Voices of conscious living
Amanda Saint on her journey to mindful living and writing.
Today, I’m thrilled to share a deeply personal and inspiring story from
, the creator of The Mindful Writer. When Amanda reached out to share her journey to conscious living, I was intrigued and knew you’d be, too. I’m honored to feature her as part of Voices of Conscious Living, a space dedicated to sharing personal journeys and mindful perspectives.In this piece, she shares her transformative journey from living unconsciously to embracing a life of mindfulness, connection, and purpose. Through her story, she reminds us of the incredible potential to rewrite the narratives we tell ourselves—and the world—about what it means to truly live.
I used to live unconsciously. My head was always elsewhere—mainly in the past but also creating imagined doom-filled futures. Everything changed when I had what I now recognize as some kind of nervous breakdown.
My husband and I were living in London, and I was working as a freelance communications consultant for a finance company in the city—a job I hated in a sector that went against everything I believed in deep down.
I’d had insomnia for 18 months and was somehow getting by on a couple of hours of poor-quality sleep a night. My caffeine intake was phenomenal, as was my evening alcohol consumption in a misguided attempt to get some sleep. My anxiety levels were sky-high, but I somehow hadn’t noticed.
Then, I received a letter from a solicitor telling me I was being taken to court for unpaid gym membership fees. A gym membership I had cancelled when we’d moved to a different part of London. Rather than give them a call and explain like a rational person would, I fell to pieces. I wailed and ranted and ran around the house like a demented banshee until I collapsed in a crying heap on the bed.
Six weeks later, we moved from London to a house in the middle of nowhere in Exmoor National Park. I had never really spent much time in the countryside before. I had visited it occasionally for a day or two and thought it was pretty in the way that city folk do but now I was immersed in it. And that’s when I first started to live more consciously.
My anxiety levels were dropping, I was sleeping through the night, and rather than constantly being elsewhere, my head was often where I actually was. I began to marvel at the things all around me on my daily walks. Waterfalls, ferns, birds, deer, flowers—all of which made me realize that everything is connected.
There were patterns everywhere, and I wondered how it and we all got here. I started to question the facts I’d been presented with in school that claimed to know the definite answers.
This was the start of a journey into spirituality, quantum physics, and the nature of reality that is still unfolding. Now, it includes reading a chapter of the Tao Te Ching daily and trying to live in alignment with its ancient wisdom in our modern world, which is not always easy. I’ve recently started studying for a Metaphysics Foundation Diploma, and one of the most important lessons life has taught me so far is that I can’t be certain about anything.
Still, I love exploring the many different ideas about what this human experience is and what it all means. I’m convinced that what we can perceive through our human senses is not the whole story.
I began to marvel at the things all around me on my daily walks. Waterfalls, ferns, birds, deer, flowers—all of which made me realize that everything is connected.
I was now a freelance journalist and started my own creative business, Retreat West, running writing retreats in local holiday homes. I was writing my first novel then, and I couldn’t afford to do any of the very few online courses available at the time, so I invited teachers I wanted to learn from to run classes at the retreats and sold tickets to other writers to pay for it. From that, I expanded into running online courses and workshops and publishing other writers' work. So I was now doing work I loved that I could do from anywhere.
But for me to become truly conscious, I needed to go on a physical journey, too, and also one into my past. After a year in Exmoor, I began to feel weighed down by all of the belongings we had accumulated. I sat in our rented house, looking around at it all, and thought, “I don’t want any of it.” Luckily, when I said so to my husband, he agreed. So we gave notice on the house, put virtually everything we owned on eBay, and left.
Initially, we traveled the UK waterways on a narrow boat for nine months, then we went backpacking in Asia and Australia, and then at the start of 2015, we accepted a work-for-accommodation job in Ireland where my husband managed a woodland (he’s worked as a tree surgeon for most of his adult life), and I looked after kennelled gundogs. In return for our 20 hours of work a week between us, we got a fully furnished, three-bedroom cottage to live in.
Since then, we have been moving around a lot, doing a mix of house-sitting and traveling. We returned to the place in Ireland many times, staying in total for around four and a half years between 2015 and 2021. This freedom from the conventional world of jobs and rental properties meant I could concentrate on my writing, my creative business, and my journey to becoming a more conscious person.
My whole life, I had felt like something wasn’t quite right with me, but I had pushed the feeling away, buried it beneath a lifetime of hedonism and busyness. But now I had all of this time to really look inside me, and that was when memories of childhood abuse by my stepfather and stepbrother that my mind had hidden from me surfaced. Once they came out, my healing started properly, and over the course of the past eight years, I have gone from being anxiety-prone and encased in a hard shell to being relaxed, positive, and completely open-hearted.
My journey to conscious living has been one filled with love, loss, and discovery, and I have now realized that there is no destination. I am on the journey for life, learning, growing, forgetting, and starting again—over and over and over.
Writing and living are journeys of discovery, and mindful writing can help us find meaning in it all.
Everything that has happened has led me to a place where I am using all of these discoveries and what I have learned about the importance of the stories we tell ourselves, about our own lives, and about others to try and use my writing for positive change in our world. To create stories that bring us together rather than drive us apart and celebrate the wonder of being here and experiencing it all in the first place.
Exploring spirituality, quantum physics, and the nature of reality has led me to practice conscious and mindful living daily. Its principles inspire both my creative work and my teaching, where I’ve discovered a love for helping others use writing as a tool for healing and growth. I now teach creative writing for well-being and storytelling.
Writing and living are journeys of discovery, and mindful writing can help us find meaning in it all.
Learn more about mindful writing at The Mindful Writer.
Share with us
Have you experienced a shift toward conscious living, or are you on the journey now? We’d love to hear your story in the comments.
If you’d like to be featured as one of our Voices of Conscious Living, we’d love to hear from you—get in touch!
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I've subscribed, Amanda!
What an incredible journey you've been on, and I love this idea of writing about your life through the lens of 'when I woke up from unconsciousness'. I'm particularly in love with the idea that you invited teachers to your own writing retreat. Very clever. Also, the healing strength of spending time in nature, it seems, was very much part of your awakening. xo
This is an awesome story and I can feel the positive growth you describe. Sometimes we need to go far from what we know to find what we are supposed to be.