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.

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”.

(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.

Lately, I’ve noticed the same question spontaneously arising for me… what moves us to generate and transform once we feel so deeply relaxed, safe and abundant that fear is no longer the animating force?

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.

Oak,

you saw it

all.

The girl who didn’t know who she was,

grimacing behind a contorting mask of someone else.

This week has been one of the most intense I’ve experienced for a long time… we’re in the final (final, final!) stages of rebirthing as Waking The Wild, inside and out, as well as every part of our ongoing business needing attention. As Jonathan described it: it feels like we’re surrounded by hungry mouths that need feeding.

I see an Italian tree in front of me. I thought it was a cypress but Google says no.

It calls to mind a summer spent sleeping under a fig tree in Ibiza. A summer of sun, sand, nudity, and living hand to mouth via the medium of art, graft and ingenuity. I was 7.

I’m undeniably open, bubbly, bouncy, full of joy and laughter, sprinkling rainbows and rose petals wherever I go.

If someone were to think the work we do matches my energy, they’d be in for a real shock.

I rarely talk directly about the importance of feeding Spirit, especially the spirits of the land around us.

The reason for this is heartbreaking, it goes directly to the disconnection humans in this modern culture have to themselves, let alone to other humans…

I haven’t shared any photos or details from my burial initiation this weekend, and I won’t be, but thought I’d share just this one with you as the big smile on my face as I make my grave put me in mind Mellissa Seaman’s words when I was a guest on her show…

I am not driven.

I don’t have strong will power.

I’m not Little Miss Commitment.

I’m about as flowing, “Oh look: shiny object!”, changeable, “Oooh, new idea!”, and capricious as it’s possible to be.

As we close the doors to Waking The Wild Medicine ‘22, it felt timely to do a post like this (for the first time since 2019!)