Ralli is a word that comes from ‘ralanna’ meaning to mix or connect things. It’s an ancient form of quilt making. Scraps of old saris and clothes gathered over generations from family members are carefully chosen and sewn together.

I tenderly folded the ten precious pieces I’d chosen to take back to Europe with me and packed them into a large tin storage trunk. I thought about the women who had sewn each of the scraps of fabric together stitch by stitch. Each one held the remnants of a lifetime, a lineage. A medley of a woman’s memories assembled patiently into a bedcover. The stories that were intended to comfort the next generation as they dreamt.

The man in the Jaipur luggage room slid my heavy trunk along the floor to the back of the counter where it would wait for me among the dozens of other tins, trunks, cases and boxes that filled the concrete room. He handed me a small paper ticket, so thin it was almost see-through, in return for my precious cargo. I carefully folded it in four and slid it into the back of my passport case. I didn’t want to lose my only claim on my treasures before I came back to retrieve them.

Six months later, I left India empty-handed. Life as usual had gotten the better of me, and I never got back to the luggage room to pick them up. I thought of the left-behind quilts often over the years, always telling myself the same story. They were India’s heritage, not mine. I wasn’t meant to take them from Bharat Mata. What India had given me was spiritual and taking material things from her wouldn’t have been right. I still believe this today.

After a year in Asia, I returned with no photos and two small Rajastani bags that reminded me of tiny versions of the quilts I’d bought with their mirrors and sparkly ribbons. India had been a reset I didn’t know I needed. The sowing of a seed that wouldn’t sprout out of the ground for decades. It wasn’t about things or traveller’s souvenirs. It was about soul.

I’m still amazed that after all the moves and transitions my life has taken me over the last thirty years, after the constant letting go and releasing of of the superfluous, those two bags were still with me. They weren’t the type of bag I could use, but somehow they remained precious treasures and deeply meaningful in a way I couldn’t explain. A part of me. They had become a rare constant in my ever-changing existence.

In terms of the lost quilts, they came back to me, too, through the research and writing around my lost Indian motherline. As I pieced the fragments of my great-great-grandmother’s, my great-grandmother’s and my grandmother’s stories in India back together twenty years later, I felt like I was piecing together a patchwork quilt. Slowly, scrap by scrap, a story was forming, a softness was emerging – just like a quilt. I realized my Indian quilt wasn’t made from fabric, but words. It was my Indian motherline story made whole once more.

As I’ve written about here before, as part of my research for my memoir, I came across the word “distaff”, which refers to a traditional tool used in spinning to hold un-spun fibers in place before they are drawn out and spun into thread and also refers to the motherline. Through this research, I began spinning on a drop spindle. At the beginning, it was just an experiment. I wanted to feel into the action of the distaff and the spindle to understand its motherline meaning. Things, however moved on quickly and before I knew it, I’d bought a spinning wheel and a second hand loom and had integrated fiber arts into my life. It felt like the missing piece. After twelve years of writing, teaching, coaching, learning, healing and holding space for others, the slow, tactile work with natural fibers was like a balm to my soul.

I came across women making Kawandi quilts on YouTube, an ancient, ancestral craft brought by African slaves to India. The quilts are still made today by the Siddi community who are descendants of these slaves. Once again, quilts captured my attention. Especially this form of quilt making, which was similar in many ways to the Rallis I’d bought all those years ago in India. They are made from scraps of old clothes and remnants and quilted piece by piece from the outside in. Unlike traditional American quilts, which are measured and planned in detail prior to stitching, kawandis leave room for the unconscious, for the magic of the unknown. I decided to make one.

It didn’t escape me that this desire to make a quilt was coming straight after dressing an ancestral doll I’d made some years previously and left naked. I would even use some of the old clothes I dressed her in in the quilt. It felt as if by honoring my ancestors through the doll, I’d triggered the ancient crafts of cloth that are in my lineage. I’d awoken something in my blood.

The magic of the unconscious didn’t stop there. As I was at the end of my quilt, I actually thought it was finished, I decided to clear out my storage room and found one of the bags I’d brought back from India. A beautiful, antique, cotton bag with embroidery, mirrors and shells adorning it. I didn’t hesitate, knowing what I had to do. I cut it up and sewed all the mirrors onto my quilt. Instantly, my quilt came alive as if it had been waiting for this final reconnecting of the dots. Now it was clear, the obsessive desire for those Rajastini quilts decades before wasn’t about their beauty or craftsmanship, it was my timeless soul recognizing this moment in the future when, like the women who’d made them, my hands would be the vehicle for the creative expression of my own motherline to come into life through me. When the many threads of my own Indian ancestral story would finally come back together.

I wanted to use all of the bag and decided that I would sew the shells that went around it onto the bottom of the quilt. As I was three-quarters of the way through, I wondered if I’d have enough. You guessed it, I had exactly enough, not one too many, not one too few. As I stitched that last shell on, I truly recognized the wonder of the unconscious and its ability to weave the most beautiful stories when we get out of our own way

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A lot is written about mothering. How to survive the summer holidays. Being a good enough mother. The mother and daughter dynamic. Finding balance as a working mother...These are all valid subjects. However, there is one area that I feel we don’t reflect and talk about enough and that is, what we project onto our children.

Carl Jung expressed this in two similar quotes “The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of the parents” and “Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on children than the unlived life of a parent.”

On a surface level, we can see this through the archetype of the ‘helicopter parent’. A woman who wanted to be a ballet dancer as a child, but whose parents couldn’t afford ballet lessons makes sure her daughter goes to ballet from an early age, even though the child may not really want to. A father who got into an Ivy League college, but couldn’t go because his parent couldn’t afford the fees hires tutors and coaches for his son from an early age, as well as editing the child’s personal essays and homework.

In my experience working with clients and in my own life, I see how this concept goes a lot deeper. The real question is, what am I unconsciously projecting onto my child? Or, what part of my shadow an I unknowingly asking my child to carry for me?

My two eldest sons were born a year apart when I was in my early twenties. When I was pregnant with the first, I dreamt about being the perfect mother. The reality was very different. By the time the two were toddlers, I was shocked at how bad a mother I actually was. The worst part being the meanness and violence that would sometimes come out of me. I didn’t know what was happening. I was horrified at myself. Luckily, I was able to get some therapy and this helped me to see that a situation in my own childhood that was being repeated. I don’t want to go into details here because it involves someone whom I love deeply, who was also very wounded and with whom reparation has gone beyond what I could have wished for. All that to say, it involved rejection, meanness and threat of abandonment – all things the person had experienced themselves previously. I was younger than this person and projected my own power and stability onto them making their reaction to me all the more powerful. The one thing he kept repeating to me was that my parents were going to run away and abandon me. I believed him. It terrified me.

By the time my two oldest sons were eight and nine, my life had stabilized and I had a deep desire to have another child. I wanted to prove to myself that I could be a good mother. I wanted to assuage the guilt I felt for not being the mother I had so badly wanted to be when my two oldest were little.

My third son was born and I was that mother. He received my full attention, the most nurturance and nourishment I could give him as a mom. However, as he grew, I noticed that he was the child that I worried about the most. My imagination would run away with itself. I would visualize and feel the fear of all the possible negative outcomes for him. I virtually created them. I couldn’t control it. It was a force stronger than my ego could handle.

I have been working on these overwhelming fears for years. I’ve tried everything including doing the ‘cutting the ties that bind’ exercise time and again, distancing myself from my son…Nothing seemed to work.

Things got worse when I began project my own power onto someone close to my husband who was very wounded, out of control, threatening and lying about us and my son. Our psyches are brilliant connectors making us re-live patterns and emotional responses in order to bring them to consciousness. Nighttime was the worst. The dark, the awful imagining would take me over from the inside. All I could feel was the enveloping fear of the power of someone who logically I know is powerless and the imagined loss and pain for my son. This one was a biggy and I was determined to heal it. The whole thing was getting out of hand. However, I remembered that a sign we are projecting parts of ourself onto someone else is an intensity in the feeling, which often signals a strong emotional reaction that is disproportionate to the situation at hand. This was definitely the case.

Gradually, in its own time, the unconscious began to rise into the light. Is this about this out of control person and my son or me, was a question that began to surface. I was beginning to see that I was the one giving power away and I was the one frightened of the pain of losing the ones I love. My son and the other person involved today are the mere screens for my projections. I desperately needed to reel my projection in and release them.

In these moments of confusion and fear, I sometimes go to an oracle, which I see as a mirror for what’s going on within me. My husband Florian recently made a set of I Ching sticks out of yarrow stalks and we use them for those big, hard questions, maybe once or twice a year. It was time to refer to them. I spent a while making sure I was formulating my question correctly. I was nervous. This wasn’t play. It was a deep need for clarity. I couldn’t heal what I couldn’t see. The question was, “How do I fully reclaim the power I have been projecting outward, so that I can mother my own inner child, release this ancestral fear, and stop unconsciously repeating my wounds with my son?”

The I Ching answered with Meng (hexagram 4) showing me that I am both student and teacher in this situation. The immature part is my still present inner child that gives her power away to angry, wounded people. I did this as a four year-old and I was still doing it. The fear of what someone crazy and disempowered can do is not the enemy that I need to fight, it is a sign that my inner child needs to be reminded that she is safe. My fear belongs to my inner child, who I am responsible for looking after. Another aspect of Meng is that I no longer need to keep analyzing what is happening. When these things happen, I just need to be with my inner child.

The second hexagram was Bo (hexagram 23). At first it frightened me, then I had to remember to read it in context with my question. The falling of the old structures is the liberation I have been needing. The power I gave to the older boy as a child is no longer a truth. I no longer need to believe the threats and wounded actions of others. They don’t come from a place of real power. As a child I built a shrine to this older boy, I looked up to him, I loved him unconditionally. In wanting him to love me, too, I gave my power to him. None of that needs to be repeated with others. My power is my own, although now I truly love that older boy because I understand the context of what we were living. He is now the brother I always wanted. The only way for me to heal the inner child is to let the old story collapse entirely. This can only happen by it rising from the unconscious to the light of consciousness.

So, why my third son and not the others? My intention of wanting to be the best mother I could was in part at least, a projection. I needed to be the best mother I could to my inner child. From pre-conception, I was asking my son to carry my inner child. By taking responsibility for this part of myself, I can release him from the weight of his mother’s projections. Interestingly, my son is called “Yonnah”, a name I chose purposefully because it symbolizes the dove and means ‘bringer of peace’. Little did I know when I named him what was really at stake.

My inner child doesn’t need fixing, she needs to be taught by adult me that when she feels the fear, I am here for her and she is safe now. The collapse of the old structure is working for myself and my son, not against us. No force is needed, no resistance, no fighting or defending myself. The journey is internal and it always has been.

I release my son from my past. I let the dove fly!

When I look back at my life as a young woman, a hippie, a young single mother, wife, mother to four adult sons, grandmother, cancer survivor, teacher, coach, small business owner I can see that through all my life experiences and roles, the sense of Self or essence that I was continually searching felt elusive. I knew it was in me somewhere. I just couldn’t quite grab it. Even though one of my character flaws is impatience, now, with hindsight, I can see that it wasn’t time. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t have the tools, the insight, the maturity and the key to unlock not only my own sense of embodied self, but the secrets of the past that were a part of what was keeping me trapped in this evasive search.

The older I’ve got the more I understand about myself and the ever-evolving journey of life. I’m grateful for these insights for otherwise life’s experiences would be for nothing, and the passing of time would be uniquely about aging skin and bones.

A six year journey through peri-menopause turned out to be a great gift. It took me through cancer and deep into my psyche and my motherline. At the time, I was sure I would reach that illusory destination at the end. Although the transformation was tangible – I connected myself to the line of women who went before me, which gave me the sense of embodiment I’d been missing and my voice became more authentic, the transformation has continued.

A couple of years after peri-menopause, I hit my second Saturn return. “Ah,” I thought, “this is it, this is when I ‘get there’ and can sit back and enjoy myself – ha, ha!” And yet, you’ve guessed it, the journey has continued. This time with a beautiful sense of slowing down. Time has worked on my impatience and I finally understand the line from Ralph Blum’s ‘Book of Runes’, that I read many times as a young woman, ‘the reward of patience is patience.’

Joining up ends from my youth that I thought were lost forever seems to be the order of the day. Picking up important threads that in my youthful impatience, my need to flee anything uncomfortable, including myself had been lost along the way. Now, I know that the psyche doesn’t lose things. It integrates that which is finished and stores that which isn’t, for the right time in the future. Finally I’ve had to admit that transformation is NOT a destination. It’s a never ending journey of discovery. The older we get, the more of ourselves we find.

A recent piece that rose from these depths in a totally unexpected way is a passion for spinning and weaving that began in my early twenties. At the time, I was a young, single, penniless mum living in a yurt in someone’s field in the West Country in England. I spun raw wool on a drop spindle and wove wall hangings on a loom I’d made out of an old wooden deckchair. Like everything in my life at that time, I soon moved on to a new place, a new chaos, a new search for self and left my foray into fiber arts behind. When I bought a drop spindle at the beginning of this year and made a distaff, it was meant to be just a brief research for my memoir on the motherline. Little did I realize that once I’d got that ancient, unchanged tool in my hands how deep and fast I was going to dive.

Last week I had a dream. A dream that felt important.

I saw a sign for a weaving teacher and knocked on the door. A strong, older lady in an apron opened the door and I asked,“please could you teach me to weave.”

“Come back later, I’m busy,” she said.

“I don’t have time.” I replied.

The next thing I know, we’re sitting side by side on a bench in her studio. I’m surprised and delighted when she asks, “what do you want to weave?” feeling that something I never dared to dream of is now becoming a possibility.

I’m spinning a couple of long, yurt poles in my hands when they suddenly fly from my grip. I search for them in her studio to no avail. I can’t understand how they could have disappeared.

As I worked on this dream, a profound sense of ‘everything happens at the right time’ came to me. The older weaver woman felt like meeting my older, wiser self. Her energy was strong, but kind. She was present for me. She’s survived and has the patience that I lacked as a younger woman. She has a space for weaving together the threads of life. Most importantly, I’m ready to learn this slower, more intentional, tactile, embodied way of living from her.

The yurt poles I was spinning were once an important part of my nomadic, chaotic life – a time when I had little sense of self. They flew out of my hands. They didn’t clatter to the floor. They didn’t break. They disappeared because they were ready to be released. I was holding onto a past that had no place in the weaving studio of my wiser, elder self where I’m going to be learning to weave stability and an understanding of time and intention.

I’m grateful that my journey through menopause and onwards taught me that I needed to trust the Crone, the Dark Goddess - that buried, wise, feminine part of us. Marion Woodman suggested that she has been in hiding to prevent humanity from destroying her, but was coming back through the many dreams her analysands had of this archetype in different guises.

We’ve been taught through thousands of years of patriarchy to be afraid of this power that is within us. The crone, the hag, the witch have been demonized to keep us from and make us fearful of this part of ourselves. Patriarchy has taught us a false sense of what it is to be feminine, that our value in society is in our youthfulness, our fertility, our serving of others, etc.

Menopause is, without a doubt, a feminine initiation, a portal to the ongoing transformative journey of becoming, of authenticity, and of befriending the dark. I am learning that the way forward is in turning away from the mainstream’s false narrative about feminine aging and to trust this force within us that has been so demeaned and scapegoated through history. Hecate is waiting for us at the crossroads with her hounds, her keys, and, of course, her lamp.

We don’t know before we start out on the path where she will lead us. My journey into fiber arts, which has barely begun crept up on me slowly, silently, invisibly until I was flowing with the daily advancements on a practical, tactile level and soulful level. Another phrase I remember from the rune book is ‘once a decision is made the universe supports that decision.’ I say ‘decision’, but it didn’t come from the mind, it came from my soul. What began thirty-five years ago in that lost, frightened girl has come back with a vengeance.

Preparing and spinning raw wool into fibers touches something profound in my soul. It brings back a balance that’s been missing in the last fifteen years of inner work, teaching, writing, coaching and holding space for others. It not only connects me to the roots of my motherline in Assam where every woman spun and wove silk, it brings me into the body, into the physicality of life. I feel these ancestral grandmothers in my bones and I can’t help but honor them, connect with them beyond space and time.

Where is your soul calling you? Are you listening and giving yourself the right to follow the call wherever it may be leading you? One of my friends has found hers roller skating and it is so beautiful to see the videos of her dancing on her skates, feeling the music in her body, gliding and flowing and rolling with such grace.

Perhaps your wiser, elder self is a painter, a gardener, a singer, a musician, a writer, a traveler. Your journey will be uniquely yours, but the call comes to us all – we just need to listen and follow it. The mainstream can be noisy. It wants us to feel overwhelmed, in difficulty, terrified of the natural process of aging, unable to move forward without the ‘industry’ its built around menopause.

This is not what our souls desire.

Within the chaos and trauma we see in the outer world, in the ecological problems, the political situations, the social injustice, it’s time to honor and celebrate that this deeply buried part of the feminine. The Dark Goddess is rising into consciousness, one woman at a time. She is coming through our dreams, our bodies, through the pull to slowing down, reinvigorating ancient crafts, getting our hands back into the dirt, letting art and creativity express her wisdom through us.

I honor those of you reading this, who relate and who are already expressing your personal myth through your own flavor of creativity or on the path to finding yours.

I acknowledge the slow, invisible coming to fruition of your soul’s yearning that takes decades, that takes life’s ups and downs to ripen, that embodies the knowledge that there are some things that only time can give us.

And lastly, I witness the natural letting go of that which is complete, of that which is no longer serving us, of that which will become humus for new life. My yurt poles symbolized a lost, dissociated part of myself who had no way to be stable, embodied, present. I love this lost part of myself, and I let her become the past, the hardened shell of the seed that needed to break so the new sprout within her could grow.

After ten years of guiding women through the alchemical stages to their soul’s path, here is a free video where I lead you into the wilderness of Northern New Mexico, the land that has held me for all these years. It’s about about the connection between nature, alchemy and menopause.

Nature, menopause and Alchemy

I believe that our individual and collective psyches are always evolving towards wholeness. Now is the time that women going through menopause and beyond are invited to listen to a deeper, as yet unknown guide within them, not to be frightened, but to trust this rising, feminine wisdom. Like Hecate, she knows the way. She has the experience and the tools, and it is her nature to lead us at this stage in our lives. Only she can do it. Whether she makes herself known through your dreams, a hunch, an intuitive knowing, a guided journey, the pull to a new creative endeavor, I encourage you to listen to her. She comes from your soul. She is showing you the next steps on your journey of personal myth. She is inviting you to spin the threads of your life into the uniqueness that is you.

“A life truly lived constantly burns away veils of illusion, burns away what is no longer relevant, gradually reveals our essence, until, at last, we are strong enough to stand in our naked truth.”- Marion Woodman

The key to a successful initiation is that those who have walked the path before know the roadmap. The elders who take the pubescent boy into the wilderness know through experience what he needs to go through in order to be initiated into manhood. Yes, he will go through it in his own unique way, but the roadmap held by the elders will create a safe and powerful container for him.

I really needed a roadmap when I myself was going through peri-menopause. It was a huge turning point in my life with a cancer diagnosis in the middle of it all. As if by magic, I discovered the alchemical stages as elucidated by Carl Jung, and in quiet desperation, I decided to use them as my map.

What I discovered was what I call magic and others call psychological alchemy. The seven stages didn’t confine me to a rigid path or set of exercises. They led me into the deepest parts of my feminine self where unknown, deeper, parts of myself knew what I needed to find my way through peri-menopause and into more wholeness, authenticity and embodiment. Yes, menopause is a feminine initiation. The alchemical stages provided a truly remarkable vessel for my initiation because they opened the path that was uniquely me mine.

Unfortunately, in the modern world, we have lost the sense of ritual for adolescents going into adulthood, for young adults becoming parents, for women going through menopause. We have also replaced the roadmaps with ‘experts’, most of whom haven’t journeyed deeply into themselves. We are fed with medical advice for natural transitional stages in our journeys of life. We are even taught what it is to be a woman and how we are expected to turn up and what we need to believe in from a society that has been built on a patriarchal model for last 6000 years. Patriarchy means a specific model, where the father archetype is at the top. Patriarchy means ‘rule of the father’ and discussing how patriarchy has distorted women’s self-image isn’t directed against men. This is not a system capable of providing the right roadmap for women.

After ten years of facilitating a program called “The Alchemy of Menopause” and guiding women into their own profound and hidden feminine underworld, I know the journey inside out. I have thrashed my way through the undergrowth in my own transformational journey and lit a lamp for hundreds of other women’s journeys. It has helped me feel on a deeply visceral level how connected to nature women’s life stages are. Nature moves through us, the Dark Goddess, the mother of the crone, guides us and she, like any mother, knows what we need to grow into our wiser, elder selves. We have to trust the unknown.

In celebration of ten years of this alchemical journey with so many amazing women, my son Jah and I have made a twenty minute video. It’s free and my gift to you. Let me lead you into the wilderness here in New Mexico, a land that has held me for all these years and show you the connection between alchemy, the wilderness and menopause.

I’d love to hear your questions and reflections once you’ve seen it.

Alchemy, Nature and Menopause Video

Twelve years ago, I was sitting in herbalist friend’s cottage in Norfolk whilst she recounted an event that included a young English woman explaining how she was retrieving the lost ways and buried earth-based wisdom of ancient England through her body memory, her intuition, and an inner sense of knowing. I was intrigued. It touched something in me about the need to find that which was lost, about being able to contact a knowing in the blood without having concrete evidence of it.

I forgot the woman’s name, but I never forgot the idea of connecting with a deep sense of earth-based knowledge that we hold in our bodies. Months later, I even tried to find her or others like her on Google to no avail.

Ancient people of the British Isles possessed a profound, sophisticated earth-based understanding of the land they lived on, the plants and animals they shared it with, the rivers and rocks, the stars in the sky. They built earthworks and stone circles that mirrored the skies, the cycles of the seasons and the moon. We still don’t know how they transported the huge stones in some of these earthworks. We have forgotten that we ever knew these things, that this wisdom is still in our bones.

Now all these years later, I realize that I’m doing the same thing as the girl my friend spoke about with such inspiration. It’s not my deep, indigenous English or Irish roots that call, but my North-East Indian motherline. After spending many years researching my lost lineage, visits to India, hours reading relevant academic studies about the periods they were alive in, scanning document after document searching for that one piece of information that would unlock the next part of the story, I can safely say that from my great-great-grandmother downwards, I know the women’s stories inside out. I know what happened to each of them, the challenges they faced and the paths their lives took them on. However, knowing all this didn’t satisfy my body or my soul. Knowing what happened enabled me to tell the story of where I’m from maternally, but it didn’t give me the felt sense I was craving. The disconnection had happened on all levels of the psyche (physical, emotional, mental and spiritual) and so the reconnection needed to happen on all these levels, too. The journey of knowing who I am and where I come from wasn’t satiated with documented knowledge, with intellectual knowing. There was something more I needed to mend, something visceral…

In reading a thesis as part of the research from my book, I came across the word ‘distaff’ which is a very simple spinning tool that holds the raw fiber that the spinner will spin. What grabbed my attention was that ‘distaff’ was also used to refer to the motherline. I bought a $20 drop spindle, made myself a rudimentary distaff out of a three-pronged branch as research for my book, and started spinning. I wanted to feel the connection between feminine consciousness, the maternal bloodline and this ancient tool used by women from all regions of the world, archaeological evidence of which dates back 12,000 years. Little did I know quite where it was going to take me.

Spinning didn’t just trigger an ancient connection with the feminine. The act itself of spinning raw potential in the form of wool into the threads of life awoke a primal part of myself. As I watched my hands forming shapes and drafting out the wool in ways that women had done for at least 12,000 years, I began to feel a deep connection with the hands of my ancestors. A profound connection with my motherline was opening up. I remembered seeing the beautiful, golden colored silks adorning the market stands and shops the last time I was in Assam. Most of Assam’s Indigenous people have raised eri silkworms and spun and woven the cloth longer than anyone can remember. My great-great-grandmother was an indigenous woman and her family, like most of the other families would have spun and woven this fiber. Eri silk, often referred to as Peace Silk or Ahimsa silk was once known as the most sustainable and ethical silk in the world because it is the only silk that is made from silkworms that aren’t killed. Unfortunately the toxic products used in the vast sways of tea-gardens in the region are causing a serious threat to the silkworms today.

My ancestors would have boiled, flattened and dried the empty cocoons and then with the same gestures as I make, they would have used the same rudimentary tool that I use and spun the soft distinctive eri silk. During the time that the Ahom tribe from which my ancestors came controlled Assam, spinning and weaving were present in every single household, and young women would weave their own wedding garments.

Little did I know when I started to experiment with spinning how deep these repetitive actions and fiber twisting would take me. What it would awaken that still lies deep within me.

I woke up three times this week trying to remember the dream I’d just had. Instead a word popped into my head. Each time it was the same word – “blood!” Instinctively, I knew it was reminding me that my Assamese ancestors of blood are with me. I’m being invited to turn towards this felt sense of their presence. The ancestors are calling us.

Carl Jung believed that we hold within us the past. Not just our personal, recent past, but our ancient origins. He believed that our mental lives, like our bodies, have archaic roots. Our physical bodies and their organs have a long history of evolution within them and in a similar way so does the whole of our psyche.

“…being in a conscious relationship with the ancestors is an integral part of individuation - it is part of becoming whole.” Carl Jung

We all have a connection to the earth. We can all retrieve ancient indigenous knowledge and support through our bodies and our intuitive knowing. We can allow ourselves to open to this part of our being and be nurtured, restored in some way as humans. It’s not as out there or difficult as we are made to believe it is.

The ancients themselves in all civilizations on earth honored their ancestors in some way. They had, and some earth based cultures still have an ongoing relationship with their ancestors. They know the language of body, of soul, of song, of ritual, of dreams that help us connect to those who went before us and are still part of us.

The gift, I am slowly understanding the depth of is the wisdom, the strength, the profound harmony my maternal ancestors had with the continuity and cycles of earth and life, with their immediate geography and even with their descendants who in some unexplainable way, they brought into being. I am forever grateful and will continue to spin, feel, connect, communicate and live from a place of deep ancestral reverence.

“To forget one’s ancestors is to be a brook without a source, a tree without a root.” Ancient Chinese Proverb

I couldn’t see his face in the shadows, although I didn’t look either. We connected like magnets through our umbilicuses. Funny word, isn’t it? I wanted to say belly button, but then I read that umbilicus is the correct anatomical term. It comes from “umbo” in Latin and means a knob or projection.

We recognized each other through our navels. This word flows off the tongue more easily than umbilicus, although it makes me think of a naval officer, not a stomach button. It comes from the word nafela in Old English, which means “hub” of the wheel.

It didn’t feel strange that the centre points of our physical bodies should be drawn to each other this way. There was no resistance. I let myself connect with the naturalness of it all. “Our umbilicals recognize each other from before,” I heard myself say. We knew each other, not with our minds, but with our connection to the mother.

My tummy button was as it is in normal waking life; white and nestled into a waist bulging with a little too much middle-aged fat. I was aware of this but not embarrassed. I knew this elusive “him”, younger than me with browner skin was Assamese like my great-great-grandmother, even though I couldn’t see his face clearly. His torso was naked and the lines of his muscles showed just enough not to be overwhelming. Next to his nabhi, which is Assamese for navel, my gaze fixed onto a small, perfectly inked black tattoo of a snake.

Even though I’d already had a “major” dream seven or eight years ago that changed my felt sense of who I am forever, I had no idea this dream was the culmination of what I’d been working towards for over ten years. In the previous dream, I faced what I believe was the rejected feminine in my maternal bloodline. My great-great-grandmother, a young Assamese woman who married a British man working in the tea gardens. When he unexpectedly died, the British took her three, young children away from her by force and put them in an orphanage a thousand miles away. This was common protocol to keep mixed-race children from their native mothers’ influence, so as not to embarrass the British. My great-great-grandmother was never mentioned again until I found documents about her a hundred and fifty years later. It wasn’t enough to find her on paper. Intellectual knowledge doesn’t heal the soul. I needed to unearth her in myself. Our psyches are like nature; nothing is ever lost, although it sometimes demands a lot of commitment and underworld navigation to find what we don’t even know we’re looking for.

Jungian analyst Marion Woodman talked about how women’s journeys to conscious femininity are inseparable from confronting and integrating the inner masculine. This is where this recent dream comes in. I’ve worked with women going through menopause and beyond for over a decade, exploring how our inner masculine is shaped and formed by the relationships that we, our mothers, our grandmothers, our great-grandmothers and so on had with men. Fathers, brothers, grandfathers, mentors, partners have all shaped, and been projections for our inner masculine.

I tracked all the relationships I could and identified the inherited programming passed down through my motherline. The message came through loud and clear: “Catherine, you will need a man to survive, but never trust a man.” I received the message and spent the first thirty years of my adulthood believing I needed a man I couldn’t trust. I found a handful of them and wondered why I kept having the same relationship with different men. Sorry, men.

One of the gifts of menopause was realizing I’d been looking outwards when the answers were inwards. The roadmaps and teachers, both alive and dead that I met along the way taught me the language I needed to navigate the underworld. Books, myths, nature, dreams, alchemy, scent, art, writing all held my hand as I took a labyrinthine adventure into the depths of my unknown self.

A lot happened, which I’ve written about in the many words I’ve published on Substack over the last year or so. Even though it’s cheesy to say, I came home to myself. I finally knew what it felt like to be embodied. I found my voice.

But there was one part of the journey I understood intellectually but began to think would never be healed on a deeper level: my relationship with the inner masculine. It’s complicated. The roadmaps are not just few and far between, they’re absent. We women today are, I believe, being asked to thrash out a new path. It’s more than clearing a path, I’m not sure a conscious path to our healthy inner masculine has ever existed.

The great-great-grandmother I mentioned who was married at fourteen to a thirty-seven-year-old Englishman, became the focus of my search for a key to my inner masculine.

When colonizers came to other people’s lands, they didn’t bring women. They took local women. The British had children with women from India, the West Indies, North America, Oceania, Asia and more. The Spanish had children with women from most of South America. The Portuguese had children with African, Asian and South American women. And the French.

Colonizers had colonizing minds. They told their mixed-race children they were Spanish, English, French or Portuguese, occluding the mother’s origins. Native women were useful because they were strong and adapted to the land. They knew the ropes. But those women, including my fourteen-year-old great-great-grandmother, had an inner masculine shaped by her father, grandfather, great-grandfather and so on. For colonizers and the missionaries who often accompanied them, the native men were to be colonized, disempowered, converted. In the eyes of the colonizer, they were “primitive” and “uncivilized.” And so too, therefore, was the inner masculine of the women the colonizers partnered with. In mixed-race motherlines like my own, in order to survive, the foremother had to split from her inner masculine and bring only feminine attributes to the marriage.

I worked with the dream of the Assamese man and our navel connection and something in me clicked. Our belly buttons didn’t recognize each other romantically or socially, but in a soul-kin connection. We share the same ancient umbilical root, our motherline, our creative source. This younger, masculine dream figure represents the underground, ancestral, matrilineal energy that is part of me, that lives in my blood. This dream has healed a split that I’ve carried since I was born and that started when my great-grandmother and her siblings were wrenched from their mother and their maternal roots. The snake tattoo that I saw so clearly in the dream is, in true tattoo-fashion, imprinted permanently in my psyche. It is the healing, the transformation and the primal life force that is the gift of the inner masculine and feminine coming together.

Since this dream, I am much more whole. I hear and feel the support, the unconditional love of the lost (and now found) inner masculine. I don’t have to search for it outside myself any longer. I don’t have to outsource this desperate need to find the unknown missing piece of myself in other men. I don’t doubt myself anymore. I listen and, guess what, I trust. And it’s true, I can’t survive without a man. An inner man.

The French refer to a garden as a veggie plot, unlike the British who take great pleasure in flower borders and lawns. I didn’t favor either. Instead, I created an aromatic garden. Each new plant I procured or seeds that I sprouted took its place in the garden not for its color, or its texture, but for its smell. I’d begun an aromatic adventure that I am still on decades later.

Once established, my beautiful, sensory garden took on a role that I’d never have imagined when I started out. The wine regions of France have a tradition of receiving prospective buyers in ‘la cave’ or wine cellar, where they sit in the heart of the domain and taste not just the wines, but the whole ambiance. Often, they are there for hours, tasting and listening to the stories of each vintage and its typicity and the wine maker’s stories. Weekends often saw a continual flow of eager wine buyers to our home.

I’m not sure how it happened, but I began leading our customers through my garden of aromas before taking them down to the cellar. We stopped and smelled the plants on the way.

“Rub it between your fingers”, I’d say, handing them a leaf or two of basil or lavender.

“Do you recognize it?”

I noticed that a softer, deeper, sometimes even more childlike aspect of these people began to emerge as they connected with the plant scents. The subtle myriads of natural essences effortlessly connected to parts of themselves that were underneath the surface of their outer selves. Memories of childhood, grandmothers, places were brought to the surface and shared with glee, sometime even with a tear. Huge, strong men covered in tattoos would suddenly start sharing memories of their childhood. I’d tell people that this was a way of preparing for the wine tasting, opening the olfactory palate for what was to come. In reality it was much more. It was an opening to the soul, to the unconscious, to the depths of the self.

There’s a neurobiological reason why you can smell a note that was in your grandmother’s perfume or the whiff of fresh rain on the dry, sandy soil and be taken back to playing alone in the backyard as a child. There’s a neurobiological reason why particular aromas trigger not just a memory but the emotion that makes you relive the scene that has been conjured up.

Unlike all our other senses, the nose has no gatekeeper. It is unedited by the thalamus. When we smell an odor, it travels to the back of the nose where it meets millions of sensory neurons. These sensory neurons are laid out like a runway (the olfactory epithelium) awaiting the arrival of these volatile, scent molecules. On the tips of these neurons are small hair-like, static protrusions, whose job it is to capture the aromatic molecules as they fly by. Glands in the mucous membranes produce a secretion that solubilizes the odor molecules. This helps the molecules, which are like keys, open the right lock, which are the receptor sites. Each lock can be opened by many different keys, although some turn in the lock easier than others, they are a better fit. And don’t forget that what we tend to think of as a simple smell is in fact a complex bundle of aromatic molecules. We could think of this as a huge bunch of keys. As they fly through the nasal space, they open many locks. Each odor’s complex signature creates through opening specific receptors a neuronal code like a musical bar that we feel (smell is a sense and therefore we feel it), be it rose or dog poop.

Talking of roses, many years after I’d left my marriage and my much-loved aromatic garden, I was travelling in India retracing my ancestral roots. More than the memories of that trip or the colors, or even the people, it was the smell of rose attar that connected me to both the lost great-grandmother and the land. You can read about this here: https://substack.com/@reclaimingthedarkgoddess/p-199607880

Just the other day, a friend had come to visit, and we were smelling oils and attars. I no longer make wine, but we make and sell aromatic oils and so it seems natural that instead of wine tasting, we share olfactory discoveries with friends and customers. After a handful of aromas and the oohs and ahhs in response, I pulled out the rose attar without telling her what it was before she’d smelled it. Instantly, her eyes widened, her face opened and she shrieked, “Wow, that reminds me so much of India. That IS India.” So, it wasn’t just me and my story. Scents tell the story of place. There’s something about the roses grown in the Utter Pradesh region of India and distilled using ancient techniques directly into pure sandalwood oil. There’s something profound, even spicey in the soft, deep way that India speaks through this unique fragrance.

Today, I live in the Sangro de Christo mountains of Northern New Mexico, a place that also has a very distinct scent signature. I am lucky that the aromas constantly travelling directly to my limbic brain are natural, ancient and have a typicity that speak the language of these lands.

Pinon pine, sagebrush, ponderosa pine, juniper, to name just a few, all speak of resilience, of adaptability to extreme conditions, of connection. As they touch the seat of my emotions on a very subtle, sometimes imperceptible level, they are sharing these qualities through their aromatic signatures with me. Even though my Indian foremother came from the Naga hills in Assam, a mountain range 8,000 miles away from the Sangro de Cristo mountains, their resilience, their adaptability, their strength faced with extreme conditions is awoken in me by the scent of these mountains. Scent is an unrivaled key to the unconscious.

In Jungian psychology, the unconscious is a living, intelligent, communication system. It speaks in images, sensations, dreams, feelings, hunches, synchronicities, intuitive and somatic knowing, and smells. It is the part of you that still remembers the land your great-grandmother walked on, even if you never met her. It is the part of you that flinches at the scent of certain flowers or leans toward a particular wood, with no logical explanation.

As Jung himself said, “the unconscious corresponds to the mythic land of the dead, the land of the ancestors“. (1)

We connect and understand our ancestral pasts through pattern recognition. How are my survival strategies inherited from the experiences of my ancestors? Is my grief inherited? What are the gifts I’ve forgotten to receive from my ancestors? What are the capacities my body remembers even when I don’t know the story of where I come from?

Scent can help us, support us, touch these abandoned parts of ourselves. Scent can strengthen us, caress us, remind us, accompany us through its unfiltered-ness, through the subtle but powerful way it knows how to touch our depths. “Our unconscious mind, like our body, is a storehouse of relics and memories of the past... it carries with it the traces of that history.“ (2) Scent meets the unconscious effortlessly. It is nuanced and does this delicately. In the same way as to be truly present, we must learn to feel what we see, what we listen to, what we touch and what we taste, a whole world opens up when we learn the ‘felt sense’ of scent. I always tell my students, ‘You can’t think and feel at the same time.’ We need to switch off the mind, the constant analyses and allow our senses to lead the way.

In French, the verbs ‘to smell’ and ‘to feel’ are the same, ‘sentir.’ You can sentir a rose, sentir the cold wind on your skin, sentir someone’s sadness, or sentir that something is wrong. There is no split between smelling and feeling. Sentire is the Latin verb “to perceive by the senses.“

Imagine what the world would look like if we put this first, if we taught children to listen to and receive the world through the raw data that the body ‘perceives.’ Thinking would then become a tool to support and bring form to this felt sense.

Maybe by outsourcing a lot of learnt knowledge to AI, we can learn to perceive through ourselves again. Isn’t that what it means to be truly human?

Blessings

Cathy

P.S I am teaching a weekend workshop with natural Perfumer, Roxana Villa in her amazing Santa Fe perfumery on Fragrance and the Ancestors at the end of June. There are still a few places left. https://www.illuminatedperfume.com/products/ancestral-perfume-two-day-workshop

P.P.S if you would like to discover the Indian rose attar

https://www.cathysattars.com/?s=rose+attar

(1) Memories, Dreams, Reflections (p. 216)

(2) Carl Jung (1920)

Eleven years ago, it was love at first sight with the high desert mountains of Northern New Mexico. It was one of those relationships, however, where you feel like you are falling in love with someone from a completely different reality than anything you’ve ever encountered before. Everything is not only new, but you don’t have any common ground. Taos and the surrounding countryside are sometimes described as intergalactic and I wouldn’t disagree.

As a plants person who made my living from herbalism, gardening, herbal botany and aromatics, I was pushed way out of my comfort zone by the lands here. They say the desert strips away everything that is unnecessary. From day one here and an urgent email from France with news of a cancer diagnosis followed some weeks later by my best friend telling me that my father was emptying his house in France,and had thrown everything I ever owned away, the start of my journey here was a symbolic letting go. And that was just the beginning.

The desert seemed to be saying, ‘don’t try and control the direction you’re going in, let me guide you.’ Guide me it did, deep within myself. Another local saying is, ‘The mountain will either accept you and embrace you, or it will spit you out.’ It didn’t spit me out, which I’m grateful for, but it did hold me in a very long incubation, which aligned perfectly with my perimenopausal journey.

In the last ten years, I felt very disconnected from the flora, the herbal medicines and anything to do with gardening that I’d known so well and inherited from my father and grandfather back in England. I no longer saw myself as an herbalist or a gardener. I’d been pulled back to what felt like a pre-school level in terms of my plant knowledge. Over time, some of the plants and trees revealed themselves to me. The iconic New Mexico aromatic trees such as pinon pine, ponderosa pine, juniper and a few herbs including yerba mansa and, of course, sagebrush. For many years, I thought that was it. I was reduced to a handful of aromatics and no gardening. Northern New Mexico is a crazy hard place to garden as it is and we live at 9000ft of altitude up a crazy, rocky mountain. Standing up straight is challenging enough, let alone cultivating. I made up it for it by hiking. Taking in the place, the landscapes, the views, the smells as a whole rather than dissecting them one by one. Looking back, this is what I needed, and this was how Northern New Mexico was letting me get to know it. As Rilke says, “no forcing and no holding back.”

I also felt a hell-of-a-lot of respect for the fact that this land and the Native American people are intricately intertwined and have been forever. Who was I to come and work with their plants, their knowledge, their lands? I needed to tread lightly on the land and also within myself. My own psyche was so used to the plants and gardens of England and then France, it couldn’t just jump into this intergalactic plant world and function. At times, I thought maybe it never could.

Plus, the stripping away had only just begun. The mountain held me tightly as I recovered from cancer and a hysterectomy. My unconscious was, unbeknown to me of course, full of material that needed to be faced and integrated. The land, the mountain, the flora and the animals were here for me when I needed a specific medicine or message, but like I said at the beginning, it wasn’t for me to control or lead the way. I had to trust. That’s the thing about the dark night of the soul: The only way is through and the only way to get through is to trust a force greater than the self.

So, trust I did and slowly allies began to appear. Bear came forth to teach me about being a ferocious mom when I needed it most. Yerba mansa showed me what it meant to encounter the Dark Goddess. Sagebrush taught me resilience and the ability to rise above the mundane and gain a larger perspective on things. Juniper supported me as I adapted to the heat and dryness of Northern New Mexico summers. This place was here for me, teaching me about itself and myself slowly, but surely.

Eleven years went by and then a shift came out of nowhere. It coincided with an inner shift. I said “Goodbye” to the family home in England taking with me nothing but a few suitcases of material memorabilia. I said “Goodbye” to England, at least in the rooted way it has always been there for me. I acknowledged the part of myself that never felt she fitted in, the part of myself that now knew why, the part of myself that isn’t English. I also acknowledged the part of myself that is. My connection to my father that came through the garden, the plants, the wildlife. I was saying “Goodbye” to the plant connection that was so easy, so much part of my blood, my ancestry. I can’t lie, I had to grieve this loss, the naturalness with which the British love their gardens and their plants.

At this point, I am reminded of the famous quote by Alexander Graham Bell, “When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.“

My psyche was offering up so many dreams about the family home, my parents, British people and I began to feel that I was once again doing the inner work for my motherline, too. My grandmother and great-grandmother first set foot on British soil from India in the 1930’s. They couldn’t look back because there was no ‘going back’. I wasn’t going to look back for too long because I’d spent ten years of inner work unearthing patterns from the past and now I’m moving forward in life.

I had to remember though that New Mexico is not a place I can control things from, make things how I want them. I had to trust the land and my relationship to it. A spaciousness opened that I began to inhabit. Not knowing what was going to come up from deep within or how the pathway forward would open, I waited.

I bumped into an old acquaintance who I hadn’t seen for over thirty years. We’d travelled together with horse and carts one summer in England. A brilliant memoir writer, she’d written a memoir about her connection to England, specifically around the area of the Uffington White Horse where she lived before moving to the US due to her husband’s work. When I met Clover in the supermarket, she was at the end of three years living in the States with her children and about to move back home to the UK. I’ve followed her move back through Instagram and Substack. Her joy and sense of belonging being back in her home, in the pace she feels she belongs in the British countryside. I’m mentioning this because as Clover found her way back home, my path was leading me away from England as a sense of home. It felt as if we were ships passing in the night, both going in different directions. Both with a different sense of home.

And then the shift happened. I was on day thirty-one of a forty-day magical inner process with a mentor about authenticity. I was feeling more than a little lost and frustrated about how I was turning up for myself and for my clients. Where was my breakthrough in authenticity? I didn’t think the process was working. I didn’t notice the shift at first.

It arose softly and subtly from my unconscious like a gentle, warm mist over a hot spring. I was drawn to plant books and thinking about plant medicine in a way I hadn’t for a long time. Pure, rooted herbal wisdom. The plant stuff I loved all those years ago and that I’d tucked away when I began coaching and teaching about inner growth and transformation. In trying to please my audience and not able to find a way to marry the two, plus living in a place where the plants I knew didn’t grow, I’d buried my authentic connection with plant medicine, plants and land in an inner place I rarely visited. It was starting to call me home. It hadn’t gone forever. It is who I am and in a process about authenticity, no excuses, I have to embrace it.

I began to clear the rocky, steep land around the Earthship after the long winter here on the mountain. Native plants, cactuses, and saplings were hiding underneath the layers of dry leaf and stick litter. Tiny plants growing out of sheer rock revealed huge, woody roots that made them strong and anchored underneath the surface. All these resilient plants so good at adapting to extreme conditions were whispering to me. It was these native plants I needed to connect with, to learn from, to tend on this land. It’s these hardy, resilient ones that know how to live here, who have lived in harmony with the weather, the harsh soils, the pollinators for thousands of years.

I was beginning to understand that the magic of the high desert doesn’t rush anything. It doesn’t charm or seduce anyone. It takes its time. It refused to rush its relationship with me. It made me wait. My psyche had to mature. I had to peel away the past, the old ways of doing things to meet this new land with a fresh open mind and heart. At last, I’m ready. I’m finally listening. I’m excited to deepen my relationship with the land of enchantment. I’m beginning to understand that the enchantment that Northern New Mexico is famous for isn’t what people think, it isn’t anywhere near the surface of things. The spell it casts upon those who make it their home is deep in its profoundity, invisible to passersby. Once we feel the magic of its depth, the hum of its mountains, the resilience of its plants and people, it starts to call one home via the heart and the soul. My heart is opening, my soul is connecting and I am finally home and excited to where this magical land is going to take me next.

“Time spent in India has an extraordinary effect on one. It acts as a barrier that makes the rest of the world seem unreal.” Tahir Shah

The town of Kannauj in Uttar Pradesh is famous for its centuries-old attar-making industry. It’s known as India’s perfume capital. Attars are an ancient, natural perfume made by distilling plant material into pure sandalwood oil. The origin of the word is Persian and means ‘essence.’ We were hoping that Moosa’s attars would do just that. Help us help others get to the essence of themselves. Although Florian and I had both worked with scent for many years, neither of us was familiar with attars or the process of making them. We had no idea what to expect, but it felt refreshing to break up the trip with an aromatic adventure. There’s something very special about discovering a new scent. It’s like tasting wines from a region you’ve never been to before. With wine you expand your palate, with aromas you expand your olfactory repertoire. We were about to be transported to new outer and inner scent-scapes.

We’d hired a driver and as we arrived at the threshold of the small but bustling town, I heard someone shouting, “Miss Cathy, Miss Cathy.”. We were inching along the main street in bumper-to-bumper traffic so slowly we were almost at a standstill. I thought I’d heard my name but told myself it couldn’t be.

Then I heard it again, “Miss Cathy, Miss Cathy” as a moped drew up to the driver’s window. It was my name. Moosa had sent one of his men to find us.

I love that about India. In the crowded traffic, in an unmarked car with no mobile phone service, he located us. India may look chaotic, but it seems to have a hive-like way of organizing itself that relies on different navigating techniques than those in the west. Indians operate like bees who use optical flow to navigate, making their surroundings feel like they are moving towards them while they feel like they’re standing still.

We followed the moped through a labyrinth of narrow lanes and alleys. A crowd of people including a man with a laden donkey gathered to help guide the driver through a gap between two walls that turned out to be the road to the distillery. As it was the beginning of the Holi festival, the streets were packed, and everyone seemed to have time to add their two cents to the equation of how to get a large sedan car through a very thin opening on a corner. I held my breath. I couldn’t bear it if the driver’s shiny car got scraped. I closed my eyes and prayed from my spot in the back seat, only opening them when it was over.

Eventually, we arrived at a factory building on the edge of town. Moosa, a small, smiley, round-featured man with dark-rimmed glasses, a yellow, checked shirt and grey suit trousers came out to meet us. When he opened the door to his distillery, I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know what to expect. But not that. I was blown away. We were on a threshold between worlds. Already India was a world apart, but this was something else altogether. I’d never stepped foot into any type of Indian factory before, small or large. I couldn’t have imagined this if I’d tried.

Our eyes had to adapt to be able to see through a dense blanket of steam and smoke. Rays of light coming from gaps in the roof cut through the atmosphere and illuminated the earthen walls at regular intervals. It was like opening a door onto a secret Medieval alchemical laboratory that existed in another space and time. We stood and stared. If we entered, we might get engulfed into this ‘other’ world, never to return. I had to get my bearings. Once again, India had gifted me something I didn’t have an internal roadmap for. I had to readjust my worldview to fit what I was seeing.

“This is our hydro-distillation unit,” Moosa told us proudly, pointing at something that was worlds apart from the sterile, state-of-the-art, stainless-steel set-ups, we were used to. Eventually, I was able to make out three long rows of large, clay and smoke covered, dome-shaped vessels rising out of ancient-looking brick structures. Under each vessel a small fire danced in unison with the rows of other small fires. This was one heck of an operation. Men in dhotis tied up into make-shift shorts stood barefooted on the brick walls fixing long, thick slug-like rolls of clay around the lids of the copper stills, banging them into place with massive, square wooden mallets. Every movement was perfect, precise, and automatic.

Experts believe that attars are made using the same method as that of the Indus Valley Civilization that dates to between 3300BC to 1300BC. We were witnessing an age-old alchemical process that had survived the making of history in that part of the world. It felt like we’d stepped back a few thousand years or more in time.

Moosa, the boss and the only man in a shirt, led us out back to the yard where local farmers carrying heavy, bulging jute bags lined up to weigh their harvest on a large, old pair of flat, brass scales. Once weighed, it took two men to empty the bags into one of the stills. Who’d have thought a sack of roses could be so heavy. Seeing thousands upon thousands of petals pouring into the vessel’s neck like a pink torrent reminded me of the preciousness of what Moosa and his men were making. The delicate flowers harvested at sunrise in the nearby rose plantations had been transformed this way for centuries. Each family has their own confidential recipes. Rose attar is simply roses distilled into the precious sandalwood oil, but some of the attars are complicated, secret blends passed down from father to son for generations.

We sat at a table watching the action and drinking chai. I felt a tinge of guilt. I knew the hard-working men were itching to get off work for the holiday. The longer we stayed, the longer it would be before they could celebrate Holi. We couldn’t leave without smelling the attars though, that was why we were there in the first place.

Moosa pulled out a large wooden box with a selection of tiny hexagonal shaped glass vials with gold-colored lids. This was even more exciting than watching the distillation. One by one, he passed us tiny glass rods drenched in his beloved and sensuous aromatics. All those roses that had been poured into the copper vessels would be reduced to these 5ml bottles of concentrated scent. Each oil had its own, unique and very special signature. It was like eating the most extravagant Michelin-starred meal served by the chef himself, except we were eating with our sense of smell. Pure jasmine essential oil, night-flowering jasmine attar, tuberose, labdanum, wild vetiver, champaca…

I didn’t say anything. I’d been abducted by the rose attar. It wasn’t just my favorite. It reached a place inside me that I never wanted to be disconnected from again. I couldn’t imagine living without it. The delicate and yet distinctive, rich, sweet-honey-like aroma of the rose crept up slowly and mingled with the warm, buttery, creamy, woody smell of the sandalwood. Like the new-born that smells its way instinctively to the mother’s breast, I realized I’d been trying to track this nourishing inner feeling without knowing it. It was the smell of Mother India. Not the multitudinous smells that waft out of every crack and orifice India has to offer. This was different. This was the smell of comfort, of a deep, unfathomable, motherly earthiness, of being nurtured and held by the spirit of Bharat Mata, the mother goddess that is India itself. I’d found it with Kali in Kolkata and now I’d found the smell of it here in Moosa’s time-old distillery. I didn’t want to lose it. It was like a life-or-death situation. Without the rose attar, I wouldn’t be able to find Mother India inside me when I went home. I’d be lost to myself, to my ancestors, to my soul. It sounds dramatic now, but at the time, it was a key player in the journey of healing my motherline.

Join myself and natural perfumer Roxana Villa for 2-day Fragrance of the Ancestors Workshop in her beautiful perfumery in Santa Fe https://www.illuminatedperfume.com/products/ancestral-perfume-two-day-workshop

After reading the 2026 statistics showing that globally, people average 4 hours and 47 minutes of screen time per day, I decided that’s it! I’m going to do something about this addiction. I’d felt it coming on for a while. I’m sixty and got my first cell phone in 2000. I was thirty-five. My third son was very young, and I was often on the road with my job as a wine broker in the South of France. The aim of the phone was to be able to be in easy contact with the child minder when I was at work. It was a very large, no bells and whistles device with one function – telephoning.

Twenty-six years later and my iPhone feels like an extension of myself. It communicates with my laptop and iPad. It’s on my desk whilst I’m working. By my bed whilst I’m sleeping. I even take it to the toilet with me.

When I think about it honestly, I can’t help but think that beyond the dopamine spikes our phones provide, they have hijacked the natural need for connection that all humans have. Of course, I have to admit that having family abroad and being able to video call them on WhatsApp in an instant is wonderful and helps me maintain those bonds in a way that the expensive landline calls and letters of the past didn’t. However, much of the so-called connection that goes on through phones is not true – no eye contact, basic communication – one word or an emoji. Connected to what?

It also creates a very tiring form of connection that never ends. I’m continuously connected to my emails, so it’s easy to never have a break from work. I’m continuously connected to always being available to everyone and anyone. I’m continuously connected, whether I like it or not to the news and current affairs…Where has the neutral time gone where nothing is coming in or going out, where I’m in the present moment with myself?

Even though I have notifications turned off, somehow, I nearly always see the emails, texts and WhatsApp messages shortly after they’ve come through, which means that I tend to stop in the middle of what I’m doing and reply. What is this weird need, wherever I may be, to answer people straight away, all times of the day and night?

This morning on looking at the time, I noticed a text from Kiran, my youngest,

“Can you print this for me please?”

“Print what?” - there was no attachment

A few minutes later, I receive a text with no words, just a document.

“When do you need it by?”

An hour goes by…

“Tomorrow.”

The fact that Kiran still lives at home and can sort out his printing when he gets here tonight doesn’t occur to him because through text, it’s easier just to ask Mom. I’ve become his handy secretary. Don’t reply, I hear you saying. It’s not as easy as all that, I’m a mother, a people pleaser, a doer. My instinct is to help. Dare I say serve? If I wasn’t so attached to my phone, these things could happen at allotted times. Not bleed into my day like a constant trickle of should’s or ought to’s. I am going to tell him to do it himself tonight, but that isn’t the point. The point is due to this “connection” that our phones bring us, I spend much of my time, energy and thoughts on non-urgent tasks for other people that eat into my time and my attention for more important things.

I have a couple of Instagram accounts for my work. They’ve grown and are helpful in terms of showcasing the type of teacher and coach I am. I remind myself of the mantra I learnt from a time management guru along the way: “Create, don’t consume.” It kind of works, but not totally. I’m not a doom scroller, but I do return to my posts an uncountable number of times during the day to see how they are being received, reply to comments, etc. Once again, I find myself people pleasing, not wanting to leave someone high and dry after asking a question or commenting on something I’ve posted. Even as I sit and write this, I can feel a subtle energy along my arm stimulating me to pick up to my phone. This time, I resist. Most of the time, I’ve picked my phone up before even realizing I’ve been controlled once more.

I’ve been sober since June 2023. My relationship to red wine was like my relationship to my phone. I wasn’t a blackout drinker or in most people’s books a problem drinker. I just didn’t like the fact that red wine had an invisible hold over me. I didn’t like its insidious pull, its promises of comfort or relaxation when people were coming around or when I was cooking or at the end of the busy day or when I was stressed. I love being sober.

My phone sneaks in in a similar way. I want to read my book but find myself staring at ridiculous reels on Instagram at the end of the day – forty minutes has disappeared before I know it. In conversations, questions come up and I go to my phone to search for the answers, which takes me into the left brain and away from the felt sense of connection that being with people is really about. I’m in the queue in the supermarket and pull out my phone instead of just being in that moment where nothing has to happen.

A few months ago, I began hand spinning with a drop spindle, something I loved as a young woman. I have a hunch this new activity is doing something different, healthier to my brain and is at least part of the reason I’m being forced to confront this addiction to my phone. I love hand spinning so much, in moments when I would have picked up my phone, I find myself drawn to my handy little drop spindle. The simple act of doing what women have done for at least 12,000 years is very centering and enjoyable. Like the phone, a drop spindle is super portable. It can be taken anywhere. With the simplest of wooden tools, I can transform chaotic, raw, wool fibers into beautiful, strong, natural yarn. In her book, “Women’s Work”, Elizabeth Wayland Barber talks about the whorl (the circular part of the spindle that spins) being symbolic of the lunar cycles and the cycles of time. The rhythmic drop and twist of the spindle echoes female biological cycles and the “spinning” of generations. I feel connected to the archetypal role of women weaving destiny from raw potential. By repeating this action many times a day, I’m healing. I’m connecting to something ancient, feminine and cyclical. I’m experiencing something healthier, deeper, meaningful and productive than my phone.

I know I have a choice, I can honor my life, the precious moments of time that I have on this earth with the things I really want to do and experience or I can lose myself and this precious life in the unconscious technological takeover of my phone. I can slow down and live by being more in the present or I can lose myself and live less by being dissociated and lost in my phone.

I know the value of true connection, and it has nothing to do with my phone. I remember viscerally the first thirty-six years of my life without a phone. I know that it’s only in the present moment that we can truly love ourselves and others and that our phones are experts at taking us out of the present moment. I feel a responsibility as an older supposedly wiser woman to wake up and act when I know something isn’t right. I have a responsibility therefore to wake up and do something about my relationship with my phone.

I know what the next step needs to be – to build a new, healthier relationship with my phone. I know from sobriety, hard knuckling it doesn’t work- not for long anyway.

My phone needs to go from being a noisy extension of myself to a tool I clock in with and clock out with for specific uses. To begin the detoxification process, I will begin with a twenty-four hour fast. No phone at all for twenty-four hours.

I will designate an area where my phone can live – no need to have it with me all the time. No phone in bedroom or bathroom.

I can use it as a timer, reply to phone calls if needed. No scrolling. Specific research can be done on my computer. In terms of my computer, I have also noticed that my fingers mechanically go to check emails far too often. My new rule is email checks mid-morning and late afternoon only.

A key to the impulse or craving for something be it alcohol, sugar, exercise, work, phone is to slow down and ask myself, what am I avoiding? What I my soul really craving? What would true connection to myself or another person look like?

I also need to remind myself that unhealthy phone use not only steals our time, our energy, our thoughts and our focus, but also impairs our focus and attention, shrinks our brains, increases feelings of anxiety and stress and disturbs sleep.

To be honest I’m scared. Scared of the power of this addiction. Scared of my inability to control my use of it. Scared of promising myself something I can’t do. I am also excited. Excited to get my life back. Excited to see how I feel without my existence being dominated by a small metal box. Excited to finish my book, to write the next book, to plant a garden of native plants, to learn to weave the yarn I am spinning. All these things take commitment and effort and desire to achieve them, much more than my phone does. I probably would be able to do most of them with unhealthy phone use, but I’m pretty sure, it won’t feel as good, it won’t happen as quickly, I won’t be as present, and my soul won’t be so involved.

I’m sixty and every day I realize a little more how precious this life is, how beautiful nature is, how amazing it feels to create, how much I love. This wild and precious life is not worth sacrificing for an endless, meaningless algorithm and attachment to my phone. I refuse to take the easy, asleep route. I’m waking up and making changes. I’m deciding to reclaim my life from my phone. I’m divorcing this unhealthy relationship pattern with it.

So, here goes. I’ll keep you updated.

It’s made me think about the ‘things’ we attach to. The things we call ‘ours’, the things we need for everyday life and the things we don’t, but we keep anyway. The things we keep in cupboards, the things we stuff at the back of cupboards, the things that end up in the cellar, the things we have ‘on show’. The things we buy and never use, the things we use every day. The things we inherit from past generations, the things we don’t know what to do with, but can’t throw away.

What do you take from your childhood home when you only have a few suitcases you can fill? When most things will be sent to charity, left for the next owners or given to friends and family? This has been my dilemma this week. Letting go of the house and its contents, too. How to decide what is worth the precious space in one of my suitcases.

The small glass owl with bright sparkling eyes that Mom was able to slip onto a little shelf quietly many years ago, a symbol of how her love of sparkle and glitz was so different from my very British father’s love of antiques. The ideal gift for my six-year-old granddaughter’s bedroom.

“The owl will always protect you”, I said feeling the pinch of living so far away from from three of my five grandchildren. “We can call it Shelagh the owl after great grandma”, my daughter-in-law chimes in from the kitchen. Relief to know that one tiny piece has found a meaningful name and home.

The garden helped me create a plan. It was my father, an avid gardener’s special place. He tended it lovingly through all the seasons. This week, spring has sprung in the UK. The birds are singing, the fruit trees are bursting with blossoms, and the spring plants have lifted their heads to reveal their delicate flowers. The normally well mowed lawn of this beautiful walled garden is now more like a lush pasture. The wildlife is loving the peaceful abundance that has newly shot from beneath the winter’s dormancy. I’m struck firstly by the clumps of forget-me-nots growing at intervals through the swaths of grass. My Dad is alive in this garden, his beloved garden.

It’s here more than in the house that the melancholy hits me. I can’t call it grief or sadness. For one, although severely diminished, my father is still alive, and secondly the feeling is one of connection not separation. In this garden, I feel the man my father was. I feel the part of him that was at peace when he was tending this little corner of the world. I feel his unique connection with each plant, tree and flower. I feel it, because for fifty years he cultivated and looked after this garden, but also because this part of himself, he passed on to me and to my sons. Not in a forceful way, very subtly right from the beginning. From the first flowers he put for me to reach for at six-months old. From the many moments of toddling after him as he dug or weeded.

As I sat for one of the last times on the old wooden bench with flaky white paint underneath the ornamental cherry tree with an old friend who’d come to say, ‘Goodbye’, not just to me, but the house, we watched as a small brown bird, hopped onto a stick Dad had wedged in the pond so it could drink. “I must remember to tell the new owners why that stick is there”, I said out loud, which reminded me of the very special collection of rare snow drops Dad’s friend, former head gardener at the nearby National Trust garden Anglesey Abbey had given him that I must remind them of as well.

These were important to me because they were not about things but connection. Dad’s connection with the frogs and birds that visited his pond, the connection with another human being who loved gardening as much as he did. His connection with the hedgehog that he built a winter home for in an old wooden beer box he put safely in the compost heap in the corner of the garden.

The garden had given me a plan. I would feel my way around the house and fill my suitcases as much as I could with the things that had some meaningful connection. I imagined my two granddaughters who live near me in New Mexico having a great time playing with all the buttons in Mom’s round antique lacquerware button box as I enveloped it in bubble wrap for the long journey ahead. My paternal grandmother’s oil paintings had to be removed from the frames they’d been sitting in for the last six or seven decades to fit into my case, but I couldn’t leave them in the house to end up as a pile of meaningless landscapes amongst cheap out-of-date posters at the back of a charity shop.

My husband, son, daughter-in-law and I run a small family essential oil distillery so an old brass and iron spring scale and an old copper hydrometer used in brewing will decorate our distillery connecting us to Dad’s long and passionate career as a brewer. Alongside that I couldn’t leave the framed document of him being awarded ‘Brewer of the year’ in 1995. He was so proud. How could I allow this meaningful moment be thrown away forever. Don’t they call the ‘final death’, the moment when no-one left alive remembers you as an ancestor, when your name is spoken for the last time and all personal memories of your life, stories, and impact fade from the living world? Don’t we have a responsibility to remember and honor the lives of those whose shoulders we are standing on?

I could go on with the meaningful things I chose to put in my suitcases, but the point is what I’ve learnt viscerally from dismantling a family home, which is the love we feel for someone who has gone or is at the end of their life is in that innate, essential felt sense we get when we are with that person. It is the unique energy the person has and how we connect with it. My father even with end-stage dementia summed it up perfectly yesterday when I visited him in the home he now lives in.

I asked him, “how old do you think you are Dad?”

“Oh, about seventy-five”, he replied confidently.

“You are eight-nine”.

Silence

“It’s a strange thing aging. I feel the same inside.” he muttered.

So, even though he can no longer walk, wash himself, eat normal food and is doubly incontinent, my father’s essence and the connection I feel with him is what is true about him and what I will remember long after he’s gone.

I love you Dad!

Is there such a thing as a fear of finishing something? According to Google’s AI there is, “Yes, the fear of finishing tasks is a recognized psychological phenomenon known as completion anxiety. It involves intense apprehension, avoidance behaviors, and procrastination, often driven by perfectionism, fear of judgment, or the fear of failure. This fear often causes people to stall on the final 10% of a project to avoid scrutiny or potential failure.”

I don’t remember having this kind of fear before, but having said that, this is the first memoir I’ve ever written. Maybe I have a fear of finishing books that mean a lot to me. It’s true that the other day I thought to myself, “I think I need to re-write it all again in a different way. I have taken the wrong angle. There is so much I haven’t spoken about that needs to be included.” As I write this an emotion is rising across my face. Sadness? A rush of grief? What is this? Why? What’s going on? Have I done it all wrong or is there something deeper, not yet conscious going on?

In short, my memoir is the story of how tracing the buried stories of the women in my motherline in India, I was able to understand more about myself and finally own my existence. Through remembering my ancestors, I was able to heal the wounds of the past in the present. It has given me a deep, visceral love for those women and the Indian roots that my mother tried to keep from me.

This is where the problem lies. How can I have got so intimate with the lives and the struggles of my grandmother, great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother and still be stuck on who my own mother really was? In the process of writing this book, my ancestral grandmothers went from being veiled behind a lifetime of mom’s smoking mirrors to becoming fully alive. Yet, as I try to join the circle and end where I began, which is with my mother, I am stuck.

The story couldn’t unravel until Mom had died. Her gatekeeping was such a barricade. Is this sadness that’s welling up the realization that she is still, even in death as shielded as she was in life? Is this sorrow the inevitable understanding that after six years of writing, researching, weaving together a fractured, silenced and shrouded motherline in the hope that I would not just understand, but connect soulfully with my own mother, that it’s not happening?

Is this impediment to finishing my book the disparity between the way others, those close to me, my adopted brother, my oldest son remember mom and the truth of my relationship with her? “I loved grandma.” “I miss auntie Shelagh.” She was a kind of icon in life and still is in death. The indomitable Mrs. Skipper. Witty, generous, intelligent, wacky. Basically, a legend in her own right. So how can I write about the void, the emptiness, the abyss I feel towards her as her daughter in the context of the truth and connection with our motherline? Just as our body derives from the ancestors so does the psyche. How I wished mom would heal with me as I wove our maternal bloodline back together.

I remember early on in life knowing that when Mom finally accepted me as a girl and not a boy, which took over a week from the day I was born, she decided on who I was going to be. Pretty, lady-like, white and marriable. I was none of those things unfortunately. It didn’t stop her loving me, it also didn’t stop her seeing me as all those things. This, I believe is where the problem began. Instead of mirroring me back to myself, so I could learn who I was, she asked me to mirror her back to herself, so I could learn who she wanted me to be. I was Mom’s proof that she was who she said she was, white and upper middle class. I believed her. I became who she said I was. How could I not, I was a child. She was my mother.

Now I not only know who I am, but this knowledge and healing came from knowing where I come from. Is mom treating me now as she treated the women in our maternal bloodline? Denying their truth, their stories, their souls, their ethnicity even though she loved them intensely? Have I become part of what must be denied, ignored, covered up? The part of myself that I have reclaimed is the very part Mom could not behold as I was growing up. It’s the part I learnt was never to show its face. That didn’t exist in Mom’s eyes. That was never beheld.

Intellectually, I know the story of my motherline in the greatest detail. As I said, I resonate with my grandmothers. I understand what happened to them. I’m now realizing that this isn’t enough. Even though I know who I am, there’s still a piece. A visceral, internal felt sense of who I am and where I come from ancestrally that’s missing. Fully allowing the denigrated, buried, ignored, judged part of myself and the women whose shoulders I am standing on to be felt is the necessary ending not just of my book, but my ancestral healing.

Our lives are a continuous flowing story of those who went before us. They are informed by what went before and what came after. In depth psychology the unconscious carries a counter position to the conscious standpoint. It provides an important compensatory function for the ego’s one-sided attitude. We see this compensatory attitude in dreams. I spent ten years finding the truth of my motherline to compensate for the burying of it (which is a more polite way of saying ‘the lies’).

At this point, I have to say that there is a great weight to truly, fully feeling, to letting the part of myself and my lineage that was hidden expand within me. This is because, it isn’t just my mother’s doing. She, too, was lied to. Lying and denying the Indian foremothers and their lineages is at the heart of the Anglo-Indian community. It’s called ‘internalized racism.’ I was surprised at first when I joined Anglo-Indian groups on social media and realized our family weren’t the only ones to be told we were Spanish not Indian. The implications of my grandmother’s life weighed on my mother. The implications of my mother’s life weighed on me. The implications of the British colonizing India weighed on the whole Anglo-Indian community. I have created a fresh road forward by following the path backward.

If I own who I am viscerally, I must face my dead mother eye to eye. I now know who we are and where we came from. I am rooted enough that this time she will not be able to ‘turn me to stone’ with that look she used to give me as a child. I am connected over generations to my ancestors. The river is flowing again. Yes, my truth, the truth will set me free, but that freedom is setting me free from the false self my mother asked me to be for her. This is why I am sad and retarding the end of my book. I am setting myself free from the woman I knew as my mother. I am scared that in doing so, she will not give up her standpoint, and I will have to admit that there was never anyone there to truly call mother.

My book begins with me walking the ancient turf labyrinth situated in the town I grew up in. My mother had just died, and a black crow watched me the whole time. When I left, I noticed he’d left me a feather, which I placed on my mother’s coffin. I later realized crows and ravens symbolize ‘nigredo’ in alchemy, the first stage of the alchemical magnum opus (the “Great Work”) representing decomposition, putrefaction, and the “dark night of the soul.”

Deep down, I know the last tour of the labyrinth will enable me to dot the ‘i’ at the end of the chapter of my book, the chapter of my life and the colonization of my motherline. I believe that unseen, magical forces are at work in all creative processes, especially ancestrally related ones, so as I step out of the labyrinth next week for the last time, I won’t lose hope that Mom will join me in our strong, healed, beautiful maternal bloodline.

I’m loving it so much that today, I found myself experiencing even deeper silence as if there’s always a new level to explore. Every day, I walk our four dogs along an animal track that goes from our earthship along the side of the mountain and eventually leads up to a natural watering hole. Today as usual, I sat on a conveniently placed, large flat rock whilst the dogs enjoyed the water, but unlike usual, I stayed for much longer. Slowly as the minutes passed, so did the noise of the dogs splashing in the water or rolling on the dry, leafy earth. Slowly they and I dropped down as if our consciousness was connecting more profoundly to the earth. This place where no-one else but we and wild animals frequent. As if, the mere fact of absorbing the wilderness made us more a part of it.

My eyes noticed a barely visible track. An animal track, but more energetic than well-trodden. I traced the way the mountain lion at night makes her way down to the water – as if she was showing me. I tracked her. I felt her. Knowing she does the same with me. Aware of each other’s invisible presence in the silence. Nothing is lost in nature. Not our tracks. Not our smells. Not our thoughts. Not our meetings across time and space.

Suddenly, it all became a grid of different invisible paths. The way coyote slips under the fallen tree trunk on lower ground and drinks from the darker, narrower edge of the watering hole, and bear lollops down from the other side where its wider and less steep. Everyone has their habitual route, including me and the dogs. Even though we come when it’s light, we have our place at the watering hole. Over time, we have become a part of this wilderness. This very special silence, broken only by crow, another daytime being who flies above us cawing with recognition, and the bluejays who have returned with the warmer weather recognizable by their high-pitched clicks and whirrings.

This place, this mountain has slowly over the years become home. The deepening silence it provides mirrors a wildness within me. A wildness that doesn’t speak in words. An emptiness that is filled by something beyond me, only when it is ready. No forcing and no holding back as a teacher of mine would always say. I believe this is my other-worldly feminineness being reignited by uninterrupted stillness, by connecting with the unseen but deeply felt wild beings who also inhabit this feral corner of the Sangro de Cristo Mountains.

This is the feminineness that won’t, can’t survive in the noise of the dominant culture we have all participated in building. I need to nurture her. listen to her – for she is much wiser than I.

A large aspect of the menopause work I facilitate is about deprogramming the archaic, often subliminal, limiting beliefs and agendas women have had to live with in patriarchal societies and have passed on conscious or unconsciously through the motherline. Although there are many similarities throughout the modern world, each country has its own stories and particular forms of repression.

I noticed right from arriving here, that the Czech women seemed to be unable or unwilling to access the past. It was as if there was a tight lid on it. Through long days of facilitating, things became a lot clearer. Some of the women even described themselves a feeling of a tight lid keeping any truths from their grandmothers, great-grandmothers and so on buried.

Don’t forget the Czech Republic has had a difficult history when it comes to women. Roma women were targeted during the holocaust and taken ‘en mass’ to the camps. Sexual violence on a massive scale spread through the Czech Republic specifically committed by German soldiers and later during the liberation on a larger scale by Soviet soldiers. The Soviets saw these rapes as a form of psychological warfare. This foundational layer of systematic violence against women has been largely silenced. Women were shamed and their voices repressed by the Nazis during the occupation and after the war during the Communist takeover, any mention of what happened was taboo.

Today, working with women, this silence is still present, not consciously or voluntarily, but I believe through generations of mothers protecting their daughters by teaching them to be silent. It has shocked me to realize how in 2026, this silence is still the ‘norm’. There is a lot of work to do for women to be able not just to voice these stories--that would be easy--but to retrieve them for the secrets of the past.

Working together, we got to the internal programing, which is “women silence themselves before they are silenced.” This was very similar to the programing I received from my motherline, which was “women punished themselves before they were punished.”

I am so grateful to be able to do this work with women in different places of the world. We cannot step into a healthy, whole feminine consciousness (which is so needed) whilst still carrying the programming of generations past.

In deep contrast to this silencing, repression and violence again women was an exhibition going on in a museum here in Brno about the many Venus figurines found here in Moravia. The most famous is known as Venus of Dolní Vasotonic made from clay and powdered bone. She is between 25,000 and 31,000 years old, which makes her the oldest ceramic artifact ever found.

It seems such a paradox between a silenced collective of modern women and these beautiful incredibly ancient female effigies. Even if we can’t know for sure what relationship these ancient people had to the Goddess and women, they indicate at the very least that female imagery held a powerful and recurring symbolic significance in the spiritual or cosmological worldview of the ancient people of Moravia.

To me, they are today a beautiful symbol of the goddess rising. The Nazis and the Soviets may have shamed and silenced Czech women and their violent control may have lasted nearly a hundred years, but a deeply human connection to the great mother and the goddess found in these 25,000-year-old figurines has an energy and symbolism that cannot be broken. The time, I believe has come. Women’s voices are needed. Through healing my own motherline, I feel empowered and supremely grateful that I can help other women heal theirs.

So, then I asked Google why International Woman’s Day and the response was “it celebrates women’s social, economic, cultural, and political achievements while calling for accelerated action toward gender equality. Originating from early 20th-century labor movements, it honors the fight for voting rights, better working conditions, and women’s rights globally.” This sounds ‘passé’. Given the global political, social, and environmental situation, I believe much more than a head nod once a year at women’s accomplishments and rights at a global level, we need to bring awareness every single day on an individual and collective level to the profound need of honoring the feminine in women and men and in the world.

What does this mean? Patriarchy has been the dominant social system in much of the world for approximately 5,000 to 6,000 years. Patriarchy is a social power system and means ‘rule of the father’. Collectively, it means that the structures dominating the world are built on systems that are male centered and where men have and still do hold a disproportionately large share of power in government, business, and religious institutions.

This imbalance that has been prevalent for thousands of years has finally tipped to a point of disaster. If we don’t do something to re-address the balance immediately, the future doesn’t look good.

Although patriarchy in a very externalizing sense seems to have profited men, when we look deeper into it, men have and still do suffer greatly, too. Jungian analyst and prolific author James Hollis has written extensively about men suffering from a disconnecting with the feminine within. He identifies the greatest tragedy for men as the, “...fear [that] alienates them from their own anima, the principle of relatedness, feeling and connection to the life force”. By anima he’s referring to the inner feminine aspects of men.

The feminine principle is inseparable from nature, Mother Nature, Pacha Mama, Gaia, the planet, whatever you want to call it. As outlined in the philosophy of Ecofeminism, patriarchy has treated both women and nature as resources to be exploited, dominated, and controlled. Both are historically viewed as passive and “other,” and existing for profit, pillage, rape, etc.

The key, I believe is not just on an external level. Once again Jungian depth psychology has helped me understand that change in the outer world is inseparable from change on an inner level.
How have the generations of patriarchal dominance and violence played out in your ancestral lines and in your life? How have each one of us internalized (most often in women) and externalized (most often in men) a tyrannical, patriarchal energy? What is the inner power play in the relationship between masculine and feminine or yin and yang within?

How can we give voice to the feminine not just in the world, but within ourselves? How can she take her rightful place as a path finder, a revealer of the way? Jungian analyst Marion Woodman suggests that the “Dark Goddess” archetype is the powerful, hidden aspect of the feminine that is now rising to take her rightful place back in the collective psyche. However, she will never fit into the power system of patriarchy. As she rises individually and collectively, she demands that each of us and the world trust in her unseen feminine powers that are so needed to bring balance back between the feminine and masculine principles, between the divine feminine and sacred masculine, between yin and yang.

“The Goddess is the unspeakable wisdom that grows into the very cells of the body. She lives with this sacramental truth at her center: the beauty and the horror of the whole of life are blazing in Her love. She is dancing in the flames.” Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness

My experience in my own journey is that, as women, we must learn to trust the unknown, the deepest, hidden parts of our own feminine psyches. In the same way as we trusted nature and the baby that grew in the dark of our bellies when we were becoming mothers, we are now being invited to trust this new, natural energy gestating within us. Post menopause, we are no longer birthing new life in the form of children, we are birthing new life in the form if feminine wholeness, in the form of feminine leadership, in the form of the Dark Goddess, the mother of the crone. We can no longer give ourselves to patriarchy, we must trust the Goddess who is a representation of our own feminine spirituality. In doing this, we give the right to men to honor their own felt sense of the feminine within.

So, for me, it’s time to say “Goodbye” to International Women’s Day and insist that within ourselves, within our communities, and within the World’s Nations EVERY DAY needs to be about reclaiming the feminine, the earth, the ability to nurture each other with all our differences and step up as a channel for the Goddess to lead us back into balance.

“When the power comes from within us and we claim it as our own, then we no longer have to affirm ourselves by dominating others. The irony is that we are actually afraid of our own power.” Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness

Psychological alchemy was elucidated by Carl Jung and is a road map for understanding the psyche’s processes. It uses the metaphors of ancient alchemy of trying to turn lead into gold as life’s journey of turning the wounds and darkness held in our unconscious selves into the light of conscious wisdom. It is a perfect roadmap for the transformational journey of women going through menopause into their sovereignty and I have been using it as a framework for the last ten years.

Yesterday, in my last class with one of the cohorts, we were working on the last alchemical stage, which is called “conjunction.” This culmination stage symbolizes the sacred inner union between opposing aspects of the psyche, which is not an easy process. In the journey of menopause and feminine maturity, it is the inner marriage between our feminine self and animus or sacred inner masculine.

All the women I work with have been bought up within a patriarchal model of society and so have their mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmother and so on. As the inner masculine in women is shaped and formed in the same way as the feminine self, by upbringing, education, societal influences and culture, as well as the relationships the women in their motherlines had with men and society, most women are in some way facing an inner masculine that has partnered with patriarchy. In most cases, we are a long way from accessing a sacred inner marriage.

Even though I have been guiding women in this work for ten years, I always prepare each session anew. This is because each group is different and the influences from our quickly changing world need to be taken into consideration, too. The outer world is a mirror of our inner world. The ‘micro’ or individual behaviors aggregate to create collective outcomes…How can we work on the inner masculine without taking into consideration world events?

I began to reflect on the recent scandal that is dominating the news and what one journalist described as, ‘the largest criminal cover-up in history.’ As I went down the list of names, I realized every sector of power in our society was represented; world presidents (past and present), billionaires, the founder of Google – a tool that we all use every day, bankers and economists in positions of political influence, a leading professor at Harvard university, members of Royal families, famous actors, writers, researchers, scientists, conductors and musicians and of course self-help gurus. The list is endless, so endless that Wikipedia warn that the entry “may be too long to read and navigate comfortably.”

How have we, as a global society, arrived at a place where so many people with enormous amounts of power and influence have been committing ‘crimes against humanity’, as a recent article in the Guardian suggests, of a “grave nature regarding scale of atrocities against women and girls?”

How has such an imbalance and dare I say, ‘illness’ in the collective psyche happened and how has it affected each one of us internally? How ill is my inner masculine? In what ways has it identified with this very sick, patriarchal, power system that we call ‘society’? In what ways is my inner masculine out of integrity? This is the real work of “conjunction.” I have to be honest, we are not yet at the stage of witnessing a beautiful inner, harmonious marriage between the divine feminine aspect of the psyche and the sacred masculine. We are being asked to be brutally truthful and identify the inner tyrant.

Please remember, that patriarchy doesn’t mean ‘men.’ It refers to a power structure not a gender. Inner masculine and feminine are opposing forces, we could also call them yin and yang (there is a part of yin in the yang and yang in the yin) or sun and moon (the sun provides the light that the moon reflects). I choose to refer to them as inner masculine and feminine, because we are on the shoulders of many generations of couples that have influenced our outer and inner behaviors. It takes a sperm and an egg (even if it is in a petri dish) to reproduce. The idea is that in the psyche, we need similar opposing forces to come together for us to be creative, healthy humans. As we have both these forces within us, women can be dominated by their inner masculine and men can be dominated by their inner feminine. It is not restricted to gender.

What were the relationships the women in each of our motherlines had with men, with the society they grew up with? Go backwards starting with yourself and write down a word for your relationship with your father, your grandfather, your partners, the society you grew up in, and now live in. Do the same for your grandmother, your great-grandmother, even your great-great-grandmother if you know her story. Once you have done that look for themes. The themes I grew up with and those of the women whose shoulders I am standing on are obedience to the masculine, dependence on the masculine even when abused, women sacrificed their energy to men, to religion, to patriarchy and educated their daughters to do the same. My own mother upheld a very patriarchal society as if it was God and hid her deeper, earthier motherline roots out of shame. She was what in Jungian terms is described as ‘animus possessed.’ She upheld patriarchal values in our household and in the values, she taught me.

“Recognizing the difference between power and love is difficult if we were raised in a home where power was disguised as love.” Marion Woodman

In my mind, I was a feminist and striving for equality in life and in my relationships with men, but my unconscious was still acting from generations of programming. I was giving my power away to the outer and inner masculine time and time again, sometimes obviously, but as I got older more subtly, but surely.

When we look back through time, our own ancestral timelines and the collective timeline, can we really be surprised at what has been exposed? The Me-Too movement exposed men that had gotten away with abuse for decades, many of them in positions of power. The history of rape and abuse of women during wartimes is huge and the numbers are unfathomable. The witchcraft trials in Europe that killed many thousands of women for apparently sleeping with the devil is part of European women’s ancestral history. This is not a new story. However, maybe the festering abscess is finally bursting on the world stage for all to see. Is this an opportunity to admit collectively that we have built a dominant culture on the abuse of power?

“The modern woman is realizing that her psyche has been raped as her mother’s before her was raped.” Marion Woodman

I believe however, it all depends on what we do with it this time. There needs to be outer and inner accountability. We are a collective, a whole. I don’t think we can point at the outer world and say, “they did this” without asking ourselves, “how did we let this happen?” How have we allowed patriarchy, which means, ‘rule of the father’ dominate not just society, not just the global markets, not just the planet, but our own souls?

Depth psychology is soul healing. It explores unconscious patterns, emotional memories, and symbolic material that quietly shape our thoughts, behaviors, and relationships. ‘Depth’ refers to the need to dive down deeply and notice not just what is visible or external in our lives, but what is buried, symbolic and often ancestral. Sometimes, we have to go backwards to move forwards.

I’m not saying we can only deal with this catastrophe within each one of us. There is a huge shift and re-balancing that is needed in the outer world. I am saying that instead of feeling helpless and hopeless, we can investigate our own inner and underworld, be honest with ourselves, our relationships, our values and identify what is no longer acceptable in our inner and outer lives. What are we no longer able to ‘cover up’? What can we no longer sanction in our own lives? Where is our integrity in question and what is needed to get back into absolutely integrity with ourselves?

I believe these are the questions we need to ask ourselves as a collective and as individuals so we can stand up in integrity with authentic voices that come from our souls and a force that is in alignment with the natural self-regulating function of the collective and individual psyche. Whether we like it or not, whether we are aware of it or not, we are striving, albeit with difficulty, although no-one ever said the journey was going to be easy, towards a healthy sacred union between masculine and feminine forces on the planet and within each one of us. What is known in psychological alchemy as “conjunctio.”

“The I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, recognizes the continual shifts that go on within the individual. The Yang power, the creative masculine, moves ahead with steadfast perseverance toward a goal until it becomes too strong, begins to break—and then the Yin, the receptive feminine, enters from below and gradually moves toward the top. Life is a continual attempt to balance these two forces.” Marion Woodman

To be more precise, I wasn’t really catapulted, but rather pulled gently yet firmly into a place in my psyche where past meets present, where ancestral spirits are real, where I couldn’t ignore the presence of what turned out to be my great-great-grandmother.

I’m not going to go into the details here. I’ve nearly finished a memoir about my ancestral healing experience and decolonizing my motherline. I want to talk about a certain flavor of disconnection that I see many women experiencing and how to reconnect with an indigenous energy that is every woman’s birthright.

Indigenous means ‘born from the land’, ‘to be born within’, and even ‘to give birth.’ Everyone comes from a lineage that, depending on its story, at some point was born from and lived intricately from the land. The word “human” roots back to the Latin word humus, meaning “earth, ground or soil,” and relates to ‘humility’ and ‘humble.’

The motherline is unique compared to our three other ancestral lineages, because through it we carry and pass on mitochondrial DNA to its members unchanged. Through this maternal DNA, we resonate together, like a tuning fork. Each member of the motherline, male and female, carries the same maternal inheritance passed on though the mother’s egg. The motherline is our clan, our earth, our embodied ancestral belonging. It is a channel that connects us like one living organism of which each generation is a part – a matrilineal psyche!

The disconnection is that we have become separated and isolated from this living, soulful flow of feminine energy that goes back through the motherline. An energy that is fed by a connection to Mother Earth, to the stories, the medicines, the wisdom, the foods, the magic and the soul of the land our ancestors grew from and were a part of. We look despairingly to the outer world, a crazy, patriarchal, power-hungry outer world for sense, for belonging, for soul, but what we are searching for, knowingly or not, can only come from within. From the inner place that connects us to those who went before us and whose gifts we carry within, if only we would turn our perspective towards them.

In the mentorship program where I teach women who want to become menopause midwives, we work closely with the sacred symbology of the labyrinth, a universal feminine archetype. When walking a labyrinth, although there is only one path, which will always take us forwards, one often gets the impression of going backwards. By following the path backwards, we are going forwards. We are also walking the steps of those whose shoulder we are standing on. When we connect to the ancients, the ancestral grandmothers, the load is shared, the wisdom of past generations, too. When the center of the labyrinth is reached, the journey outwards begins. The labyrinth is often considered an ancient symbol of the womb or the birth canal of the Great Goddess, where walking to the center represents a return to the source, and walking out represents a rebirth and integration of this source energy into life.

As I accompany women in my programs, I see the transformation when they finally reconnect to the existence and reality of their motherlines, to their songs and stories and through that to a deeper sense of self. The connection to the land of our foremothers is still a part of us and in the same way as our ancestors are in the lands, they are also in our bones and our psyches.

“… the collective unconscious is in no sense an obscure corner of the mind, but the mighty deposit of ancestral experience accumulated over millions of years, the echo of prehistoric happenings to which each century adds an infinitesimally small amount of variation and differentiation.“ Carl Jung, Collected Works 7, Para 729

So, how do we get started in reconnecting with our ancestral experience? As long as you know where your motherline originates from, you can begin. My great-grandmother was born in Assam in North-East India. Her mother was from the hill tribes of that region. I have had such a wonderful time researching the ancient ways of the Assamese people—The religious beliefs, the magical beliefs, the rituals, sacred instruments and ceremonies, foods and plant medicines. You don’t have to know the details or have personal documents to understand your ancestors’ lives. There is plenty of historical and ethnobotanical information online for every corner of the world, as long as you know the land they came from.

Recently, I started hand-spinning again after thirty years, triggered by some research on the northern European female shamans or Volvas. I then remembered the women from the hill tribes of Assam are world re-known handweavers and spinners of the most gorgeous silks and cottons. After a few minutes of research, I was being nourished by the stories of my motherline and their deep connection to weaving and spinning. According to the Indian Institute of Handloom Technology, Mahatma Gandhi once eulogized the Assamese women for their weaving skills saying, “Every woman of Assam is a born weaver, and she weaves fairy tales in cloths.“

There are ancient stories of Assamese women weaving in just one night ’kavachkapur’, sacred talisman cloths believed to protect soldiers in battle. The process was a magical ritual where the cotton was collected at midnight, cleaned, spun and woven into cloth before dawn.

As I spin raw wool with my drop spindle, which is such a universal, ancient, feminine tool found in the same simple form all over the world, including Assam where it is known as a ‘takuri,’ I connect with my own ancestral mothers, but also the unbroken lineage of women past and present across the globe. Women from Mesopotamia, the Andes, Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America who used the very same spindles in the very same way. I feel the soulful energy of generations in that meditative, rhythmic motion that transforms raw fiber into the thread that has spun the world. It is this ancestral energy that I connect with, that nourishes me, that gives me the power to move forward, to turn up for life.

I’m not saying we all have to take up hand spinning or weaving, although they are beautiful crafts, but I am inviting you to sew the broken threads back together by discovering the heritage that is rightfully yours. The ancient ways that come from the land of your foremothers and are in your blood, bones and DNA. What were these magical ways of your people, the songs and chants, the rituals and crafts, the medicines and foods? Don’t forget, the route backwards helps us to reconnect with what is precious—our instincts, our rootedness, a sense of peace from connecting outer to inner, conscious to unconscious, past to present. These are the things that can nourish us from within, and if we listen carefully, we may even hear the voices of our ancestors guiding us forward.

Model of Saffron Walden Maze, the ancient turf maze in the town I grew up in from 12 years old.

So when I read in the local Taos website that there was a creative meditation collage workshop to welcome in the year of the fire horse, I came out of my shell and I signed up. I thought that being a participant instead of always facilitating would do me good and the subject and medium spoke to me.

We were guided through the stages of gathering images, fine-tuning by selecting the ones that would end up in the collage, placing and gluing. It felt a little rushed as it was only a two-hour workshop, but I sank into the process and let myself be guided.

The interesting part came once our collages were complete. As I said, I’ve spent hundreds of hours interpreting collages with students, but I’d never had a map that defines the placements on the paper. I listened with perked up ears when the facilitator explained the process. She did mention the name of a ninety-three-year-old artist whom this lineage of collage work was handed down from, but unfortunately, I didn’t catch it. I’ve searched on Google, but to no avail. If someone reading this is more versed in this type of collage interpretation and knows who I’m talking about, please let me know.

A lover of the unconscious and the language it speaks, I enjoyed tuning into the meanings of the different placements. The central image is the “Self-Image,” representing who we are now in our lives. Plonked right in the center of mine is an ancient archetypal female fertility carving in stone with two smooth, protruding breasts. I also glued a New Mexico style heart onto the bottom half of the statue. Straight away this got me thinking. I work with women. I am in a deep process with ten or so women going through a nine-month mentorship to become menopause midwives – of course the archetypal mother/fertility symbol speaks to me. “But you’re not fertile anymore,” said a small voice in my head. A hint of shame about my age and inability to reproduce. I recognized it straight away as the voice of the culture I live in that reminds women every day that the only fertility or creativity that really matters is our ability to reproduce. I didn’t let it win. No, I AM fertile, more fertile than I’ve ever been. My fertility is my creativity, my authenticity that comes from the rebirthing of myself.

I have four sons and five grandchildren. I have spent many years mothering. I still mother and grandmother, but my focus at this time in my life is on my own rebirth. It is through this rebirthing process that I mother and grandmother more wisely. Less from fear or codependency and more from grounded authenticity. This, I believe is what the menopause journey initiates women into. The focus changes, the energy transforms, and the psyche knows that to become sovereign, to become older, wiser women in a society that desperately needs us, we must birth ourselves, our true, authentic, feminine selves

.

The image straight above the central image represents our ideals, our ideal self. I have the word angel and a young, black girl wearing large, white sunglasses and radiating energy from her head like the sun’s rays. Angels are archetypes and according to depth psychology, these invisible guides help us navigate the invisible world of the psyche and discover the hidden aspects and meaning of our own calling. The angel leads the eye to the image of the girl who with her vibrancy and radiating energy represents a wholeness. Whole unto herself, which, like Lilith, is the symbol of the sovereign women. She doesn’t need a man. In those moments she comes together with a man, it is though connection, not need. She is both sun and moon, conscious and unconscious. Even though she is wearing sunglasses, we see the strength in her eyes. The direct look of Self to the outer world.

The upper right corner represents the ‘mission and causes.’ Why I am here. My call to contribute to the world. A photo of a woman in the sixties taking photos in what looks like London or New York sits very separately from the rest of the collage. I like her strong stance. She is out and about in the world and behind her back a man is taking a photo of her. She is focused on what she is doing and no longer looks at the masculine, who is beholding her in action.

Moving down to the lower right-hand corner that represents, ‘outward energy.’ How am I spending my time and energy right now? This made me laugh because right in the corner is a bird perched on a pillar. I live in an earthship, nine-thousand feet up a remote mountain and often feel very much like this bird looking down at the world going on below. The man on horseback with his packhorse bringing up the rear and the word “roots” above it points to the notion of movement. In my life now, there is some outer movement, but I’m interpreting this as more the notion of inner movement, which is huge at the moment, triggered by a recent happening that came unexpectedly out of left field. As my collage suggests this is another layer of my ancestral motherline story coming into consciousness. I should never have done an enneagram on deepening this last draft of my memoir about decolonizing my motherline. The lesson being, be careful what you intend, especially when you map it onto an enneagram.

The bottom lefthand corner is the zone of one’s ‘creative wellspring,’ the force that is needed for us to manifest our creativity. This one also made me giggle. I’m an avid herbal tea wildcrafter and drinker. The wildflowers in the image are commonly known as “Prairie Smoke” and appear to be coming out of the tea pot. No hesitation here. My creative well spring comes from the wild, from the plants and how I bring them into the metaphorical teapot, i.e.my life. Without our artisanal essential oil distillery and the wildcrafting I do for this, my balance in life, my creativity would certainly be stunted. My own nature springs from my relationship with the wild.

The upper left-hand corner represents our ‘dreams and memories,’ our inner world of imagination and possibilities. In what way does Georgia ‘O’Keefe live in my unconscious along with the silence I have worked so hard to find within me? She is a powerful woman who lived and created in the same part of the world as I live in. She left us the roadmap of female autonomy, independence, and the courage to redefine one’s own path in the desert, i.e. outside the confines of societal expectations. Once again, we have a woman who was ‘whole unto herself.’ Often alone, she carved out her own territory, living alone in the badlands here in Northern New Mexico and refused to be defined by others. She painted her own, unique representations of the land and the wilderness here with bleached bones and vast, empty skies that went way beyond her paintings of flowers. For me, she represents a woman who doesn’t need permission to express herself, to live the life that suits her.

I’ve left the bottom center image to last because it represents our ‘blocks and shadows’ and I was shocked by the precision and insight I got from this. When I was making the collage, the word Irish and the Irish gypsy woman, her children and caravan instantly caught my eye. As I was ripping them out, I knew I was connecting with my mother’s unknown father’s side. Through the research for my memoir, I found out that my mother was illegitimate and the father she called ‘Dad’ wasn’t her biological father. Although it was a shock at first, it made sense. My mother hated the man she called dad and even though he died when I was a teenager, I never met him and she had no contact with him. I have researched through DNA matches her biological family but have only got as far as to know that her father was an Irish man who must have been in Calcutta in 1927 when she was conceived.
It feels so spot on that the word Irish and the horsedrawn caravan image have come up as the blockage in my life. I have done so much work on the inner masculine, my relationship with the outer masculine. The recent push in yet another layer of inner healing was also to do with the masculine. So, how is my mother’s illegitimacy a blockage for me? I know the answer in a feeling sense. It will take me more reflection to put it into words. So far, I can say that the absent father replaced in my mother’s life by an abusive stepfather made it impossible for my mother to trust men. Her message to me growing up was, “Catherine, you will need a man but never trust a man.” A double bind if you ask me. More importantly is how does this message play out with my inner masculine? When I need the energy of the sun, the yang, the masculine principle, he isn’t there and in his place is an abusive voice that mimics patriarchy. The voice that said at the beginning of this collage work, ‘now that you are post-menopause, you can’t be fertile or creative.’ As I write this, I look at my collage as a whole and I notice the smiling young lad with the farming tools and I remember Marion Woodman’s words, “the whole process of the soul’s journey is toward the inner marriage of the mature masculine and the mature feminine.” I see this young man as a healthier, developing aspect of my inner masculine. A part of myself, I can learn to trust. I notice the youngish man on his beautiful, black horse, and the ballet dancer supporting his partner. All positive images of the masculine.

I decide that thanks to my collage, my intention for the year of the Fire Horse that begins on Tuesday is that I CAN and WILL overcome my blockage with the masculine. With the help of my angels, I intend to discover that healthy, inner masculine just below the surface who is connected to his inner and outer nature, to his body and the feminine so I can radiate that sun-like energy, just like the ‘ideal self’ image at the top of my collage into the world through my creativity.

I didn’t listen to the signals for years (yes years), and so the last one got so loud, it was impossible not to. I suppose, I should be grateful that finally, life woke me up and showed me my blind spot. My enormous, dark, loud, painful, lonely, wounded, ridiculous blind spot.

In one fell swoop, every relationship I’d ever had in my life became meaningless. Although, I’ve worked through numerous addictions over the years, I was suddenly facing the core one. I thought the only one remaining was sugar, but no, relationship addiction is the one that was hiding where I couldn’t or didn’t want to see it.

For years, I was sure, cockily sure that I’d healed my codependency, and I had to a degree. I’d healed my pitiful self-sacrificing to all humans I interacted with. I’d healed my enmeshment with my four sons. I’d healed my inability to say, “no” to anyone. I’d healed my inability to make decisions without first imagining how other people would react. The one thing, I hadn’t healed was my inability to have boundaries in intimate relationships. I shouted about my boundaries without really believing in them, which is why I now can see they didn’t work.

When life woke me up, I found myself reflecting on Elizabeth Gilbert’s recent book “All the Way to the River.” I bought it when it first came out six months ago, not because she was writing about sex and love addiction, but because I’m writing a memoir myself and so try and read as many recent ones as I can. I devoured the book in a couple of days, but remember, I said I am my worst client. At no point, even when she goes into the details of realizing she was codependent and addicted to relationships, did I see myself. I even passed the book on when I’d finished it. I thought I was so beyond any of the problems she writes so intricately about.

Now, when I look back at every relationship I’ve had from adolescence onwards, they fit the criteria that I found myself downloading from the love addicts anonymous website. I read through the list and copied the ones that I resonated with into my journal.

· Being unable to leave the relationship

· Committing too quickly

· Being too dependent

· Allowing a partner back after misconduct

· Feeling exhausted by frequent highs and lows

· Experiencing relationship obsessiveness

· Feeling unloved, resentful or undesired

· Changing oneself to be in relationship

· Feelings of anxiety and depression

· Feeling tired, confused and irritable

My first thought was, doesn’t everyone feel like this in their relationships? My second thought was, how could I have reached sixty and only just realized this? I then remembered that I’d asked a student of mine who is a great astrologer to have a look at my chart.

“You are going through your second Saturn return. You have Saturn on your Moon, which is the 29.5-year echo. What were you doing 29.5 years ago?

I remembered my first Saturn return. I was in India, living in Varanasi with my two oldest sons who were four and five at the time and a group of hippies from the Rainbow Family. Gosh, now I think about it, I was a wandering single mom. Lost to myself, to my kids (cringing as I remember this) and lost to life mainly though my inability to have healthy relationships with men.

I thought I’d dealt with it, but I guess this is the function of our second Saturn return. We get another go around, another chance to unwrap a persistent layer of what must be my core wound.

I haven’t just been hanging around in the last 29.5 years and one thing I have accomplished is ten years of intensive ancestral healing work (culminating in my soon to be finished book). What I can say about this core wound from the ancestral objective is that it didn’t start with me. My grandmother, a mixed-race eighteen-year-old living in Calcutta in the 1920’s was taught to believe by the colonialist atmosphere that her only value was sexual. My mother was conceived at that time by an unknown Irish soldier passing through. There’s much more to this story and my motherline, but you will have to read my book.

So, I am confident that this layer of healing is not just for me. I’m excited to mop up these deep emotional wounds for myself and my ancestors.

As my astrologer friend says, “It’s a maturation of your Moon which has everything to do with Chiron, the wounded healer. It is conjunct and a repeat of the core wound. Focus on what needs healing, what is ‘frozen’, what is working and what is not. Your Moon is in Pisces, so where are you over giving and not giving to self, or not including yourself in unconditional love?”

Dare I answer everywhere? This is the pattern of the women in my lineage. I inherited it. I, like them, was mothered with this message of codependency, and programmed to giving of myself totally in relationships no matter with whom.

I have worked consistently on these motherline themes thorough my research, writing my book and it is central to my work with women going through menopause. Now I am being shown that once through menopause, it isn’t over. The amazing feeling of post-menopause, of having ‘done the work,’ of finding my voice and my soul’s purpose was just a breather before Father Saturn, who governs the time that passes, turned up again with more offerings and the message that the journey of healing continues. As my astrologer friend says, “Saturn cycles aren’t easy, they are sobering.” And yet, at sixty with, dare I say it, a lot of hard-earned wisdom under my belt, they even feel like a gift.

(photo - Varanasi - 1994)

At the height of her work in the eighties, she noticed that Dark Goddess images, symbols and characters were turning up regularly in her clients’ dreams. She saw this as a message from the collective unconscious that the feminine was rising as a need for balance in individuals and the world.

The psyche is a self-regulating system. In the same way as our physical bodies are continually striving for homeostasis so is the individual and collective psyche. Was this collective expression of the Dark Goddess, the psyche’s way of trying to self-regulate an out of balance system?

Today, I am lucky enough to have a thriving coaching business and get to spend a lot of time regularly with clients who come from all over the world. Like Marion Woodman, I notice themes and tendencies expressing themselves through my clients. The most current one being what I can only describe as an ‘opening’. It feels like a collective shift in awareness. People’s consciousness and ability to look at what is happening in their lives seems to be going from a more external perspective to a clearer understanding and vision of the ‘invisible’ or unconscious realms.

I find this very hopeful, especially given the state of the planet socially, ecologically and politically. “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” We live in a very externally driven, materialistic model of society, so if we can’t change it with an externally driven, materialistic mindset, could this shift in human awareness be a sign that something is changing on a different level?

I know my experience comes from a tiny corner of the world and could just be a theme I am seeing in a certain portion of humanity, a portion that thinks like I do. However, I do believe that we are a microcosm of the macrocosm and the experience of an individual or small group of people mirrors something on a much larger scale. “As above, so below; as within, so without.“

I have hope that humanity is capable of positive evolution. I believe that, as in a depth-psychological model, the human psyche is made up mostly of parts of itself that the ego is unconscious of, both individually and collectively. I believe that individual and collective wholeness comes from bringing more of our shadow and unconscious selves into conscious awareness. Carl Jung said, “Wholeness for humans depends on the ability to own our own shadow.“

So, when I see more and more of my clients bringing to the sessions a deepening relationship and understanding of their own shadow, a sensitivity and mindfulness of the underworld and the subtler influences of life, I have hope.

My hope is that this part of the human makeup that is wise in a non-intellectual way, that is wise in a way we can’t even fully understand, that is vital to our wholeness and our humanity is rising. It isn’t rising with weapons or dominance, but with the gift of awareness; Awareness of what needs to be integrated for us to individually and collectively come into balance.

In any healing modality, the first thing a practitioner does is find out where the imbalance is. When we look at humanity as the patient, where are we out of balance? From what I can see, we are living in a world that values external and material beauty looks, external and material wealth, external and material power, thought over feeling, science over soul. We are totally out of balance, and we are about to topple.

As I said, the human psyche is self-regulating. The personal and collective unconscious are real. When I witness my clients embracing their feelings, the non-material inner journey, and their unconscious, I have a glimmer of hope that something beyond our ego awareness is leading us in a way we cannot yet imagine, but we cannot ignore either.