The Long Way H.O.M.E.

What 20 years of Shadow Work Has Taught me About life

The wind on top of Arthur's Seat doesn't care that it's your birthday.

I stood there last Thursday, 44 years old, with the last of Henke's ashes in my hands, looking out across Edinburgh. The castle. The old town. The streets I walked as a student.

I hadn't climbed Arthur's Seat in 20 years. The last time, I lived round the corner, training to be a PE teacher. I had it all mapped out: the job for life, the pension, six weeks off every summer.

I let Henke go. I'd been holding on to him for 15 months. And my 3D self cried.

Then I did something I hadn't done in a long time. I looked back. Properly. At the whole road between that student and the man standing there.

It wasn't a straight road. It wandered through nightclubs and classrooms, across the countries I've lived in and dozens more I've passed through, in and out of love, into illness and out of it, through a pandemic, and through the hardest 15 months of my life.

It was the long way H.O.M.E.

And standing up there, I understood something I couldn't have understood at 24: that all of it, the highs and the lows and everything in between, was the path. Not a detour from it.

This is the first time I've written the whole story down in one place. Not for sympathy, and not to impress you. I'm writing it because somewhere in it, you'll probably find a piece of your own road. And because 20 years of shadow work has taught me a few things I wish someone had told me at the start.

So make a cup of tea. It's a long way H.O.M.E.

The boy in the DJ booth

When I graduated, I started working in a behavioural school. By night, I was DJing around Glasgow.

The music took me further than I ever expected. I became a resident at The Arches, Scotland's biggest nightclub. I went to Ibiza every summer and got to spin there too. I warmed up for some of my heroes in the house and techno scene.

From the outside, it looked like the dream.

On the inside, it was falling apart.

There were fights. I was nearly stabbed. I was arrested at the Metro in Saltcoats. There were the drug years. And underneath all of it there was depression, anxiety and panic attacks. I ended up off work, taking citalopram and then Cipralex to try and get through it.

I didn't know it then, but I was running. The music, the parties, the next summer in Ibiza: all of it kept me moving fast enough that I never had to feel what was underneath.

That's the first thing the shadow teaches you, usually years later. The things you run from don't stay behind. They come with you.

Running as far as I could

Then an opportunity came to teach in Qatar, and I took it.

I was PE teaching, doing personal training on the side, playing football, DJing boat parties, and even DJing at Gordon Ramsay's Maze. New country, new life, same me.

In Qatar I met Stacy, and we got engaged.

We moved to Australia together, and I made a big call: I gave up teaching. I went all in on personal training, then holistic health coaching, and built a business.

Ten or eleven weeks before the wedding, I called it off.

That's when Henke came into my life. My Chow Chow. I met him at two weeks old and brought him H.O.M.E. at eight weeks. He road-tripped all over Australia with me, from Perth across the Nullarbor to the Gold Coast, Sydney and the Sunshine Coast. I've never known unconditional love like it.

I'd crossed the world, changed careers and built something of my own. And I was still running from the same things I'd been running from in the DJ booth in Glasgow.

You can change your country, your job and your postcode, and you'll still wake up with yourself.

The house by the ocean

That was when the real inner work started. From 2015, and even before, I went deep into my own healing and personal development. Over the years since, I've spent more than $200,000 on it, healing wounds and patterns I had no idea even existed when I was 24.

I met Sam, and we married soon after.

We moved the business into our own premises, rebranded and opened our own gym. We moved north of the river, to a rented place a three-minute walk from the Indian Ocean in the northern suburbs of Perth.

Then I got cancer. And then Lyme disease. I healed both of them naturally.

I sold the gym and started working at a deeper level with people. I was asked to be a keynote speaker. I was running workshops, seminars and retreats.

And then Sam and I divorced.

Stuck in the place I'd left

I moved back to Scotland in 2019, thinking it would be for six months.

Then COVID arrived, and I was stuck there for two years.

I came back a very different man from the one who'd left. I'd done years of deep healing. And yet, within a week of being H.O.M.E., the old me was back. The streets, the faces and the family dynamics all pulled the old version of me straight to the surface.

That's associative trauma. Your body remembers places. It remembers people. Walk back into the environment where the wound was made, and your nervous system acts as if no time has passed.

Those two years were some of the hardest of my life. There was slander and public accusations. People came to my door to attack me. I was bullied online. People tried to take my business from me.

Five years in Bali

Then I went to Bali, and I stayed for five years.

Soulify went to a whole other level there. The retreats, the men's work and the workshops served thousands of people. I took my generational healing gifts further than I ever had. I got to see sacred sites all over the world.

I also wrote my first book, The Meandering Journey H.O.M.E. It's the first of three, and it tells the early part of this story in far more depth than I can here. You can get your copy here.

On a Soulify tour, delivering in New York, I met Samantha. We fell in love, she moved to Bali to be with me, and we got engaged there. We travelled the world together.

The hardest 15 months

We moved to Peru together, where Samantha was doing her shamanic studies.

Life there tested everything. Daily power cuts and electrical problems nearly cost me the business. I was sleeping three or four hours a night, trying to keep the lights on. It brought up a lot of alienation, and I felt very alone in the relationship.

I wanted us to move to Portugal, and I started the visa process. Then Samantha decided she didn't want to, and we lost money trying to make the best of what we had in Peru.

In July 2025, Henke died back in the UK. It left a massive void, and it began 15 months of grief.

Samantha got pregnant. We lost the baby.

We moved to San Diego to start a new life together, and then she decided to leave.

I slept on friends' couches until I could get myself back together. And then I came H.O.M.E. to Scotland.

Which brings me back to the top of Arthur's Seat.

What 20 years of shadow work has taught me

Standing up there last Thursday, I asked myself what I'd change about the last 20 years.

Then a better question came: minus the drama, what am I going to create in the next 20?

This is what the long way H.O.M.E. has taught me.

You can't outrun what's inside you. I tried. Ibiza, Malaga, Tarragona, Barcelona, Lisbon, Ericeira, Fatima, Sintra, Lisbon, Cascais, the Algarve, Glastonbury, London, Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh, driving the North Coast 500, the Isle of Skye, Iceland, New York, Nicaragua, Mexico, India, Thailand, Lombok, the Maldives, Las Vegas, LA, New Zealand, Zante, Athens and Mykonos. I even tried living in Qatar, Australia, Bali and Peru, and started the residency process in Portugal and San Diego. The shadow came with me every time, because it was never out there. It was in my body, waiting to be integrated.

Everything goes back to the root. Every pattern I've had in love, money and purpose traces back to what I call your Deepest Dominant Thought (D.D.T.): the generational mother and father wounds that cause you to feel unsafe and unworthy to be the real you. Heal the branches and the same fruit keeps growing; but heal the root and the whole tree changes.

Understanding it isn't healing it. I understood my patterns for years before they changed. The shifts only came when the work reached my body, through breathwork, somatic release, energy healing, meditation, vagal toning and of course our very own Soulify journey.

You can register for the next online Soulify here

The hard seasons leave clues. Every loss on this road pointed at something inside me that was ready to heal. External things always leave clues to internal possibilities.

Celebrate the people who are here. I've learned to celebrate the people who are here, rather than commemorate the people who choose not to be. This last year, the people who showed up for me gave me rooms, couches and their shoulders to lean on. I'm receiving because I'm giving, and I finally understand that the two are the same flow.

You can lose everything, feel nothing and be anything. I've lost two engagements, a marriage, a baby, friends, family and my best friend on four legs. And in losing everything, I've found who I really am.

The long way H.O.M.E.

When I let Henke go on Arthur's Seat, I wasn't only letting go of him. I was letting go of everything old, to make room for everything new on this next lap around the sun.

The road from that student to the man on the hill was long, and it wandered. But every wrong turn was part of the way H.O.M.E.

If you're somewhere on your own long road right now, lost, running, grieving or starting again, I want you to know it isn't wasted. None of it is.

The Meandering Journey H.O.M.E. opens right here, in Edinburgh. And if you want the start of this story in full, from the boy who ran to the man who finally stopped, it's all in my book The Meandering Journey H.O.M.E.

Get your copy here.

Here's to the next 20 years.

About the author

Mark Reid is the founder of Trysted Soul and the creator of Soulify. He helps people find purpose and love beyond trauma by healing the mother and father wounds at the root. He is the author of The Meandering Journey H.O.M.E., and he's based in Scotland.