My own purpose is guiding others to discover their soul’s purpose and to actualise it, whether that’s through founding a business, creating a non-profit venture, or by honouring it in the work they already do, and one of the things I’ve seen is vital is that we need to honour the time that takes, however long that is.

Soul business is usually slow business 🐌

(Or why we won’t promise you’ll make an easy 6 or 7 figures - overnight or at all)

Word of mouth

Ebb and flow

Easy does it

I sat with a man recently who had sat with ayahausca… We were in the work of integration.

You may know that after a ceremony with a teacher plant it’s considered wise to consciously integrate what occurred.

People are often called to work with me and Jonathan as they're called to or are journeying through life initiations such as a plant medicine ceremony, a dark night of the soul, or a huge change or rupture, such as relationship breakdown, childbirth, job change or loss, ill health or bereavement pulling them in down into its alchemical crucible.

Many people who come to work with us are undergoing psychological alchemy, though they often don’t know that - or not fully, even though they are often experienced facilitators of transformational or spiritual work themselves, for example working as coaches, therapists, and spiritual teachers.

You see life in a different way to most, and you’ve learned to hold back from sharing much of what you see and feel because painful experience has shown you that few can understand or relate.

And so when huge world events are taking place - that no-one can agree upon, aside from agreeing that they’re terrible - you are compelled to hide that you are seeing those events through a different lens altogether.

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.

(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.

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.