It feels like the first day. Of Spring. I have been patiently waiting for this day.

Three times today I have taken the time to sit and fill the temple of my head with birdsong. Once, in my car as I rested before travelling back home. Once at the railway crossing when for a short while I was the only car, and with my engine off the birds took over, windows down. And once back home, in the sunshine, on a wooden banana bench at the front of our house.

And the birds are in couples, collecting material for their nests, in a cycle that has lasted for millenia.

It has been a day of seeking quiet, from early morning coffee and a new book stash in my favourite bookshop (I like to be among the first to arrive at 9 am) I walked along the shore this morning towards the sun, by contrast to my habitual Northerly meanderings, in order to avoid the large loose dogs that were chasing after sticks in the waves (note: dogs very often run up to me at the beach in the UK and some run up barking, which terrifies me and I wish to avoid it) and I therefore noticed that the fragments of earth we call pebbles, tumbled into smoothness by the sea were gleaming like jewels and the foam was advancing and caressing them before shifting them and inviting them back in. These gems exist in what I experience as a magical zone between land and ocean…a zone of flux and transformation.

It’s a zone, ‘the edge’, where I also feel totally at home.

And now inside the house in our library, and my office, silent but for the low mechanical hum of the hard drive, I desire to make the link between magic, the ‘Religion’ of the Minoans, new leadership , psychoanalysis and Yoga Nidra. For this, my friend, is what my book stash revealed.

Can I do this in one article? A tall order, perhaps. But it’s a calling that persists and that I must follow.

Magic, Chris Gosden (1) defines as humans taking part in the universe while it simultaneously ‘influences and shapes’ us. Following Claude Levi Strauss, magic he states is a ‘humanisation of the universe’ a way that the universe ENTERS US and we share in this mutual participation. Astrology is a form of transcendent participation. Alchemy and shamanic shapeshifting are transformative ones and divination a transactional one - both of these forms of magic are MUTUAL and involve a kind of moral relationship of respect and care of and with the world. Some examples of the latter include leaving offerings for the spirits of place, or the oracles revealing the thoughts of the gods at Delphi.

Magic is where humans feel kinship with other beings, the land and the cosmos. A central belief is that we are JOINED.

Side bar - I feel very keenly that when I interact with members of the medical profession today I am regarded as very much a living, breathing, walking collection of biochemical reactions. This, to them, is what life is. This is what is true in the mechanistic scientific worldview in which they have been steeped. And I find it existentially terrifying. I feel separated from my kin like an abandoned orphan. What terrifies me is that I am of no interest to them as a person. I am just a big petri dish.

‘Magic’ by contrast to Science ‘knits us into a dense skein of connections with all other things, living or inorganic’ writes Gosden. I love this image of the skein, the winding of thread, to represent interrelatedness.

Magic immerses us in the world, and places us in direct relationship with it. Science separates us from it and places us in a state of alienation.

Magic is a much older form of knowledge than both rational, mechanistic Science and inherently hierarchical Religion. She is indeed their Mother but they are problematical children which have together given rise to Modernity. Historically, Gosden shows, where magical practices existed human connections were strong and there was no distinction between culture and nature, mind and body…in practice they were interwoven. Thus…craft production would have been a sacred act.

Gosden reminds us that sociologist and philosopher Max Weber pointed out that a process of disenchantment had to take place for Modernity to be born and with this came a sense of loss. I have today felt the grief that is the loss of enchantment.

It is time once more to be enchanted. Everything is animate, sentient, conscious and in relationship when we return to the enchanted garden.

I have been feeling for some time that it is time to return to this garden, the true Eden, not the later version where woman was demonised and diminished. And the people who nineteenth century archaeologist Arthur Evans misleadingly called ‘The Minoans’ have a message for us.

James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis tells us that the whole Earth is a dynamic system for supporting life, which I believe that my ancestors in ancient Crete already knew. They lived a settled life with stored food, communities, multi-functional buildings, trade, scripts and travel.

Oliver Dickinson (2 ) shares a diagramatic representation of ‘Minoan religion as ritual action’. Here, we see that the entire life of the people was in essence an offering and invocation. Since in the Minoan cosmos everything was sacred, life was constant co-creation with the universe through objects and substances both useful and beautiful (clothes, figurines, bowls, vases, cups, plants, food and drink) being used in processions and ceremonies as well as communion with stones and trees in caves and using shrines (in temples and houses as well as in the open air) through dance, music and song as worship. There was no separation between material and divine. In fact it makes no sense as I write this to have these twin aspects of reality as separate concepts.

Much of course remains unknown, in our current understandings of knowledge. There are no written texts (at least not yet discovered) and we are left with various interpretations and theories prone to cultural overlay - some of which I am going to be highlighting in the coming weeks.

But certain forms of knowledge, like magic, are far older than those accessed through alphabetic writing. Indeed some. like Leonard Shlain, argue that the birth of alphabets and linear writing (in lines from left to right or right to left - strikingly the ‘Phaistos Disc’ is both pictorial and spiral) signaled the beginning of separation from Gaia our Great Mother, and the unity and wholeness felt by my ancestors - and the beginnings of war.

‘Relaxation means to be blissfully happy’ - Swami Satyananda Saraswati. (3)

Yoga Nidra teaches us that when the mind is in control, no peace can be found. We know through the original Tantric teachings upon which this ‘relaxation technique’ (in its most reductive form) is based that RECEPTIVITY is enhanced when we enter into a deeper state of consciousness beyond the logical analytical mind giving us a keener intuition and access to the ‘true self’ and creativity. This I believe is the natural magical state. It is interesting that Yoga Nidra arose as a technique designed to return us to what was once a natural state of ‘pure undivided consciousness’ aka UNITY.

We have been long deluded, distracted, separated and as a result grieving, lost and fearful. We have been handed a poisoned package - a story of scarcity and insufficiency that haunts us like a ghost. It is in the whispers of the traumatised and abusers who took it upon themselves to destroy the enchanted garden.

On page 21 of Yoga Nidra on the page about the SANKALPA or resolution of Yoga Nidra I discover a written message on yellow paper with the address ‘Out of Eden’

It goes as follows:

‘Love you

Love your warmth, your smile

The softness of your skin and your warm and gentle heart.

I love you

I love your smile

I love the warm feelings you give me inside when we are together.

I love you for being you X’

It seems to speak to me now, to say to me, to remind me that we are love.

A sankalpa is like a seed of change planted in the mind.

Let ‘I am love’ be my sankalpa.

‘Milk is what we desired first’ writes Terry Tempest Williams in her foreword (4) and ‘blood is what drives the human heart’.

She reminds us that we are elemental by nature and authentic leadership will be born from the bodies of women. This is why I have chosen to work closely with women in this phase of my career. Williams reminds us that the new way will come from ‘a different way of being in the world through presence and instinct and the courage which comes from falling in love with the earth’.

She asks the question:

‘Could it be that the ‘genius of women’ is our capacity to transform the world through creation?’

Which leads us back to magic, to enchantment, and the role of our whole bodied response to life - no longer in separation, longing for union, no longer being a character in a play that is our life outside of our animal body of this earth which leads us away from unity and into transference and projection - and ultimately fascism. (5).

We have a choice now.

The books that chose me to be woven into this piece:

‘The History of Magic’ Chris Gosden, Penguin 2020 (1)

‘The Aegean Bronze Age’ Oliver Dickinson, Cambridge University Press 1994 (2)

‘Yoga Nidra’ Swami Satyananda Saraswati, Bihar School of Yoga 1998 (3)

‘Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart’ Ed. Nina Simons, Park Street Press 2010 (4)

‘Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience’ Christopher Bollas, Routledge 1997

______________________

I would love to know what thoughts if any this has evoked for you. Let’s make it a conversation to be continued.

Leave a comment

I am attempting the impossible

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When words were arrows I would unleash a poem from my bow into the forest of flattened out trees.

When words were darts you dipped them in poison and launched them our way daily leaving us staggering and depleted.

We were beautiful all along but your sharp tongue impaled our longing leaving it hanging like a flailing fish out of water.

My quiver was full and abundantly laden and joyous were my choices as I danced in the glade of my becoming.

But you ignored our beauty, you walked the line alert for infringement of which there were many.

Just being a girl was an infringement – what about the camps and the polished shoes and the neatly lined uniform and tucked sheets? What of this they will not have it.

Our chaos drove you mad.

Another dart then, or how about the steady hand, the fist, to put an end to this living evidence of joy. We were drained of our blood as you danced with your cape of stories and enchantments.

But the seed sprouted roots first and continued to grow strong for its neglect, I watered it with my tears which flowed inwardly, secretly in the dark.

No more arrows for me, no more darts for you.

Only waves washing the shore of forgetfulness.

___________________________________________________________________

This poem began in a writing circle for women that I facilitate. We meet around each full moon. We write from our bodies. And I write along too. Last circle I showed a bunch of dipping pens that I inherited from my father, as part of a bigger collection of fountain pens and biros from a time before keyboards. The poem that emerged used the metaphor of the pens as arrows or darts and then flowers to evoke my relationship with words.

I tried to wrestle the poem into submission, and then mislaid it.

But something stirred this morning arising from my new interest in ‘hydro-feminism’ a subject that lures me in, being a lover of water. And I think it was the sound of the water that summoned my fingers to the keys.

Sometimes we need to let the words have their own way.

But I am grateful for each and very woman who brought their gifts and continue to do so. And the pens opened a door.

If you want to write from your body come and join us - our next circle is in April.

Witness

(or ‘what the garden saw’)

-

Me eating the middles of daisies,

worms wriggling cool against my palm.

Me lifting stones and seeing Spiders

scuttling into coolness and cuckoo-spit

foam on fronds of Mint nodding yes

in the sunlight of my mind. It even sees

inside the house where now the dolls

in their shoe box ship come

spirited through the air

all the way to Czechoslovakia

and alight in the rockery

coming alive in mountains and stories,

magic and all flesh and bone.

-

The cat show with an audience

of one. A gate crasher, a boy

on the wrong side of the fence.

Me throwing a stone at him.

Us as horses, another show,

this time it’s us jumping

over obstacles but never falling.

-

A tidy 4 year-old,

socks pulled up. With birthday

friends, posing for Dad,

smiling while legs stick

to the sun-scorched

blood-red gloss-painted chair.

-

Me lying winded

after handstand-practice gone wrong.

And It’s always summer.

Me, a teenager sunbathing - looking up

at the volatile clouds. Willing

the sky to stay blue. And later,

a lifetime later when I’ve long left home

me lying face down laughing

in wonder at a dying

velvet rose in front of my face

poised between

life and death,

and it’s always summer,

a French Comic Opera

filling the air.

-

I grew up in a tiny universe of inside, outside in the garden, school and holidays in Scotland - and it was always that garden that provided me with solace that was easy to access. The garden that started out as a patch of soil grew as we grew. In this ‘list’ poem I make the garden my witness, because that is what it feels like now. The garden was alive, especially in the summer, and made me feel alive too. It’s where I played pretend as a child, sun-worshipped as a teen and LSD- tripped as a young adult home for summer. I had Radio 3 on in the kitchen and I could hear it clearly even in the garden with the door closed.

I am also bearing witness in the writing to my changing self - with the garden being an arena of magic and transience.

What is revealed? That I am a sensual being open for magic, I lived in a world of the imagination and still do, but I am not perfect - I can react, I can feel defensive. And even in the garden I was not quite free of the events that took place in the house. There was a desire in me to be a performer, and a host. I only ever did a hand stand into crab once - and it was a practice run that did not go well. Maybe that was the start of a weakness in my back. My sister and I taught ourselves by being captive horses to stay on out feet. I still crave a blue sky.

The garden’s final witnessing was part of my chemical initiation into unity consciousness, my parents still at work - when I lay down and laughed at the vivid beauty and absurdity of it all .

I came into the world eager, open and totally accepting - happy to be enjoying another incarnation. And I arrived in a family where the mother and the father did not really know each other - this by the way is far more common than is often recognised or talked about. Especially in the early part of the twentieth century people came together through marriage and then the normal thing to do was to have a few children and raise them with little or no support, unless there was still an extended family but even then the assumption was that the two people had to manage everything alone in order to feel competent - their jobs, the children, the house, the finances and of course the emotional nurturing.

I happen to know that my own parents came together because they were sexually attracted to each other. Sexual attraction in one incomplete human for another incomplete human as the basis of a child-rearing project has its pitfalls. I think I was lucky to be the only child for a while, basking in the novelty of it, but when there were three of us I knew even at the age of six that my mother was not coping. I even ran away from my first day at school and went back home at lunchtime because I was worried that she was not okay. She had no love for herself and with three girls her inner resources were spread very thin. Dad was out at work every day and busy being what a man was supposed to be, she was left alone in the house not knowing what to do. Keeping house and cooking were not her strengths.

I was beginning to learn about what happens when people are not known for who they truly are.

So there we were, two people intimately connected who did not know who each other were, bringing up girls who were not valued for who they truly were, and for what they were becoming - because how can you, if you don’t know who you are? And if you have no idea that there is even such a thing as the true self.

Jungians would say that this is the essentially human journey - one of ‘individuation’ -of becoming who you are when all of the conditioning is removed.

I somehow arrived in this family to discover through lived experience how challenging it was to be me in an environment where no one was understood! I thrashed around for a while because I was only a child and I did manage to play but it was punctuated by periods of puzzling - how can I help these two to be happy? I saw that they were not, and I wanted them to be - not just because I knew that my life would be better, but also because I sensed that there was more to them both than they were able to express. And that sense got stronger and stronger, until eventually all that was left was THE QUEST.

I set off to find the answers to some big questions.

What is life about? What is the right way to live? Is there a pattern to things? Is religion true? What is true?

I searched in Philosophy. I searched in my reading. I searched as an observer of people and through writing poetry, I searched in my early roles in mental health and community work. And when I became a mother, I searched within myself probably for the first time. And once I had fulfilled my sacred contract of becoming a teacher, then a counsellor, I discovered that the problem I had encountered on my own upbringing was replicated culture-wide.

Again and again I came back to something that seemed like the core problem.

Who am I? And who are you?

I was already a qualified and experienced teacher and counsellor when I started up my own business. Teaching was a way that I could create experiences for people that changed the way they understood things, and counselling was a way that I could help them to express what was really going on for them, beyond what was expected of them. But I was frustrated, as a natural question-maker that I was not allowed, within counselling, to ask questions. I had seen how powerful that was in teaching and I wanted to include it in my 1 to 1 work.

Enter coaching stage right.

I hired a coach to help me extricate myself from a 30-year career in education and set off on a self-employed route in my late 50s. As usual for me, not the expected or conventional thing - so no road map existed.

Within only two or three sessions I was able to see that I had a vision.

This was one of those moments we call ‘life-changing’. Visioning was the intervention that I needed because it enabled me to know that I was not just an isolated individual but part of something bigger, and beautiful and important. It was a moment of integration too, when all of my previous experiences made sense as leading me to this unifying vision. Counselling’s main area is the here and now, which has its own power, as I already knew, but I was blown away by how powerfully I was able to connect with what some call ‘the quantum realm of possibility’ which is accessible to us through our bodies and through the power of our imagination.

I resolved to train in coaching so that I could take people there, and completed that in 2018. My big breakthrough moment came when I was, as part of my training, observing a Master Coach live ‘in action’. When she asked her coachee about ten minutes in:

Who are you?

I shivered in recognition. There was a potent silence. I now had permission to ask people the most important question. The question that inevitably leads to other related questions, like:

Why are you here?

and

What really matters to you?

and

What kind of world do you want?

This is the excitement of coaching, that of leading people back to themselves. And knowing that the answers are all inside waiting to be free.

And my work over the past 7 years as a coach has confirmed for me that when this happens, when someone remembers who they are, there is nothing that can stop them achieving what they desire. And I have come to believe, more and more strongly, that each of us does arrive here (once again) eager, open and totally accepting - happy to be enjoying another incarnation.

And then we meet the culture, which is when the re-learning begins, the doorway into the mystery opens.

And if we choose to enter we merge with life itself.

And if this is the meaning of it all - then we are going to need many coaches to guide us through this great transition - back into our purpose, holding our golden visions of how things can be.

I am inviting you this Spring time to meet with me to explore who you are and why you are here at this time and to get clearer on what really lights you up so that you can unite with the creative life force and make changes that matter.

We begin with a free Discovery Call. This is NOT a sales call and I am not going to persuade you into anything. It is simply an offer to begin to open up some doors and windows and to explore your unique situation and some ways forward.

Book a Call

This is the question I was asking myself as I stirred my porridge on the stove this morning. As the oatmeal with its salt and almond milk relaxed with the heat and gently insistent, slow spiraling of the spirtle and released its starches and fibre to become edible, digestible and nutritious a similar process was taking shape in my mind.

Writing - why do I/we do it?

Writing - I take the raw ingredients (experience, memory, language in the form of words) and I place them in a container - the elusive ‘mind’ which I experience as a meeting of body intelligences - brain, heart, belly, skin - and I stir. I let it all swirl.

And then something begins to take form - the alchemy of meaning.

Meaning grounds me, strengthens my roots, reminds me - in a world that offers chaos with no compass - just who I am, and what I came here for.

I am here to make sense and to help others make sense. Without sense-making humans can be dangerous to themselves and others. Without asking ‘why?’ the human surrenders herself to the meaning of others, immediately offering herself to external validation - which comes (or not) at a price.

I write to taste freedom. And I offer my writing classes, workshops and circles as tasting sessions of this freedom.

My work has been story-based from the outset. Anyone in heart-led business soon learns that story - a patterning instinct that humans carry in their DNA - connects us - heart to heart. I have been sharing my stories publicly for almost a decade. I have learned about story from the greatest teachers, and I use story as an instrument. It is a transformational tool, both in the telling and the receiving.

Story creates bonds of recognition between people, which is why it has been crucial in our evolution and why it has become important again.

But Poetry holds a special place for me. Poetry is the ultimate freedom vehicle. Poetry seeks me out and often finds me, urging me to open windows and doors to let in the new. Each poem is like a new room (in fact ‘stanza’ is Italian for ‘room’) of furniture, shapes, functions and textures. And in these rooms magic occurs. We see the world anew, every time. We get out of the ordinary and into the extraordinary and sublime. Poetry is my temple. It has its rituals of word shaping and arranging, of cutting and snipping - inside the flow of meeting and receiving - so that the glorious words can take their places in relationship.

And the most magical ingredient of all that binds poetry and story is metaphor - the principle practice of journeying to the realms of limitless possibility. Metaphor is the language of the imagination. In alchemical terms it is the bridge between matter and spirit. It is the language of the body.

If Potency had a formula it might go something like:

Flow {(Imagination + Sense memory) x (Language + Receiving)} = Potency

And what is Potency? It is the sum of its parts. It is pure potentiality. It is the new kind of power that the world needs - the power to influence change through connection and bonds.

Two key offerings of Potency are the book ‘Food for Roots’, and the ‘Writing to Heal’ circle for women which is currently spiraling through the 13 moons of 2026. Tomorrow - Tuesday February 3rd is our Snow Moon circle.

My experience last night of this full moon was one of revelation - something coming to light. Remembering that the moon’s light is also the light of the sun and that the two celestial bodies that humans have been guided by for a very long time are in a dynamic relationship. They manage the light, hold us on planet Earth. The moon creates cyclic rhythms - the tides of the earth’s oceans and the menstrual cycle of pre-menopause women with wombs.

Here in our part of the UK the sun has been hidden for weeks by dark low clouds, and last night the glow of the Snow Moon was diffused by the mist making it strangely brighter and more shared. I have a sense that we are all still in preparation mode, unable to implement only able to be astonished and even shocked (some more) out of our collective sleep.

Humanity is learning how to be in realationship.

Okay, I have made this ‘typo’ so often now that I now know that I am being nudged repeatedly towards the creation of a new word - and this word is REAL-ATIONSHIP.

It means to be in relationship while being real. Being real let us remember is not the same as being ‘honest’ or speaking with no censor. It actually means to be present without masks or facades. It means to have all of our felt sensations - even the uncomfortable ones - available to our awareness. If we can INTUIT when to express what we are feeling, this can be highly potent in real-ationships, which rely on the development of TRUST. This is why humans are still ‘adulting’ - or as I prefer to say ‘integrating’ - trust is at an all time low. It must come back into play.

And this is why intimate, safe, non-hierarchical spaces where trust can develop - trust in yourself and trust between each other - are needed.

To conclude:

Why do you write?

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This is a question we will explore and share in tomorrow’s circle before allowing ourselves to be guided by our the memories storied in our bodies to write and share a story - a story of how we are becoming who we truly are.

In a sense we are eternally becoming, eternally returning, cycling, spiraling, creating - if we are aligned with the life force. If we catch it and frame it in our own language (our real voice) we create a capsule which contains vital medicine not only for our own healing but that of the world.

I’m tired.

Tired of working on my shadow.

Tired of marketing that trumpets the repetitive message that I need to go the the ‘next level me’.

Tired of group containers that can’t hold me.

Tired of the hundreds of emails I get from Substack. I cannot possibly read them all.

Tired of ‘freebies’ and ‘funnels’.

Tired of feeding the AI slop with my writing.

Tired of late stage Capitalism.

Tired of being split in half just in the very living in it.

Tired of the insanity of world leaders.

Tired of trying to pin down butterflies.

Tired too of the way the human has disgraced itself and how this has created an illusion that the body is weak and it must succumb to something else - the mind, the spirit, ‘source’.

I crave time away, time in the forest, time on the shore.

I crave touch, my own and that of loved ones.

I crave eyes looking into mine.

I crave the sun warming my skin.

I crave clear air.

I crave simplicity.

I crave a clear mind.

I am ready for peace on every level. There are days like today when I feel it will never come…even though I know it’s my joy to feel it and create it.

I am ready to surrender to my imagination - the realm where duality dissolves.

I am ready for poetry to take me in her arms once more.

I am ready Gaia for you to hold my tired body awhile on your porous, pulsing surface.

I am ready for my soul to be made, for my magical child to leap and play in the fields of fantasy.

I am ready for you to whisper sweet truths in my open ear while I curl in the womb of my belonging.

I am ready to dream and let that be enough.

I am ready to let actions be taken by me only from the elixir of the dream that says ‘peace is possible’.

Let there never again be boys in coffins draped with flags - in carriers bringing their shattered bodies home to their mothers.

Let the peace marchers be the Board of Peace.

Let this message be enough.

First of all I have a very important message for you.

Before I go any further, you might like to make yourself a soothing cup of your favourite beverage and set aside 10 minutes to read and digest this.

I’ve come here at this time on Earth to tell you not only that peace is possible, but Paradise is possible - and one possible way is to align ourselves with the life force. This life force that is Regenerative, metamorphosing...and when we do this we become

· Creative

· Purpose driven

· Positive contributors

· More alive!

Peace becomes possible when we are reliant on each other in a web, a mutually supportive network where each person is CREATING something, whether it be useful things such as mini buses or pens, or else they are supporting the creative in some way. Or each of us is creating beautiful things, or useful AND beautiful things.

The people who ask that I tell you this – the so-called ‘Minoans’ - let beauty be their guide...let the feelings of pleasure, awe and wonder be at the centre of experience....and not to deny the presence of death but to welcome it and honour it, not fear it - and yes openly wail in grief about it..these were people who could strip down the bones of their dead family members to assist everyone’s journey to the next phase of existence and celebrate those who bones lay under their houses and were part of their very foundations.

We do not need to defend ourselves against others who are not like us, because we welcome those who are not like us. We learn from them, and we teach them at the same time. We host them, we visit them, and we let them live in ways that are also Regenerative.

To get there we need to engage in difficult conversations. Creating meeting spaces in these conversations and also in physical space...spaces that please the senses, that soothe the spirit, allow ourselves to have our blind spots revealed.

Also the unconscious needs to be made conscious. Lots of work to be done there, through somatics, through our bodies and their wisdom. Through accessing our inspirations and intuitive powers.

This way, war becomes unnecessary. It is consigned to history...so we can remember not the glories of war but the folly, absurdity and absolute cruelty of it. Eventually it becomes unthinkable. We can barely believe it happened when we read the history books.

All activity becomes about life and how to enhance it.

And now a Golden Nugget and reflection point:

One of the Golden Nuggets I received in what was a deeply healing and transformational experience in Crete was this…

We are creating reality, a change of mind, a pivot, a rejection of what feels wrong...leads to truth which is a feeling that we are in the right place. This requires the skill of working with saboteurs and illusionists as well as facilitators and guides that really see us. Recognising what is yours and what is not yours. And what you are sometimes being invited to carry.

And we are co creating it with every encounter. Every act of attending.

We can be in presence with and dance with mountains as well as the ocean. With wells, streams, rivers, lakes. With wind, sun and even rain. With trees and forests. With flowers, birds and beasts. Teachers are everywhere!

I met many teachers in Crete last September, such as the woman in the mini-market and her husband who taught me the purpose of the incense that we were buying to rid of a terrible smell from a dark hole of an air b and b I had booked us into for our last few days. It was not as the photos had suggested, and the host was very defensive, so we tried to ‘make the best of it’ (hence visit to mini market for incense) thinking that nothing else in Stavros was available…even though I was already getting strong messages to leave this place asap from the moment we arrived. The couple explained that the incense required a special disc which you set alight and then place the incense onto it to release its smoke and aroma, and that it was used at funerals. I checked with her that it would not be ‘bad luck’ to burn it at the apartment, then we took it back.

Within an hour of us burning this incense, the need to find somewhere else was so strong that the energy virtually pushed me into opening up my phone to find us a place nearby so that we did not have to travel again, it being 8 pm. And there it was – Mare View. It looked smart, with its view of the sea and minimal clean interiors (minimalism is definitely calling me right now!) I paid for 3 nights immediately and the hosts (two sisters from Chania) got back straight away and said that it was not possible to move in now but ‘would it be ok if they could get it ready for 11.30 pm.’ I said ‘Yes Please!’ and we lay down on the low bed in the gloom…waiting.

Sure enough my phone buzzed at 11.28 and we got in the already packed car and found the new place. What was waiting for us was such a warm, beautiful, genuine welcome from one of the sisters, her son and husband who had been helping her clean and tidy. The place was beautiful, spotlessly clean and had everything we needed, they gave us gifts of cake and eggs from their own hens. I just kept saying ‘wow’ as they showed us proudly around. YES this was a green light of the kind I was guided to follow 4 nights previously.

We had 2 days in Paradise, and the house was just under the mountain, and on the last day I danced in the garden with the mountain and the wind. The perfect last day, a beautiful embodiment of all of the MANY lessons I learned from the teachers both human and more-than human – Crete infused me with new understandings of my Life Purpose.

Do not be satisfied with less. Less than what you deserve and are worth. Less than you need to be you and do you. You are a creator – go and create your next opportunity.

Let go of the less.

Paradise can be found NOW.

Strengthen your intuition, your soul senses, and let that be your guide.

With Love,

Alison

*Trigger warning - references to trauma occur in this piece.

Today is a time to regroup.

I am a hope-holder and I am a pioneer. It is my job to go into spaces which can feel unsafe and connect with the traumatised to find common ground, our common roots. It is my job to understand. It is my job to not lose hope, and I can do this because I carry a memory of what is possible.

I want to start by saying something about the ‘trapped-freedom’ polarity that I believe we are all holding. Essentially we are love, free and eternal - and this is our true nature. We can experience this when we use our awareness to go there – and human beings are re-discovering this now. Once you have been there it is impossible to un-know that the trap is illusory, not real, entirely made-up by the disembodied mind.

We are not suited, this human form which has existed for so long yet so briefly in the universe, for sitting and receiving traumatic images via social media the Internet and TV. In the old days, and I refer to the 1960s, 70s and early 80s, violence was still occurring but pre-internet we were shielded from it - and it was the cultural norm that others who generally we put our trust in - journalists and newspaper editors, politicians, the military - had it covered. (Oh innocent days!)

The recent trauma which was unfolding in America a few days ago was being filmed on numerous phones from various perspectives. The shooter even filmed his victim minutes before he killed her, in one unbelievable twist, so if you’ve been following these events you will have seen that too a young woman in the last moments of her life. I both wish I had not seen this and glad that I did, because I saw hope. Innocent hope, and some fear, is what I saw.

The participants, the actual bystanders filming with their phones and not, and the people watching it unfold on their screens at a safe distance have all been taking part in what is a re-traumatization and also (possibly) the beginnings of a painful rebirth.

I realise now that I have once again been witness to trauma meeting trauma through more trauma. We are all to various degrees traumatised once, twice and more because we live in the modern world with its disconnection, concrete and mechanical processes - its high-rise buildings, its department stores, its guns, its family homes, its cars, its bombs, its bots, its phones . And its narratives too - which we are hardwired to welcome in. We are meaning-making creatures ready for explanations and too ready to be told what to believe, too ready to be persuaded by anything that in some way soothes us and makes us feel something that resembles groundedness. But this is groundedness in the way that Ready Brek resembles oats or a hula hoop resembles wholesome food.

If we can say something like ‘Well… you see/say that because you are a liberal leftie/Trumpist/snowflake/woke/right wing fascist’ then we are buying into the problem we are seeking to fix - which is the phenomenon of OTHERING.

We see this now in attitudes to global migration and nationhood - and we remember the dehumanising of Jews, travellers and the disabled in the build up to the Holocaust. We see it in the long established existence of racism born of colonial practices and ideology. We see it in the essentialism of traditional gendered roles.

The narrative of othering goes - ‘If she is (X – inset preferred label) then she is not like me and I am safe. I can put her over there behind that barrier/ in that detention centre/ in that gas chamber. I can then justify it with my own disgust and hatred of myself turned onto them’.

People are already traumatised and now they are carrying the anxiety of the remembering of whether they will be ‘next’.

In essence this anxiety is ancestral and very ancient. It arose is a result of population growth when tribes conceived of life as a competition for scarce resources. The first weapons turned on other humans came from this era. We have to ‘other’ to use a weapon to maim, torture or kill. We all carry this memory of being ripped form our life source and we feel it as part of being human to various degrees. Only now it is the basis of the manifestos of populist political parties wherein they feel the power it gives them to pursue a purist (and ultimately genocidal) agenda.

I notice that ‘empathy’ is being used instead of ‘sympathy’ in some of the discussions being had. I was asked the other day if I empathised with paedophiles - and I said ‘yes’. I explained that because at a core level they are human I can empathise, as I can with any damaged human, but this is in no way condoning that behaviour which is abusive and damaging. I empathise with them at the level of their primordial being. This primordial being is not the same as what anyone does, or what they are called or what feelings they evoke in others.

And it’s what’s considered to be abusive and damaging that’s at the heart of what is now a searching for shared values.

Consider the following list:

· a prisoner kept in solitary confinement in a small cell

· a goat being strapped up and scraped with a sharp metal comb for its soft underfur so that we can have cashmere

· a murdered woman being blamed for her own murder and her wife living with that

· a woman being kept prisoner at home by a male partner

· a child being repeatedly belittled and ostracised at school

· an armed officer of the law telling a woman to ‘get the F out of the car’

· a child being physically punished for being naughty

· prisoners with bags over their heads

· children forcibly removed from their parents

· cows hung up by their legs in abattoirs alive before they are killed

I won’t go on, though I could, listing the many ways that humans abuse other beings, but the point being that some of these things are deemed acceptable in this modern world.

Where do we begin to unravel all of this and to even begin to build a better life for all humans and animals?

There are many ideas.

We might, for example, begin to breathe and live from our bellies instead of our heads. The belly is a fundamentally loving and unconditional space. It is where we can feel an incredible sense of freedom and openness. It is also a part of the body that women have been taught is disgusting, and has to be flat and invisible. The head often can be the opposite.

Brain-based living divorced from the rest of the body has caused the mess we now see.

If after connecting with our bellies we then took off our costumes (our clothes) and our masks (our egoic personas) and sat in circle with people we have ‘othered’, and we were asked to start again, what would happen?

What about something practical that we can immediately implement for ourselves? (- Please note that these are measures offered here as foundational activism, not solutions in themselves, ways of coming back to who you truly are so you can operate from that position without causing further trauma for yourself or others, and each is offered as an opening). You may have heard some of these before, and if you have you will know how simple yet challenging they are.

· live without screens for a day or even a week (or longer)

· read physical books

· write with pen and paper

· move your body

· be aware of your body

· breathe with your belly

· lead from your body

· somewhere warm, spend a period of time without clothes. Or maybe a loose robe without underwear or anything else constricting any part of your body

· lie on the ground

· make the effort to see someone beyond your mind’s ideas about them and just see what happens

In our regrouping, how will YOU begin again?

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Fundamentally I believe that this life is an opportunity to grow and to learn through a series of adventures.

This is a story of how a confused, lonely, disembodied, clever young woman found peace, meaning and community and opened the door to the fulfilment of her purpose.

Flash back to late Autumn 1985. She had looked for answers in Western Philosophy, and while this was enjoyable had found only more questions. She had dabbled in various growth modalities, read Hesse, Sartre and Maeterlinck. She had taken a psychedelic journey and had a 48-hour experience of unity. All of these things helped, and indeed formed parts of the mosaic she was, but nothing reached her confusion. And now she was facing her biggest challenge yet. She was carrying a child inside her, and her relationship with the father of her child was far from harmonious or supportive.

‘What shall I do?’ was her first question.

She had been trained to think, so she started to think it through. But this only led to complications, tapped into her fears and created frightening echoes in the chasm of her lonely heart.

But one day, when buying muesli and soya milk from a city heath food store, a notice got her attention.

‘Weekly Zen Meditation

Nourish your mind. Rest your nervous system. Feel more balanced.

Join our gentle, grounding Zen Meditation Group — a weekly pause designed to support calm, clarity, and overall wellbeing. Perfect for beginners and experienced meditators alike.’

She was called. She was activated. Keen, curious, drawn. She knew. She did not hesitate, as soon as she got the chance, to ring the number of the leader of the group (this was the 80s, no internet). His voice on the phone emitted a warm calm she had never heard before. She felt it cocooning her soul. It was sealed.

Her boyfriend scoffed. He did not believe in anything and was suspicious of this - ‘Zen’ - was she joining a cult? Getting into religion? It was delusion. Her knowing cancelled out any potential influence of his controlling (and fearful) doubt.

The room was in the attic of a Georgian terraced house in a upmarket, stimulating and studenty part of the city. In the hallway was a tidy arrangement of assorted shoes. She took her own off and added them before padding up the three flights of carpeted stairs until she heard gentle voices in conversation coming from a slightly open door.

Seven or eight men and women sat on the floor in a circle. Around the edges of the room were strange little benches with slanted seats and round black cushions. Some of these were under the skylights, and it was to a cushion that she gravitated when the time came to meditate.

Everyone took their seats. The leader rang a small bell, which was the signal to become silent and to concentrate on simply breathing. Guided by his soothing voice she felt the waves of her own breath rising from what she would come to know as her root, it was a space below her vulva, below the cushion, and even below the house itself and she drew it up over her head and back down again into the ground below. Her baby settled, ceased playing football with the wall of her womb. A series of cycles and then came the song which seemed to flow effortlessly from the breath. Each voice sang in unison and the sound vibrated in her body:

‘Buddham saranam gacchami
I go to the Buddha for refuge.
Dhammam saranam gacchami
I go to the Dhamma for refuge.
Sangham saranam gacchami
I go to the Sangha for refuge.

Dutiyampi Buddham saranam gacchami
For a second time, I go to the Buddha for refuge.
Dutiyampi Dhammam saranam gacchami
For a second time, I go to the Dhamma for refuge.
Dutiyampi Sangham saranam gacchami
For a second time, I go to the Sangha for refuge.

Tatiyampi Buddham saranam gacchami
For a third time, I go to the Buddha for refuge.
Tatiyampi Dhammam saranam gacchami
For a third time, I go to the Dhamma for refuge.
Tatiyampi Sangham saranam gacchami
For a third time, I go to the Sangha for refuge.’

This intention to go for refuge to something beyond herself was immediately comforting, enfolding her in an embrace. Her voice was faltering at first and she tried not to be heard by the others but when she felt the rhythm she grew more sure and joined with the other voices to form one monophonic sound composed of different voices united in their longing. The repetition meant easy memorising, again very little effort. The reliability that the song would be sung provided safety that she had never, until now, felt.

The sound of the singing was joyous, peaceful and infused with a deep yearning which she felt arising in her every time they sang and which the song both touched and soothed. And then they fell into silence facing outwards, together yet alone, and she felt the arising and passing away of her thoughts without chasing them - how beautiful that they came and went just like the clouds she saw framed by the skylight from her seat on the floor. From that point on her mind, that had been at times like a pan of writhing scorpions, would become sky and her thoughts become ever-shifting clouds…and later she was to understand that her emotions could create the weather - a storm, a mist, a calm sunny day…

And then followed the walking meditation - her favourite part of the session. How beautiful, how harmonious to walk with others in a circle, slowly feeling each part of each step, the parts of the feet that contributed to the whole movement - heel to toes, heel to toes, walking lightly on this earth, treading softly in presence, being here - all of her, with others and no need to talk. Just walking. Moving her body with awareness in a shared space.

After this was the tea. The clinking of the metal spoons against delicate white china cups, the sweet aroma of steaming lemon verbena, the quenching of thirst and the silence from which voices found their places.

Just drinking. Just talking. No biscuits. Just tea. And taking care over what was said. All of the speaking was quiet and kind and seemed to come from a remembered and ancient place.

Ritual. Repetition. Routine. Reliability. It was not long before the combination of these things brought the peace, simplicity and clarity that she had been longing for - and not the loss of her self as she had feared, or at least not the loss of her persona - the behaviours, the habits and the beliefs that made up this way of being in the world that she had unknowingly considered to be true and real and brought unnecessary pain and suffering that she herself had created for herself! How wondrous to discover this! And not as words in a book but through lived experience. Not the loss of her persona but something else - the relaxing of her into something far more free and expansive.

And as the practice of coming together in the weekly space developed, she realised that it was also the the people and the gentle, unhurried facilitation of the leader that created for her another feeling she had lacked - belonging. This was, for now, her community.

Together they visited a local monastery and she found how everything ‘ordinary’ was a sacred ritual - the shelling of peas, the stripping of wallpaper, washing one’s own bowl straight after eating. Eating itself - with no talking - took the attention onto every bite, every mouthful, the smell and taste and texture on the tongue of the food, the swallowing - and there were the peas she had shelled, moist now in their sauce and ready to go onto her spoon. She was finding beauty and wonder everywhere. It just needed ATTENTION. It was amplified and deepened by COMMUNITY.

And there were the teachings. She had been wrestling with a question of how to peacefully demonstrate against nuclear weapons. Was not anger the enemy of peace?

Her audience with the Abbott, one auspicious day, brought the teaching that there was no contradiction and it was the mind that created duality. She was realising how her mind had become so powerful it had actually trapped her. She was discovering that her body sought harmony and bringing it into partnership with the mind had this miraculous effect of making problems not disappear but become NOT PROBLEMS but teachings - of the whole being. There was no trap.

She bought her own cushion from the monastery shop and took it home, along with a small poster which called to her and is still on her wall over thirty years later:

‘When we wish to teach and enlighten all things by ourselves we are deluded.

When all things teach and enlighten us we are enlightened.’

This koan* by a teacher called Dogen Zenji became a philosophy that nestled at the heart of her own work and practices.

This young woman was already a poet who came with a love of words and went on to train as a teacher, then a counsellor then a coach. She eventually became an elder, as we all do if we are fortunate enough.

She was soon to give birth to a boy that would become a gentle, loving man, she was soon to discover what modern people call ‘The Goddess’ and to experience a connection to her ancient ancestors and their stories. She was four years from travelling to their land of Crete. She was later to marry an artisan baker and lover of mountains, experience more awakenings, meet more teachers, run retreats and women’s circles and publish a book of poetry. She would have many glorious adventures.

But for now her mind was quiet, she had reclaimed her body and she stepped easily into her own future, and with the knowing that peace can be found when you root into meaning, ritual and community. She carried the truth from then on that the larger story of which she was part is that we need a shared quest, a philosophy that makes sense and embodied practices.

She wove and she wove this into everything she thenceforth did.

She knows (and perhaps has always known) the solutions for the loneliness and confusion that is now a part of modern living - and she offers these now as part of her work, her sacred work. She was later to discover another element of her work - of recreating paradise. This is the work she was born to do.

What is the work you were born to do?

What stories led you to here, and now?

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*koan - a paradoxical statement or question designed to provoke insight.

Hermanne Hesse - ‘Siddartha’ (1922)

Jean-Paul Sartre - ‘Nausea’(1938)

Maurice Maeterlinck - ‘The Life of the Bee’ (1901)

(Poems by my Dad, Maurice and typed by him using my toy typewriter)

When the fog of time recedes I see my Dad sitting at his writing desk. And I realise that his aspirations - his poems, his degree halted half way through, his letters - are now, and have always been, my achievements.

I can’t remember what age I was when I asked for a typewriter for Christmas but the typewriter that arrived - a Mustard Yellow plastic ‘Petite’ toy typewriter - was made in the 1960s so I think I may have been about 8, 9 or 10.

It was not what I wanted, I wanted a real typewriter, an adult one. I did not feel like a child, so I felt a surge of disappointment upon initially opening the wrapped parcel containing it. I did not want to play with a typewriter, I wanted to be a writer! However, my parents had done their best so I soon discovered that I could still get a thrill from making the words that continually danced around in my head real, and permanent in a way that my handwriting was not. I remember the excitement of rolling the sheet of paper into the rubber platen and the joy as my words tapped out noisily clattering their arrival into the world letter by letter. It felt magical.

Around about that time Dad was also writing - poems, and most memorable of these a trio of poems each about his three daughters where he proves that he sees them, even though his pride was never explicit. Curiously, after he had penned this seminal work, he used my typewriter to make them real.

It was like he was one step behind me all of his life in terms of writing but at the same time dragging me back with his own deep lack of self-belief. So I became a kind of vessel for his deepest ambition, and because it was important to please him I fell into this role very well.

Deep, deep, down Dad wanted fame. He wanted to be a singer, or even a film star. He wanted to make records and be heard and mentioned on the radio. He wanted to grace stages. He admired the songs of Gershwin and Cole Porter, and loved the balladeering of Frank Sinatra. In his youth Dad was just as handsome, if not more so, than Sinatra. He used to tell a story about his first job at the labour exchange when crowds of girls would gather to see the new stunning employee behind the counter. In those days though he was shy, and so his artistic self-expression took the form of private poems. He also loved to draw, and his quick pen and watercolour sketches showed considerable ability. Once we had all left home he took to going to art classes where I am sad to say he lost his spontaneous style in favour of chocolate box mediocrity. Despite that, his sense of colour and perspective still shone through.

My sister Amanda took up the baton of the brush and I the portal and the pen.

When we holidayed I would keep a written account of what we had done, because it felt important to record the new and wonder-filled things that were outside of the norm of our usual conventional existence in a little box of a house on a 1960s newbuild estate on the outskirts of the drab mining town where he had grown up. Trips to the beach, tea rooms, museums, country houses, gift shops and wild trails. These holidays in Scotland exposed me to nature and aspects of culture which fascinated me equally.

These holidays, and writing, were liberation to me.

Now that Dad in his 90s is slowly losing himself in a care home it seems important that I capture a sense of what he was, what we were, in these dark grey days before the New Year of 2026, and in doing so edge towards what we could be even as we carry these origin stories of how we were made.

As I finish this piece I have broken off to take a delivery. A box of 30 books – my book, 30 copies, ready to sign and send to women who want my words. And this time, there is no misprint on the last page, they are ready to go out into the world.

And Dad-as-he-was would have been proud I think that Alison has published a real book, and Amanda’s art work is the basis of the cover.

And I also wonder what I am still holding back from, and what do I still have time to do?

Last night I dreamed that I was in a wood and I had to collect branches as a part of some kind of quest - dead branches shed by trees, branches that were a branch-too-many, and the many lying dead on the ground.

There was a song that went with this, barely known even to the wise keeper of the branches-no-longer-needed but he sang a remembered part to me which I once again forgot minutes after waking.

I felt the invitation to write the song (even though I have forgotten it) brush against my skin like Goblin's Gold on my bare arm as I edge along the cave wall in the dark.

Goblin’s Gold is a moss that makes its home in deserted ruin and cold crevice. It dazzles in the dark when caught by even the faintest of light. It feels safe and feather-soft. It is determined - to be green, not to become invisible in the hidden and unvisited places and to be seen by feeling.

‘Write me’ - it whispers.

Where we live, each of the four farm cottages has a tree guarding it. Ours is Lime, provider of cloth, soothing tincture and drum shells. At the threshold of Winter she had her branches pruned and I grieved for the loss of her weeping canopy, her green hair that in Summer offers shade and a comforting shadow oscillating to the rhythm of the breeze on the floor of the bedroom as I prepare for possible insomnia.

These reachings that are branches, the support that are branches, the evidence of growth that are branches…this quest asks me to compile a store of things no longer needed - as fuel for a fire on a long, cold dark night and as fuel for the New Year that is rising like a new wave of possibilities.

Things I no longer want to reach for, types of support I no longer need and growth that is done. Modernity urges us to grow forever and never to feel complete, Nature invites us to feel into what we can shed so that we can grow to shed again. The letting go is part of the growth.

I invite you to reflect on what is already fully grown, what branch or branches are good and healthy right now? And also to feel into that half-remembered song of collecting the dead wood from the living trees.

Listen carefully to your dreams right now as we approach not only 2026 but also the Wolf Super Moon, because your dreams always complete you and are your deepest needs calling you.

On January 2nd we meet to write beneath the moon and I invite you to bring light and welcome the dark which is the intimate partner of light. I invite you to feel, to become the flickering flame, fierce AND fragile, borne of the dark, bringer of illumination.

And we will share what has been illumined, what has been gathered, so that we can offer it to the world.

What will you write?

I am calling 13 women to join me – read on if you are curious…READ ON

(by the way I am not ‘against’ men it’s just that I work with women right now for reasons I shall soon write about)

The meta-crisis is a term being used to describe the complex web of interrelated problems for the planet and her beings facing us as a species, all of them caused by us as a species. Global warming, extinction of animals, polarisation of political and religious ideologies and the violent defence of them, the cruelty and loss of empathy as scapegoats are sought, population growth, continuing inequality of access to health care, education and resources…to name but a few… all cry out for a starting point INSIDE the human being. Until the way humans feel, think, feel and behave changes ‘we’ will continue to exploit, attack and ignore the problems until we do not exist anymore as a species but before that we will all struggle as never before.

One way that writers who care about this, and whose spiritual work is to help humans change, can address this urgency is by finding new ways of expressing through the written word that use emotion, physical intelligence, intuition and direct embodied experience using the senses as inspiration.

So if you are

- A writer

- A caring human deeply concerned about how we are doing

- Sensitive and brave enough to feel what you are feeling

- Doing purpose-driven work that leads to inner change

My new writing circle is for you.

The biggest ‘why’ is outlined above.

What you will get by joining is

- a compassionate set of witnesses,

- a safe space to say new things and reach new understandings

- accountability,

- a ritual of showing up.

Together we are stronger. Together we will write our way to new truths and find new ways of expressing these truths. Together we will be able to face ambiguity and complexity and not feel pressure to look for premature solutions but more FEEL our way to new insights that we will excavate using the word.

We will meet online at or around each of the 13 full moons of 2026, on Tuesdays or Fridays, between 5 and 7 pm GMT/BST.

I will facilitate the space by sharing an exercise (creative, somatic, intuitive, meditative, voluntary) to inspire you into writing on the month’s theme. I will also share quotes from what I am reading, and book recommendations along the way.

Crucially there will then be sharing of things written and/or reflections on the process.

If you have a Substack you can use the circles to generate new material for your writing. Or if you are new to the platform you can maybe begin to write on what I am finding an intelligent, polite and calm place full of interesting people who want to change things in favour of peace.

It is happening via Substack and on Zoom.

So what you need to do is set up a monthly subscription to my Substack (£25 per month or £250 per annum) to gain access to all 13 of the circles and exclusive community discussions.

I can now confirm that the dates of the circles will be Friday 2nd Jan, Tues 3rd Feb, Tues 3rd March, Friday 3rd April, Friday 1st May, Friday 29th May, Tues 30th June, Fri 31st July, Fri 28th Aug, Fri 18th Sept, Fri 23rd Oct, Tues 24th Nov, Tues 22nd Dec. There will be recordings of the sessions if you cannot attend all of them.

We will come together to hope, to vision, to express, to mourn, to celebrate, to laugh, to rage, to experience, to write, to be silent, to speak…all in the service of conscious and authentic new ways of expressing.

If this interests you I am happy to chat further or take the time check out Potency to feel the vibe before deciding if you want to go deeper.

My Love,

Alison x

My relationship with stones has been a lifelong one.

As a child I would get down on my honkers on the shoreline offering my root and my hands to the stone beings which have always felt alive. I would communicate with touch, primarily, and I feel now that I was desiring something older, much older, for me to be kin with.

It took me a long time, following trauma at age 13 which severed me from my body, to be reunited with the stone beings. It needed a long journey of decades back home to my roots, connecting again to where I felt at home on the larger rock on which we all live. And then I began to feel their messages with my hands as they spoke through me.

When the stones speak…

It’s a kind of noticing how we fit in and around each other.

It’s a love of holding and being held.

It’s a feeling of kinship reaching out from Mother Gaia who supports us all.

They speak of their wild homes and their cosmic origins.

They shrink me down to the size of an atom.

They expand to the size of a planet.

They invite us into our oldest relationship.

They speak our remembering.

When the stones speak I am holding them in my hand, or making of them a bed and we get close. I listen through touch.

They connect me back, body to body.

Body of stone, body of flesh - and bone.

It’s a journey back.

They speak through me.

A fissure is a line of breakage caused by and created by cracking, splitting and a reformation into a long narrow opening. A cracked or split rock is an opening into something else.

When I was cracked into the gap between my head and my heart/gut my head escaped injury and soon after began what became years and years of sense-making while the rest of my body ceased to feel, ceased to sense the world. It was an event of splitting and a rupture so fierce that it opened me into understanding how conquest and violence as power is perpetuated.

I soothed myself by singing the hymn ‘All things bright and beautiful’ - feeling the hum of remembering through the words ‘bright’ and ‘beautiful’ and linking me back to what I have always known.

That we will return to the garden, and this time it will be very different.

The book is born and I am waiting for a delivery of 30 special copies to be signed and posted out in time for my launch next week.

Meanwhile Food for Roots the book has given birth to a circle! She is indeed a mother.

The roots in the title are your connection to the life force. These are roots that are needed if we are not only to survive but thrive as a species and emerge into a world of beauty and abundance for all. I am sensing the need for sustenance and so - ‘Food for Roots: Writing to Heal’ is born today after a shortish gestation.

It’s a space to be real, seen and heard.

Where healing is wholeness.

And where writing is revelation.

It’s a monthly circle where we write together and in the writing come to wholeness, to nourish your roots.

And you can bring your different selves - all are welcome here.

The world is in a human-made crisis – the meta-crisis – so called because all aspects of society are decaying and all are interlinked.

It is becoming difficult for those passionate for peace to have a voice, and to be brave enough to speak out when injustice and judgement is witnessed. It is challenging at times to maintain hope, optimism and resilience when it seems that we are experiencing a collective insanity where radical voices are being shutdown alongside any talk of how we might find common ground.

To strengthen your unique connection.

I have created a sanctuary for you.

All aspects of being a multi-faceted, sensitive, creative human are welcome here.

A space where you can come as you are – come with your joy, your rage, come with your curiosity, come with your grief, come with your passion, your projects, come with all of you with no need to perform or mask.

A space where you will feel safe enough to tap into your creative well to access the unexpressed. In freeing this conduit we heal ourselves and are more adept at doing our work in the world.

A space where you will meet others on the journey of total transformation.

This is for you if you have a fire inside you for change – you may be running a heart-led business, you may be a facilitator of change in your area of influence – you deeply desire to change the world through your work and you are feeling the urgency of this.

This is for you if you need a space to play with ideas, to find expression for all of the swirling thoughts and ideas that visit you each day.

Here you have the space where you will create what you need to – whether that be poems, material for your book, to process or simply to journal - all in the deeply supportive company of others.

How will it work?

I provide a stimulus – it might be a current issue that I am feeling is affecting us, a piece of inspirational writing, a channeled message, a meditation that I lead, or simply a powerful question – whatever the prompt you will be gifted an exercise to catalyze you into writing from the deep well which is your connection to the earth and cosmos, the deep well which is your imagination and your muse. Then we write together and there will be space for sharing.

What makes this different to other writing circles?

Safety is my number one priority. In order to express while transforming we need to feel safe – to feel accepted not judged, to feel seen not taken for granted, to be valued not overlooked, to be known and not be in disguise.

When we have things to say that are transgressive, new, tender and maybe even wild there is a level of safety required where we can relax enough to let these necessary voices emerge.

This is an evolving space, while every session has a structure for you to flow into.

I have decades of facilitation of creative spaces where the hidden voices and the dormant messages can come out to play – in poems, in prose, in drama, in innovative new ideas.

And recently I have overcome a lifetime’s fear of judgment by self-publishing a collection of my poetry, and fulfilling a childhood dream. I feel more liberated and potent then ever.

What change-makers have said:

‘With you I feel safe enough to open the door to commune with the world/universe and write that down’ Resa, Sound Resonator

‘It’s very much felt like a cocoon this week, through the ritual of being in circle and the ritual of writing poetry the days felt very blessed –I feel a safety. The group felt safe, so I felt Safer in myself. It’s been quite profound’ Emily, Attachment Coach

‘thank you for helping me recover, renew and grow a sense of my identity as a poet and perhaps even a guide for others.’ Lisa, Author and Story Coach

‘This experience is taking me home to myself, but it’s a me beyond any prior self-concept.’ Jan, Teacher and Writer

‘My voice has grown’ Kez, Author - Performance Poet - Weaving Words Facilitator - Eco-Therapist - Speaker - Events Organiser - Voice Over Artist - Actor

‘Now I have many ways to connect, channel, nurture, celebrate my unique divine fractal expression of the universe.’ Esther, Personal Development Therapist.

‘It was a joy to see everyone’s work, and to hear so many voices. Thanks Alison for keeping us all safe in that wonderful sacred container.’ Alison Jones, Poet and Teacher

All sessions will be on Zoom.

We begin on January 7^th.

4-6 pm GMT

Early Bird payments are £25 pm or £250 for one year.

Simply resubscribe as a paid member, and also get access to the community of writers.

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By setting up this subscription you become a paying member of my Substack Publication ‘Potency’ – which is a practice where I align with the life force itself and write – and I share the writing so that you can be you AND create regenerative impact which honours the wide web of life, of which you are an essential part.

In the circle I share this practice and it is my intention to help you amplify and liberate your true voice in service.

Let us meet and see what is ready to emerge in 2026!

From my heart to yours,

Alison

I am in a relationship with my new book.

At first the patriarch inside shouted at me, twizzled self-doubt into my mind, told me stories of rejection and failure. And for a short while I believed those stories again, because after all they have stopped me from sharing my poetry with a wider audience for decades. All of my life so far, that is.

As I have said in another post, I decided to self-publish for deeply political reasons. If I believe that every woman, and indeed every man and every imaginative person who is a challenge to the dominant narrative has a right to share their message and indeed needs to share their message then I have to ‘embody’ that belief.

Little did I know that embodying it would take me into this relationship - with many layers that keep on being revealed in a magical, mysterious way that has its own kind of timing.

The actual process of making the book online (before it became a physical thing) was at times agonising. Choosing the cover design was the most difficult - I had so many to choose from and all were subtly different. Choosing the poems was not difficult, and it was hugely enjoyable, but it was not straightforward. The collection was evolving from the moment I had the idea…and was still doing so when I sent off my first draft. Luckily fortune smiled and gave a way in to other poems I had rejected…and suddenly they wanted to come in! At first it made no sense - why these ones? But once I had sequenced them in one of the three sections they were perfectly placed! The poems themselves are a community of kindreds, and found each other in a months’ long process that I seemed to be the conductor of.

At various points Patriarch and I had a conflab that went along these lines -

Him - ‘Well Alison, you do realise that you are going to be criticised don’t you? How will you handle that?’

Me ‘Well Pat I can see that you are panicking somewhat but I actually want this - feel with me what desire actually is for a moment - can you feel how it will be to speak to people through a permanent book?’

He began to salivate and a weird expression came over his stern face that made him look like he was softening into more of an irksome grimace.

I continued.

Me - ‘I realise Pat that you are an expert at criticism - indeed you invented Literary Criticism - and I have learned so much about it from you. But what I want you to know is that I have learned those lessons now and I know I will be criticised but now I know that it does not matter. It will not destroy me because I am not the book’

His mouth stopped working. We agreed to go ahead.

And when the first proof copies arrived I ripped open the parcels to run my hands over them, smell their woody insides, caressed and turned their tempting pages.

It was love. It was desire realised.

We met, we were in love.

She is…beautiful.

Pat had a go more or less immediately ‘Urgh …the cover feels a bit rubbery - in the way that self-published print on demand books often feel’ he scoffed.

I believed him for a brief moment and then I got to see that what was to him rubbery felt to me more like velvet, or suede as one of my kindred souls suggested.

As the days sped by the books took up various positions in the house.

And I ‘realised’ that the feeling that made me skip down the hallways of my mind was that I felt REAL.

This physical book was real, we were real. The community of poems that were in relationship with each other was also real. It was ‘manifest’. A love fest.

I remembered the Minoans again. And how they were in real-ationship with the whole world as they experienced it. And I remembered how they have guided me to this moment in my life and in my work.

‘This has to be said, in a way that only you can say it.’

I would love to meet you in Substack if you are reading this in an email - where we can continue this dialogue about the transformative effect of books, and poems. Just click on this link:

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I have designed the book as a process that the reader can enter into. I know all poetry books do this, and I love this about them I really do. But I wanted to make it easy to enter into the process - a process of becoming the world you want to see.

One thing that the book does is it really gave me as way in to express my multi-faceted ever-changing nature. A poem is a living thing, a person even. A person who speaks to the deeper parts of us, the as-yet-unconscious. And it’s so thrilling how they have gathered in this waiting room ready to meet you!

I am in the process now of opening up and receiving loads of ideas - things the poems want to do. Events, people to meet, conversations to open up…have all come flooding in like a healing balm, or a writer’s wet dream.

I am inviting you all to an online launch on December the 12th at 6 pm, where I will read some of the poems and talk about my life with Food and Roots, introduce her to you, and to what has changed now she is in the world.

‘How wonderful life is, now you’re in the world’ (I used Elton John’s line there, from ‘Your Song’ with a word changed.)

PS I will share a link here in December the 11th where you can buy the book if you wish, if you feel the call to go deeper into your relationship with change. Or, if you message me or come to the launch you can receive a personal signed copy of the hardback!

Now, tell me, what or who are you in real-ationship with right now?

And comment below of you’d like to come to the launch and I will send you your free ticket!

These Wings

(after Sappho Fragment 31)

These wings will not melt

On contact with the sun

For they are the heart’s desire.

Letting our love fly right into it

We are forever sustained, burning,

Smouldering, oozing, melting.

-

Mending these wings

With balm of voice,

Sealing this intimate letter

With the infinite longing

Of my promise.

-

All will be dared.

-----

There are eight meanings listed in OED’s entry for the word ‘wayward’ and none of them are positive. So what was I to do with a collected Kafka, which Dad had given me as a Christmas gift and had written ‘To My Wayward Daughter. M’ on the inside cover?

True, I had gone against his wishes, and this was just the latest in a whole string of disobedient acts going back into my childhood. And yes I am proudly to this day ‘self-willed’ in the meaning that I am a self and I have a will and generally though I value advice I do not always follow it if my own inner wisdom tells me otherwise. But perverse? The connotation of the perversity and wrongness of being self-willed, and going against expected behaviour has been embedded in the word since its inception in the 1700s. It’s a word that peaked in frequency in the nineteenth century, then dipped only to rise again in the 1970s. Generally, ‘wayward’ people have been labelled as insane, castoffs, callous and indifferent.

Clearly he was not pleased. My father expected to be obeyed. He saw himself as the arbiter of right action, and any thing other than what he advised was considered deviant.

‘Deviant’ was a word I used to describe myself in the 1970s when I spent 2 years studying Advanced Level Sociology at school. Durkheim’s theory of deviance made a lot of sense to me, and I liked that it was a thing. I wrote it in black ink on my pencil case. I was already aware that I was not one for blindly following rules.

He really struggled, I see now, with my emergence as an autonomous adult.

If we had been able to have a grown up discussion it might have gone something like this;

Him – So Alison, tell me why you have decided to leave your University studies to go and live with your boyfriend?

Me – Well it’s like this Dad. I have been struggling with the Leeds course, and though I miss him* (*my then boyfriend who was studying in Liverpool) my main reason for leaving is that the course is not suitable for me. There is a lot of logic and I find it difficult and not important. I have discussed it with my tutor and he suggested that I must follow my heart but not burn my boats and return to a new university at some point in the near future. So I have decided to get a job in Liverpool and maybe apply for their Philosophy course next year.

Him - ah yes I see, I did not realise that you had a plan. Well you have my blessing dear, I know you will choose well for yourself. Let me know how I can support you.

As it was, he gifted me the Kafka book (while telling me what he thought of me) and then neither of my parents spoke to me for 6 months. They gave me the silent treatment as a form of punishment. So instead of having his and their support I made my own way – first by getting a job in a theatre, then by successfully applying to study Philosophy at Liverpool University. All while sharing a series of flats with my boyfriend and having a brilliant cultural and intellectual adventure with some drugs thrown in and trips to the Welsh and Cumbrian mountains in his fur-lined Morris Minor Van.

At weekends or nights I would stand in the street waiting to use the red public phone box with my coins at the ready while some other student had a very long conversation with their parents. On one occasion he asked me what we had been doing in Philosophy and I told him innocently and maybe somewhat provocatively that we had been discussing whether the table in the seminar room that we were sat around really existed.

He never forgot that and used in his speech at my wedding in 2007 to show just how wayward I once upon a time could be. He was newly and reassuringly convinced that I had fully signed up as a member of the capitalist class when I learned how to drive in Europe – famously navigating the corniche route in the South of France from Nice to St Raphael in a Renault Espace – had a management role at work, bought my own house and had a big fancy wedding in a country house. The reality was somewhat more nuanced than this. It made him feel better to tell himself and our guests this story, even though he was IN FACT privately overcome with pride and (unseen by me) cried during the ceremony – as he secretly wrote in the guest book.

Both of my parents were bright and gained entry to Grammar Schools in the 1940s – but both were mysteriously removed at crucial stages, unable to fulfil their full potential. In the case of Dad, he left school half way through his A Levels to go into National Service and from there transitioned into work as a civil servant which he did until he retired in his fifties. In his sixties he sat his A Levels again and got good grades in both English Literature and History. He started studying for an Open University degree after that, and was doing well in his TMAs (teacher-marked assessments) but again was halted - this time due to a series of mini-strokes or TIAs. To some extent he had already managed to transcend the expectations of social class by rising to the upper echelons of the civil service and then marrying a Tory ex-headteacher after my mother died, but his educational underachievement I know frustrated him, held him back and made him feel inadequate. This is also partly why he supported every stage of my education (as long as I was paying by the rules).

It is sometimes hard to tell whether he wanted to be like me or I wanted to be like him. Some of our ancestors on his side were penniless and/or illiterate, and some were also bound by the straitjacket of evangelical Christianity, including his own parents (or from their perspective living in the higher grace of God above the sins of money-making).

His admiration of me as the second child in our entire large extended family to go to University was never expressed. At that time, he was still underachieving in both his work life and personal life. He was mismatched with my mother and craved intellectually equal companionship once the sexual attraction had worn off to reveal their fundamental incompatibility. To see me achieve where he had not must have become important to him, but only as an avatar or extension of himself…not as the free-thinking, spirited, creative (and yes left wing) real daughter that had blossomed both due to and in spite of his parenting. Which is probably why I did not attend a graduation ceremony, because I did not feel that the real me was the one being celebrated by that.

At that time, there was a mismatch between what he thought an University education could do and what I knew it had actually done for me. I truly believe that Higher Education gives you the ability (probably more so in the Arts and Humanities) to question the status quo. In reality I had become even more ‘wayward’ than he thought I was.

Dad spent much of his post-school life controlling others or being controlled. Control was almost a way of life. National Service was followed by the Civil Service, with periods as scout master and hockey umpire scattered in between. The head of the civil service department was appropriately named ‘The Controller’. I imagine Dad found it hard to control a house full of women – his wife and three daughters – especially since I believe that he suffered from a form of anxiety that often tipped over into catastrophizing. Having cowered during the second world war under shelters in the neighbours’ kitchen as a child he was very quick as an adult to see what might go wrong. He always made that clear, making us live in fear and self-doubt rather than courageous confidence.

But holidays were very different. On holiday he changed. He was a singer, a story teller, a lover of adventures - and we would go on hikes up hills and through the woods, once getting lost but finding our way back to the holiday cottage just before night fall, his back full of gorse thorns. When he was relaxed, he was a different man.

Maybe modern life away from the mountains, woods and sports fields felt dangerous to him, maybe he thought we were vulnerable. Yes, but I also believe that he found women and girls at best a mystery and at worst a cause for disgust.

During the working times he controlled us though corporal punishment, and perhaps in armed forces style the ritual of lining up outside his room to be spanked one by one if any of us had done anything wrong it made sense to him if you manage to push aside that we were children and what he was doing we now consider abuse. Only once it escalated into full scale abuse when he totally lost control of his rage at being disobeyed. I paid a lifetime’s emotional price for this but also know from it that patriarchy contains this very lesson – that women are inferior and have to be controlled, if necessary with violence. My Dad was infused with Patriarchal ideology, and as the blows rained down on me I think of it now as me receiving one of the fundamental tenets. His efforts were wasted on me in terms of controlling me. I just was self-directed by nature. If anything it made me want to leave home sooner that I might have. It certainly made a loving relationship in later years impossible for us both.

As I make the final changes to my first ever ACTUAL, PHYSICAL book – a poetry book which will be on sale from mid-December – part of me wonders if without the Alzheimer’s which is diminishing him every day just now he would be proud of me. I wonder if when he bought me my first typewriter for Christmas when I was nine he knew what he was helping to create. I suspect that the poems in my book would shock him…and at the very least he would not understand them. Nevertheless I think he would have been very proud that his crazy daughter was now a published author. Another tricky apparent contradiction for him to navigate.

A new way for humanity will not come quickly after thousands of years of pain and suppression, it is created in each act of subversion and rebellion as the old ways slowly die.

If we care about creating a better way we must keep on subverting, rebelling and creating. Even as we remember being crushed. Even as we feel the prison bars of self-doubt and fear beckoning us back to the old ways.

And let us redefine ‘wayward’ as some combination of ‘innovative, determined, adventurous, creative, daring, heart-centred, self-directed, loving the world’.

NOTES (from the OED)

Wayward - adjective

‘Disposed to go against the wishes or advice of others or what is proper or reasonable; intractable; self-willed; perverse; (of a child) disobedient, refractory.

(She is a brilliant but wayward actress.

Daily Telegraph 11 January 28/2

Of judgement: perverse, wrong, unjust.

I bear sole responsibility for any errors or wayward judgements expressed in the pages that follow.

R. Cross, Steven Berkoff & Theatre of Self-performance Acknowl. p. xi)

Of a thing, condition, etc.: contrary to what is expected or desired; untoward. In later use chiefly used of fortune, destiny, etc. Now rare.

1851

Poor child! a wayward fate has been hers.

M. Reid, Scalp Hunters vol. III. i. 11Citation details for M. Reid, Scalp Hunters

With the. Wayward people as a class.

Reaching the indifferent, the callous, the wayward.

M. Connolly, Mr. Blue (new edition) vii. 110

A wayward person.

1969

He couldn’t have put her his own sister nice and clean in a nut house for waywards could he.

M. Lee, Four Men & Monster 18Citation details for M. Lee, Four Men & Monster

2004

It collects the waywards and castoffs and gives them a place, a home.

L. Steven in J.-F. Leroux & C. R. La Bossière, Worlds of Wonder 68Citation details for L. Steven in J.-F. Leroux & C. R. La Bossière, Worlds of Wonder’.

As we (in the Northern Hemisphere) edge towards the season we call Winter - a time of darkness, cold and stasis…and also a time of hidden growth beneath the surface of things…I feel the call within me to slow down and keep stopping. This is what my life has consisted of for months now. I am doing just enough to keep things ‘ticking over’ but there is a refusal inside me to succumb to what I now understand is the very essence of modernity - fast pace - the demands to keep moving, keep scrolling, keep distracting, keep pushing, keep feeling like there is never enough (time, money, things we need to live this life) and all the while trying to create meaning in a meltdown of meaning - tricky one that.

As part of this what I am calling a Sacred Pause, I am deliberately rationing my time looking at and interacting with screens - in my case the PC, my phone and the TV. It’s not the first time I have done this but this time feels qualitatively different. So this little while I am spending on Substack typing away is partly inspired by what I have been reading while in my Sacred Pause. I read to feel inspired, I read to feel my edges blurring against someone else’s semi-permeable edges.

I am doing a course on ‘Advaya’ called ‘Returning Home to Our Bodies’ by Abigail Rose Clarke which is based on her book of the same title. And I love her concept of ‘ecotone’ - it is a vibrant edge between two states of being, like my favourite place the shoreline and it evokes for me this edge that I feel when I am reading someone else’s article or book. My values meeting their values and let’s see where we meet and create a new thing out of our meeting.

This is what is so compelling about Substack - and why during a Sacred Pause with rationed screen time I choose to include time on it - so many of us creating and recreating culture through our bodies, minds and words and creating a new culture letting our feelings forge new thoughts and ways of expressing.

Because this is what is up for grabs now as we find ourselves deep in the grip of what fellow poet Paul Kingsworth calls ‘The Machine’ - the technological ethos which is now destroying our very bodies, let alone any new thoughts they might have. I am also half way through his book ‘‘Against The Machine: on the unmasking of humanity’. It’s a wise and important book for our times, beautifully written and researched, with deep values running through it. Even though I am only half way through I found myself feeling eager for his solutions - but for that I have to wait until Part 3! And patience is also part of my sacred pause.

You may know if you have been in my world for long enough that for the past three years I have been going trough a major transition which feels fundamentally ‘spiritual’ - I use parentheses around that word because I also feel that the word itself possibly needs examining, unwrapping or even replacing. And now it strikes me as write - it is affecting every area of my life. It’s as if, as someone who prided herself on helping others though transitions, I have been ushered into the biggest holy mother of all transitions - ‘you want to understand the nature of these times? Well here, I gift you the biggest transition of your life so far - one so far reaching that you wonder if there is an end to it. Swim in it, write about it, feel it, understand it for within its wildness lies inklings of the future’ the Great Mother whispers in my ear. It also strikes me today that I am a microcosm of the bigger collective transition we are undergoing…what shall we call it - ‘The Great Death and Rebirth’ perhaps? - maybe too soon for that - what about ‘The Threshold’ or ‘The Gathering In’.

Whatever the name we call this place might be…my calling today is to declare a Sacred Pause and to embrace it lovingly and feel in to its deeper, more authentic love.

I have periodically been watching the clouds, the sky, the trees in their changingness and their non-verbal language of change. It is such a relief to commune with the non-verbal ones as they move so very slowly in deep time. They teach me how verbal I have become and that silence is one of the best ways to hear what is emerging in my non-verbal body.

Take some silence with me now - gaze away for one moment from this screen and notice what your eyes and senses alight upon.

MMM Silence.

I want to also tell you about another book I am currently reading - this time a novel - by another fellow poet Ocean Vuong ‘The Emperor of Gladness’ which I am imbibing in slow, savouring sips of deliciousness. It’s a story about modernity’s outsiders and outcasts finding love, home and family in unlikely places. I thank him deeply from my heart for writing this book. He is revealing for us what it means to be beautifully and delicately human when what we are labelled as and what we think we are falls away and what really matters for humans finds a way of being expressed and made real.

I like to read at least two books, sometimes more, simultaneously, so that they can meet with what is emerging in me as I make my own meaning of where we are. So as I am half way in all three things - the Abigail Rose Clarke, the Paul Kingsnorth and the Ocean Vuong - I venture to sense what is in their intersection, their mutual ‘ecotone’ and it’s something like BEING HUMAN.

I am feeling that what the Sacred Pause is all about is the removal of and rationing of - putting boundaries around - technologically constructed distractions from being human. We have reached the stage in The Great Death and Rebirth where we could allow ourselves to become a servant to the very technology ‘we’ as a species have created. It begins with the mechanisation of the body and then the self. We go to gyms where machines dictate our pace, we allow technicians of the body to operate on us (in the name of absence of disease) and we use social media which simultaneously appropriates and steals our identity from us. All of it is resulting in the loss of what it means to be human.

For this we need to re-sacralise every aspect of our existence. The Pause is a space for me where stopping is a kind of becoming, a return home. When things rearrange themselves inside like a stiff spine relaxing on the floor of the earth and every part comes back into harmony with the others.

Maybe you are a creative, sensitive, rebellious outsider who has never felt like they have fitted into society’s conventional avenues, you might even be feeling like an alien when you go to the supermarket or travel by air (insert your own arena of strangeness here).

Maybe you have worked in various leadership roles wanting to make an paradigm-shifting impact only to eventually find yourself shrinking to fit.

Maybe you want to step into a new kind of leadership based on values like diversity, beauty, creativity, connection, transformation and regeneration.

You have always wanted to change the world and there has never been a better time to step up.

You are the change the world needs.

I believe that everyone is gifted, but if you are reading this you are one of the ones who knows that you have something, a set of unique and potent gifts that will help steer humanity in a totally new direction - a direction which will eventually result (probably not in your lifetime, but that’s how much you care) in everyone having everything they need - and then…well there will be no more war, no more cruelty, no more scarcity, no more discrimination and unequal access to abundance.

Our potency as change-makers and leaders consists of what matters to us, what we are passionate about, and why we feel we are here at this great tide change.

Our ability to be the change essentially relies on 3 things that this publication and its community will do for you.

1. Nurturing your unique giftedness.

2. Showing up authentically but also in a way that is boundaried.

3. Offering your gifts in service while attending to 1 and 2.

This publication ‘Potency’ is a way in to this work, which is ultimately aligning with the life force itself - so that you can be you AND create regenerative impact which honours the wide web of life, of which you are an essential part.

For decades I have been inspiring disrupters into world-changing transformations which begin in the inner world and then ripple change into relationships, offerings, projects and new ways of living, doing and being.

If ‘Potency’ had a mantra it would be ‘I create, therefore I become’.

It exists to inspire you into creative action and to help you feel seen and heard. I want you to feel that you matter because YOU ARE POWERFUL - your Potency is Medicine and is your power.

Here you will find articles written from my own experiences of working with the life force - articles about courage, soul-nourishment and contribution touching on themes such as presence, attending, speaking truth, disruption, outsider-ship, authenticity, impact, life-design, intentionality, resilience and so much more.

The fountain which feeds these offerings for you flows form my own lived experience - my ancestral lineage, my traumas, my epiphanies, my observations, my meditations, my many transitions and reinventions and the impact I have made in a lifetime’s service to Mother Earth working with her wounded peoples.

So dive in, subscribe to receive off-kilter musings such as a new women’s circle due to start at the end of this month.

I am here to inspire your uniqueness your realness and your courageous heart.

Let’s get going! Time to explore!

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(Photo by Debora Luzi)

A few months ago I said an aligned ‘yes’ to a women’s retreat in Southern Spain, run by two teachers that I totally trust and respect.

Having run three retreats in Crete myself, I thought it was high time I received. Also, having found myself in what my current coach has helped me name a ‘liminal initiation space’ I felt that allowing some more of my essence in would aid me through this and into my next phase of service.

I was totally unprepared for what actually happened by contrast to what I wanted to happen, or imagined might happen.

The power of the unexpected is that it can throw you off clinging onto expectation, which is a flimsy kind of knowledge. Once thrown into an even deeper liminal space, and this can feel deeply uncomfortable…no let me say it rather as PAINFUL and excruciatingly so…new possibilities can be experienced.

Here’s how it went for me.

As soon as I stepped into the passport control (note the word ‘control’ there) I felt it, a remembering of what happens when people are coraled into obedient lines according to who is ‘in’ (in this case the European Union) and who is out (in my case the inaptly named ‘Great Britain’) a deep fear of what could lie at the end of this queue arose in my being.

And then, I realised that because I could not connect to the airport internet there was no way of connecting with the other women arriving at different times at an agreed cafe. I was swiftly and unexpectedly cast out into a zone which was so upsetting I did not then understand where I really was - apart from in Spain on my own with no way of connecting anyone. Of course, because I am resourceful. I did find a way, and eventually (after a dark ten minutes of tears and rising panic) met up with four of the women and then we journeyed to the retreat venue in our pre-arranged taxi. There was a structure, and a care all along and right through the retreat…enabling me to feel what I am about to reveal.

It was becoming apparent early on to me that I was not in control, that I had to surrender control. Interesting, this is not easy for me. So I went into that space where I was invited to trust, and to receive without knowing what I was about to receive. Scary, for my wounded inner child, who of course I had brought along.

Then it became apparent that the structure was looser than I was comfortable with. The leaders changed things a number of times, and unexpected things just kept on happening outside of the itinerary.

Once I had been thrown nicely off centre, I then became totally anti-social. It was not that I disliked anyone, although of course I was triggered by certain behaviours, indeed I had three unscheduled one to one conversations with different women that I vibed with throughout the retreat which were enriching and enlightening. Given that every day there were three sit down meals which lasted at least an hour, I was again thrown into this realm where I seemed to totally lose my ability to step forward and make myself visible in conversations that were sociable but highly unpredictable with people I did not know. I was longing for depth, and for me this ‘chit-chat’ was superficial and even uninteresting (mostly) and seemed to consist I observed of ‘winning’ the space in a very random fashion, with topics wildly changing and shifting in ways that made no sense to me and quickly lost my attention. AKA social group conversation.

As this feeling of total outsider-ship became more and more intense I realise now that what was unfolding was that I was actually being revealed to myself, and to others.

I have always been an outsider, but have never been able to admit or embrace it. And just in case I was not getting this message I received it in a more forthright manner in a shamanic clearing that I was given as part of the retreat on Day 1 - ‘You will never belong’ the voice said. Phew, talk about harsh.

Now then, because as you know every archetype has a shadow, I was cast into the shadow realm of my outsider status and began to feel very weird - isolated, rejected, lonely - and I contemplated leaving early. Once I had decided to stay (maybe you might say that my soul was in charge here) this shadow did not let up, and I was forced to remove myself frequently from the group in order to maintain my identity which was also seriously slipping, and even then I egotistically thought that the others would be feeling angry, and worse - sorry for me. It was agonising. And while the other women whooped and screamed and star-gazed and danced and chatted I was alone in my room wondering who I was. I actually thought I was losing my sanity…’maybe I am neurodivergent’ - I seemed to dramatically lack the required social skills and the ability to cope with unexpected change - I thought by way of comforting myself, and indeed that could be true but I do not personally need it to be true.

Even through all of this I was being looked after, cared for, allowed to experience what I was really experiencing even though my mind was playing the story I heard when I was a child the theme of which was ‘there is something very wrong with you, because you resist what we say is good for you’.

As an outsider, I vehemently resist any ideology that claims to have everything explained. I refuse to be categorised, boxed in, or to submit to any notion that this crazy life is anything but our own co-creation. I exist in a realm where nothing can be known with any rational certainty. I stand outside of, and apart from, society’s dominant norms and values. What this means is that I can easily vision alternatives and embrace a unique perspective - essential for a poet and a paradigm-shifting cycle breaker. Also, from the outside, I can observe and collect clues about the way the world works, all of its working parts. I can attend to the moment as it is. My curiosity is constantly engaged.

On the shadow side, this can feel lonely. It can feel impossible in certain social situations. It can feel like my identity is very fluid. It requires periods of silence and solitude.

I have always known this, but this retreat, from the moment I signed up has sealed my status. And what I also know is that I want to serve women who are also outsiders.

What I am committed to provide is structure so that you feel safe. Safety is essential so that you can have the confidence to step into your outsider powers. My circles are very structured, I will never leave the space for your voice to chance. I will never let you compete with louder, insider voices.

It does not matter how you became an outsider, because not only will you always feel like one, it is actually a superpower - possibly that you came here with. Understanding your story is not the journey I am talking about in this piece. I am talking about what we as outsiders, if we are to create truly revolutionary ripples with our work, NEED in order to be ourselves and not lose ourselves.

We need:

• To experience belonging by not erasing ourselves, or fawning, or pleasing, in order to fit in.

• Spaces where removing ourselves is considered normal, and catered for, allowed and even expected.

• Spaces where views that are counter-cultural are accepted and valued - because this is where your magic happens.

• Deeply meaningful conversations - where you can hear and be heard.

• To have an impact - because you are a leader who is most powerful at the edges.

If you are vibing with anything I am saying here, and you want a space like this, I will be opening an online circle series soon that does the above things.

What the retreat that I said the aligned ‘yes’ to showed me was indeed who I am in essence, and typically for me, not in ways that I expected, or that was particularly enjoyable - but that last bit (it not being enjoyable for me) is also ok, because I did not go to enjoy myself, I went to challenge myself out of my stupor.

But one experience I want to leave you with arose out of a shamanic journey we took to meet our power animal, and then to BE that animal. It felt totally natural for me to be on my own in the trees, knowing that my tribe was nearby, sniffing the air and shaking the branches with my upheld hands/paws to let fruit fall.

Postscript

I want to thank Debora Luzi and Teresa Filice and each and every woman I encountered on the Essence retreat for gifting yourselves, expressing your essence and for your kindnesses.