Every year on Canada Day (which also happens to be my birthday) I ask myself the same question.
Am I living who I was born to be?
I was born in Scotland. I lived there for the first nine years of my life, on ground shaped by rock and salt and weather, before I crossed an ocean and rebuilt my life on another coast.
Where I come from, people build cairns. A cairn is a marker made of stone, raised one rock at a time. In the Highlands they mark the summit, the resting place, the turn in the path when the mist comes down and there is no other way to know you are still on your way. People add to them as they pass. They hold for generations.
But they were never only markers. In the old Celtic world a cairn was a doorway. The ancient ones raised them over the dead as portals to the Otherworld, the realm of the spirits and the old gods, so the stones stood on the seam between this life and whatever comes after. Many of them were built to catch the light. On the winter solstice the setting sun reaches straight into the heart of the tomb, and in that alignment the people were saying something they had no other words for. That death, and the return of the sun, and the long line of the ancestors are one motion, turning. Stone that keeps time. Stone that remembers.
And there is a quieter meaning, one that anyone who has walked a long trail already knows in their body. To build a cairn, or to add a single stone to one, is an act of patience and presence. You slow down. You steady. You place one stone with care. And you do it partly for the stranger coming up the path behind you, the one who will need to know they are still on the way, a small blessing left by someone they will never meet. The benevolence of strangers, made of rock.
There is an old Gaelic saying between people who are bound to each other. I’ll put a stone on your cairn. It means I will remember you. I will honour you. I will add to what you are building. It isn’t a soft sentiment. It’s closer to a vow.
When I moved to the Saanich Peninsula, I didn’t choose it, it chose me. I felt something deeply resonant here, like the echoes of generations speaking through my body. The same wild edge, the same rock and water, the same weathered stillness in the land. We crossed an ocean and I set down my own cairn here, stone by stone, in new soil.
That is where the name Cairn Wellness came from. Not just a word I liked the sound of. Something ancestrial, carried deep in my bones from one coast to another, held through time and honed by generations of family before me, the hands on healers, the psychics, the mediums and the Cailleach.
I’m telling you this because the cairn is how I understand people, at the level of Being. Not what a person does. Not the strategy, the plan, the problem on the table, though we get to those. I work with who someone is being underneath all of it. That is the level where things actually change, and it’s the level most work never reaches. People feel it before they can name it. Something settles. The role comes off. The founder stops performing the founder. What’s reveals is the person, their being, and the person, their being, is who I’ve been speaking to the whole time.
I go to depth because the surface was never the point. Depth is where the ground and magic lives, the ground a life is actually built on, the magic experienced in ways that defy words. Letting go of technique and formula to stay there, holding the spiritual container while folks do the same.
Living who I was always born to be.
And here is the truest thing I know about the work. Something is at work that is greater than me. Nothing to fix, nothing broken. I hold the field, and something larger than technique or training does the real moving. I’ve watched it for decades and I still don’t fully have words for it. That is the closest I come to the sacred, the spiritual, the magical. The thing I witness, over and over, when a person reorganizes themselves from the inside and the change holds.
That is the cairn, made human, standing with folks while they build something that stays. Stone on stone. And then it is theirs, and it marks the way, and it holds for a long time after I am gone from “the room”.
This is what I have always had on offer, long before there was a name for it. In a boardroom. In a family business. In a quiet conversation that changes the course of a life. The same thing every time. Being, depth, and the willingness to stand with someone at the edge of who they are becoming.
Clients aren’t clients at all. They are travellers whose path intersects with mine, brought together at one of the many mystical crossroads life creates for us.
With love, T
