Why the change?

As we grow, and learn more about ourselves, we sometimes need to make significant changes.

In 2024 I made the decision to end the food business I had created ten years earlier because I was burning out. It wasn’t just because of the constant stresses about money, the incredible amount of admin (just keeping up with food safety documentation, web issues, goods damaged by couriers, social media and on and on), or the massive piles of dishes. It was because all of this was dragging me away from my emerging life’s purpose.

The food business was also happening against a background of my mother dying, the sudden deaths of my father-in-law and his step-son, a full time job at the University and a fractured shoulder from a bike injury. I was actually desperate, and going downhill. 2024 was a year of crisis, and I felt a very massive change was needed. 

What I didn’t expect was the at times intense efforts of people around me to prevent me from going through a necessary metamorphosis. This may sound like a strange thing to say, but it is true. People often struggle with us changing, and often do not want us to change. They can be attached to an image of who we have been, rather than who we are now, or who we need to become. 

I found this deeply upsetting at the time. 

Eventually, this feeling turned to anger once I realised what was happening. And the anger became an incredible motivating force to just get on and do it. 

In reality it was yet another coming out. These transitional moments have often seemed very painful, and I have always been grateful for the people who magically appear to help me through.

So I closed the shop and stopped production of the fermented foods I’d been making since 2014. However, I retained the name ‘The Urban Monk’. The strapline had always been ‘serving up nourishment’, and I wanted to build on that theme by getting to the thing that really motivates me: aligning our inner and outer lives so that we can actually live. 

Transition, metamorphosis, is a delicate process and we need good people around us to have our backs. Having experienced this time and again, I want to be one of those people.