relationships that Dr Iain McGilchrist talks about. A relationship with nature. A relationship with people who understood that part of me. And a relationship with the sacred. Only years later did I find the words for what had happened.

I’d found somewhere I belonged.

Today, that’s at the heart of everything Jason and I have created through The Way of the Buzzard.

It’s also why, through the year, we create opportunities for people to come together, pause, reconnect with nature and experience what it feels like to explore these questions alongside others.

We’re planning something special at the end of this month, we’d love for you to join us. It will be, online, free, and held over the time of the full moon and the next turn in the Celtic Wheel of the Year: Lammas.

If you’d like to keep in touch with all the details as they’re announced, you can join our mailing list on our homepage here .

And, if something has landed with you reading this, I'd love to hear about it in the comments below.