Yesterday, I listened to five precious souls share their journey of discovering their soul purpose and becoming their medicine (a conversation that we'll share on the podcast soon).

There was a question I asked each of them which was something like “What called you to that journey?”

On Friday evening, I broke my foot, though at the time I did and also didn’t know it was broken (the paradoxical Schrödinger's Cat experience of living through a mythical lens.)

My husband was out and I watched a film with my children, afterwards we decided to dance to one of the songs on the film’s sound track (for those of you who, like me, like details it was ‘Ooh Wee’ by Mark Ronson, Ghostface Killah and Nate Dogg)

In modern spiritual circles, the self often gets a bad rap, and yet, all the while it’s being dismissed and denied, it’s busy running the show.

To clarify, when I say modern spiritual circles, I am talking of forms of spirituality that are 30-50 years old and based in non-duality or oneness in some way, rather than Eastern traditions in which students are devoted to a master, happening within a context in which a cosmology, community, concepts of consciousness, and practices have been baked in for aeons.

This post is one I needed 12 years ago, but then maybe if I had I would have dismissed it, and maybe just upon seeing the title…

• Dismissed it as woo woo nonsense… “shamanic”, “spiritual”, please. Why not throw “astrologist” in for good measure?

Healing isn’t fashionable, it’s not impressive, it’s certainly not cool. It’s no wonder we dress it up in other terms or more often, attempt to escape the need for it altogether, via…

After a long deep inhalation of rest and play in Sicily, I’m back at work today; these are some of the ways I’m breathing in this week…

A massage, an astrology reading, taking Wednesday afternoon off for my soul to drift and dream, a psychodynamic therapy session, and time spent with my tree.

This is what my boss said to me back in my corporate days when I asked him what he thought of the run through of the complex presentation about our digital strategy that I was intending to take to the board.

For all my brains, experience and effort, the thing that stood out to him was my bosom.

Jonathan and I have taught for many years that the greatest gifts are found in our deepest wounds… it’s the underlying principle that our work in our year-long Medicine crucible of guiding people to uncover their soul’s purpose and become their unique medicine is based upon.

“The magic you are looking for is in the work you are avoiding” Dipen Parmar ✨

As much as this is a powerful (and deservedly much shared) quote, if we read ‘magic’ as wealth, success, status, or the dream relationship, and if we read ‘work’ and we think “Perhaps this means I need to hustle harder, or take the leap and hire that coach promising prosperity, or start sharing myself on social media in a way that terrifies me.”… It could be useful to go deeper.

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.

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.

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.

I cried seeing this rose this morning… talk about death and rebirth (as I did in my last post).

This rose had to be uprooted when the old summer house came down in April.

“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.

I met a successful entrepreneur at a party last week, and we got talking about what we do.

Attempting to capture what I do in a few short sentences is foolhardy, so I said something that met the dear man and the precious moment about how Waking The Wild helps people to find and live their purpose.

Today, I walked to the crest of a windswept hill to make offerings to my oak tree in celebration and gratitude of its vital role in me beginning and then completing a commitment - a commitment to a three-year period of intense shamanic initiations.