I was on my daily wild wander this morning and appreciating one of the first bright sunny days in weeks… so far 2023, here in my corner of England, has been predominantly grey, rainy, cold and blustery.

Whatever the weather or time of day… I’ve gone out into the wild, day after day, season after season, year after year.

A sneak peek behind the scenes of Waking The Wild today! 👁️

It’s our first day back at work and we’re straight into ‘22 review and ‘23 planning. This year will be a mythical year for Waking The Wild in all the ways!

That means we need to create more intentional structure and support, including…

recently recorded my solo show All The Everything (a monthly variant of the Waking The Wild Show) and the topic was ‘How to be powerful and responsible about your neurodivergent needs and gifts’ - there’s a link to the show below.

The invitation within the episode was to be conscious and sovereign about your neurodivergence… honouring what comes with that, and the wounding that will make that challenging, without making yourself, others or the world wrong.

Here’s what showed up for me this year, and in true Lian-style, it turned out to be all about myth and archetypes…

THE CHILD

I devoted to knowing, loving and listening to my inner child more deeply than ever.

I haven’t chosen a ‘word for the year’ for many years since I realised that I’d reached a point on the path where letting go of that form of (perceived) control of my experience was necessary to go further, and yet, this week little Li asked for 2023 to be the year of the Child: the archetypes of the Child, my inner girl, my actual children, and the inner child of everyone who I’m in connection with.

I interviewed a chap (they might not be a chap and I may have changed some details to protect their identity) for The Waking The Wild Show recently… he is one of those people that folk in the coaching world get excited about… a multi-millionaire, a creator, a trailblazer. There’s much to appreciate and admire about him.

As I said in my last post, my father has been on my mind a lot in recent weeks as I’m descending into yet another Jungian-hewed abyss.

This morning I was pondering how in my spiritual, magical, rewilding circles (where neo-paganism so infuses the water we swim in, even if it’s not directly mentioned) the common refrain of “Solstice blessings!” that will ring out today, takes me back to childhood, a time when my father and his friends honoured the summer and winter solstices, sometimes with all night celebrations in the woods.

Barely a day goes by when I don’t recall or realise a lesson learned from…

my martial arts days

my digital days

my 13-year-old who was obsessed with myths and psychology

A dear friend sent this to me yesterday - it makes ALL the sense to me. 🥰

I’m told on a very regular basis that I’m in my own world or that I exist in my own bubble, and we don’t even need to get into my ‘creative’ relationship to time.

TLDR: we’re closed for business - ish.

As we approach a million downloads of the podcast, our offerings filling up before we’ve barely had the chance to open them for enrollment (sometimes before they’ve even been created) and having to turn people away on an increasingly regular basis… we’ve reached a point in our evolution that is a death and rebirth, beyond what we foresaw.

Like many of you, I’ve practised accepting myself, seeing through the illusion of myself, liking myself, losing myself, transcending myself and loving myself.

And what’s creating the most expansion for me is: being in full, deep approval of myself.

“The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.” Terence McKenna

An important aspect of the work that we do at Waking The Wild, both our own inner work and the work we do with others, is about the words used to create ourselves and the world.

At any one time, the good ship Waking The Wild carries between twenty and thirty souls, depending on the crucibles that are in play, with thirty being the absolute maximum.

The upper limit is fully intentional, based on how many people Waking The Wild can hold so that every person, passenger and crew, can be met in the most powerful, loving and aligned way during their time onboard with us.

It’s so interesting having memories like this come up - ie written before the autism diagnosis in May ‘21.

To a large extent, I’d already accepted my quirks, and the experiences, gifts and challenges they’d created over my life, even though I hadn’t yet fully understood the reason for them.

(I could have waited until it’s 10 years to write this but it felt right to do it now - see #8)

1. Creating a successful business takes time. I remember being about 2 years into running my own business and sharing the challenges with a close friend, she recalled that her father said it typically takes 3 years for a business to become successful, that was so helpful to hear back then. And…

I’ve just realised that I didn’t personally share this episode (link in comments) I recorded with my beloved Lucy Pearce at the time we released it a few weeks ago… it wasn’t a conscious decision not to, I share episodes to my timeline quite rarely, though this was obviously much closer to home than most so maybe there was a subconscious hiding at play.

Growing up with a father with a genius IQ who lived and breathed numbers (he taught maths and physics), when despite my perfectly fine intellect, I struggled with telling the time, telling left from right, or the most basic mental arithmetic (I often use my fingers to count beyond 5 even now), I knew there was something at play.

Before I went to bed last night I was reading a book for the *partners* of autistic women (such an autistic woman thing to do), and then spent my dreams giving three different TED talks on our sensitivities, lack of guile or filter, and our seeming ill fit for this modern material world.

This is one of my most used phrases which has become an iconic and much-quoted Waking The Wild term, so much so, it’s frequently abbreviated to “MfL” (which can also been read as “mother f*cking love” - which actually has much the same energetic!)

Much of the work we do now is guiding magical people from being cookie cutter coaches into being their soul’s unique medicine…. A journey summed up here in a handful of words and yet it can be long and arduous, it requires diving into their deepest wounds and being initiated into their power in ways their soul chose but their human wouldn’t.

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.