In my earlier piece Embracing the Shadow: A Journey to Wholeness (https://holisticcounselling.co.nz/blog/the-birth-of-the-shadow-and-the-creation-of-suffering/), I introduced the idea of each of us being a guesthouse – a house full of rooms, each one holding a different quality of who we are. I talked about how, somewhere along the way, we learn that certain rooms are dangerous to leave lit, so we switch the lights off. Not because the quality itself was ever bad, but because it was used to hurt us or showing it once cost us too much. I talked about what happens in the dark: how a neglected part doesn’t just disappear, it goes feral, and eventually escapes as some version of a tantrum – a Gollum moment we’re none too proud of.
If you’ve sat with that idea for a while, a natural question follows: once I can see the house I’ve built, how do I actually live in it differently? This is where I want to introduce two words that, in my work, do a lot of heavy lifting: fate and destiny.
Two Realities, Living On Top Of Each Other
I ask people what they hear when I say the word fate. Almost everyone says some version of the same thing: it sounds fixed. Doomed, even. Like something that’s going to happen to you regardless of what you do. That’s exactly how I use the word. Fate is the version of your life built entirely from your blueprint – the definitions of self, others, and the world you formed early on, before you had any real choice in the matter. It’s Groundhog Day. The same triggers, the same reactions, the same outcomes, dressed up in new faces and new decades. Based purely on your history, we could draw a fairly accurate line forward and predict where you’ll end up. That’s fate.
Destiny is a different word entirely, even though it’s answering the same question – where is my life going? Destiny has nothing to do with what happened to you and everything to do with why you’re here. It’s the sense that there’s something only you can bring to the world, some contribution or quality that’s yours to offer, independent of how you were treated or what you learned to believe about yourself. It has a shiny, open quality to it. An invitation rather than a sentence.
Here’s the part that trips people up: both of these are true, at the same time, right now. They’re not sequential — it’s not that you graduate from fate into destiny once you’ve done enough work. They exist layered on top of each other, like two transparencies held up to the light, and in any given moment you are living from one or the other. The real question isn’t which one is true. It’s which one has your attention.
Your Nervous System Doesn’t Know What Year It Is
This is where it helps to bring in the body, because fate isn’t just a story you tell yourself – it’s a physiological event. Polyvagal theory, developed by Stephen Porges, gives us a useful map here. Broadly, your nervous system has three main gears. There’s ventral vagal – the state of feeling safe, connected, curious, able to think clearly and relate to others. There’s sympathetic activation – mobilised, fight-or-flight, ready to defend or flee. And there’s dorsal vagal – the shutdown state, collapse, numbness, the freeze response when neither fighting nor fleeing seems possible.
None of these gears are chosen consciously. Your body is running something called neuroception underneath your awareness at all times. Constantly scanning the environment and the people in it, asking one question: “Am I safe here?” And crucially, it isn’t asking that question based on what’s actually happening in front of you. It’s asking based on your blueprint. The guesthouse you were born as, and everything you decided about the world while wiring it, becomes the lens your nervous system uses to interpret danger.
This is why, so often, we find ourselves reacting to something in a wildly disproportionate way and thinking, afterwards, what on earth was that? It’s because your body didn’t just perceive the current moment. It perceived every earlier moment that ever taught you this was dangerous, and it responded to all of them at once. The moment your body registers threat – even old, outdated threat – your frontal lobe, the part of your brain responsible for reasoning, choice, and perspective, goes offline. Not metaphorically. Functionally. Your body has decided that thinking is too slow to keep you alive, so it hands control over to a faster, older system. You act first and understand later, if you understand at all.
This is fate, seen through the body. It’s not a character flaw. It’s a nervous system doing exactly the job it was built to do, using outdated information because that’s the only information it has. The circumstances have changed. The programming hasn’t caught up.
The Signal Gets Louder If You Don’t Answer It
There’s a concept from process-oriented psychology (process work) that I find enormously helpful here, and it dovetails with everything above. Process work suggests that the parts of us we’ve disowned, and the truths we’re not yet ready to face, don’t simply stay quiet. They try to get our attention, and if we don’t respond, the signal escalates.
It might start subtly – the faintest flicker of unease you can talk yourself out of in half a second. If that’s ignored, it can move into your dreams, into imagery that keeps circling back no matter how strange or irrelevant it seems. Ignore that too, and it starts showing up in your outer world. A pattern that keeps repeating in your relationships, a conflict that keeps finding you no matter who you’re with. If that’s ignored long enough, it can eventually show up in the body itself, as tension, illness, exhaustion. The message doesn’t get weaker for being ignored. It gets louder, and it gets more physical, because it needs you to notice.
This maps directly onto the guesthouse. The quality you locked away doesn’t quietly accept its fate. It knocks, gently at first. A flicker of irritation, a pang of longing when you see someone else living freely in the very room you shut down in yourself. If you don’t answer, it knocks harder. Eventually it’s not knocking anymore, it’s breaking the door down, and that’s your tantrum, your Gollum moment, your outburst that seems to come from nowhere. It didn’t come from nowhere. It came from every earlier signal you didn’t have the tools, or the safety, to hear.
The invitation here is not to wait for the loudest version of the message. It’s to get curious earlier and to treat the small flicker of discomfort as information rather than an inconvenience, because it usually is exactly that: information, offered generously, before it has to escalate.
Building The Bridge
So if fate is what happens automatically, and destiny is the truth of who you are underneath it, how do you actually move from one to the other? I think of it as building a bridge, and the materials for that bridge are entirely in your body and your attention.
The bridge starts with noticing. Because your nervous system reacts before your thinking mind can weigh in, the only way to interrupt the pattern is to catch it earlier and earlier in its own sequence. To feel the first flush of heat in your chest, the tightening in your jaw, the urge to disappear, and pause there, before the automatic strategy has fully taken over. This is often the difference between fate and destiny in any given moment: not whether you feel the old activation, because you likely always will to some degree, but whether you get a beat of awareness before you act from it.
In that beat, there’s a second figure worth getting to know – the witness. Alongside your wounded, reactive parts, there has always been another part of you: quieter, easy to forget, but present since before any of the damage was done. Some people call it the observer, the inner parent, the highest self. Its job is not to eliminate the wounded part, but to take care of it the way a steady, loving parent would sit with a frightened child rather than telling it to stop being ridiculous. The more you practise turning toward that witness in small moments, the stronger and more available it becomes in bigger ones.
How Belief Becomes The World You Live In
There’s one more piece I want to add, because it’s the part that turns all of this from insight into actual change: what you focus on, you tend to create more of.
If you spend your energy locked onto what you don’t want – fighting your reactivity, resenting your patterns, bracing against the outcome you’re afraid of – you are, without meaning to, still living entirely inside fate. You’re facing the right direction to keep repeating it. This isn’t about blame; it’s simply how belief works. When you believe something is true about you — that you’re unlovable, that people always leave, that you have to earn your place – you don’t just think it, you start behaving as though it’s already true. And the moment you behave that way, you begin creating the very evidence that proves you right. Not because the universe is punishing you, but because belief shapes behaviour, and behaviour shapes outcome, every time, quietly, underneath your awareness.
The way out isn’t to declare war on the belief, which usually just entrenches it further. Remember, what we resist persists. The way out is to build a genuinely detailed, embodied picture of what you’d rather be living instead, and to let that picture pull your attention, your decisions, and your actions toward it. This is destiny doing its work: not as passive wishing, but as a compass you check often enough that it starts to outweigh the old momentum.
Both Are Still True
I’ll end where I started. Fate and destiny are not opposites fighting for the last word, and one doesn’t cancel the other out. Somewhere in you, right now, is a nervous system doing its old job perfectly well, and a whole self that was never actually damaged, still intact, still capable of anything. Both are real. The work (and it is ongoing, patient, unglamorous work) is simply learning to notice, moment by moment, which one currently has your attention, and gently, with practice, choosing again.
References
Merton, R. K. (1948). The self-fulfilling prophecy. The Antioch Review, 8(2), 193–210. https://doi.org/10.2307/4609267
Mindell, A. (1985). River’s way: The process science of the dreambody. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Mindell, A. (2002). The dreammaker’s apprentice: Using heightened states of consciousness to interpret dreams. Hampton Roads Publishing.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.
Porges, S. W. (2017). The pocket guide to the polyvagal theory: The transformative power of feeling safe. W. W. Norton & Company.
