Getting Laid Off Was A Great Day

This may sound totally strange but getting laid off from my job four years ago was a really important day for me. In fact it was a great day. My life changed that day....for the better.

When I was younger, I loved my job as an IT consultant. It was exciting and adventurous at times. However, the travel started to weigh on me. At times, traveling to a different city or even country could feel very lonely and destabilizing. After 10 years as a traveling consultant, I chose to join a startup and live in San Francisco. This was also very exciting in the beginning. I was living downtown and riding my bike to my office everyday. It was a very fun experience.

However, as I aged into my early 30s, I started to want something different. I met my husband, we married and were pregnant with our first baby within a year of meeting. We also moved back to Ohio to start our life as a family. We then had two more children less than two years apart. During this time I was working from home and my children had a nanny that came over while I worked. I was constantly feeling out of balance as a working mother. When my third baby came, I wanted to stay home with my kids. I couldn't give my all to my children, and to my job and coworkers. I had to make a choice. I actually made the decision to stick it out at work and go back to work after maternity leave.

Why did I choose to go against my intuition and go back to work? Fear. Plain and simple, I was afraid to not have a job. I had been working since the day after college for 16 years. Even though I had money saved up and I knew I could afford to take a break, I had the belief system that I needed my job. Working was part of my identity.

The universe had other plans. After returning to work, I was laid off shortly after. I was probably the happiest person to ever be laid off. This was actually what I wanted....to take a break to focus on my family. It was like the universe telling me, "Ok if you are too chickenshit to take a break from work, we will help you out." This was an important day because my life changed after I was laid off.

I took the space and time I needed to focus on my kids. But it was more than that. It gave me the space to think about life. Soon after getting laid off, I "randomly" started researching near-death experiences. I say it was random but none of this was random. I then started reading books nonstop about near-death experiences, past life and between life hypnosis, and evidential mediumship as my kids napped and played. I also started meditating, and soon I was a different person.

If I hadn't been laid off, I'm not sure I would have stopped to think about life, what happens when we die, and my purpose. This was the path I was supposed to take, it was what my soul wanted. There was a reason for my passion and excitement around the metaphysical topics I was researching. Learning about the energetic universe, who I am as a soul, and talking about it through my writing has been the most exhilarating and positive thing that's happened in my life.

My point here is that being laid off may seem like a negative experience but it was a great day in my life. That door was supposed to close for me so that I could follow my next passion and purpose in life. These things never happen by accident or by mistake. They are supposed to happen to help us pivot. Before I was laid off, I felt intuitively that it was time for me to shift to something else. Since I didn't follow that intuition, the universe gave me a nice little nudge to get me on my path.

The universe always has our back and there's a reason to these experiences, we just need to relax and listen quietly within. When we give ourselves time, open up, and start to ask questions like "What's next?", "What's my purpose?", "Okay universe, I'm listening, what do you want to tell me?".....we receive our answers. Sometimes not right away but we receive them when we are supposed to.