Leaping into the Unknown: Part 2 — What Happens When You Bring Your Old Patterns With You

🎧 “Tidal Wave” (Acoustic) – Old Sea Brigade

After taking the leap — uprooting my entire life and landing in Bali — everything flowed, just like I said it would. The friends, the home, the opportunities, the abundance. The universe delivered. (Little did I know this would be short-lived…)

What I didn’t realise was that I’d also packed something I didn’t intend to bring with me.

On the outside, it looked like I was living the dream. And on some level, I was. I’d just got to Bali — I was chasing sunsets, sipping coconuts, spending my days by the pool. I was surface-level happy.

But underneath? I felt off. Ungrounded. Within a couple of months I was up, I was down — lost, confused, overwhelmed. And the plan I’d made to fund my life over here? The brands I’d been working with in Sydney who’d promised to keep working with me when I moved — it all fell through. I’d even landed new brand deals over here from Aus and those fell through too.

The plan I’d built to sustain this new life was a bust. And I had not budgeted for this.

Two months passed. Three months. Five months. Still, barely any income. And with every month that ticked by, I started feeling the same things I’d felt back in Sydney — the same feelings I’d left to escape.

Trapped. Scared. Confused. Hopeless. Stressed.

I was thinking wtf? I literally had uprooted my whole entire life to Bali and I’m still feeling like this?

What people saw on Instagram wasn’t my whole reality. Nobody saw the spiral happening behind the coconuts and the golden-hour shots. I was lost, seeking answers, quietly falling apart in paradise.

And then one day a friend said to me:

“Lena, you’re trying to live your Sydney life in Bali.”

It finally clicked.

I hadn’t escaped my old life. I’d recreated it, just with a nicer backdrop.

I wasn’t physically running back-to-back PT sessions anymore, but I was still setting a 5am alarm every single day. Still structuring every hour of my day — meditation, oracle cards, 20,000 steps, gym, business work, sunset, repeat. Zero space for flow. Zero room to breathe. And underneath all of it, the same old conditioning quietly running the show — the scarcity mindset, the hustle, the relentless chasing of productivity while the money drained away and the panic quietly built.

You can’t outrun your patterns. They come with you.

My little escapes to Ubud

Every few weeks, I would feel an urge to run off to Ubud. It was the one place where I felt like myself again. Clear. Grounded. Free.

But I kept going back to Canggu. I’d already built a life there — the friends, the spots, the routine. (My comfort zone.) I had just made this big transition to Bali, I wasn’t ready to pack up and start again (again!!).

My intuition was screaming. I wasn’t listening.

You know what they say — if you don’t listen to your intuition, the universe will eventually put something so big in your path that you have no other choice but to listen.

I had to learn that the hard way.

Eventually, I started to shift things. I stopped overscheduling my days. Stopped forcing myself to go to the gym. Started letting my body actually rest. And finally, finally — I listened and made the move to Ubud.

And it helped. Canggu is definitely more hustle energy. It’s essentially Sydney in Bali — busy, performative, everyone chasing something, minimal people slowing down. Ubud was different. I slept more than I had in years. I moved slower. I started to exhale.

But even that wasn’t enough.

When the universe made me stop

The universe, apparently, had decided it was done being patient with me.

I was on the back of a friend’s bike, wearing sandals, heading down a tiny alley a few minutes from my place. We’d just come from a dinner for a UGC collab — the kind of work that no longer felt aligned. And then, out of nowhere, I felt something catch my toe.

Blood spurting everywhere. Horror movie levels of blood.

An eighth of my toe — sliced off clean.

I couldn’t walk for three weeks. Alone in a country that wasn’t mine, in a place where I barely knew anyone, because I’d only just arrived.

It was brutal.

But the universe had finally got my attention. I had no choice but to stop. Completely. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I literally could not push, force, or hustle my way through anything.

And that stillness, as painful and terrifying as it was — became one of the most pivotal moments of my spiritual journey.

Because sometimes things have to completely unravel before they can bloom into something you never could have imagined.

Part 3 coming soon: What the forced stillness cracked open — and how the universe used it to rebuild me from the ground up.