While Natalie MacNeil is a leading embodiment coach and bestselling author today, she has experience in many industries that taught her the lessons that are the foundation of her work today.
Working in the production industry taught her patience because she always needed to be thinking years ahead for planning and getting signed off on the next project. It would take multiple years to bring a project to life.
In the beginning of her career, Natalie would feel a sense of frustration that it would take so long to create a project but then she learned how sweet it felt to get to bring something to life with a team and get it out into the world, surrendered to the final result and how many people would view the project.
Those experiences started forming the foundation of her belief that we get to create our dream futures and bring big visions to life by embodying them in the present moment.
A Decade of Experiences Through Travel
Natalie shared a story with me about patience and living our purpose from her trip to Italy. She was in Rome looking up at a building that had taken more than 400 years to complete.
When the plans for it were first drawn up, the architect, the artists, and the craftsmen that were working on it knew that it wasn’t going to be completed in their lifetime.
They were laying the first bricks. They were creating the initial structures knowing that future generations and lineages were going to continue what they had started.
She just remembers standing in front of this masterpiece of a building and weeping; because she felt like she got the lesson of patience and living your purpose day to day on such a deep level.
There are things you are creating now and seeds you are planting. You are planting seeds that will not bear fruit for years but you follow the call to create without having an attachment to the final result.
Ever since that moment, it’s been easier for Natalie to just plant the seeds and be in that process.
For Someone Experiencing Doubt
Natalie shares that it’s important to hold on your vision when you are creating something but surrender your attachment to the result, knowing that any kind of failure is feedback.
Any kind of result that isn’t the result that you wanted, is simply feedback. It’s a lesson that gets woven into the story and the tapestry that is your story, your career, and your business.
Natalie shares that she can look back on the last 15 years of building her business and she can see now that everything that didn’t go her way was feedback for her to learn and improve.
There is always some type of lesson when we are open to it.
Natalie’s career has taken her from production into embodiment work and meditation and travel, and so many things in between.
There were so many moments in her career when it just didn’t make sense how something was unfolding. But now she can look back and connect the dots.
We just have to surrender ourselves to the present. It can take practice, but over time we will be able to look back and see how every step has been an important part of fulfilling our purpose.
It’s the contrast that allows us to have so much appreciation. Especially in the moments of joy and fulfillment and achieving something.
We have to have those contrasting experiences, to come into a deeper presence, deeper joy, deeper levels of power and deeper divine design.