What Does Forever Mean to You?
What does forever mean to you? For me, it is my life here with the Trails to Empowerment community, living the Six Principle philosophy and how I share that with others. But where I’m going can’t fully be explained without taking a look at where I’ve been. To explain this, I will use the Hero’s Journey outline.
Stage One: The Ordinary World
Summer six years ago and my ordinary world before coming to the Trails to Empowerment community was a place where I lacked purpose and was looking for something more, even though I didn’t consciously know this. I had no self-belief, this at least I knew. I worked a conventional job and had just graduated university. I couldn’t wait for university to end so I could “get on with my life”, but once I graduated I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life.
Stage Two: The Call to Adventure
I researched jobs in Canada and came across the Trails to Empowerment community where I wanted to apply as a conservation volunteer. I couldn’t get a work visa at the time as the pools didn’t open for another four months, so I signed up for the guide school which I could do with a tourist visa and which would start in nine months – what felt like an agonizingly long time to wait for the rest of my life to begin.
Stage Three: Refusal of the Call
Although I was now able to come to Canada with my tourist visa, if I wanted to stay for longer than six months, I needed a work permit. I was already thinking about forever, even if I didn’t know what that meant. But the process of applying for a visa seemed overwhelming. I’d never applied for a visa before and it was also a pool system. What if I was in the pool for years and years and just never got drawn? The pools opened in January and some time in February or March I finally stopped procrastinating and applied.
Stage Four: Meet the Mentor
Finally May came around and I could arrive at the Trails to Empowerment community for my guide school (and the rest of my life) to begin. Here I met several mentors. There was Manon who showed me what a capable, independent and self-reliant woman looked like. There was Kevan who taught me many physical new skills but which the underlying lessons of which was always about empowerment, responsibility and the start of my own self-belief. Then there was Gerry who simply did everything I wanted to do and was a female pioneer breaking her way into the male dominated industry of hunt guiding, becoming the first licensed female hunt guide and the first woman to own a guide territory.
Stage Five: Crossing the Threshold
As I completed my guide school and settled into my new life at the ranch, I learned more and more about the community philosophy. I internalized it, seeing how it aligned with my own values and principles, learned how to live by it and became instrumental in moving it forward, through creating new websites, writing content and marketing.
Stage Six: Tests, Allies and Enemies
Life in the bush is full of challenges, some of them include learning how to split wood, shoe a horse or survive when there is snow on the ground and freezing temperatures for almost half the year. Then there is the mindset adjustment of learning to be self-sufficient because the grocery store and all the other city amenities that I took for granted before coming here were a minimum two hour drive away, four if you wanted a specialty thing. I rediscovered the positive mindset I had lost sometime as a teenager and took responsibility for learning everything I needed. Although it was a steep and long learning curve, I soon felt comfortable in this environment.
Stage Seven: Approach to the Inner Most Cave
As I progressed on my journey at the ranch, I faced gradually bigger and bigger challenges. I went from writing website content to setting up new websites. I transitioned from guide school student to lead guide on wildlife viewing pack trips. I went from fantasizing about being a writer to writing and publishing my own books and setting up my own business, a publishing company. I fully knew by now that this was all a graduated program, one that would last the rest of my life.
Stage Eight: The Challenge
It’s hard to define a single challenge in this wilderness world where challenges are a daily occurrence. There are physical challenges such as almost tripping over a mother black bear and her three cubs in the dark and moving away safely. There’s the truck breaking down at the end of a logging road with no one to rescue us but ourselves. There’s riding and training green broke wild horses. But I know what the real challenge is and it was only in my mind. It was to learn to accept myself, to create my place and live the life I wanted to. Once I accepted myself, everything else was easy. When I trusted myself, there was nothing I couldn’t do.
Stage Nine: The Reward
The rewards of jumping into life in the Trails to Empowerment community and sticking through every challenge are more than could ever be listed in a blog story, but here are a few. I remember six years ago how overwhelmed and confused I felt about getting what now seems like a simple work permit. Now I have got my Canadian citizenship, completing the immigration process all by myself. I set up my own publishing business all by myself and the support of the TTE community, including the website set up, getting my books into stores and working with the printer. I get to live the wilderness lifestyle where I can be self-sufficient, harvesting food from the land or growing it ourselves. Maintaining our own water supply, driving the heavy equipment to get our own firewood and being the trainer and occasional vet of our own animals. I get to ride the mountain tops, going deeper and deeper into the wilderness with every opportunity. I have grown as a person from someone with no self confidence and no purpose to someone who believes in myself, to create my own future, to live my purpose, to be a Lead Mare, an empowered female leader.
Stage Ten: The Road Back
Here, I have to think about where the road back leads, after all, I’m not going back to the UK or my ordinary world, although living here at the ranch has become my ordinary world. Five years ago, when I’d made the decision that I would be staying forever, I quickly realized the road led back to the ranch every time I went out to the bush. That was because each time I went to the bush I grew, expanding my comfort zone and my skills.
Stage Eleven: The Resurrection
I see this stage as similar to Stephen Covey’s seventh habit of sharpening the saw in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which is a recommended book here in the Trails to Empowerment community. This is each time I read a new book that supports the philosophy here or someone shares a vision of how to move things forward. It is a strengthening, a renewing of my purpose and inspires me to take the next step on my journey.
Stage Twelve: Return with the Elixir
This is living my purpose, how I use my unique skills to make a difference in the big picture and this is where the forever program comes in. For me, my purpose and my forever is writing about the philosophy and sharing it with the world to inspire more people to begin or continue their transformational journeys. That could be through my books, blog stories, creating website content or any other way that I can write and share the philosophy. As I continue on my own journey, living all of our Six Principles, learning more about each, connecting more deeply to nature and myself, becoming more self-sufficient, empowered and conscious and aware, contributing more to conservation and investing in my personal development, I create more writing material to share. I can share it because I have lived it. I have the experience and the story which bring the philosophy to life. Every time I ride into the back country, I return with a story and a lesson to share, to inspire others to live a life with purpose. To achieve their goals, to define their interests.
Forever is to live the Six Principle philosophy, to live this wilderness lifestyle, writing about everything I learn and experience, always moving forward. Forever isn’t long enough, but that’s what I’m here for.
– Charlie B., UK
