People sometimes ask why I use a name I wasn’t born with. This is how it came to me, and I fought it for a long time.
In 2012, a gift came through me that I have come to know as an energy that runs through my life and work. Four years later, in 2016, I began to receive guidance from what I call Source, in spoken and written form, and it always referred to me as Little One. I didn’t like it. I took it as derogatory, as though I wasn’t good enough, as though I was beneath something.
That same year I was told, more than once, that my name would one day have to change, to match the place where I would need to stand. I didn’t know what that meant.
During a meeting that year, a name came up that sounded like Shamu. It stuck as a nickname. I knew it wasn’t the name, but it stayed, and to this day Krystle’s children still call me Aunty Shamu.
All my life I have carried an image of myself standing on a mountain with a monastery behind me, somewhere that felt like Tibet. When I was told the name had to change, I began to look. I knew Little One was part of it, so I searched for its meaning in Tibetan, in Sanskrit, in Japanese. Nothing came. I let it go.
In 2019, Krystle and I were in Bali running a retreat when the urgency came back. I assumed it would be a Sanskrit name, something a priest could give me, so the two of us went to meet one. He told me I could use Anandi, meaning mother of the universe, and also joyful or happy. I loved the word, but it wasn’t complete.
That evening we went to dinner with David, the manager of the retreat centre, and the words Little One kept repeating, over and over, until I could no longer follow the conversation. Back at the retreat centre I sat on my bed, with Krystle beside me, and was told to find their meaning in Nepali.
I typed it into my phone, and the word that appeared was Sānō, pronounced Sah-noo. It was so close to the nickname I’d been given two years earlier that Krystle and I nearly fell off the bed.
Then I was told to look up Sānō in Latin. The meaning that came up was to heal and to cure. We were stunned.
As I sat with the words, memories began to unfold, of times long past, of mountains, of being a Buddhist monk. It felt like home.
And still, I didn’t want to use it.
I struggled with it badly. I had no lineage. A new name, announced out of nowhere, felt like something no one would accept. What would people think? It took me more than nine months to put it out into the world, and when I did, there was backlash. I didn’t know what to make of it.
It was brutal at the time. A name is more than a label. It is how other people know you, and in many ways how you know yourself. Giving mine up in public meant letting go of one more thing I had leaned on, one more piece of who I had been, and I had already been losing a great deal. It felt like being stripped of something I hadn’t agreed to lose.
I see it differently now. It was part of a longer unwinding of who I thought I was, and each layer that fell away left more room, not less.
I can’t tell you why any of this came to me, or how. The name arrived the way the work did: it simply did. I’ve told it as plainly as I can, and I don’t ask anyone to believe it.
No one is required to change their name, and I’m not attached to this one. You can call me whatever you like. “Hey, you” works fine. I have even thought about going back to my old name, and I tried it, and it felt so strange I had to laugh.
And Little One? In time I recognised that it was never an insult. It was a term of endearment.
If you’d like to understand the work behind the name my book Deeper Than You Know is out..
Digital and EPub Deeper than you know
Paperback Deeper Than You Know →