(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.

(A part 2 and a balance of sorts to my last post about pedestalisation and demonisation.)

In many forms of spiritual and sovereignty work, there’s teachings about victim consciousness, sometimes it’s specifically spoken about this way and sometimes using other terms.

This is an archetypal pattern that we can experience when a teacher or leader is perceived to fall from grace in some way and we feel disappointment, disavowal or dismay.

When we feel these things, we are likely moving from one end of the shadow pole to another… From projecting perfect master to total disaster.

(An oversimplification of a deep contemplation we’ve been in)

As I shared on the latest Waking The Wild Show episode (coming out soon), Jonathan and I have come back from our August break with a more intentional focus for the show going forward.

There’s been a rupture rumbling beneath the celebrations and fresh beginnings… It's big but not bad - though it might seduce one to see it that way - it’s simply life twisting and turning the wheel of change, like it always does.

One of the portals into self-illumination, which is one of the seven elements of the work of Waking The Wild, is making conscious ancestral (which is really archetypal) patterns and cycles.

As Waking The Wild students will know, some of my most repeated words are “Focus on yourself.” (Which really means “Focus on your own soul.”)

As an example, in Wild Feminine, I invite the women into a week-long ‘Complaint Cleanse’, which simply put, is about noticing when they’re complaining about others, often their partners, and then enquiring into what’s creating their need for someone else to be a certain way. (There’s a lot more to this work than I’ve shared here, not least the absolute love needed when we’re shining a light on the wounds that create these kinds of needs

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…

When people tell me that they don’t think they can hear their soul speak, it’s simply because they haven’t learned how to listen yet… They’re either expecting their soul to speak very differently to how it does or they’re filling their minds and lives with the external world, often via scrolling, drama, television, gossip, and news - it’s usually both.

As the healers, guides, shamans and visionaries we have to learn to take soul-aligned action, no matter what, in order to know who we really are.

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.

A profoundly deep healing shamanic experience such as a soul retrieval or a ceremony with a teacher plant can be the equivalent of years, decades or even a lifetime of other modalities, and yet, it’s not a panacea or a magic bullet, or even a replacement for those other modalities.