*

In 2024, I had one of the most practically challenging years of my life. In the first half of the year I was doing really well at navigating it. And then about half way through the year, we hit a financial point that was challenging me beyond anything I had experienced before. As a coach who supports people through challenging times, I told myself that I must know what to do to support myself through this time.

And despite my best efforts, I failed myself.

I had been able to keep supporting my beautiful clients. I am so deeply present and prepared in my coaching sessions, my personal challenge didn’t impact my ability to hold space for them and to show up for them. In fact, coaching was and continues to be one of the most nourishing parts of my life. Coaching gave me so much energy last year.

However, by the end of 2024, I had not been able to provide enough support and coaching for myself. I realised that for the first time in my life, I had ended the year in a worse state than I started it. I had gone backwards physically, mentally and financially.

I had completely lost my sparkle.

As I realised this, there was a living expectation – a belief pattern – within me that reared its head. It told me “You’re a coach, and you support other people through these kind of challenges and yet you have gone backwards. You do not have integrity, Jenna”. I heard it, and I allowed myself to believe that. It really affected my self-worth and my confidence and my motivation.

*

A CONCRETE HELL

Concreting operations was not something I ever thought I’d have to talk about over and over again for months and months. And yet, those who know my husband and I, have heard us talk about our epic concrete driveway project that we never asked for.

Our long, very steep driveway that accesses our forest retreat home was severely damaged in the 2022 floods and needed to be repaired at a huge expense.

My husband is one of the greatest performing artists in Australia, who last year found himself dedicating his time and energy to concreting too. He ended up having to physically do all the concreting himself because we could not get concrete trucks up our steep drive; and we couldn’t have afforded the expense of having a contractor do it anyway.

We hired a full-time labourer (an angel called Zakk) to support him.

If I’m honest, I give no shits about concrete and its process of becoming a driveway. And I think at heart, my husband and Zakk didn’t either. Something we gave no shits about became the physical and metaphysical barrier between our lived reality and the possibility of our next chapter: getting our house ready for rental so we can move to Spain.

And so, with each 4m slab that was completed of the 80m, we were closer to our next chapter. The project became a symbol of how sometimes there is a painful completion to enable the birthing of the next chapter.

So 2024 saw Australia’s greatest baritone concreting almost full-time, and me putting all my earnings and personal energy into supporting the operation.

It took all we had on every level; financial, emotional, physical and spiritual. I felt my life force getting harder and harder to find throughout the second half of the year. But we had to keep going. We had to finish, and we kept moving towards the finish line.

By the end of 2024, they had finished the driveway. I am so proud of José and Zakk. It’s done.

But both my husband and I crossed the finish line and collapsed.

This is not just about the driveway project sucking away sparkle though. As I reflected over the break, I could see that the broader cycle of this personal challenge began with bushfires, viruses and survival.

That was the real beginning of my sparkle fading.

*

SURVIVING FIRES, COVID AND FLOODS

At the end of 2019, we lived through the Black Summer Bushfires when our home was at threat of fire for many months. We lived connected to alerts for evacuation and our house was packed and belongings in storage. We were evacuated twice. One of those times I was alone and I spent a night in the evacuation centre not knowing if we’d have a home the next day. We were some of the lucky ones as our home was saved.

And after that, COVID came. I know that many humans were negatively impacted by the COVID period in some way. For us, we lost our entire income, which then was 100% related to the performing arts. We found ourselves without the possibility of a livelihood.

I know many who are still holding trauma and stress in their bodies from that time. COVID was traumatic for so many. I had released parts of this trauma over the years, but there was still more remaining in my body.

A fellow coach recently shed tears about how she was still dealing with the personal aftermath of COVID, and I shared with her how we were still navigating it on the deepest level too.

I was.
I am.
My husband was….
Is.

The threat of losing our home, followed by the threat of not being able to earn an income and survive, followed by floods and the flood repairs creating extreme financial pressure was relentless and a lot. I realised we were constantly living with the threat of basic survival for four years.

*

Maslow knew a bit about this. I know for sure from my own lived experience and from coaching others that unless the bottom two levels of his triangle are in place, it is very challenging to achieve expansion in the upper areas.

And so what happens to the body, mind, spirit when our external environment has us in survival mode for so long?

*

A PSYCHOLOGICAL WEIGHT

For me, I experienced a gradual – a really stealthy, gradual – shift in my thought patterns and their relative power within my inner world.

I cleaned a bunch of them up in 2022-3 and shared that work in my debut audio book meets album, Unravelling the Voice, which you can listen to here. And naive me thought that work was done. Ha!

Then more patterns revealed themselves to me in the holidays.

It began with the true voice of “I can’t afford that” in 2020, which by 2024 had strengthened to almost entirely stamping out any glimmer of joyful desire within. I had stopped allowing myself to buy things and experiences that give my joy. I had stopped allowing myself spend on outer beauty. And I witnessed most of my financial resources flowing towards concrete – not something I would ever have chosen for my money to flow to.

It began in 2020 with the true voice of “I need to finish what I currently have and complete my Australia chapter”, which by 2024 had strengthened to almost entirely stamping out any creative inspiration within. It led to consciously not initiating any new projects or collaborations and deliberately allowing my music work in Australia to die by the end of 2024. I kept telling myself I would just initiate new music collaborations when I got to Europe. It meant that music and singing was almost gone from my life. It meant that most of my time was being spent in completion mode, for many years, which is the part of creation that inspires me the LEAST. It meant that I was shutting down important inspiration that was coming to me and my creative life force had nowhere to go. And while the completion was creating the space I had craved, by the end of 2024 my creative life force was crying within.

It began in 2021 with the true voice of “I am too tired. I don’t have enough energy to do that”, which by 2024 had strengthened to having mostly solo work in my calendar. I am such a people person. I love working in a team. I love working together towards a shared purpose. It led to a life where I was a solo creator most of the time. It led to isolation, loneliness and sadness.

And these are only three of the patterns. There were many, many more.

The initial thoughts I’d needed to survive in 2020-1, which served me then, had gradually increased in size and weight to the point where they were so heavy they were dominating my inner world, and weren’t allowing any sparkle.

By the time the driveway was complete, I had extinguished my sparkle completely.

As the financial pressure increased towards the end of 2024, I started to experience some surprising psychological symptoms. It was frightening.

As the new year arrived, I began having Reiki sessions with an amazing Japanese healer. I felt maybe I just needed a bit of help with my energy. After the first one, I felt good! My face wanted to smile again. But it soon faded. After the second one, the reiki healer wrote me a little note on a piece of paper. She said it was an important message for me, and that the meaning might become clear soon.

It said: “Rainy Day”. I didn’t sense a meaning of that at the time, but I left the little note on my desk.

*

*

The week after, I was having a coaching supervision session with my coaching teacher Julie Parker, who is also a psychotherapist. I arrived prepared with my list of questions to support my coaching work. But the question she opened with disarmed me. She asked “What is the thing that you most need support with today?”

The list fell away from my mind and I said “Julie. I’ve lost my mojo.” I continued to share how I felt and shared through tears how I was struggling to get to my baseline of wellbeing. All of the normal things I’d do to recharge just weren’t cutting it.

Julie asked me “Do you think you might be depressed?” And we explored how I was experiencing intersecting symptoms of clinical depression and burnout.

I have sometimes observed myself to live in a pendulum fashion: sometimes swinging too far in a direction over a long period of time, and then needing a correction. I’d done it again.

Fuck.

*

A WAKE UP CALL

This information from Julie was exactly what I needed to hear. A mirror held up to me at the current state of my existence, and mindset, and what a long-term conditioned response to external stress had become. It was the mirror that showed me I needed to shift and change and unravel yet another layer of burnout.

Julie told me this wasn’t my new normal and it wasn’t going to last forever. It was going to pass.

Just like a Rainy Day.

I didn’t feel any need to hang around for diagnoses or to pathologise what I was feeling, I was only curious about how to feel better.

As part of a separate group experience with Julie, she invited me to create a goal. I wanted to embody my sparkle. She invited me to reflect on where in my life I felt contracted, which was in almost ALL parts of my life. And I began to see the power, darkness and dominance of the thought patterns that were causing it.

I had been here before, in a different context, and healed from dominant, oppressive thought patterns before. But this was a new flavour for me. Yet another layer of deconditioning and unravelling such that my soul may sparkle, once again.

I leapt into action.

*

SPARKLY BOOTS OF MY SOUL

We now find ourselves in Sydney, where my husband is back in his natural habitat of the Sydney Opera House for the first time since COVID.

To be away from our beautiful and high-maintenance mountain home, living in a small apartment has been healing for us both and opened up the opportunity for us to remember what life is like without that stress.

I walked past a shop many times, where I had seen a pair of sparkly boots I adored. They were sparkly like a star; they reminded me of the cosmos and how much I love stars and cosmology. They also reminded me of my cosmic worldview (or my universeview).

I told myself over and over again “I can’t afford those”.

They reminded me of the awesome work that I love to do with planetariums, and how I wanted to do more and I thought “I can’t start anything new, I need to complete this chapter”.

My heart would sink each time I walked past.

The sparkly boots became more than a pair of boots. They became an outer symbol of my inner sparkle. There, looking at me behind a window, and showing me how I was choosing not to connect with it.

The truth was, they were not expensive. I could afford them. As soon as I realised this, I went back and I fucking bought the boots.

*

I started paying super-heightened attention to my inner world, looking for glimmers of sparkle. Each time I saw one, I quickly formed more actions I could take that would begin to allow my inner sparkle to breathe. She was suffocated and flattened. Such cruelty in my inner world. I felt ashamed at being so cruel to the gentle sparkling light within me.

I began to see, feel, listen to her soft brightness once more and allow her to be heard by taking action on her messages.

These actions were small and subtle. The boots. A haircut. A call with friends. Engaging in a group coaching circle with deeply supportive women. Some delicious sushi and jazz with my husband. Allowing myself to remember the joy that classical music gives to me. Co-creating a song with a collaborator. Coaching of course, a major energy charger for me.

And some surprises too! One of the sparks I had extinguished was a desire to be in a fitness community and feeling physically stronger, because I had loved seeing my sister do that. And so I now find myself regularly lifting weights and jumping around in a group environment multiple times per week, and finding connection with my sister as we share about it.

*

I realised my own business ecosystem was constricting me, and I had to release my inner CEO and reimagine a much more expansive work environment for myself. Yes I have been working as a coach for many years now, such that I could practice and hone the craft. But I am, and have always been more than a coach. Coaching will remain, as part of a larger ecosystem of service offerings. My inner CEO is well and truly communicating the vision she wants now as I have allowed myself to finally be the vessel for her (re-)birthing.

I also talked with Julie about my past and what had led to the symptoms I experienced and engaged in yet another layer of deep self-knowledge and healing. The experiences I’d had, had been able to show me a deeper understanding of some of the patterns that were alive in my body.

In truth, I just needed someone to hold space for me and listen, in the way that I do for others, and all the heaviness around that went away.

Wow. As soon as I started taking actions, the symptoms lifted more and more. My inspiration came back, my creativity, my joy. My sparkle started to come back as quickly as a fire.

Only five weeks after the darkest psychological point of my life, I am surrounded by group support and my own mentors again. I am in creative flow again and developing a business plan for the true expansion of my work that I’ve longed for, possibly for my whole career. I’m holding space for others from a place of wellness. I’ve launched my new website. I’ve shedded another skin and I’m back in alignment.

But there’s more. A truth that is still sinking into my body; that it is possible to feel as motivated and alive as I remember from my younger years, in this older body. But this kind of aliveness feels different. My younger memories were partially fuelled by caffeine or fear or striving. This aliveness feels like a culmination of many years of unravelling burnout patterns from within. Removing internal barriers leads to inner openness. Inner openness allows more life force energy to flow through. Sparkle through. This aliveness feels fuelled by the universe.

My sparkle was self-silenced often in the last four years. But now she’s back. I’ll never do that to her again.

*

THE GREAT BEGINNING

I’m walking into my next phase with some new knowings:

• I can support my clients well, even while I am going through personal challenge.
• I do have integrity as a coach
• Rainy days happen to many of us
• Rainy days come and go, and the rain brings us nourishment in its own beautiful way
• While my pendulum nature can be painful for me, it always gives me experiential learnings that I can share to support others
• In the duality of this physical universe, light cannot exist without the darkness and the true work is finding harmony with both the light and dark
• Expansion is not something that is ‘done’
• Starving my inner sparkle of action is my darkness.
• Action from the place of inner sparkle is my medicine.
• It is truly possible to find a regenerative aliveness after burnout(s)

I also know that sometimes we need to knuckle down and finish the thing to be able to fully create the next thing. It’s true. And I have paid for my younger self’s decisions to start WAY too many projects at the same time around 2020.

I have learned the hard way (again FFS!), that for me to thrive, I need to balance the contraction and convergence of completion with the expansion and divergence of creation.

*

Too much convergence, and not enough divergence stifles the emergence of our creative life force. (And similarly, too much divergence removes the potential for emergence.)

Also, I focused so much on the exhausting completion energy since 2020-1 that I missed the fact that I was investing in creating the right soil conditions for planting the seeds of my next phase. Thanks to my coach Giles Hutchins for holding that mirror up to me.

The last four years have been part of the preparation for the great beginning of Act 2 of my life, where I am truly able to integrate all that I have learned and become and fully step into my own unique soul-craft.

That feels really good to say.

So hello, and welcome, to my great beginning. The energy is different here. It’s way more fun. There’s more muscle and sweat. More people. More life force. Even more support for myself and a way more expansive vision. There’s a much more simple life in Spain awaiting my husband and I, as well as proximity to my Scottish family.

There are sparkly boots.

And definitely no fucking concreting.

*

*

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Reflection journal questions that have supported me that I now offer to you:

• Where are you feeling constricted in your life?
• What actions would support your expansion?
• What thought patterns shut down your sparkle?
• How often does your sparkle get to be the leader of your inner ecosystem?
• What remains in your inner world from COVID that doesn’t belong there?
• How can you create a more safe and stable outer world so that your creative life force has a nourishing container?
• How is your effort now creating conditions for your next chapter to emerge?
• How has your life prepared you for your next great beginning?
• What is your relationship to convergence and divergence?

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Jenna Robertson is a Regenerative Leadership and Creativity Coach working with executives, entrepreneurs, change-makers, pioneers and creative professionals. Jenna would like to acknowledge her coaches Julie Parker and Giles Hutchins and her beloved husband, José, for their support for her through this period.

If you’d like support to reconnect with your own inner spark, do reach out to Jenna for a discovery call here.