A Sceptic’s Awakening: Learning to Trust the Unseen
- Jennifer
- 2 hours ago
- 13 min read
Between Doubt and Trust: A Story of Remembering
When I was a child, I knew there was more to life than what we could see.
It wasn’t something I was taught.
It was just there, woven into everything.
But as life happened to me,
as losses accumulated,
as betrayals hardened me,
as the world showed its sharp edges,
that knowing faded.
It wasn't that I simply doubted.
It was that I knew there was nothing beyond my immediate reality.
No hidden benevolence.
No secret orchestration.
No divine force looking out for me.
If there was any kind of greater intelligence, it seemed clear it wasn’t for me.
I wasn’t worthy of its kindness.
Or worse, maybe it was indifferent to me altogether.
When people spoke about trusting the Universe, I didn’t just roll my eyes.
I felt anger.
Contempt.
How stupid could you be, to believe something so naïve?
"Trust the Universe," the memes said.
As if life hadn’t already proven otherwise.
I wasn’t sceptical.
I was certain.
And I stayed that way: solidly, cynically grounded in the visible, measurable world, until life itself began to pull at the edges of my certainty.
Until the impossible started happening.
First quietly, through encounters I couldn't explain.
Then louder, through timings so perfect they defied coincidence.
It wasn’t just the arrival of The Magical Man* (read my story here) that shifted something in me.
It was everything that followed.
I started to notice the patterns.
Not in a dramatic way, but in the quiet details.
The way my thoughts would mirror the sky.
How animals moved.
How the air changed.
How certain days felt heavy and others sparkled with possibility.
It was like the whole world was humming with meaning, and I had started to tune in.
Slowly, I began to understand: I wasn’t separate from life.
I was part of it.
Not just living in the world, but moving with it.
Woven into its rhythms.
I was already reading the energy of the day, through feelings, through instinct, through the way the world responded to me. I just didn’t have a name for what I was doing.
When astrology found me, it was like someone handed me the map.
I didn’t have to guess anymore.
I could see the shape of the day before it unfolded.
See how the sky was moving, and what it was asking of me.
Where I was in the story.
And I realised: I’m not strange for living this way.
I'm not crazy.
I’m not making it up.
I’ve just remembered something we all once knew.
This language has been here for thousands of years.
It’s written in the stars, and written in us.
Yet despite everything,
the magic,
the miraculous,
the thousands of impossible synchronicities,
the evidence,
the fact that the birth chart can reveal aspects of our lives and selves even we've forgotten, doubt still lives alongside my noticing.
Trust doesn’t come easily.
It has to be chosen: again and again.
It has to be practiced.
Strengthened, like a muscle.
Here are three lived experiences that help to remind me, to choose, even as I forget:
3. The Book That Found Me
When I was a child, there was a book I loved beyond reason.
A beautiful, illustrated story that stayed with me long after I was “too old” for it.
I can’t explain why it mattered so much. It just did.
It was a kind of secret comfort I didn’t have to explain to anyone.
Somewhere along the way, the book vanished.
Life happened.
My childhood bedroom was cleared.
I grew up, moved away, had children of my own.
But sometimes, when rooting through old boxes or visiting my parents, I’d think of it.
I’d search.
I’d even try Googling, but without a title or author, it was like trying to summon a ghost.
Eventually, I wondered if maybe I had imagined it.
Then, in the autumn of 2017 - a season of endings and new beginnings - the title of the book dropped into my mind, fully formed.
Out of nowhere.
'My Very Own Sister'
I searched online.
And there it was.
Just one copy for sale. £174. (I was born in 1974. And it turns out the book was first published in 1974. Coincidence?)
I didn’t buy it.
£174 is an extortionate amount for a book, but especially for a single parent on a limited budget.
But that was okay.
It felt like enough just to know it existed outside of me.
That I hadn’t made it up.
At Christmas, I showed my Mum the book for sale online. She remembered it instantly.
She hadn't seen it since I was a child.
She couldn't say where it was.
'Maybe it’s in a box in your loft?', she said. (It wasn’t. I knew it wasn’t.)
Still, I hoped. Quietly. That one day I would own this book again.
That I'd be able to hold it in my hands, and re-read the story that had felt so magical, so special, when I was small.
Perhaps another one would turn up, and at a more affordable price.
At the time, I was in the middle of something I couldn’t yet name.
A season of longing.
Of trying to hold onto faith in something I couldn’t see.
I didn’t know it yet, but I was walking the first hard miles of a much longer journey.
A journey that asked me to believe in what had no proof.
A journey of faith.
Of trust in a greater intelligence whose kindness I was worthy of.
That wasn't indifferent to me.
Months later, after a summer of deep healing and impossible synchronicities, I went back to my parents’ house.
And there, on the dresser in the guest room, was the book.
Perfect. Untouched by time.
Exactly as I had remembered.
I sat down on the bed and cried. Because opening it, I remembered the story, and in remembering the story I realised why it had been so treasured.
So cherished.
So loved.
It's a story about a little girl. With a secret twin. A twin who lives in a hidden golden palace.
A secret twin who called her, "My Very Own."
A secret twin that loves her more than anyone else in the world.
I had forgotten the plot, but not the feeling.
The longing.
The belonging.
The place where she was truly seen.
Truly known.
Special.
And loved.
And I understood why I had clung to that story.
Why it had planted itself so deep inside me.
Because it wasn’t just a story.
It was a prophecy.
The child I was had known something the adult me had forgotten:
That I was made for connection.
That love is real.
That my longing is not a mistake, it's written into my being.
That a love like this is possible.
My book was returned to me in perfect timing.
It came back when I was ready to hold that truth again.
Curious to know how?
My mum had just happened to find it - sticking out of a pile of random junk in the loft.
It hadn’t been carefully stored.
It hadn’t turned up during any of the countless tidying sessions or reorganisations the loft had gone through over the past 30-odd years - including when a new roof was put on, and everything had to be moved and sorted.
It hadn’t found its way downstairs with all the other childhood books my mum had lovingly saved and retrieved when her grandchildren were born.
It had simply... stayed hidden. Waiting.
And yet, when it finally appeared, it was exactly as I remembered it.
Delicate yes, but whole.
(45 years old by then!)
Still in amazing condition.
2. The Magic Number
Around the same time, another impossible thing happened.
I was driving home from my parents’ house with my kids (then 11 and 14) and our new puppy.
On the drive there, I had noticed my mileage was about to tick over to 66,666.
Since I’d been seeing synchronicities everywhere, I thought:
That'll be a moment worth noticing.
I didn’t expect the chaos that would follow.
On the motorway, my tyre blew.
Terrifying.
Fast lane.
Three lives depending on me.
Somehow, I steered us to the hard shoulder.
Shaking.
Pretending I wasn’t terrified.
No idea how to put on the spare tyre.
No breakdown cover.
No idea where we were.
The AA said it would cost hundreds and take hours.
The kids and I walked along the side of the motorway, me carrying the puppy, my daughter sobbing, my son trying to be brave.
And then, just when I was about to give up and pay whatever it cost, the traffic police appeared.
At first they said they couldn’t help.
Then they changed their minds.
They changed the tyre.
They stayed with us.
They rescued us.
We got back on the road, crawling along at 60mph.
Hours behind schedule.
Exhausted.
And then, something happened.
At 6:00pm: 66,660
At 6:01pm: 66,661
At 6:02pm: 66,662
At 6:03pm: 66,663
At 6:04pm: 66,664
At 6:05pm: 66,665
And at 6:06pm, the odometer hit 66,666.
Perfect.
Impeccable.
As if the entire terrifying mess had been designed to slow us down just enough to witness that moment.
Even the chaos had been held.
Even the terror had been threaded into a larger design.
Not every sign of magic looks like a blessing at first.
Sometimes it comes disguised as loss.
Sometimes it doesn’t give us what we thought we wanted, it gives us what we needed to awaken.
This last story didn’t always feel like magic when I was living it.
At times it felt like heartbreak.
But looking back, I see it was the beginning of everything.
The beginning of me.
1. The Man I Was Always Meant to Meet
I met The Magical Man a year before we ever spoke.
One lunch break, walking with a friend, we bumped into him.
They talked. I stood silently by.
But something happened that I still can’t explain.
I was utterly captivated.
By his voice.
By his gestures.
By the presence of him.
He spoke about trusting the universe. About magic.
I thought he meant card tricks.
I had no idea he was speaking about real magic - the kind you live.
When we walked away, my friend told me about him.
It was clear she cared for him.
I suggested she pursue it.
She said, "I’m not his type."
Somewhere inside, I assumed that meant he wouldn’t consider me his type either.
But I couldn't get him off my mind.
From then on, it was as if I saw him everywhere.
Every time I left the office, I'd see him.
I started hearing about him.
His manager sat opposite me, and it seemed everyone was always talking about him.
He became very present in my world, even though we'd never spoken.
We smiled when we saw each other.
I may have mouthed "hi."
When I found out he was moving into my office, I wasn’t surprised.
It felt inevitable.
And that's the primary feeling I had, looking back:
I will know this man. I just need to wait.
And when we finally spoke about it, it turned out he had felt the same.
From that very first moment, he had known we were connected.
He had asked the Universe when he would meet his person.
And the answer had come: Wait until December.
We started talking in September.
By December, it was undeniable.
But just weeks later, it became clear that a relationship wasn’t on the cards for us.
There wasn’t a dramatic ending.
We just... agreed.
For him, I think he knew he wasn’t ready. Maybe I wasn't his One after all.
For me, it felt like I was being asked to pause.
To hold what I’d felt without trying to make it into something.
To trust the timing of something I didn’t understand.
And at first, it didn’t hurt.
Not then.
Because I could still feel the presence of something larger - like the connection wasn’t ending, just changing shape.
Becoming something quieter.
A friendship.
But that, too, dissolved.
Conversations faded.
Silences took their place.
And eventually, the absence settled in.
That’s when it hit me.
What I’d thought I could hold lightly,
what I told myself I’d accepted,
began to crack me open.
I didn’t expect it.
I didn’t understand it.
We’d barely known each other.
But the grief that rose in me was total.
It brought with it the ache of every other abandonment I’d ever felt.
The longing for something I didn’t even believe I deserved.
The shame of having wanted.
The disbelief that something so powerful could leave without explanation.
And underneath all of that, something deeper:
A quiet, insistent voice that said,
This isn’t the end of the story.
This is the beginning of you.
It was a dark night of the soul, even though I didn’t have that language for it then.
He was the catalyst. But the journey was mine.
What he activated in me was something ancient.
Something sacred.
Something I had to walk through, alone.
The years that followed weren’t about finding love “out there.”
They were about finding home in here.
I began the slow, humbling, magical work of building trust: not in him, not in fate, but in the Universe itself.
In the intelligence that moves through everything.
In myself.
Those memes I used to mock, the ones that said “just trust the Universe”, I write them now.
In fact, just yesterday, I wrote one without even thinking:
"Let the Universe bring you what you want. You don’t need to control it. You just need to be able to receive it."
I couldn’t have imagined being someone who would say that.
But I’ve lived it now.
I’ve felt the difference between forcing and allowing.
I’ve watched life reveal itself in perfect timing: not just once, but over and over again.
I’ve studied astrology formally, yes, but more than that, I’ve embodied it.
I’ve lived it.
Felt it.
Worked with it.
And now, I’m no longer searching for a map.
I am the map.
I move with the sky.
I listen.
I trust.
Well, mostly.
This isn’t a story about falling in love with someone else.
It’s about returning to the person I was always meant to be.
The person I always was.
I just had to remember.
Looking back, it makes perfect sense.
But still. Some doubt persists.
And I don't just have my stories to rely on.
The Magical Man has stories aplenty of his own.
Many more than I.
He’s lived through ridiculous experiences that defy reason, seen things on the daily that he can’t put into words, he's been told by The Divine Feminine herself that he is a divine being deserving of love, and still he refers to himself as a "non-believer", still he says, “I don’t believe any of it.”
It’s how he copes.
It’s how I cope too.
Because the truth is, belief is dangerous when you’ve been hurt.
Hope can feel like a setup.
Because if we believe. If we really, fully open to the idea of mutual, divine love, then we have to risk the most frightening things:
Not just heartbreak.
But humiliation.
Shame.
The horror of having been foolish to trust.
The fear that we will be seen. And found lacking.
The fear that if we hope and it breaks, it will break us too.
That it will confirm the oldest, darkest fear:
That we were never enough to be chosen.
Never enough to be loved in the way we long for.
Trust Isn’t Certainty. It’s a Way of Living.
These stories don’t erase my scepticism.
They don’t demand blind faith.
They remind me.
They soften the edges.
They invite me to live as if The Universe is kind, even when fear whispers otherwise.
They invite me to keep choosing trust, again and again, even when my mind demands proof.
Because here’s what I know now:
I have been met before.
I will be met again.
And every step, even the ones that felt like wrong turns, have carried me exactly where I was meant to go.
Maybe I can't believe it all the time.
Maybe I don't have to.
Maybe trust was never meant to be a feeling I could cling to, but a way of moving through the world with my eyes open.
A way of letting wonder and doubt live side by side.
A way of remembering, even when I'm not sure.
Maybe it’s enough to keep walking toward love anyway.
Maybe it’s enough to live as if the magic is real, until one day, it doesn’t feel like pretending anymore.
A Final Note
This is what I want to offer you, if you’ve made it this far,
not an answer.
Not a fix.
Not a promise that life won’t still ache.
But the gift of remembering.
Remembering that there is more to this life than what we’ve been told.
That the world is alive, responsive, full of signs and meaning.
That we’re not lost in it, we’re part of it.
And that the wisdom you need isn’t somewhere outside of you.
It’s already here. In your noticing. In your longing. In your story.
You don’t have to believe.
You just have to stay open enough to remember.
And if you want help finding the language of your own story, Astrology is the map I use.
It’s not a belief system.
It’s a living, breathing conversation with the sky, with life itself.
It’s the same conversation you are already part of, whether you realise it or not.
You and I, we are walking the same path.
It may look different for each of us.
But underneath it all, it’s the same longing.
The same remembering.
And it would be an honour to walk a little way alongside you.
If you feel called to explore your own map, the one written in the stars and in you, you can find more about my astrology sessions here.
Learn more about my fundamentals here.
And book in with me here.
*The Magical Man
If you’ve read this far, you might wonder why I call him The Magical Man.
The truth is, meeting him was more than a romance that didn’t happen.
It was a catalyst. A crack in the structure of my life that let the light in.
What I later came to understand is that some connections are different.
They don't come to complete us, or even to stay with us.
They come to awaken us: to burn away the illusions we didn't even know we were carrying.
In the New Age, this kind of connection is often called a twin flame or twin soul: two souls who mirror each other so fiercely that everything false must fall away.
Not so we can be together, necessarily.
But so we can become who we were always meant to be.
The Twin Flame Journey isn't easy.
It's not a love story in the way the world usually understands it.
It's a path of radical self-knowledge, healing, and transformation.
And it's not something you choose, rather something that is thrust upon you. When the time is right.
It was only after meeting Him, and letting go of the idea of "us", that I found the framework I needed to navigate what was happening to me. To manage the deep emotional, spiritual, and psychological metamorphosis that had been bestowed upon me.
Astrology became one of the tools in my arsenal. Not as an escape. But as a map. A way to understand the energies shaping my journey, and my own soul’s call to become more than I had ever dared to imagine.
This is what I bring to my work now:
Not theories.
Not dogma.
But lived experience.
And the deep compassion that can only come from walking the road yourself.
If you are on a journey like this - messy, painful, beautiful - know this:
You are not broken.
You are becoming.
And you don't have to walk it alone.
Read more about The Twin Flame Journey here and find my answers to questions the journey provokes in you here.
And if you'd like some support (I offer Mentorship and Twin Flame Journey Readings), you know where I am.
A note on AI & my writing:
I use ChatGPT as a writing assistant—not as a writer. These are my thoughts, ideas, and words, shaped by my lived experience and deep love for self-work, self-awareness, the spiritual journey, and astrology. AI helps me refine, structure, and nudge me toward better phrasing, but the voice you’re reading is mine. I use it as a tool to help me put into words everything I believe is valuable in sharing my insights. Honesty matters to me, and this is simply one way I bring my thoughts to life.
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