Paul Willis | Blueflame
From the age of 13, I was pack-bullied. Not occasionally — every single day, for four years. The same group of boys, every recess, every lunch break, every class. My name turned into a slur and chanted across the schoolyard until I couldn't hear myself think. My books thrown. My bag emptied. All of it watched, and ignored, by the adults who were supposed to be paying attention.
My voice cracked at the age of 12 and, well, that's when it started. My voice developed a lisp easy to hear to the common ear. I lived in a country town in rural Australia in the 1980s, and I knew — even before I had the language for it — that it wasn't safe to be me. So I endured it, along with everything else.
And there was an "everything else." Long before the bullying started, I already knew I was different in a way I had no words for. I felt things other people didn't seem to feel. I felt the impact in my own body when someone tripped and fell in the schoolyard. I felt the knife plunge in on scary movies as if it had happened to me. I had a sense of knowing things before I knew how I knew them. My brothers called it being a "know-it-all" — "you think you know everything," they'd say — and I did know things. I just didn't know why, or that there was a word for it.
There was no one to tell me otherwise. My parents weren't in a place to understand sensitivities like mine — it wasn't a failing so much as it simply wasn't in their vocabulary. This was an era of "toughen up," of boys being handed a metaphorical spoonful of cement and told to get on with it. So a gay kid who was also a natural empath and intuitive grew up with no map for either thing, in a town with no room for either thing.
By my late teens, I had learned to function. On the surface, I was capable, ambitious, sociable enough. I got into a relationship with a woman and married at 24, standing at the altar already knowing, on some level, that I was doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons.
What I didn't yet understand was that the same sensitivity that had made me a target as a kid was also becoming my quiet advantage as an adult — even though I still had no name for it. I was promoted quickly, and not just because of the work ethic my parents instilled in me. I had an uncanny ability to see a solution before anyone else in the room could articulate the problem. I could sit with someone, and they'd walk away feeling truly heard — not because I said the right thing, but because I was actually, fully present with them. I made National General Manager by 30.
One afternoon in my mid-twenties, a colleague walked into my office and said, "You know you're very psychic, don't you?" I didn't — not consciously. I had experiences I could look back on and recognize once she named it, but I had no framework for claircognizance or clairsentience, the two senses that turned out to be dominant for me: knowing things without being told, and feeling things in my body that belonged to someone else's story. She became my spiritual teacher, healer, mentor, and friend for the next 24 years.
But knowing what I was didn't mean I knew how to live with it — or with any of it.
Underneath the "successful by every visible measure" version of me:
Networking events — I'd stand in a corner and fake phone calls to avoid the small talk I couldn't manage. Relationships — I kept people at arm's length with sarcasm, humor, competence, and busyness. Anger — it came from nowhere and went to the wrong addresses. Fear — it ran as background noise so constant I didn't know it was there until, one day, it wasn't.
I didn't begin the real work until I was 30. It took eight years. It wasn't linear, and it wasn't easy. But somewhere in my late thirties I crossed a threshold. The weight I'd been carrying for most of my life — the shame, the fear, the accumulated charge of four years of daily humiliation, the exhaustion of being psychic with no instructions — started to release. I didn't feel like myself again until I was almost 40.
Then, thirteen years ago, I did it again — except this time I chose it.
I walked away from a successful career in adult education, work I loved, work with minority communities that mattered to me, and I left my home country to follow my heart. I thought that decision was the brave part. It turned out to be the beginning.
What I found on the other side wasn't the life I'd pictured. I was met with passive abuse and spiritual and psychological instability from my then-husband, which slowly wore me down. I was alone in a foreign country with no support network, unable to get hired, and eventually destitute. Then my body started to give out under the weight of it: I nearly died of COVID-19, dislocated an ankle having to learn to use that leg again, and went through a bout of vertigo so severe I had to learn to walk again. More ER visits than I can count. Eight years that held more trauma than the four and a half decades before them combined.
There were four separate dark nights of the soul in there — nights where I would genuinely rather have died than kept going. When I was on what felt like my deathbed with COVID, I remember saying, out loud, "I am ready for you to take me." It wasn't to be.
An acquaintance recommended a Vedic astrologer. The first session told me nothing I didn't already know. A year later, in 2024, I booked a second session and asked specifically about my transits. He'd never heard my history, and he described it back to me almost exactly — stepping out of a job in 2014 for freedom, roaming in 2016, a major move in 2017 when I relocated to the US, and karmic struggle and destitution between 2018 and 2024. He mentioned Uranus in Taurus, though not to the extent I understand it now, and told me flow and freedom would begin in the second half of 2026.
It's here. I had three or four major transits, all tied to karmic work, stacked on top of Uranus in Taurus at the same time. All of it has been lifting since January. Uranus moved out of Taurus on April 25, 2026. And now I'm working through the last of what that cycle left behind — some PTSD from it all, and small, honest battles with my own protector, my ego, over whether it's actually safe to shine.
That's not a sob story. It's a map.
Because the people I work with aren't broken. They're carrying things that were handed to them before they had any choice in the matter — fear of rejection, anger with no clear address, loneliness in a crowd, relationships that repeat, a heightened sensitivity to energy and emotion that no one ever taught them how to hold, a version of themselves they can sense but can't quite reach.
I know that terrain from the inside. And I know the way out — not because I studied it, but because I lived it, and then spent a decade learning how to guide other people through it.
I don't work with you from a textbook. I work with you from compassion and a knowing — because I have my own version of what you're carrying. I did my work over two decades, and I'm still doing it. If you're ready to put yours down, I'm not asking you to go first. I'll walk it with you.