I’d lived in 11+ places (some of which weren’t houses) by the time I was 11.

All of those places made their mark in some way, left a wound or a soft spot in my heart, but perhaps no more so than The Old Smithy, a converted black smith forge owned by an uprooted Canadian artist called Allen, in Exmoor, North Devon.

Jonathan and I are halfway through our month off and I am more present than ever to the fact that the work of Waking The Wild isn’t about us, therefore it doesn’t stop when we stop.

I’m seeing Waking The Wild alumni and students shining their souls into the world, in ways that are as unique as they are. Here’s just a few…

Whether they know it or not, they’re magically gifted in some way - maybe they can easily enter non-ordinary states of consciousness and journey to other realms, see or feel energy, foretell the future or know other information they “shouldn’t” know, or heal others in ways not yet understood by science. It’s important to say that their magical gifts will often have been repressed through wounding and conditioning so they either might not know they even have them or will have experienced them in unwelcome ways.

"I believe that to enable us as a society to move into a far more evolved and sovereign state we need to start with that question ‘who am I?’. And I think this work is a really amazing step forward in understanding that on an individual level, and then that having an impact on an organisation and societal level." - Elke Edwards

What’s required to live from soul?

✨ Heart-centred

✨ Soul-led

✨ Sovereign

These are the three tenets of Waking The Wild that are woven into everything we do.

A client told me that she often struggles to create time for body-led movement*, she asked if it’s OK if she’s simply listening to her body throughout the day and seeing how it feels and wants to move.

I’m about as undogmatic as they come… and after all these years of almost every kind of spiritual, shamanic, somatic, shadow, sovereignty, archetypal, alchemical & self development work, I’ve arrived at the point where it seems to me that unless it prioritises the Child, it’s not really The Work, it’s yet another abandonment of the Child.

I’m lying in bed listening to my family downstairs making me breakfast in bed, and admiring my very own Klimt, painted by my daughter (when she discovered last week that he is one of my favourite artists, she secretly began painting this).

You absolutely can gag yourself for fear of the ones who are compelled by fear to judge and criticise.

Maybe you’ve experienced being shamed in recent years or maybe you’re imagining it based on long ago experiences.

I contemplated long and hard about sharing this photo I found yesterday because it’s one from my “boy” years (edit: it was for about 10 years, not just a short phase) when I was repelled by anything that seemed girly or feminine, which I’ve spoken about but haven’t ever shared photographic evidence of.

If you’re comparing your pace of productivity and creation to someone else’s then you’ll miss your own gold.

I see some people creating at a rate that seems almost alien to me (and I say that knowing that my own flow of creation can seem extreme to others).

I’ve been lying in bed looking through old photos with the children.

The timing is interesting because this month in Waking The Wild Medicine we’ve been entering the crucible of Story (especially the telling of the story of our wounds and gifts… and telling them from Sovereignty), so my younger self has already been more in my awareness than usual.

I was just pondering some of the reasons that people have joined Waking The Wild Medicine in the past couple of years…

✨ To discover their purpose

✨ To connect deeply with a circle of like-minded people

✨ To peel back the layers over their authentic selves

As you might know, I speak a lot about how our greatest gifts are held in our deepest wounds, especially for those of us who are changeworkers, healers and coaches devoted to doing our deepest soul work.

In fact, one of our deepest, most magical crucibles, Waking The Wild Medicine, is focused on exactly this ancient truth.

I’ve been journeying through the five stages of The Thankless Task over the past decade (and in truth, before that for most of my life at stages 1 & 2), if you’re human, I suspect they’re stages that you’re journeying through too.

And you’ll notice that there’s no “How to” move through these stages, that’s because it’s the same work I speak about over and over. It is the work of individuating and actualising to live from soul - our deepest, fullest truth - which requires devotion to healing our wounds, integrating shadow and realising our union with all that is…. And it begins with choosing to begin.

1. That it’ll come easily.

Yes, a vital part of doing your soul work is about doing what you’re innately great at, but ‘innately’ doesn’t mean that there won’t be a tonne of conditioning and wounding in the way or that it won’t require years of guidance and practice to fully actualise it.

I happened to see that Sara in the WTW Team shared a short clip of John Patrick Morgan and I talking about the King archetype (link below) into a thread about women referring to men as “kings”.