I’ve known for many years that the voice of Soul and Spirit is quiet, sometimes imperceptible, when we’re numbed and seduced by life in this crazy modern world.

Making the right choices for YOU is about knowing the difference between your 3 types of needs:

Needs that are Primal, e.g. for your human to survive.

Needs that are from Shadow, e.g. created by conditioning, trauma or ancestral wounds.

That might sound like a strange collection of words to put together and yet, in my work they make for such easy bedmates, they’re more like soul mates (we’ll ease into the scarily woo matter of ‘soul’ gently, leaving that to the end.)

As part of my year-and-a-day long commitment to the Fire, I decided to have weekly saunas, which will be interspersed with sweat lodges with my shamanic family.

As part of the work we do to unite people with their soul, I lead them through journeys into different experiences.

Some of these journeys are called guided visualisations, though I’ve known for many years that not everyone can visualise clearly and I’m continually adapting how I create these experiences to powerfully work for people who hear, feel or know instead of see.

Today is the first day of my month-long sacred pause… no teaching, no podcasting, no guiding… instead I will be devoted to my family, my home life and my own shamanic practice.

I’m beginning the month by re-reading my teacher, Jez Hughes’ first book.

One of the most important things I teach women is how to fall truly, madly, deeply in love with their menstrual cycle.

"When you take the medicine of the Baba Yaga, dark Shamaness, it changes you. When you plead with her to show you how to get back to your wild aliveness, to the state in which your rocking hips effect the shining sea, you'd better be ready.

I’m naturally a leader and teacher, even though it took decades to fully accept it, meanwhile simultaneously (because shadow often works like this), for most of my life I have struggled to submit to someone else’s authority.

“The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.” - C.G. Jung

It is terrifying because it is the most shocking, confronting and disruptive thing… it triggers other people like nothing else when you’ll no longer gag and contort yourself to receive scraps of their approval.

I read a couple of studies recently about the dark side of being seen to be “doing the right thing”.

They showed that displays of excellence can turn off or provoke the very people they might otherwise inspire.

One study showed that “Principled deviants who take the high road threaten others’ moral self-worth”.

I’m *barely* back from the woods so please don’t expect any sense from me but I’ve just discovered it was 8 years TODAY that the podcast was born and it feels right to celebrate…

This is another shadow voice that’s made itself known very clearly lately.

Interestingly, or rather - magically, this is growing louder just after my last initiation into Father Sky, who brings the truth serum from Above.

The rich irony of this shadow voice is that I’m painfully, horribly, triggeringly honest (as my family, my team and our students will tell you).

(Written a year ago and even more true today)

I planted these two different honeysuckles over the swing seat many years ago with the dream that one day they would unite in the middle… now they finally do, it absolutely delights me.

My daughter and I went for a walk today. I suggested she sit quietly a little way away from me so we could both be with nature.

After a while, I called her back to me and she came over excited and amazed at what happened.

One of the practices of Waking The Wild is dream work because it’s such a powerful portal to descending into the soul. Here are some of the ways we guide people to work with their dreams to slide down deeper into their soul…

It doesn't have to be

the blue iris, it could be

weeds in a vacant lot, or a few

small stones; just

pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try

A new, previously unconscious, shadow part of me has been speaking recently.

It tells me “I’m too good for this!” when I’m choosing into doing certain things I have resistance to.

It showed up clearly and unexpectedly, for the first time a few weeks ago in the woods, when I was helping to build a sweat lodge from the land up.

To these three men… so different, and yet each of them have provided me with so much.

Chris Brook, I really couldn’t have wished for a more wonderful father for my children…

Rob Tyler, you’re in my heart and mind every day. Last night we went for a Southern Indian meal…

Chris Tyler-Humm, Sandy chose well when she chose you, not just a husband but a man who became so much part of…

For the past few weeks, Fox spirit has been calling for me to work with it.

The constant messages from Fox, culminated in me taking the “wrong” route home on Friday and finding a dead fox on my path.