I was with a client this morning supporting her with integrating a deep, difficult plant medicine journey.

I drew a tarot card for her which mirrored symbols that had both shown up in her journey and in a message she’d received when visiting her special tree a few days before.

Hello beautiful soul,

It’s my first day back at work since before Christmas, it’s been a while since I’ve written something like this and there’s been many (many!) changes, within and without, since the last one, and so it felt like it was time to (re-)introduce myself and the work I do.

You’re already doing work that on your best days, you feel fortunate to be doing.

And it’s certainly much better than what you used to do.

But secretly you know… it’s not quite right.

It’s sort of the right direction, it’s sort of the right kind of clients, it’s sort of using your gifts.

As we (Jonathan, the whole team, and I) journey into the evolution of Be Mythical, we have been deep in conversation and contemplation of those words and what we mean by them.

There’s a shadow of both words that we are called to be conscious of, intimate with and responsible for…

(Even and especially if you dismiss the notion of wounds OR feel you’ve already healed)

If you’re a coach, therapist, or practitioner of transformative, healing or spiritual work and…

🩸Despite thinking you’ve already escaped the rat race and are doing your soul work (certainly compared to friends and family, or your past self), you’re still feeling constrained by someone else’s ideas of how to do what you do… maybe your industry’s, coach’s, teacher’s, parents’, or culture’s.

If you dare to follow a winding path through an ancient forest that is overflowing with fae folk if you know how to see them, you will come to a clearing in which there’s an oak door carved with symbols that are strangely familiar though you haven’t seen them before in this life... The door is the enchanted portal to Medicine ‘24, and unseen hands have flung it open.

One of my past teachers once shared a story (which I’ve probably misremembered to some extent - but that’s the way of stories and dreams and how they work through us) of a group of westerners in ceremony with an indigenous shaman, at the end of their time together, the group were bright-eyed, feeling full of power and love, and ready to make a big difference.

This is not something I ever intended to write - the wounded healer is the archetype I’ve spent a lifetime attempting to deny, even just accepting the role of healer has been an excruciating journey, requiring me to let go of everything I had clung to for security and to open to everything I had pushed away for sanity’s sake.

The lifelong struggles with being neurodivergent in a modern world that doesn’t understand or welcome differences, the trauma, the scars, the chronic facial pain, the terrifying hallucinations, the shamanic sickness… all of these and more, I’ve made my peace with and received the precious gifts held there.

(The shadow of shadow work)

As the popularity of shadow work is growing, its own shadow is arising along with it.

But before I say more about that, I’ll share first how deeply I celebrate and support the increasing popularity of shadow work, especially deep inner child work, and especially when done from sovereignty. Sovereign shadow work is a foundational aspect of the work we do with our students and is something I am delighted to see is catching on and being woven into many different forms of healing and change-work.

Over the past decade of deep healing work, I’ve kept different photos of my childhood self at different ages on my altar and my desk… Keeping in my awareness what I had avoided looking at through pain and shame.

I was talking to precious WTW alumni Nicole Barton this morning, she was sharing with me how much is transforming in her life since the shamanic healing she had with me two months ago, and saying that amongst other changes, she was being unexpectedly called back to activities she once loved, such as horse-riding, yoga and piano.

“Though children obviously require the security archetypal projections create, adults cannot continue to submit to that authority without undermining their own psychic growth. At their worst, infantile projections onto parents, if not withdrawn, become the foundation upon which any dictatorial system depends, particularly when the tyranny of that system is never fully experienced because the security it provides outweighs the cost of submission.

One of the first and most powerful practice I invite the women in Waking The Wild Feminine into is some form of body-led dance or movement.

I’d go as far to say that without that... I’m not sure much wild reclamation of our bodies (and therefore our lives and souls) is possible.

Now and then I get unassailable evidence that one of my Waking The Feminine women has got that wild embodied feeling that I’m guiding them into.

Hearing these evocative words read aloud in Circle was one of those times... It’s a poem written by one of my WTWF wild sisters about the body-led movement practice I invited them into... 🐺🔥♥️

This weekend in the woods, two people at different times told me my singing was beautiful. Hearing them say that felt healing beyond words, so much so, I couldn’t express it to either of them at the time. But it wasn’t healing because I needed reassurance about my voice itself, it was because it meant I had finally been able to move beyond my fear of singing fully and freely in front of others.

Sovereignty is one of those words that comes with so much glitz, baggage, and rot, it’s hard to look at it straight.

In truth, we *can’t* look at it straight.

We look at it through the wounded eyes of the Child.

“If the only thing people learned was not to be afraid of their own experience, that alone would change the world.”

-Syd Banks

Ironically, I notice that the majority of the people who come to work with us after they’ve been travelling that path for many years are still stuck in the search to more effectively escape their feelings (i.e. their experience).

Many years ago, long before I consciously began on the shamanic path, Jonathan gifted me a smudge fan - knowing before I did what was to come. He foresaw the twists and turns my path would take from non-dual spirituality into rewilding, embodiment and shadow work and then shamanism.

“It’s hard being friends with you… you’re always so WELL!”

This was what a loved one told me recently.

I understood where she was coming from, I am exceptionally blessed, but it also called to mind the decades in which wellness wasn’t an enviable quality of my life.