The Waiting Room.

I always brace myself if I have to deliver this one loaded word to a client. It signifies a time that we'll each go through in a twenty-nine year cycle, but equally it's been overused as spiritual speak. Three syllables is all it takes for a raised brow, a loaded sigh, or the occasional side-eye.

"You know what's coming next," I respond with. This is my cue to become the ultimate salesperson. Not in astrology, not in self-development, but in trusting the rhythm of your own life.

"Let's talk about surrender."

Surrender first appeared in the fifteenth century and was only used in a strictly legal context, for handing over your possessions if ordered by a court of law. Today it's enveloped in manifestation with the ultimate tagline: trust the process.

I've spent a lot of time exploring manifestation through a spiritual lens, why it works for some people and why it's harder for others, and a lot of the time it hasn't got anything to do with whether you're lucky or not. It all centres around self-trust.

Even though surrender makes us think we're giving something up—control, focus, or giving up entirely—it actually does the opposite. When we white-knuckle the steering wheel of life (been there, done that, and hand on heart, it doesn't work), we move instantly into scarcity, afraid that if we loosen our grip it will all fall apart. When we shift from resistance to acceptance, our focus moves to what we can actually influence. Which is everything.

I've been obsessed with this topic for years. But I want to be honest about what sitting in the waiting room actually looks like from the inside, because trust the process sounds pristine from the outside.

In early 2021, after almost three years of building my astrology practice, I found myself questioning whether I had what it takes. I'd come from a corporate career that looked wildly successful on paper, and stepping into the esoteric space (something convoluted and grey by any measure) had taken years of internal reconciliation. I'd found evidence it was right: the business was growing, my relationship with astrology was deepening, the path was revealing itself. And then I declared it, wholeheartedly, without wobble. This is my path.

That declaration held for three years.

Then Neptune moved opposite my natal Mercury, and the fog arrived. Neptune at low vibration is deception, illusion, smoke and mirrors. At high vibration it's our connection to divinity, the subconscious, and the creative possibilities we haven't yet allowed ourselves to imagine. In 2024, for the first time since that original declaration, six years into building this life, I questioned astrology. In totality.

I want to be careful here, because in hindsight I understand exactly what Neptune was doing. But in the middle of it, I was someone who had spent years telling anyone who would listen that this was her path, suddenly unable to locate her own conviction. That’s a specific kind of disorienting. But a great astrologer once told me, you should never make a rash decision when Neptune is involved.

What Neptune requires is space. Space in your physical body, space in your mind, space in your calendar. Because spaciousness is how you access your inner wisdom. It's how self-trust gets built—not through certainty, but through the willingness to stay in the question without burning everything down.

In the past, I would have quit. I would have made the anarchic, reckless call and called it intuition. This time, I read. Seventy books that year. Old spiritual texts, esoteric corners of the internet, everything I could find that helped me understand what I was being asked to learn rather than just endure. The pages in those books became lanterns.

And here's what came from that season: I realised that astrology isn't who I am and it was never my identity. It's my vehicle. The thing that lets me operate as my Higher Self, to view myself as a continual research project. Neptune didn't take my path away from me, it illuminated what had been hidden all along—that I'd conflated the tool with the self, and once I could see that distinction clearly, I could speak about what I do with a completely different quality of conviction.

That's what the waiting room actually gives you, if you let it.

So if you're in it right now, between the version of yourself you've outgrown and the one you haven't quite become, I’m not going to tell you to trust the process. I'm going to suggest something more specific: acknowledge where you are. Name it. Then ask yourself what this season is actually trying to teach you. You can't plan your way out of the waiting room, but you can plan what you do while you're in it.

Because as Sam Hinkie, former NBA manager and unlikely philosopher behind one of sport's most controversial strategies, who spent years deliberately losing games and was widely condemned for it, once put it: trusting the process was never about doing nothing.

It was about having a plan in place to make things better.

The waiting room is the plan.