On the long road back to Embodiment...
The wound that keeps on hurting, and the gift that keeps on giving.
I’m becoming intimately re-aquatinted with my instinct to avoid and repress lately.
Avoidance and detachment has been my go-to in times of stress for as long as I can remember.
Whether it’s a result of lots of trauma as a kid, or the fact that I’ve got the most airy and bone-dry chart you ever did see, I don’t know.
But being in my body and actually ANIMATING my experience has never been something that comes easily to me.
Maybe that’s why I devote so much of myself to studying embodiment.
It’s why I’m constantly creating maps and frameworks and archetypal models BACK IN to the truth of my experience.
I need them.
It’s why my whole body of work is archetypal maps back into the Self through the poetry of our cycles.
I’m a map-maker by nature because embodiment has always been such a challenge for me.
I don’t believe that we “find out who we are in times of stress”.
I reckon we find the truth of ourselves much more deeply in times of ease and thriving.
But damn, meeting our habitual avoidance patterns (in my case anyway) in times of stress… it’s always revealing as fuck.
I’ve got some housing instability shit happening at the moment, and it’s turning my emotional health into an ongoing fart noise (I’m so fine, I’ve got support networks out the wazoo and buttloads of unearned advantages to cushion me, I’m loved, thank you for your concern but I’m honestly okay)
And WOOF. My instinct is to SHUT THAT SHIT DOWN.
Total detachment.
Right now, it feels like my spirit is holding my body at arm’s length. Cold, aloof, unaffected. I’ve got a deep-seated “rise above it” instinct that metastasised itself into full on nervous system freeze, chronic illness, and substance abuse in my past.
I know this game, and I know what the end will look like.
Re-animating my body and my experience is something I’m doing on purpose right now.
If I didn’t have maps to guide the way back, I’d be lost in that avoidant detachment for a good while.
Thank fuck for the beautiful work other brave spirit-cartographers have done.
And I know this is a cringe thing to say, but thank fuck for the maps back into me that I’ve made too.
I’ve always groaned and rolled my eyes a bit at the whole “the greatest wound contains the gift” thing. How cheesy.
But, annoyingly, it’s true.
I now study and teach liberation-centric embodiment because self-abandonment and dis-embodiment is my greatest wound, and the one I’ll carry always. What a gift to be reminded of that!
My calling has always been in how to navigate the long road back into Embodiment.
Not because it’s easy.
But because it’s been the greatest challenge of my existence.
One of the greatest privileges of my life is to have the opportunity to share what I’ve learned (and am constantly learning) from my own descent back into embodiment.
The path is lifelong, and there are no easy fixes, but I’ve spent the better part of the last decade distilling my own recovery down into a cyclical, archetypal map - so that our cycles can be our guides and teachers in our recovery from colonial patriarchy.
This cyclical map is the foundation upon which everything we explore inside REWILDING is built.
To all you decolonising feminists in recovery from self-abandonment and capitalist patriarchal dogma - this work is for you.
Learn how to work with your cycle as your guide and your teacher in landing back into your body after trauma.
Inside REWILDING, every cycle becomes a rite of passage - from frozen, colonised, hyper-individualised…
…to open, liberated, and connected.
Applications are open until the Full Moon, and there are only 9 more spots available.
We’re a cosy and intimate space, and we like to keep it that way.
Women, femmes, menstruating people of all genders craving liberation-centric community are enthusiastically invited.
Click the button below to join us, I’m so excited to meet you.