Peter Matthies spent years in Silicon Valley venture capital, burning out, feeling like an alien in a world that everyone else seemed to navigate with ease. Then a book about an Apache elder, a psychic mentor in Carmel, and a flash of insight on a plane from New York led him to found the Conscious Business Institute in 2005. Since then, more than 80,000 professionals from Starbucks, BMW, Siemens, and Intel have gone through its programs.

Nathalie Claude knew at five years old that she wanted to sing jazz. She fought for it, moved to San Francisco to study it, and spent 30 years on stage living it. Then she went to Egypt, saw a vision of gemstone-infused crystal singing bowls, could not find them anywhere, and built them herself.

Stacie Marie Sholer had spent 20 years building a national business from zero to three million dollars a year, raised her children as a single mom, and given 90 percent of her soul to something that was no longer hers. When she finally walked away, she found what had been waiting all along: art, healing, and the work of bringing people home to themselves.

He was three years old when they took him aboard. When he came back, he did not want to leave. David Francis Collins grew up in Southern Rhodesia, today's Zimbabwe, in a traditional Catholic family. By age five, he had received his second ET communication: a vision of interconnected orbs of light that has never left him.

Jai Gobind is an astrologer, intuitive, singer-songwriter, and creative guide whose journey took her from the San Fernando Valley to Boulder, Colorado, through dark nights of the soul, peyote ceremonies, and the discovery of human design, before landing off-grid in Arizona, living fully in her gifts.

He grew up roaming the grounds of a Scottish castle, playing games with his own consciousness, not knowing the spirit world was already testing him. ​ Chris Ratter spent decades as an antique dealer and Edinburgh taxi driver before everything changed at 38

Some people find their soul mission in a moment of inspiration. Stephen Berkley found his in a stack of yellow legal pads belonging to a sweet octogenarian named Ethel.

We have been taught to fear the fire. The loss. The diagnosis. The marriage that ends without warning. We call these things devastation. We call them the dark night of the soul. But what if we've been reading the fire wrong?