Life Isn't Happening To You — And Understanding This One Shift Could Change Everything

We know how that can sound

When you’re in the middle of a painful season — a betrayal, a loss, a door that won’t open no matter how hard you push — being told it’s ‘all part of the plan’ can feel hollow at best.

We’re not here to dismiss your pain. What’s happened to you is real. The hard things are genuinely hard.

But we’ve both lived long enough — and been through enough — to look back at our most painful chapters and see, with hindsight, how much they shaped us. How much they gave us, even while they were taking something away.

What suffering is really asking of us

Here’s a question worth sitting with:

What if life isn’t always about getting what you want — but about becoming who you’re meant to be?

The challenges, the disappointments, the unexpected detours — they have a way of growing us in ways that comfort and ease simply don’t. They build resilience. They show us what we’re actually made of. They strip away what was never really ours to begin with.

That doesn’t make them easy. But it does make them meaningful. And meaning is one of the most powerful and lasting antidotes to suffering we know.

The coincidences worth paying attention to

Think back over your life. Can you find a moment where something unexpected happened — a plan fell through, a door closed, a chance encounter you didn’t engineer — that led to something you now treasure?

A friendship that began from a wrong turn. An opportunity that only appeared because something else didn’t work out. A version of yourself that only emerged because life asked more of you than you thought you could handle.

Those moments aren’t accidents. They’re life happening for you.

The more you train yourself to look for them, the more you’ll find them.

What this looks like at our retreats

At our women’s wellness retreats in Ontario and through our online community, we ask women to look back at one coincidence in their lives that led to something beautiful.

The room always gets quiet at first. And then something opens up.

Women start connecting dots they’d never connected before. The job loss that led to the business they love. The relationship that ended and made space for the one that changed everything. The health scare that finally made them take themselves seriously.

That reframe — from to me, to for me — doesn’t erase the pain. But it changes what you do with it.

Moving from surviving to growing

We’re not suggesting you rush your healing or pretend hard things are secretly good things. That’s not what this is.

What we are saying is that there is a true version of your story — not a fabricated one — where even the painful chapters played a part in something larger. Where the losses made space for something new. Where the hardest seasons produced the deepest growth.

You get to choose which version of your story you live inside.

Not by ignoring the pain. But by refusing to let it be the only thing that defines what’s possible for you.