There is no place your sacred calling will not take you. You will revisit unhealed parts of your past so you can mine the depths of who you are and reclaim what you discarded long ago. You will make friends with aspects of yourself that you thought were not redeemable and cash in on their fresh energy. You will learn to be comfortable with the uncomfortable and trust the unknown. And you will redefine and align power and ambition to what is sacred to you.

Your sacred calling will also use everything that is part of you: all the wins of your life, and all the losses. All the hurts from the past—the disappointments, heartaches, and failures—will be transformed by the alchemical process of turning your “lead,” through your compassionate loving, into your gold. You will go through this process many times, and each time you will know yourself, trust yourself, and fulfill more of who you are.

Each rebirth, each spiritual experience that emerges, will find you more complete, more whole, and more you.

If you want to hold on to certainty, the known, the status quo, the security of your day-in-and-day-out comfortable, predictable life, you will be challenged. You may have the desire to live your sacred calling, but if the risks of failure or failure itself is your personal taboo, that fear will always make you find convenient excuses to put it off.

You will discover the ways your human nature, your humanity, does not support what it takes for you to follow a sacred calling. But you can learn new reference points for yourself so your human nature can assist, rather than resist, your intention to enter this bigger playing field of self-expansion, personal growth, and soul-revelation.

If you need constant validation or acknowledgment from the world that you are on the right path, you will also be challenged. Knowing who you are at the very depths of your being is one of the first requirements for being able to hear and follow a sacred calling. The outer world is not designed to pat you on the back or fill your cup of approval. Instead, it throws all manner of obstacles and shiny bright objects in your way to get you to abandon or to distract you from what is most precious inside. It beckons you to give up this Looney Tunes pie-in-the-sky vision and to avoid joining the ordinary masses doing ordinary work in their ordinary lives. But if you learn to listen to your inner guidance and find the outer support necessary, you will resist the world’s point of view and learn the systems, strategies, and inner tools that will help you find your way. – Excerpt from, Manifest Your Sacred Ambition: Summon Your Heart’s Calling into Bold Loving Action by Rebecca E. Skeele