Seven years ago in 2019, a cute, fresh-faced younger me spoke these words. Listening back on them now, I smile. What medicine to hear them again, and how consistently I - and perhaps you too - need reminding.

Menopause is not something we associate with pleasure, but this is the topic of my writing today, and a breadcrumb trail I’ve been following over the past year.

A note if you’re a man reading this… I would love my writing to be valuable and illuminating to you too. The idea that menopause is only a women’s issue was never really true - and the themes of descent, self-worth and a healthy relationship to pleasure are universal. Thank you for being here!

Every summer around this time I have an annual appointment with a psychic. I don’t plan it that way, it just so happens that at this stage of the year, something in me calls for a kind of midyear introspection.

Reflecting on my session a year ago, I am remembering the words the psychic spoke to me: “You know what it is to hustle and make things happen Ruby, but you are not so connected to pleasure and how to have a really good time.”

What? Me? But…I worked with sexuality and pleasure for years! I’ve gone to over 15 Burns! I go to clubs to dance. I… I…

Oh.

It’s true that I primarily worked my ass off at Burns and festivals. And the clubs are kind of fun. . . in a kind of being blasted with intensity and catharsis kind of way. The Ruby who worked with sexuality feels like light years away now. And upon further reflection, I had to concede: on those forms you sometimes have to fill in where it asks you what your hobbies are, as time went by, I witnessed myself increasingly never having anything to write.

Over the years, my bright, creative, sensual and inspired self got a bit lost. As I believe all of ours do: in needing to earn an income, in the quiet shadows of trying to prove ourselves, in the subtle yet consistent energy of pushing, and in nervous systems so overstimulated and under-resourced they seem to have become an inherent condition of modernity itself.

I think of the (400ish?) ovulations that took place in my body in 35 years of menstruating and all the sacred, creative energy that was generated through me, where it all went, and what it means to me now that it has stopped.

Since my cycle stopped two years ago, I have fallen off whatever spinning wheel and trajectory I was on and come to a juddering halt, while witnessing the world’s wheel, still in a frenzied, cataclysmic spinning.

I find myself in a kind of betweenness, a liminal state, devoid of the fire and drive I used to have, my mind willing my soul to lead the way onto the next creative adventure, but simply needing to be with myself in the silence and the discomfort.

In this void, my body invites me to reflect on everything that I was happily too busy to notice or pay attention to in the effervescence of my cycling years, seemingly pointing to the question: Can I really be with myself?

Can I meet myself with kindness in what I’m struggling with? Can I bring tenderness to the tendencies to judge myself and my body for the challenges it’s experiencing and lovingly call in my inner critic? Can I be curious about what survival strategies I’ve been operating on, that I no longer have the energy to fuel? Can I gently look in the mirror at all the ways I have self-abandoned? The narratives that live within me that are not conducive to my thriving? The places that are hardened?

It is not an easy path.

Initiations never are.

And I’m coming to understand that pleasure is a most powerful and needed companion in the menopause process. It’s the counterweight to a lifetime of striving and the thread that keeps us resourced enough to excavate our underworlds.

I know what it is to have achieved, fixed, changed, been there for others, been busy getting somewhere - all with the result that my true enjoyment got left behind.

I’m sure you know this too.

Menopause is a training in the unfamiliar. Like a second puberty that no one ever told us about, it involves a massive brain-chemistry shift, impacting every system in the body. The ways we did things before no longer work, and it takes time (years!) before whatever happens next arrives.

It is massively disorientating. And so easy to fall into doubt, wondering if it will ever change, if we’ll ever feel ok again.

Pleasure is the thread I am holding onto, mid-mess, while clarity and direction are not available.

The pleasure of drinking good coffee and not feeling guilty. The pleasure of learning the new skill of baking sourdough… taking time for each stage…the sensual pleasure of kneading, shaping, eating that first warm slice, dripping with hot butter. Exercising in a way that my body is calling for and that feels good - rather than what my mind (or ‘experts’) tell me. Letting go of aspects of my professional work because I don’t enjoy them. Consciously investing only in friendships that feel reciprocal and nourishing.

Pleasure is what reconnects me to my sense of flow, my body, my senses, my capacity to be present, to relax - so that my intuition and whatever other parts of me is being upgraded (which is what I like to think is happening) can guide me.

And as I acknowledge how what feels pleasurable is also changing for me (simpler and slower seems to be the gist of it) it is consistently, gently guiding me to trust my own perception.

What a radical thing, to centre pleasure during these tumultuous times, where every day seems to surface new horrors in the world.

Imagine. There are over 1 billion of us out there in the world going through menopause right now. One billion of us being told in a myriad of different ways that this is a decline to be managed, medicated, endured, gotten through.

What if we told ourselves a different story? That it could be a portal, a threshold into a different relationship with pleasure? Not as distraction or escape but the very thing that lets us find our way back into our bodies, our senses, our yes, after decades of override.

I think about what it would be like if this became part of the culture of menopause. How the world might be impacted by of billions choices that are grounded in what is truly life-affirming. A billion women waking up, honouring our bodies and saying yes to ourselves.

Recently I have started painting again - giving expression to the artist within me who got lost along the way. To lose my sense of time and busy myself with my hands, to drink in different colours and textures, to stop thinking and just allow inspiration and play to guide me - has become a now near daily pleasure.

But in doing so, I also meet that goal-driven part of me that is constantly seeking the reward of a good finished product. The part that wants to be ‘good’ at this, that looks at my work and is dissatisfied with my efforts. I notice how these thoughts detract from my pleasure, my motivation to play.

So this is my practice now: to keep returning to the feeling and not the outcome. Again and again. Letting whatever is moving through me - a colour I’m drawn to, a texture, a frustration or ache or joy - find its way onto the paper before my mind gets a vote. I am learning, begrudgingly, brushstroke by brushstroke, to let that be enough.

And as I practice, I notice something thirsty and dry in me being watered. Not all at once, not dramatically. Just a little. Just enough. Which, I am beginning to understand, might be exactly the point.

If you are going through the menopause portal and feel like you would benefit from some support to navigate this transition and find your own compass, I offer one-on-one sessions. You can find out more here.

Masculinity is a complex topic, often somewhat charged, and one that I believe deserves to be given much more time and space for exploration, unpacking and uplifting.

And so it makes sense to listen to, learn and be inspired through a variety of different voices, which is exactly what’s happening at the forthcoming free Initiated Man Summit, beginning this coming week.

I am honoured to be one of a minority of female speakers, but there are many other male voices from different cultures, backgrounds, and walks of life. If you’re a man reading this (although it’s open to anyone!) you’re warmly invited to sign up (it’s free).

The focus in not on rejecting masculinity, but expanding it, by becoming more present, more emotionally alive, more embodied, more relational, and more deeply rooted in love, integrity, and service.

Over three days you’ll discover:

• Why so many successful men still struggle with intimacy and connection.
• How to relate to sexual energy as a source of vitality rather than performance.
• What initiation actually means - and why so many men are hungry for it.
• Practical ways to build stronger relationships, greater emotional resilience, and deeper purpose.
• How to move beyond outdated ideas of masculinity without losing your strength.

Find out and reserve your spot here.

My answer might surprise you.

As someone who has the honour of speaking with many men in private sessions about their intimate relating, there is something I witness often, and which leads not infrequently to trouble in their personal lives: a fear of hurting women. I believe it's one of the main reasons men struggle to know - or express - where their own boundaries lie.

We speak a lot about women’s boundaries, but rarely men’s.

I think that many men feel a lack of permission to have boundaries in their relationships with women.

Why?

I imagine there are many threads to follow here, but one I've been sitting with, is what happens when we live in a culture in which many women identify as - and are seen as - the victims of a transgenerational gender war.

In this dynamic, a man’s boundary becomes a potential act of harm rather than an act of integrity, because they've been positioned as the ones with power and the capacity to hurt, while women have been positioned as the ones who need protecting.

None of this is to deny that many women have experienced real violence or intimidation at the hands of men. My interest is in what happens psychologically when this story becomes the primary lens through which men and women encounter one another, and when the story becomes so total that we lose sight of men's vulnerability too.

I see many men who identify as good men, who don't want to be the 'cause' of a woman's pain, and who - rather than risk being cast as the aggressor for expressing a boundary - fall into self-abandonment, sacrificing their agency, going silent and withdrawing.

The result is disconnection, resentment, suffering, and rupture to relationship.

As a woman, I confess that in the past I have not always made it easy for the men I have been intimately relating with. I know what it is to be loving until I stop getting what I want. How in response to my feeling unsafe, I withdraw my love in an act of unconscious control dressed up as self-protection. I have witnessed myself unable to tolerate my partner’s boundaries without reactivity or fear, reinforcing the very thing that makes him afraid to have one.

And I have compassion for myself and anyone else struggling with boundaries and admitting to the strategies we’ve developed through our nervous systems trying to protect themselves. It’s not like we have an abundance of examples of role modelling good boundaries in our relationally impoverished culture.

For so many of us, the first no's we ever offered as children weren't met with love and an open heart - they were met with aggression, punishment, or the withdrawal of love. Many of us were forced to sit still for hours each day, taught in schools in ways that did not feel natural to us, and tragically, spent our earliest years having our boundaries overridden again and again, until it started to feel normal.

Many of us have never experienced a boundary bringing us closer together: instead we associate them with the pain of disconnection.

Even the word “boundary” feels misleading, conjuring the image of a kind of wall between us.

Interestingly, the word comes from the Latin bodina - a legal and territorial term used specifically for a landmark or stone marker dividing one property from another. When it was borrowed for therapeutic and self-help language centuries later, it’s roots came with it. We inherited a word built for something you defend against trespass, when what we actually mean is closer to an internal compass - the felt result of being embodied, present, and in connection with ourselves; something sensed and adjusted to in real time, not fixed in stone at all.

I wonder if this also contributes towards the confusion we collectively have around what true boundaries are and what is control, punishment or armouring.

True boundaries - both expressing and receiving can be initiatory in nature.

They confront us with identities we've outgrown: the rescuer, the good girl, the good man, the pleaser, the victim, the controller. Every genuine boundary asks one of those identities to die.

Expressing a boundary requires courage and risk, especially if we’ve been conditioned to equate our worth with limitlessness. It asks us to meet the parts of us that are afraid or insecure, to risk being disliked, misread, or losing our belonging.

Receiving a boundary well requires that we recognise the other person is not an extension of us, but a separate, sovereign being with their own limits. It asks for a kind of ego-death in miniature - accepting “no” without collapsing it into “I am unloved,” and without reactivity. This is the shape of every true initiation: we leave an old identity behind, face the ordeal, and return changed, more mature for having crossed it.

Sometimes, boundaries do require us to walk away. But more often, they invite us to create something new together: a fresh imprint of holding both a boundary and a connection at once. Prentis Hemphill defines a boundary as “the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.” I would go as far as to say that this is what a relationship is: staying true to ourselves while staying in connection, and the infinite number of little deaths - of wishful thinking and our projections - we have to honour as a result.

The times I’ve been on the receiving end of a boundary from a man, and still felt him there - willing to stay in connection, to keep engaging with me - have been potent medicine: pivotal, transformational moments I remain deeply grateful for. They’ve taught me how to be in relationship and taught me respect. Something I had not learned growing up.

So, what do women want?

I obviously can’t speak for all of them, but if you’re a man reading this, I want you to know this:

We talk a lot about the lack of initiated men in the world, but what’s actually needed is that we keep initiating each other, through relationship itself.

Not the co-dependent kind, but real relationship, where we learn to sit in the fire of staying true to ourselves while remaining in connection.

This is what mature love asks of us. Not that one person learns to have boundaries while the other learns to tolerate them, but that we keep initiating one another into greater integrity. Every honest "no" that remains connected teaches us something new about love.

So, dear men, I want to share that your boundaries are needed. They are an expression of being unashamedly you: embodied, present, self-respecting, committed to integrity, courageous.

If you're asking what women want deep down:

I think it’s that.

The Initiated Man Summit is a free, three-day online interview series exploring what it means to be a man in today’s world, running from 29th to 31st July.

Hosted by Gayatri Beegan, the summit brings together leading voices exploring masculinity, relationships, sexuality, leadership and personal growth.

In my conversation, we explore a Feminine perspective on men ‘beyond blame’, alongside practical insights and grounded perspectives to support men in living with greater authenticity, connection, integrity and aliveness.

Across the three days you’ll delve into topics including:

• conscious sexuality and erotic intelligence

• emotional depth and relational maturity

• healing shame, disconnection and performance conditioning

• power, integrity, leadership and responsibility

If you’re committed to your own growth - or know a man who would benefit from these conversations - I encourage you to join us.

Reserve your free place here

I sat in the echo of watching this reel for some weeks, feeling it grating on me and yet reluctant to write about it. Feeling into my resistance, I came into contact with my fear of being seen as resentful or man-hating or overly critical. And then feeling more into this, realised that this is the internalised version of the exact dynamic I actually want to write about: our collective mistrust in female perception.

Instead of trusting my own perception and acknowledging my accurate social reading, I reframe it as some kind of personal failing or character flaw of mine… evidence that I am too small and bitter to see clearly.

So, instead of me judging my irritation, allow me to trust and follow it for a moment, and name a few other connected examples (and I’m sure you have plenty of your own).

A recent one: a body-oriented coaching accreditation program I participated in, where a group of 95% female participants were guided by a male teacher, through a company that is run by a man.

My Linkedin feed, where I see men on a daily basis market themselves as experts and consultants to companies and organisations around regenerative leadership and business practices, meanwhile so many of the women I know who practice menstrual cycle awareness religiously - who are the very embodiment of regeneration - are struggling to find their way in the world.

A large, international organisation that teaches relational skills and practices through expensive trainings and festivals - run by two men.

We live in a world in which women's ways of knowing, relating, and leading are treated as unreliable, soft and insufficiently rigorous. And on the other side: these same capacities - relational intelligence, embodied knowing, cyclical wisdom, attunement* - get extracted, systematised, and sold, often by men, often at considerable profit, often back to women themselves.

Somatic Psychologist Ailey Jolie writes in her Substack :

She continues to write about how we all participate in this dynamic on a subtle somatic level, beyond the conscious mind: the small contractions in the body of hearing a woman’s voice speaking as an authority, compared to the downward settling sensation of hearing a man’s voice.

These tendencies live in all of us in some shape or form; including in the nervous systems of women, who have been most harmed by the dynamic. Which is kind of devastating - to have absorbed the terms of our own diminishment so deeply that we enact it before our conscious mind even notices.

There is a kind of impossibility of being received in our leadership as women: when we speak with the same authority as a man, without the softening of an apologetic laugh, we are judged as too sure of ourselves, too much. And yet if we are too insecure or uncertain in our speaking, we are registered as unconvincing.

So what is actually being mistrusted? If we follow the contraction to its root:

At the deepest level, what gets mistrusted is women’s perception itself.

Not just our emotions, not just our bodies, but our capacity to accurately read reality. The message, absorbed so early it feels like the air we breathe is: our inner registrations are unreliable.

We are too close to things.

Too feeling.

Too partial.

And this is devastatingly precise as a form of control, because perception is the root of everything.

If you can get someone to doubt what they notice, you don’t need to argue with any single conclusion they draw - you’ve undermined the instrument itself.

There is one more turn of the knife: While the perception and wisdom of women gets deemed unreliable - and yet commodified and sold, all the while, there is an insistence that gender is a social construct and there is nothing particular about being a woman at all, nothing distinctively female to reclaim.

We have nowhere to stand.

Nothing to claim.

And yet somehow, still, are being extracted from.

I spoke to a man earlier this year who - much to my envy - told me he doesn’t second guess himself. His words echoed in me weeks after this conversation, illuminating how second-guessing myself has been such an integral part of me, I could barely imagine how life might feel without this.

This isn't an argument against discernment or humility. It's about recovering the ability to distinguish healthy reflection from reflexive self-erasure.

I think of a life-time of countless ways I have mistrusted my reading of reality. How easy it is to feel like something is off or out of integrity or doesn’t feel quite right and to quickly assume this reflects something wrong with me.

I should feel differently. I should be stronger. I shouldn’t be having this kind of experience.

It’s always “What's wrong with me”? rather than “What am I accurately perceiving?”

I think of all the times I have endured something, stayed longer than I should have. Made choices that my body knew weren’t right for me. The times I have outsourced my own authority to experts, projected on to others who know more. I think of the exhaustion over time through constant inner negotiating and self-doubt. How much anger I must have denied and swallowed, how much I have edited myself around others and made myself smaller than I am.

And if you know me, you will know that I can also be confident, creative, eloquent and powerful and unashamedly me… and yet this undertow has always been there beneath the surface.

I’m not ashamed to talk about it because I know that this kind of self-doubt also impacts you, or someone you love. And my heart is longing for a world in which our perception and wisdom as women is given its rightful place.

This is clearly so much bigger than just you or I doing our inner work. And yet each of us plays a role in what comes next.

As women, it’s continuing to notice the moment before self-doubt arrives - the split second of clear perception before the override.

It’s having the courage to trust our perception publicly, naming what needs to be named, staying with the irritation or anger long enough to receive its guidance, each time knowing that we make it fractionally more possible for another woman to do the same.

As men, it’s becoming genuinely curious about where your knowing comes from, holding this question without defensiveness. It’s listening to women. Not to respond, not to improve upon, not to systematise, just letting what a woman perceives land as though it might be true.

It’s all of us noticing the bias buried in what we call intelligence - the assumption that certainty is more rigorous than intuition, that the linear is more trustworthy than the cyclical, that what can be systematised is worth more than what is simply, deeply felt and known.

While these capacities belong to no one exclusively, women - through the lived reality of bodies that cycle, descend, bleed, carry life and that know so viscerally what it means to tend life - have a more direct inheritance of this intelligence.

The integration of feminine perception - into leadership, into institutions, into how we make decisions and measure value and determine what counts as real - doesn’t just benefit women. It makes the whole system more capable of meeting and responding to what is.

This isn’t a claim of superiority. It’s a plea for wholeness. A world that only trusts one mode of knowing is a world operating with half its intelligence - and we are living in the consequences of that narrowing.

We are all needed. All of us. But we cannot afford to keep building the future while one of its most essential instruments goes untrusted.

It’s time we trusted what we know, as women.

It’s time the world did too.

I'm aware that I write this from a position of relative privilege. For many women, trusting their perception publicly carries consequences I don't face: their livelihood, their relationships and their safety. This asymmetry is part of what makes this all the more urgent.

Image by Danie Franco

I am holding space for a client who is full of frustration and self-judgement that her business is not moving forwards at the pace she would like. I guide her to listen into her body and where the frustration is stored, and she has the sudden realisation that what she really needs is not to push through, but to rekindle her sense of playfulness and enchantment, to drink from the well of what inspires her - and her eyes sparkle, energy rising as she shares this.

I am facilitating a workshop some years ago and I am menstruating - my energy is low and my sensitivities are even more sharpened that usual. I am afraid that I will not do a good job, but instead of pushing through and overriding my body, I lean back into what I am feeling, and it ends up a remarkable session of attunement and deep flow.

The above are all examples of giving the current of Yin, it’s rightful place. Not as an afterthought, not even as an equal to Yang per se, but as the foundation from which life - creativity and flow originate.

I imagine reading these examples, you have had your own experiences and realisations not dissimilar to these. And perhaps you too like me, need regular reminders of this:

The rightful order is that the Yang is in service to the Yin.

The midwife is in service to the mother.

Not the other way around.

And yet we live in a topsy turvy world in which this is reversed, and we’re all confronted with the consequences.

We treat doing as the real thing, and being as what you earn if you’re lucky - a reward at the end of a productive day, a holiday after a hard year, retirement at the end of a working life. Rest is what you get when you’ve justified it. Creativity is what you squeeze into the margins.

We look at the symptoms not the cause, we follow agendas, rather than listen. We fill the silence before it can tell us anything. We build faster rather than asking where we're going. You might be skimming this piece of writing right now, hoping to extract the gems from it, without really savouring and enjoying the process of taking it in and feeling me - Ruby - as the source of these words.

In right relationship, Yang takes its orientation from Yin. It asks: what does life want to do here? And then it moves in service of that.

Yang without Yin as its ground and guide becomes manic, extractive, self-referential. It optimises without knowing what for.

And even though we might not have the words for it, at this stage in our culture, I know that you too, like me, are intimately equated with it:

We feel the hollowness. We see creation without soul all around us. We feel the grief of meaninglessness. We feel the exhaustion in our bones.

We are living in the era of a Yin deficit that is slowly running its course into self-destruction.

And it hurts.

I wish I could tell you that after all my research, enquiry and practice in living a more Yin centred life - that I’ve cracked it.

I really have not.

But I’m comforted by the thought that perhaps finding our balance between these two currents is not something we can ever reach, but a life long journey and dance.

I take heart in how life is constantly speaking to us and how so many of our struggles, illnesses and discomforts - our personal initiations and descents - are invitations towards letting Yin lead. They are the deeper intelligence of the body and soul, speaking in the only language that cuts through the noise of our doing:

It is the becoming aware of the tension in my jaw multiple times a day, and remembering its invitation to pause, to unclench not just the muscle but the whole orientation of striving that has accumulated there without my noticing.

It is the daily meeting and releasing of my inner critic, as I acknowledge my low energy levels and return to trust again and again, that my menopause journey is taking me where it needs to.

It is noticing the sharpness of judgement I have towards someone and pausing long enough to ask what’s going inside me.

It’s noticing the autopilot reaction of reaching for my phone and choosing stillness and feeling myself instead, opening myself to the yearning for real connection that’s underneath the impulse.

Examples like these are perhaps the most intimate expression of what it means to let Yang serve Yin: not a grand philosophical reorientation, but a thousand small moments of choosing to listen rather than override. Of treating our own discomfort as a messenger rather than an obstacle. Of trusting that the signal in the contraction is more intelligent than the will that wants to push past it.

What excites me about this, is that from this perspective, all the dysfunction in the world is a wake up call… to soften and to listen, to step out of urgency and our agendas and be humble enough to actually meet life. . .

To let outward action be guided and in service to something deeper.

Because that ‘something deeper’ carries an extraordinary creative intelligence. One that knows what wants to be born, even when we don't.

If you’re navigating something you’d like support with, I work one-to-one with people navigating moments of change, stuckness, or searching. Find out more here.

Street art by Eduardo Kobra

Those of us who work within this field will, I imagine, not be short of work in the future: as humanity’s somewhat morbid fascination and reliance on AI continues to grow, I find solace in the mirror it offers us around how starved we are for things that technology cannot provide: touch, real presence, nervous system co-regulation, and the coming together in collective ritual.

As someone who used to be at home professionally in this field and then left several years ago (but recently re-engaged)), I find myself in an interesting position in perceiving both its power and also blindspots.

Last year I was offered an invitation to facilitate at a conscious intimacy festival on Crete, which took place last month. I planned several workshops, one of them centred around the theme of ‘reverence to the Feminine’ - inspired by Crete being home to the last matriarchal civilisation of Europe.

Over six months I let this topic work me, researching and writing about what it means, what it asks of us and what blocks us from it.

Finally, feeling full with anticipation and curiosity about what we would discover in our shared explorations, the day of the workshop finally arrived.

It was not an easy workshop. There was a palpable sense of fatigue in the air and the quality of attention felt fragmented somehow, unable to really land deeply anywhere. I was struggling. About halfway through the workshop, I paused and asked the 30 or so participants how they were feeling and experiencing us as a group.

People started naming the sense of fullness, heaviness and exhaustion, that I too was sensing in the space.

It was day six of the festival with a packed programme, from morning until night. Some people had been attending up to ten hours of workshops a day. Most of them were completely saturated.

I decided to acknowledge the reality of where we actually were, rather than continue trying to generate another meaningful experience on top of the overwhelm, and suggested we take a break and people feel into whether continuing was really what they needed or had capacity for in that moment and they were welcome to bow out.

More than half the participants didn’t return after the break.

What happened with those who remained was profound and beautiful (I’ll share about that shortly) but in the echo of this experience, my heart was pained and I was struck with disillusionment that my offering and my art wasn’t appreciated, received or respected. I felt judgements rising inside me: there were moments at the festival where I felt like people around me were on a bender, but instead of consuming drugs, they were consuming connection.

It was a painful paradox, that after six months of research and building anticipation, the biggest reveal was our lack of collective capacity for reverence.

And perhaps my disillusionment itself had a kind of extractive quality at its root - I had an agenda, an attachment to a certain outcome and take away. In the days that followed, I sat with a myriad of different uncomfortable sensations and humbling questions.

My intent in writing about this is not to focus on criticism of this particular event (which was beautiful and organized by lovely humans, who graciously invited me).

It’s easy and convenient to point fingers about how the “conscious scene” falls into the same traps as mainstream culture and imagine ourselves rising above it. These spaces simply magnify dynamics that many of us are living inside everywhere.

Instead, I invite you to become curious with me around how the phenomena of consumption rather than being in relationship with, lives inside you. Because this is what I’m still left processing.

And let me tell you: it’s humbling and uncomfortable.

I imagine that if you are reading this, you too, like me, are swimming in a culture organised around consumption. And yet it can be difficult to recognise, because it rarely appears in obvious forms. More often it feels pleasurable, empowering, stimulating - even caring. It is woven so thoroughly into the atmosphere around us that many of us hardly notice.

So what is the tendency to consume exactly? Or what is it not?

Rather than :“Can I stay present long enough to let this touch me?”

It asks: “What can I get from this experience? How can this serve me?”

It’s the difference between being on autopilot and picking a flower because we want to have a nice thing - and taking the time to notice, appreciate, discover and allow ourselves to be moved by a flower - without the entitlement of thinking we have the right to own it.

Maybe like me too, you are guilty of picking that flower at times.

Maybe like me too, you know what it is to scroll other people’s content for a sense of nervous system regulation and connection, without really properly taking it in or responding reciprocally with generosity and care.

Or perhaps you have been guilty of consuming information compulsively without actually allowing it to become wisdom - taking in podcasts, reels, books, essays, faster than your nervous systems can metabolise them.

Dating apps are another obvious example, where people become profiles - glimpsed, evaluated and moved past in rapid succession. And where the abundance of possibility somehow leaves us emptier.

Spirituality, consumed through retreats, ceremonies, workshops and peak experiences, sometimes moving from one transformational high to another without building lives capable of actually integrating what we touch.

We consume intimacy, seeking emotional intensity or the palatable, pleasurable parts, without wanting the slower, less glamorous realities of relationship - repair, continuity, accountability, boredom, caregiving, limitation, mutual adaptation.

We travel and consume our destinations. It was such an inspiration staying with my friend Danielle Keiser when I was on Crete and witnessing her bring a plastic bag with her whenever we went for a walk, in order to pick up rubbish.

Perhaps most painful is the awareness of how we consume time itself, rarely allowing emptiness, silence, digestion or unstructured presence. Filling almost every gap with input.

I could go on - but you get the picture.

It’s kind of devastating, feeling into that, right?

This is what happens when you let a Yin deficient culture run its course. It’s the very opposite of reverence.

Image by Rapha Wilde

Back to the workshop and what happened when half the group left…

As a facilitator, moments like these are also exciting, when we have to drop all plans and simply work with what’s there. I knew I wanted to stay with the elements of ritual and free play, but I knew I needed to drop the planned structure around that, and so I guided people to feel into what they needed and then into a free space to explore.

What happened was deeply moving and unexpectedly beautiful: the whole field seemed to reorganise itself into a constellation of co-regulation and deep nourishment.

A group of four men found their way together in the centre of the room, holding one another. On either side, a woman cradled someone gently in her arms - on one side a man, on the other another woman.

And as I watched this strange, tender, serene tableaux vivant emerge and allowed it to touch me, tears came to my eyes and I felt - yes - reverence. It felt like the frequency of the initial mother to child holding that each of us (hopefully) experienced in those first precious moments of life.

Looking back now some weeks later, I think about the meaning of what unfolded and my own need of deep nourishment: where I get that from, the ways that humans can sometimes meet that and sometimes - if I am honest - can’t.

And I am reflecting on what it is, underneath the tendency to grasp and to consume - that I, that we - are actually longing for, that truly quenches our thirst and fills the emptiness that I know so many of us can relate to.

This is what I know:

That there are moments in my life where I feel deeply connected to and nourished by something greater - often through dancing, crying, laughing, holding space or facilitating, crafting with my hands, being in nature, deeply seeing another human or being seen, or listening to a live orchestra. Those transcendent moments where my sense of being a separate self softens and I feel myself moved by life and a deep intimacy and belonging with existence.

That life often seems like an endless series of temptations and distractions away from that intimacy and my inner felt, embodied experience.

That meeting these deeper places within me often involves meeting the layers of resistance, of discomfort, tension, anxiety - the places I don’t want to feel.

And that trauma, the speed that modernity moves in, a culture deficient in Yin - all of these make that intimacy with life, impossible.

So what does being relational rather than grasping and consuming even look like?

I think it’s relating to our body as an intelligent living system, feeling its disquiet, knowing when to slow down, to rest, to integrate, rather than filling ourselves with more. Noticing that our aliveness depends on cycles.

It’s being in relationship with a place - being curious, noticing, listening, taking it in giving something back - like my friend Danielle.

It’s becoming curious about another person’s interiority beyond what they provide for you emotionally or erotically. Allowing them to remain partially unknowable. Staying interested after projection fades.

It’s allowing one meaningful experience to slowly alter how you live, instead of consuming more spiritual experiences.

It’s participating in the slow weaving of trust, continuity and mutual care, rather than consuming community through events and temporary highs, becoming someone who also helps hold the field, not only receive from it.

It’s stopping to treat ourselves as a project to fix and to begin learning how to stay present to our own unfolding.

Real nourishment, I've come to think, cannot be consumed. It can only be received - and only when we're willing to be slowly changed by what we meet.

Consumption on the other hand is essentially nourishment with the vulnerability removed.

It gives us the sensation of taking something in without requiring us to be genuinely affected.

The dopamine without the digestion, you might say.

I caught a glimpse of reverence in that room, in the second half of a workshop that didn’t go to plan: the deeper truth that emerged, people simply present to what was needed. There was nothing to consume in that moment - perhaps only something to surrender to.

Maybe that is what reverence has always been: not a feeling we generate or a state we arrive at, but what remains when we finally stop reaching.

And perhaps that was enough to begin with.

If you’re feeling the pull toward something more relational - in your body, your relationships or the way you move through the world - I offer one-on-one work for men and women. You can book a free 15-minute conversation with me here.

I’m sitting in a bustling cafe nestled in a valley on the island Crete as I write this, warming myself by a crackling fire, surrounded by locals immersed in lively discussions around plates of meatballs, bowls of cherry tomatoes and sipping local beer, while it continues to drizzle outside and the green hills are cloaked in mist. Somewhat different than the weather I envisioned when I planned this trip six months ago!

Last year I accepted an invitation to offer a workshop at a festival on the island on the theme of ‘reverence to the Feminine’. Crete is home to the last matriarchal, Goddess-worshipping civilisation of Europe - the Minoans, who lived here seemingly peacefully and equitably in the Bronze age. Considering what has been unfolding in the world over recent weeks, it seems an obscure, almost farcical moment to be giving a workshop on this theme. Or perhaps it is perfect timing, depending on how one looks at it.

In case you haven’t encountered it, I’m referring above to the CNN report that revealed a dark underground world of sleep porn - men who drug their partners in order to rape them, sometimes live-streaming for paying viewers. It feels like another layer of collective purging as our shadows around sexuality and power continue to be exposed.

It feels important to say clearly: the men who commit acts like this represent an extreme. Not all men, and not most men, would ever cross such a line. And nothing in this writing is intended to blur that distinction nor dilute responsibility.

While the research focused on this specific form of abuse, it touches a wound that nearly every woman carries - that of having experienced some form of boundary violation. The WHO reports that 30% of women have experienced sexual abuse (which I’m pretty sure is underestimated) and over 80% have experienced sexual harassment. And we are still far from anything resembling justice: the vast majority of rapes never reach court. No one has yet been convicted in relation to the Epstein files.

I would like to share briefly a little about myself before I continue. I have been a victim of sexual abuse - including abuse that happened while I was asleep. I have also spent fifteen years working one-on-one with men, and a significant portion of that work has been with our sexual shadows. I say this not to establish authority, but because I think it matters that this reflection comes from someone who has lived on both sides of this - who knows what it is to be a victim, and who has also sat with men in their most hidden and shameful places. I hold both of those things as I write.

Since reading this report my heart has been feeling stretched with holding the complexity of all the different responses I’ve seen:

I’ve seen what felt like a collective trauma response in many women: reeling in horror, amplified by confusion around the numbers, with many mistakenly believing (myself included, at first) it was 62 million hits to a so-called “rape academy,” when in fact the website was a general pornography site and it was 20,000 videos of sleep porn content.

I’ve read many social media posts and Substack articles - predominantly by women - analysing the structural and systemic failures, the shadows of patriarchy and male entitlement that produce such abuse. I’ve seen many different posts on how men might respond, how they might do better.

The majority of responses I’ve witnessed from men have been defensive: correcting the numbers, suggesting the whole thing is vastly exaggerated, or dismissing it entirely. This has been met with pushback from women who feel even more unseen and gaslit, and who become - understandably - increasingly distressed.

But what sits with me most loudly right now is men’s silence.

I say that not with judgement, but with curiosity and compassion.

Which, I’m aware, feels like a taboo thing to say.

I pause for a moment as I write these words, because this topic is so very charged, so tender, so laden with personal, collective and trans-generational wounding. There is currently one acceptable narrative, and to veer from it is to risk stoking further outrage. I find this deeply problematic - not because the anger isn’t justified, but because I don’t think one voice and one conversation is enough.

Sexual abuse is a vast and complex subject. We need many voices. We need the capacity to listen, to see nuance, to hold more than one truth at a time.

And that capacity is precisely what trauma makes harder.

Whether individual or collective, trauma causes the nervous system to get stuck in a threat state. From that state, the brain literally cannot access the same flexibility, nuance, and empathy that it can when regulated. As a protective response, the traumatised mind constructs a rigid narrative - a clear map of safe and dangerous, good and bad, victim and perpetrator - because complexity feels threatening when you’re in survival mode.

Let’s take a breath together.

You with me?

The one acceptable conversation I see, however justified it is in its anger, is women talking at men or about men.

Now here comes the nuance: this is crucial, and it hasn’t happened enough, and it remains maddening how difficult it seems to be. But as I sit in the ensuing silence, I find myself holding two concerns simultaneously: firstly, that it isn’t the only conversation we need to have, and secondly, that I’m genuinely uncertain whether it’s working - at least, not in the way it’s currently being conducted.

Recently, in response to the CNN report, a popular Instagram therapist known as TherapyJeff asked: “Where do men go for support when they have dark thoughts?” He received a torrent of backlash - accusations of decentering victims and of pulling focus away from their pain. He subsequently issued a public apology.

To me, this moment illustrates something important about where we currently are. To be fair: some of the criticism of his post raised legitimate questions about timing and framing. But the broader response and the ritual of public shaming followed by capitulation, teaches men that their inner life is too dangerous to disclose. And that is precisely the opposite of what we need.

Centering the victim has been an essential and long-overdue response to a history of dismissal and blame. And yet, when it becomes the only lens we’re able to look through, it can sometimes limit the kind of healing we’re hoping for.

It can also increase shame in perpetrators, and research consistently suggests that shame makes reoffending more likely, not less. My colleague Louis Weinstock wrote a beautiful piece this week around men and shame.

So what is happening in the inner world of men?

When I look at men’s responses to this moment and in the conversations I’ve had with friends and clients, I perceive a kind of freeze and paralysis. It doesn’t feel empty, but more as if something is happening internally that doesn’t yet have language, or perhaps doesn’t yet feel safe enough to be spoken.

Beneath defensiveness, there is a kind of bewilderment around finding oneself implicated in something so horrific, simply by being born a man. Which I totally get. It doesn’t make the defensiveness useful, but I really do get where it comes from.

Most men I speak to are unaware of the realities that women go through, a phenomena that Sarah Steed articulates so well in her recent article “I’ve Never Seen This.”

Listening to the silence, what is also painfully clear is the lack of brotherhood - of men moving toward one another in this moment, supporting each other to actually feel what’s being said, to be moved by it, to examine themselves honestly. It feels individual and private, each to his own.

Now, if you’re a woman reading this, you might be thinking ““Oh God, do we really need to do the emotional labour of figuring out what men are thinking and have compassion for them? We’re tired! We shouldn’t need to do that!”

I don’t think there are shoulds that apply to everyone. Each of us hones in on what our response (ideally, rather than reaction) is and we follow it. Yours might well be different than mine and that’s ok. But I do think the connection between men and women on our planet is a foundational one and needs the utmost care and tending to. Anything that helps us feel connection rather than distance, understanding rather than judgement is helpful.

And in that spirit, I want to include something that I have received pushback in the past, but I feel like is an important aspect to shine a light on:

If we are speaking about healing, not just accountability, but something deeper and more transformative, what is it asking of all of us?

If we really want to initiate change, it means that women need to do our shadow work too. The patterns that shape men’s inner worlds don’t arise in isolation; they are formed in relationship, in families, in culture, in the spaces we all co-create.

The victim-perpetrator binary, however necessary in acute moments of harm, can become a way of avoiding one’s own complexity. I think as women we need to look at the ways we sometimes participate in cultures that demean women. The ways mothers sometimes wound sons through their own unhealed pain. The way the righteous position of victimhood, when held too tightly, can itself become a kind of power that makes genuine encounter impossible.

I’m not suggesting equivalence and that women are equally responsible for what men do. I am saying that healing, real healing, not just the performance of accountability, requires all of us to be willing to look at ourselves honestly. That includes the parts of ourselves we’d rather not see.

As I finish this piece of writing, I am remembering how it actually started…

I saw a first social media post about “62 million men” and my first reaction was dismay at the way so many of us expose ourselves to news these days. It felt so awful to read something about horrific sexual abuse and scroll on. I think of all the intense information we take in every day without truly feeling and processing it and how it just adds to the overwhelm and sense of helplessness.

My first impulse was to find a way to come into deep feeling with other humans - but before I knew it, the world was reacting, analysing and sense-making and I found myself swept up on this wave.

There is such a temptation to want to understand and analyse the horrors of the world, but ultimately I think we need to grieve.

Not just demand accountability, though all of those things have their place. But actually grieve together, if we can find a way.

Grief is different from blame. When I am in blame, I maintain a distance and superiority and it keeps the problem located firmly in the other. Grief requires something more vulnerable of us: acknowledging that something real has been lost or broken, and that the loss implicates all of us in some way. That we are all, in different ways and to different degrees, living downstream of something that has gone very wrong for a very long time.

Collective grief is hard. We have almost no cultural containers for it. Our discourse culture is almost perfectly designed to prevent it - everything moves toward reaction, position, outrage, tribe.

Grief requires slowing down. It requires sitting with something unbearable without immediately converting it into action or certainty.

But I think it may be the only thing that actually metabolises something this deep.

It’s not the only thing we need to do but perhaps the ground from which everything else - genuine accountability, real change, the kind of empathy that crosses the divide between women and men - might actually grow.

It’s a clear, blue-skied morning and a few days later as I finish writing this piece.

After two days of rain, the sun has come out and I’ve just been for a delicious morning swim in the sea. In a few days I travel to the festival to offer my workshop, drawing inspiration from this island where thousands of years ago, it seems that something different was possible between men and women. I don’t know exactly what that looked like and I’m sure it wasn’t all roses, but I find myself intrigued and moved by the fact that it existed.

I wonder: what if we’re not needing to build something entirely new but it also involves remembering and integrating something we know in our bones? And that the path runs not through more outrage - though outrage has its place - but through a willingness to feel, together, what has been lost.

I think that’s where I want to go.

“It’s a food stand.”

“What kind of food?”

Hoping my voice wouldn’t crack with the emotion I was feeling, I proceed to describe the variety of Turkish deli foods - baba ghanoush, hummus, different colours and flavours of creamed fetas - before receiving her next request and taking her by the hand, guiding her to the market stand on our adjacent side, where I began to describe the brightly coloured enamel cups that were on display.

“Can I touch them?”

I guide her hand to a cup, my heart bursting with the intensity of this sudden, unexpected sensory adventure I find myself on, all because I'd asked a blind woman who bumped into me whether she needed help.

It was the perfect gateway to seize the moment for my current challenge:

I have given myself the task of speaking to one stranger a day.

Now, however open-hearted and friendly I might think of myself, I am not really the kind of person who speaks to strangers. An introvert at heart, my default is to generally treat the outside world with a certain wariness. I am frequently to be found with my headphones on when I travel and - although I try and withstand the temptation - am often busy on my phone, feeling awkward and irritated when someone bursts my personal bubble and asks me for money. My body contains countless uncomfortable memories of being stared at and approached in less-than-desirable ways.

And so after a week of connecting to strangers wherever I can - sitting on the tram or at the tram stop, drinking coffee in the cafe, the man in the South Indian restaurant eating his masala dosa next to me, the woman ahead of me in the queue at the Sisyphos toilets, the market stall vendor selling herbs and spices - here’s what I’m noticing and learning:

Speaking to strangers feels like a tiny yet powerful rebellion against a very large and mostly invisible system.

It’s doing something that the entire architecture of modern life is seemingly organised to prevent.

The headphones, the screens, the apps, the self-checkout tills that mean you never have to interact with an actual human to get what you need - it’s all structured around efficiency and profit being valued over the wellbeing of people. It’s built on the assumption that other people are, at best, an inconvenience, a friction to be reduced, and at worst, risky and dangerous.

I confess… I am not immune to these feelings at times. Perhaps you aren’t either. It is, after all, the air we breathe, the water we swim in. I feel like my body contains an infinite number of micro-tensions that hold these beliefs in place.

I don't think there are villains out there who decided to make us more isolated. This is just what happens over time - the slow erosion of ordinary human contact - when we build from within a culture that simply hasn't valued connection. It's the accumulation of systems that work better when humans are predictable, optimisable, reducible to data points and purchasing behaviour, rather than actual human beings.

And somewhat unbelievably, no one paused to ask what that might cost us.

And yet… we feel it. The loneliness and isolation. We lament our lack of belonging, our feeling of rootlessness. We worry about falling through the cracks, of not knowing who to call when we need help. Events, workshops, retreats and plant medicine rituals attempt to offer what we’ve lost. And yet what if the thing we're aching for is available, right here, in the most ordinary of moments - if we're willing to be the one who reaches first?

Every time I step out of my comfort zone and speak to a stranger (and I’ll add that every single one has been a positive experience) I feel something in me softening, uncoiling. I always feel a little more connected, uplifted, alive. The beauty is also in the mutuality of it: knowing that the stranger you speak to also receives something. They too get the counter-evidence to the narrative that humans are just background noise or something to be wary of. They too get reminded that they’re visible, that they exist to someone, that the world contains people who will meet their eyes.

And something else I’ve noticed: while at the beginning I had to push myself, the more I do it, the easier it becomes - but more than that, it’s as though something in me invisibly opens, and people approach me more. I have found myself having multiple interactions with strangers in a day without even really trying.

The act of seeing the humanity in those around us - these repeated tiny acts of courage - weaves the relational fabric that holds us. It is the slow restoration of human connection and our sense of shared humanity.

It’s the antidote to a dehumanising world.

It requires no institution, no tradition, no app, no leader. It’s completely available, right now, to anyone. That really is a kind of power - not power over anything, but power with. The power of reweaving something that’s coming apart, one small thread at a time.

This morning the man drinking coffee and reading the newspaper in the Berliner cafe next to me laughed out loud a few times.

“There’s things that give you a good mood, reading the newspaper?!” I asked him.

He proceeded to go through various pages with me, explaining the parts he found funny or uplifting. We started chatting about this and that, and after some minutes I excused myself - I had a call to jump on - and thanked him. I told him I’d been feeling down about the chaos and suffering in the world; about knowing that Germany is the largest European donor to Israel, and that my taxes therefore help finance this war.

“But we can’t do anything about that!” he exclaimed.

“This is what we can do something about,” and he gestured between the two of us.

“Just simple moments of connection like this.”

P.s Comments are always welcome in response to my writing (and greatly appreciated). If you want to share a comment, please do so on the Substack article, rather than replying personally to this email. Thank you!

P.p.s And speaking of reaching out to strangers - if you're navigating something you'd like support with, I work one-to-one with people navigating moments of change, stuckness, or searching. Find out more here.

P.p.s And if you’d like even more inspiration on this subject, I recently met the inspiring Dr. Gillian Sandstrom - a professor in the psychology of kindness, who is soon to publish a book on the topic of speaking to strangers, which you can order here or from your local book shop.

What I’ve seen a lot of - which is the default of what we see everywhere, no matter what the offence is - is judgement and finger pointing. We pay in clicks and attention and subscription fees to see a light shone on the ugly boils of humanity erupting to the surface. We feel our moral outrage, point the fingers at the lack of male role models, Patriarchy and Capitalism. In doing so, we can easily fall into the comforting illusion that we are somehow separate from the problem - that by naming it, condemning it, and locating it outside ourselves, we have made progress.

But ultimately we are siphoning off more of our power to conglomerates like Netflix and the “villains” that ultimately I believe, paradoxically, are expressions of conditions we have collectively helped to create.

Moments like these, where our collective attention is focused for a moment on an issue like the manosphere, could be pivotal in our collective processing and ultimately our evolution of consciousness. But in order for this to happen, we need to interrupt the reflex of outrage, at least for a moment, and ask a harder question:

How might this be an intelligent or adaptive response to the conditions we are living in? And how might each of us be implicated in the reality from which it arose?

It’s so easy to think that we are separate from the ails of the world, that we somehow rise above it. But we are not separate.

We are all participating, in one way or another, in the creation of a profoundly yin-deficient world: a world in which connection, belonging, and relationship are not treated as forms of wealth, while money, status, and domination are. Most of us find ourselves swept up in this game on some level, whether we want to be or not. Most of us have internalised and perpetuate on some level, the fear of vulnerability being weakness. Most of us have not done our shadow work on integrating the parts of that want power and to feel power over.

As women, there are difficult questions for us too. Many of us carry deep wounds around the masculine (and many of us have good reason for our mistrust). But sometimes, in focusing so intensely on our victimhood and the ways we’ve been harmed, we fail to see the very real ways boys are harmed too, or the ways we might be perpetuating that which we lament.

We have become fluent in criticising men, yet far less practiced in recognising, supporting, and amplifying healthy forms of masculinity.

We condemn misogyny in men - rightly, but we are often less willing to look at the bitterness, contempt, and essentialising of men that has also become normalised in many female spaces, including all across social media.

I spoke to a friend recently in his early 60s who says that the women he meets in his local dating pool are interested in dating, but simply don’t need and aren’t looking for partners. This is mirrored in my friendship circles too - while many of us desire male partners, we’ve learned over time to live without them. We don’t ‘need’ them in the ways we collectively used to. I imagine men all over the world sense this and how massively disorientating it must be.

None of this excuses the obvious misogyny of the manosphere. None of it softens the need for discernment, accountability, or a clear naming of harm. But if we only respond with condemnation, we miss the deeper pattern. In a world where many young men feel unappreciated, that the playing field is broken, where belonging is scarce, where status is everything, where resentment is everywhere, and where visions of mature masculinity are painfully absent, it is not surprising that some of them turn toward the manosphere for belonging, direction, and the promise of power.

Among the obvious feelings of alarm and dismay, the overriding feeling I had while watching these young men trying to navigate life was tenderness and compassion.

I think of young men and their fierce, testing, risk-taking energy that is in no way inherently toxic, but extremely potent and needing of guidance and conscious direction. When channelled well, this is the energy that can be protective, creative, disciplined, devotional and world-building. It can also become destructive when it has no meaningful container, no elders, no initiation, no challenge worthy of it.

If that fierce young masculine energy is not given a path, it will find one.

One of the tragedies of the current moment is that we often seem unable to distinguish between male energy that is dangerous and male energy that is simply intense, wild, unformed, and in need of guidance. So instead of initiating it, we either fear it, shame it, pathologise it, or leave it to be shaped by the market. And the market is always happy to provide a counterfeit initiation: domination, status, sexual conquest, emotional numbness, optimisation, power over love.

Part of the manosphere’s appeal is that it functions like a counterfeit initiation. It offers a code, a hierarchy, a brotherhood, an enemy, a discipline, and the promise of transformation.

I imagine also how the confusion around gender that we’re swimming in also creates the conditions for young men to cling on to more outdated and narrow forms of masculinity. On the bright side, more and more young people are rightly questioning the limitations of rigid gender roles, but the shadows side is that in some spaces, we might wrongly negate gender as a concept, see it as entirely socially constructed and try and bypass it all together.

There is a polarity that arises, where one end moves towards softness, ambiguity and fluidity and on the other end we have young men overperforming hardness, certainty, and dominance.

Like all expressions of polarity, the more we judge one side as the ‘wrong’ one, rather than asking how it is an intelligent or adaptive response to something in its environment, the more extreme it will need to become.

Underneath the tenderness I felt, there is also grief, for the mess that we’re all in, the world we have collectively created but don’t want to take responsibility for.

There was a scene in particular, when influencer Myron Gaines’s girlfriend (now ex-girlfriend) Angie says something like “I see a different side of him behind closed doors.” For me, that moment revealed how beneath even the most performative or defended identities, there is the longing to be disarmed - to drop the persona, to be met, to be seen, to be loved.

While I’m not immune to anger or frustration, I choose not to let that be my organising force. I return instead to my love and appreciation of men, to a respect for the complexity of what they are navigating, and to a curiosity about how we might meet beyond the patterns we are all, in different ways, caught inside.

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p.s I have three spots available for male clients to explore receiving support and growing in the realms of intimate relating and leadership . Click here to find out more.

The story we are handed is pretty bleak: loss of libido, dry, painful vaginas, the end of our desirability and the slow fading into irrelevance.

I imagine how this narrative is also convenient in keeping the status quo. It spares us from collectively acknowledging that menopause is not actually a decline but an initiation into a different expression of power, and initiations are disruptive. They ask us to see what we have perhaps avoided seeing.

One of those things, for me, is this:

As a woman, I have fed off men’s desire and allowed it to mistakenly fill those places in me that feel empty and unloved.

I grew up in a world that was not designed for my cyclical body, my relational orientation, my embodied rather than cognitive ways of knowing. Perhaps like you too, the unspoken messages I absorbed is that my way is less than. I am both too much and not enough.

In this landscape, male desire can become an intoxicating validation, as we mistake desire for love.

This dynamic has influenced countless past sexual experiences of going with the flow, whilst subtly and not-so-subtly betraying my body and felt sense of what’s right for me.

On a collective level, this dynamic of women unconsciously seeking worth through desirability has deeply shaped intimate power dynamics and gendered imbalances that echo into our wider culture.

Menopause and different arousal patterns

So. Yes, menopause creates changes in our bodies.

And if we allow ourselves to be initiated by the process, how we relate to everything - including sex - will change too.

Without that hormonal buffering and procreative drive of earlier years, what once felt tolerable might no longer. Sex becomes exquisitely sensitive to integrity. The parts that self-abandoned in order to receive love, are no longer in the drivers seat, nor the parts that were just happy to go with the flow and accommodate a more male style of sexual expression.

Through her research on different arousal patterns, Rosemary Basson talks about how many women experience responsive desire (triggered by context, connection, or touch) rather than spontaneous desire (desire appears first and leads to seeking sexual stimulation), especially in long term relationships and (according to my research) in or after midlife too.

Research also shows women’s sexual desire is more sensitive to stress than men’s (I highly recommend the book Come As You Are by sex researcher Emily Nagoski, who explores women’s higher sensitivity to the possible “brakes” during arousal compared to men.)

Earlier in life, hormonal momentum and the pull of validation can sometimes carry us into sex even when the emotional or relational ground isn’t fully there. In midlife, this buffering softens. The nervous system becomes less willing to override misattunement or performance.

‘Loss of libido’ at menopause may therefore be less a disappearance of sexuality than a refinement of it - and we will all have our own ways of processing that. For some it might feel liberating; for others it might catalyse grief, confusion or loss.

But through the stripping away of desire that is fertility driven or seeking validation, we are left with the question:

What do I actually want?

Creating bridges & a disastrous date

The danger here is that we’re already existing in such a climate of separation and hostility between men and women, that menopause has the potential to create even more distance and resentment between us.

How can we create bridges and be pro-active in creating the lovers and the intimacy, which we desire? How might menopause be a leadership threshold, that invites us into a deeper maturity in how we relate?

I’m not saying that bridge-building is the sole responsibility of women. We’re all being initiated in different ways - men too - often without language or support. If we are to meet differently, the work must be mutual. As a woman, I’m just curious what my role of rising up to the challenge looks like.

I went on a rather humbling date recently that illuminated this edge, the need for bridge building and wise leadership in creating the kind of intimacy we long for:

Read more

For my twelfth birthday, I had a costume party with my little gang of female friends with the theme of “hippies”. I remember wearing my mother’s long, flowing cotton skirt from the 70s and a bandana. That evening, we dreamed into our future lifetimes in the realms of relationships. Who would find a husband first? Who was most likely to turn out to be a lesbian? Who would get divorced and married multiple times?

I don’t actually remember which future was predicted for me, but I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t being single for most of my life.

I really do lead a blessed life in countless ways. I have meaningful work, live in a place where I feel relatively free to be who I am, am surrounded by beautiful friends and live in a gorgeous apartment, but I confess… partnership and having positive intimate experiences with men have not played a significant role in my personal life.

After committing to research exploring ‘reverence to the Feminine’ back in September (as a personal interest but also in preparation for a workshop I was invited to deliver at the Cocoon festival on Crete this Spring), I feel like I owe you an update!

I realized towards the end of last year during my cougar explorations, that I was not creating experiences that were fulfilling me, and therefore I needed to check in with where I was coming from and re-assess. I was tired of feeling like the mother in my connections with younger men, tired of feeling unmet in the ways that I desired (if I’m going to teach the bare basics, then I’d prefer to be paid!). I felt a longing to be met by someone on eye level, closer to my age. And so last week I went on a first date with someone a little older than me, who seemed animated and curious, handsome and had a few green flags (and in retrospect, some pretty significant red ones too). After an evening having a drink in local bar, sparks flying, a second date planned for the following weekend, he sent me a follow up message:

“Thank you. I wasn’t planning to meet such a EXTRAORDINARY woman. From head to toe. Can feel every drop of my blood flowing my body. Thank you for allowing me in your life.”

We checked in the following day. “Are we still on for Saturday?” he asked, to which I confirmed.

And then I never heard from him again.

He simply vanished and ghosted me. My message went unanswered and the second date never happened.

Tending to myself has involved leaning into the beautiful, stable, nourishing friendships I am surrounded by, resisting the temptation to obsess about what is going on for someone to behave that way, and to choose to focus on the wake up calls and gifts that are clearly in this for me. Of which there are plenty.

I feel humbled and tender re-reading my research questions from nearly six months ago and feeling into where I am now…

How do I take full responsibility for the parts in me that cause me to make choices that aren’t in reverence of myself?

What is underneath the parts in me that are so parched and ravenous to receive reverence? Does my hunger block it from flowing freely?

What are my own shadows when it comes to offering reverence to men?

How can I attract experiences that reflect my beauty and power back to me in intimate encounters? How do I inspire and bring out the best in the men I connect with?

What do men struggle with the most when it comes to feeling deep reverence for women? How do I navigate my disappointments?

And I also feel determined - to continue evolving and deepening my ability to see patterns of my own disempowerment, and also to not accumulate cynicism, or more layers of protection or resentment, after another disappointing experience.

But in order to not become harder, I need to allow myself to become soft, and that involves allowing sadness and heartbreak - something that I can struggle with - and I feel I am not the only one.

It is a strange time, not just to be a woman, but I imagine anyone - when it comes to romantic relating.

So much confusion and hurt around what it is to be a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ and our roles in romantic love. The old paradigm of relationships is no longer working. No one is seemingly managing to do “free love” without causing a torrent of carnage in their wake. Women, for the most part have been taking the lead in their growth and relational skills, and many men have yet to catch up - and yet we’re still embedded in the patriarchal conditioning that makes women want a “daddy figure” to look up to. And we’re all sick and tired of dating apps, treating humans as expendable ego trips.

My instagram feed is full of women eye-rolling at how lame their dating experiences are and being disparaging towards men. I see so much bitterness.

The article and resulting storm after last year’s Vogue article “Is having a boyfriend is embarrassing now?” I think represented a collective peak in this cynicism.

I know that statistically, unmarried women in their 40s are the happiest group of people out of anyone. And I have no doubt that many women are happy being single. But I imagine in the many women who do long for partnership and being met in the ways they long for by men, beyond the evident bitterness that I see everywhere, there must lie a deep tenderness, grief, and disillusionment - the pain of unmet longing and relational fatigue, which I rarely hear spoken of vulnerably.

Over the last days, as I used this situation to feel into the layers of my grief, I have been wondering about the place I have given men in my life. Despite clearly not living a conventional life, I admit I still have that maiden part in me that longs for a certain sense of completion through a man and partnership. A young, hopeful part that is somewhat trapped in the illusion of the Disney fantasy of happily ever after. And a longing - that I see in countless women around me - to be deeply seen, appreciated and revered.

For centuries, women have been looked at, evaluated, consumed and idealised - but rarely perceived in our inner complexity. We have been mirrors for male desire, not subjects of our own stories.

So when a man appears who seems to notice us - who looks into us with curiosity, intensity, reverence - it can feel like oxygen. It awakens something ancient and parched. And when that gaze suddenly disappears, or reveals something hollow and disconnected underneath, the pain is not only romantic disappointment, it can feel existential.

And yet, I imagine this longing is more than my conditioning or ancestral heritage, and that there is a kind of alchemy, growth and fulfilment through polarities coming together in partnership. Something archetypal in my being female, that blossoms through recognition and reverence. But when I sit in the fire of that longing - as I have these last days - and allow it to consume me, something else shifts into being:

The longing to be in devotion, not to a man, but to life.

To be in service to Her.

And the ways life wishes to move through me.

The prayer in my heart that surfaces is this: may I not be blinded by my ego, my little self that thinks it knows what’s best, but may I be a vessel for something greater.

The hunger to be seen as the extraordinary woman I am will never be fully satiated through men. Ultimately, what I have come to conclude, is that this longing is not only relational, but spiritual - a longing for divine union, for the hieros gamos, for intimacy with life itself.

In the meantime, my task is to hold myself in this exquisite tension between small and big self, human and more than human. Not to erase the desire for partnership, nor to spiritualise it away, but to hold these two parts without abandoning myself. From this place, recognition from outside begins to loosen its grip, not because it no longer matters, but because it is no longer the source.

This last unfortunate experience was such a slap in the face, the main things I can conclude is that there is something within me that requires a deeper look at my naivety to charm, and that life obviously has other plans for me. In the meantime, the dating apps have been deleted once again and I sit with the enquiry:

Can I remain open without being naive, discerning without becoming cynical, compassionate without betraying myself… and even more courageous in fully embracing life?

I was recently confronted with the ways in which my spiritual framing of menopause as a ‘descent’, was enabling me to bypass the very real physiological depletion that I have actually been experiencing.

The archetypal journey of menopause clearly involves descent - a slowing down and dismantling, journeying within into unintegrated parts of ourselves that could not be met while we were too busily immersed, accommodating the demands of life. Yet in hindsight, I realize how I had unconsciously entered the danger zone of normalising my exhaustion, the brain fog and various other symptoms - as part of the experience.

Which I imagine is something easily done. If you are a woman reading this, I imagine you too have had your fair share of normalising e.g dysregulation, discomfort or depletion.

Being a woman in our world is seemingly synonymous with discomfort and pain.

We are, after all ‘afflicted’ with the burdens of childbirth, periods, period pain, PMS, hormonal swings, fertility struggles, miscarriages and culminating in the ‘condition’ of menopause. This is presented as just par for the course: a long list of inevitable discomforts to be endured, managed and frequently medicated.

Entire industries have been built around this assumption.

Painkillers, hormone suppressors, hormone replacements, antidepressants - all addressing symptoms without, for the most part, asking deeper questions. And all of it reinforcing a deeply patriarchal narrative: that we women are inherently complicated, unstable, unreliable, and our suffering is normal, expected, even biologically ordained. We are after all, the weaker, lesser sex - a notion with a long and ugly history, from Aristotle’s description of women as “deformed males” to 19th-century medicine framing female biology as pathological by default.

And there are vested interests - whether conscious or unconscious - in keeping it this way.

If we began to seriously question why our nervous systems are fried, our immune systems dysregulated, our adrenals exhausted, our cycles painful, our menopause experiences debilitating - we would inevitably begin to question the culture and structures we are living inside that demand the constant productivity, emotional labour, availability, self-suppression, and adaptation at the expense of our own embodied rhythms.

I pause here as I re-read my words, and feel my energy slumping at being ‘another angry woman, raging at the system.’

I could cite studies here, further illuminating the structural injustices at play (I did, and then deleted them - it felt too dry).

What I’d like to do instead is to ask you a question:

What if the work is not to endure our physical challenges or transcend the body, but to fall back in love with it?

One thing that feels clear to me, is that to create a culture of respect and care for these extraordinary, sensitive, cyclical, uniquely female bodies, we must start with ourselves.

And I’m aware that not all women have the same margin for rest or choice - underlining that this question is not just personal, but political.

Over the past two years, I am blessed to have served as community lead for the graduates of the Menstruality Leadership Programme at Red School, the largest school of embodied feminine spirituality in the world. My job involves listening to hundreds of women who have chosen the path of attuning to their menstrual cycles and going down the path of conscious menopause.

These women are not somehow exempt from symptoms or challenges, but what I am continually struck by, is how different their lived experience is from the relentless torrent of misery about womanhood that dominates mainstream narratives.

I am blessed to see countless examples of the depth and embodied authority of women that comes from using the menstrual cycle as an anchor for self-connection. Stories of the sense of belonging that arises when we root ourselves in our bodies and feel our connection to something larger - to nature, to the cyclical blueprint of life, to the cosmos itself.

Countless examples of the power that comes not from dominance but of owning our vulnerability and integrating, rather than overriding the different parts of us. Stories of the exquisite psychic release of bleeding, the wisdom of learning to let go rather than brace against life. Of letting life lead us, rather than being driven by the head and our individual agendas. Of taking pleasure in the different inner seasons that live within us.

And I witness what happens when we are in dialogue with our bodies and learn to meet our symptoms as information and signals guiding us to course-correct how we live, work, and relate. It is of course not fool proof, that if we simply do xyz then our symptoms dissipate or disappear, but I’ve seen enough examples of this that I know there is truth of great importance to be found here.

Ultimately, these stories centre around what happens when dignity is restored. Dignity in being openly cyclical and in dismantling the layers of shame whose residue still clings to our culture.

There is, in truth, so much wisdom and wonder available to us in being women.

We are not designed to suffer. We are simply the canaries in the coal mine, signalling what needs to change.

Our beautifully receptive, exquisitely sensitive bodies are often the first to register what is not sustainable, what is toxic, extractive, or out of alignment - long before it becomes undeniable at a societal level.

Recently I feel like I have come into a new chapter of my own menopause journey. My panic around who I am if I’m not driven and on fire, constantly following the trail of what’s next, has subsided. The unknown feels less threatening. Daily rest and feeling ease feels like an integral part of my life, rather than something unfamiliar and like something must be wrong. And as much as I hate taking supplements (!), they seem to be really making a difference - not solving the deeper questions, but supporting my body in its depletion, while I continue to listen.

I may have lost friendships and work opportunities that no longer feel aligned - but I feel an ease with being in my own skin and a sense of coming home that I am celebrating. I’ll cherish this feeling, for as long as it lasts! - it is, after all, not a linear process. But of late, I feel a welcome sense of wellness, and am sitting with the question:

What if it doesn’t have to be so hard?

What kind of world might we begin to create if we stopped settling for narratives of inevitable suffering? If we learned to understand and love our female bodies - not as problems to be solved, but as intelligent, sensitive instruments, responding to what’s out of integrity? And if we began to collectively demand the conditions we need in order to fully inhabit the beauty, dignity, and wisdom that live within them?

We had a heart-warming and soulful circle last time and are very much looking forward to this one (our Wintering-themed playlist for anyone interested can be found on Spotify and ITunes).

WINTERING: Dreaming & Renewal

with Ruby May & Maya Puig

January 11th

11:00 – 13:00 CET (English)

16:00 – 18:00 CET (German)

In our culturally linear world that prizes constant productivity, allowing the cyclical nature of life to guide and inspire us is a radical act.

In this online salon, we will come together as women aged 40+, a stage often marked by transformation and a deeper need for reflection…

𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘮𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘪𝘯𝘷𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨?

𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘴𝘰𝘪𝘭, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 - 𝘴𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘸𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘨𝘳𝘰𝘸 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘥𝘰 𝘴𝘰 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘢 𝘸𝘦𝘭𝘭 𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘥, 𝘤𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘯𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘩𝘦𝘥 𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘦?

​​​

This will be a gentle space for journaling, guided meditation, sharing in pairs and circle-time. And an invitation to bring our curiosity around what themes and what medicine we might carry for each other, as we gather together to slow down and receive the wisdom of this time.

Find out more and register here

It was the impact of an intravenous iron infusion that jostled me awake.

Towards the end of last year, I found myself lying supine in the dim and atmospherically lit back room of a local doctor’s surgery, alongside several others quietly tethered to various drips. The receptionist (who also appeared to be the resident nurse) took the wad of cash I clutched in my hand (cash only, no invoice; the whole thing felt somewhat strange, bordering on dodgy) before connecting me to a reddish-brown liquid that began to seep into my vein, drip by drip.

Posting about my experience on social media later that day, I was amazed at the number of women in my orbit who have been navigating iron deficiencies.

A little research later and it was confirmed: iron deficiency in women has reached near-endemic levels globally. A recent Guardian article on the topic that begins with “Look around you and it isn’t hard to find an exhausted woman” (…yep!…), goes on to share the results of a recent study that showed that 1 in 3 women attending a clinic had an iron deficiency. A facebook group for iron deficiency I was recommended recently currently has over 230,000 members worldwide, with multiple posts per minute at peak times.

Why do women lose iron?

While the dominant theory is that women need and lose more iron than men because of heavy periods, I was inspired by recent conversations with my friend Andreas Demmel about the potential hidden and deeper reasons behind this.

Before I divulge however, let me share with you what happened after my iron infusion:

That evening, I noticed that I was not as tired as I usually am and could stay up and function like a ‘normal’ person. The following day I noticed a palpable sense I can only describe as more internal ‘solidity,’ as though an inner structure was giving me a holding that I hadn’t felt in a long time.

A few days later I facilitated an online group call after which my inner critic took ahold of me and reduced me to a contracted, shame-filled puddle of self-doubt. Something in me erupted to the surface as I came to realise how commonly this happens to me and how unboundaried around my inner critic I often am. My whole system screamed “enough!” as a deeper realisation crystalised around my need for a more solid sense of self and boundaries. Not as in walls around me, but boundaries that arise as a natural extension of being a healthy, resilient and nourished human.

The feeling of solidity didn’t last (unfortunately iron infusions are known to often not last) but it fired up my curiosity:

What are the different qualities and capacities connected to minerals and how we can bring more of an embodied and conscious approach to them?

Perhaps like me, you are guilty of swallowing handfuls of supplements in disconnect, without having much awareness or connection to what they are and how they actually function.

Across many ancient cultures, minerals and metals were not understood as inert matter, but as living carriers of particular qualities, intelligences, and forces.

In alchemy, astrology, and traditional medical systems, metals were seen as condensed expressions of cosmic and elemental principles that shape not only the body, but the psyche and soul.

Iron (I’ll share about other minerals in part 2) can be perceived as a masculine element - not in the sense of gender, but as an expression of the masculine principle.

Energetically, it represents the inner scaffolding that allows life force to move with purpose: the capacity to stand upright, to hold form under pressure, and to meet the world without collapse. It is the quality that gives shape to vitality, anchoring energy into action and responsibility. Psychologically, iron corresponds to inner authority, boundaries, and strength. When iron is present in balance, it supports courage, steadiness, and the confidence to take one’s place in the world; when depleted, this inner holding weakens, and life can feel effortful, uncontained, or draining.

Seen through this lens, I can’t help but imagine that the endemic levels of iron depletion in women point toward something beyond heavy bleeding or increased physiological demand alone.

What if iron deficiency reflects a deeper relational imbalance in how we women are living, working, and orienting ourselves in the world?

In our culture shaped by linear time, constant output, and chronic overexertion, most of us are required to push against the rhythms of our bodies rather than be guided by them. Our cyclical, responsive nature is often overridden in favour of consistency, productivity, and endurance - qualities long associated with the masculine principle. When this principle is overextended, severed from the receptive, regenerative feminine, it becomes extractive rather than supportive.

From this perspective, the depletion of iron mirrors a deeper exhaustion of the very capacity that is being continuously called upon: the inner structures that allow us to hold, endure, and keep going, often without adequate rest, renewal, or relational support.

I can’t help but continue this line of thought by touching into what often feels like a missing masculine presence - not only within our inner lives as women, but in the relational and social fabric more broadly.

Many of us are living without the steady, protective, resourcing forms of masculine support that once existed not only through men, but through village structures and their collective holding.

In the necessary and liberatory push toward independence as women, something vital has also been lost: the experience of being supported enough to soften, to rest, to not have to carry everything alone. The shadow side of this independence is that we are now asked to be both container and content, protector and protected, provider and provided-for - often without the sufficient relational buffering that we need.

(And of course at the same time, many men are navigating their own crisis of meaning, belonging, and masculine identity, unsure how to offer strength without domination, or presence without control etc.)

What we think of as personal depletion is often the body responding intelligently to collective demands that are unsustainable.

To tend to exhaustion and depletion at its roots then requires more than supplements. It asks us to both take this larger, systemic perspective, and also to take responsibility and personally tend to our soil - the beliefs, values, and inner contracts that quietly govern how we live.

The gift of my burnout in 2021 and ongoingly in my menopause journey has been being forced to slow down and step out of the ‘business as usual’ and take a good hard look at the myriad of unconscious beliefs I have carried around that keep me going against my body in subtle and not-so-subtle ways: “I need to do it alone,” “I need to prove my worth through achieving xyz,” “rest has to be earned,” “needing support makes me weak”, “ease means I’m being lazy or indulgent”, “softness is unsafe”. (I could go on!)

Can you relate?

The use of the word ‘soil’ above (a word I keep coming back to over the last year) is instructive here:

Minerals are not synthetic interventions but gifts of the earth, reminding us that health is relational, reciprocal, and cyclical.

As we step into a new year, it may be wise to ask whether it is wise to set new goals and intentions when the ground beneath us is already eroded. Depletion asks us to tend to this soil: to look at our relationship to life, to reciprocity and our patterns and conditioning around this.

The words of Bayo Akomolafe that I’ve quoted before are as resonant as ever: “The times are urgent; let us slow down”

Perhaps the most radical act is not setting higher aims, but restoring the foundations that make life - and vitality - possible.

…

If you are a woman aged 40+, do come and join me and my colleague Maya Puig this coming Sunday 11th January for Wintering, a gentle online gathering to tend to our soil as we look at the year ahead (in EN & DE).

What a contrast - I imagine - to how so many of us feel.

Perhaps you too.

This word empty is still reverberating inside me.

Now that I no longer have the rhythm of a menstrual cycle, I am drinking in all the permission this Winter Solstice portal offers… slowing down, softening. In my meditations, I picture the quietest, darkest places on our planet that I can possibly imagine: pitch black, wave-lapped shorelines on uninhabited islands in the Artic Circle, the silent glide of owl wings over crystalline snow, sleeping whales, untouched caves, deep in the belly of the earth.

These images are my medicine, and I let them seep into the stretched and frazzled places inside me, creating space, slowly emptying myself.

I’m so far from feeling called to create grand visions or come up with shiny, ambitious New Years intentions. But there is a longing to create shared, ritualised space to digest and to empty: to give our bodies space to unwind, to acknowledge the year we’ve had - the overwhelm, the beauty, the ache, the confusion, the ways we’ve been invited to transform, who we are in our becoming - and to do this in togetherness.

Perhaps, like me, you feel an increasing urgency that the world doesn’t need us to continue the status quo and to continue being busy, running around frazzled. It asks that we listen and that we tend to the soil of our being. That we are radically honest with our priorities.

We carry so much in this phase of our lives, as women in midlife…often quietly, invisibly. So much vulnerability, so much strength…and so much opportunity as we get to define this time for ourselves like no other generation before us.

And so - if you’re also feeling the calling to use these special days in the lead up to a new calendar year for slowing down, digesting, emptying and reflecting - this is a gentle womb- and heartfelt invitation to join myself and my dear friend and colleague Maya Puig, tomorrow, Sunday for Wintering.

This will be a gentle space for journaling, guided meditation, sharing in pairs and circle-time. And an invitation to bring our curiosity around what themes and what medicine we might carry for each other, as we gather together to slow down and receive the wisdom of this time.

Harvesting & Reflection

December 28th. 11:00 – 13:00 CET (English) & 16:00 – 18:00 CET (German)

A time to reflect on what has been: honouring blessings, challenges, and teachings of the past year. Together we will witness one another’s journeys and open ourselves to the lessons we each carry.

Dreaming & Renewal

January 11th 11:00 – 13:00 CET (English) & 16:00 – 18:00 CET (German)

Opening space for what wants to emerge: not through traditional goal-setting, but through deep listening, reflection, and ritualized acts of intention.

You can also book each event separately.

Find out more and register here

Even with the end-of-year rush, the noise of consumerism and wonky family dynamics… there is magic in the air.

In our linear culture otherwise obsessed with forward motion, these longest, darkest nights of the year still reveal a thread of ancient, cyclical knowing - a brief permission slip to get cosy, slow down and simplify. Something in us connects to a slightly different way of being: more reflective of where we’ve been, where we are and where we are heading. Ancient, pagan symbols start mischievously popping up everywhere (decorating Christmas trees, wreaths, kissing under the mistletoe, Santa and his reindeer!), and we are invited to reflect on our appreciation for those loved ones, closest to us.

In the spirit of deepening our experience of this time together, I’d like to invite you* into an opportunity for reflection and renewal - details below.

But first, an offering of some simple inspirations for connecting with the Solstice (potentized by tomorrow’s dark moon), this coming Sunday:

1. Enjoy seasonal music. My playlist that I always play around this time can be found on ITunes or Spotify.

2. Read a poem. I’ve been enjoying Sweet Darkness by David Whyte - thank you to my friend Filiz Telek for sharing this with me.

3. Curl up and read a winter inspired novel. My favourites for this time of year are A Winters Tale by Mark Helprin and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel by Susanna Clarke.

4. Get crafty! Long dark nights are the perfect time for lighting candles and doing some simple crafts, especially so if you’re able to harvest local, natural materials. You don’t need to be an artist - and it’s a wonderful way to allow a different way of being to guide you. I love how, when I have an idea or a vision for something I want to create and I enter into the right space, it’s as though it ‘makes itself,’ and I’m simply the vessel supporting its creation. Here are some simple ideas.

5. Create a small gathering. Whether sitting around the fire, enjoying food by candle light, a simple sharing circle around how you’re closing this cycle or reading poems or meditating together, marking this day doesn’t have to be complicated.

6. Journaling. Some prompts could be “What is life asking me to surrender to, as I close this cycle?” “What were the biggest gifts/defining moments/challenges of this year?” and “What is my body calling for, as I transition into a new cycle?”

7. Smudging. A time when the veil between worlds is considered to be at its thinnest, the Raunächte (the Central European winter threshold of the 12 nights between the Solstice/Christmas and Epiphany), smudging with local plants was often used to cleanse homes, protect against roaming spirits, honour ancestors and mark the threshold between years. I also love using my bells and symbols - a fun activity to do as a little procession with kids too!

*An invitation for women aged 40+ with my dear friend and colleague Maya Puig

Being a women in her 40s+ is archetypally imbued with transformation and a deeper need for reflection. As the year draws to a close, this is an invitation to pause and honour the process of wintering: that rich, dark soil where rest and reflection prepare the ground for new life.

This is not about self-improvement and setting goals in a traditional way - we want to share a space with you to slow down, to take time to connect to ourselves, our bodies and life, so that we can consciously transition into this new cycle with integrity and intention.

When we stop and listen, what are our bodies telling us and guiding us towards?

What are we being invited to meet, to surrender to?

How do we tend to our ‘soil’, so that what wants to emerge has solid foundations?

Harvesting & Reflection

December 28th. 11:00 – 13:00 CET (English) & 16:00 – 18:00 CET (German)

A time to reflect on what has been: honouring blessings, challenges, and teachings of the past year. Together we will witness one another’s journeys and uncover the lessons we each carry.

Dreaming & Renewal

January 11th 11:00 – 13:00 CET (English) & 16:00 – 18:00 CET (German)

Opening space for what wants to emerge: not through traditional goal-setting, but through deep listening, reflection, and ritualized acts of intention.

These circles are an intimate opportunity to explore through journaling, guided meditation, sharing in pairs and circle-work. Let’s bring our curiosity around what themes and what medicine we might carry for each other, as we gather together to receive the wisdom of this time.

Find out more and register here

Sean Combs: The Reckoning - a documentary released this past week about the downfall of rapper, music producer and media mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs and his Bad Boy empire, spanning decades of his life and career - did not disappoint.

Currently the most popular documentary on Netflix, I feel like moments like these are a kind of collective processing of humanity on our world stage. More than the individual in question, the person becomes a container for a collective archetype - the tyrant king - and a kind of lightning rod for our collective shadow around power. Stories like this where we watch the downfall of unbridled power offer a kind of ritualistic pleasure, and shared catharsis.

But simply focusing on the villain, we might be tempted to forget an inconvenient truth:

Villains don’t rise in a vacuum, they rise in an ecosystem that we collectively participate in.

They require enablers.

What does the story of Sean Combs reveal to us? What is the ecosystem that led to his meteoric rise to fame and glory and subsequent downfall?

What we enable says a lot about who we are as a culture.

I think of the history of systemic racism and impoverishment of African Americans feeding a desire to raise the bar on what’s possible. A wider culture that worships fame, dominance, money and a system where abuse is normalized if the outputs are profitable. I think of the people who surrounded him and who needed him economically, who were seduced by proximity to power. And of the countless people who enabled his exploitation, manipulation and abusive behaviour and subsequently got burned in the process.

I realize that in many circumstances, enabling isn’t a choice. Sometimes it’s what we do to survive systems that offer no real alternatives.

And lest I sit safely in my living room critiquing people whose worlds I’ve never lived in, I also have to turn toward the mass collective fawning and enabling I’m woven into and participating in every single day.

Perhaps you too…

Many of us have tolerated exploitative work cultures because we’re chasing the myth of individual success and fear being seen as ‘weak’ if we confront employers. We choose to give our attention to misogynistic or abusive celebrities because they make ‘great art’, give power to harmful political leaders out of fear of chaos, spend time and money on technology that harms us because we’re addicted to convenience, complain about billionaires and wealth inequality but simultaneously normalize extreme wealth as aspirational and buy their products. Our resignation “that’s just how the world works” and “what difference would I even make?” too, is a powerful enabler.

We participate in a global culture of distraction, where outrage replaces action. We share posts, watch documentaries, discuss villains (like I’m doing!) and feel morally awake - while the systems stays intact.

There are many subtler variations of enabling that I have been guilty of: entanglements in codependent relationship dynamics and over-functioning for others so that they don’t have to change. Avoiding conflict to ‘keep the peace’. Giving more than I receive, being the one who listens and holds space, meanwhile becoming resentful, feeling unseen and perpetuating relational insensitivity.

Enabling is a relational collapse - a collapse of boundaries, self-contact, discernment, and our capacity to stay rooted in what we know to be true.

At its core it’s simple: We abandon ourselves so someone else doesn’t abandon us.

The world is a painful mirror of our self-abandonment.

And as we are forced to confront the polycrises unfolding on our planet, we might also recognise them as a collective initiation - an invitation to face our shadows around power and to see how trauma has conditioned us to tolerate harm.

Ultimately, we are faced with a spiritual initiation - asking us to remember the sanctity of our own agency. To feel where we disconnect from ourselves in the hope of being chosen, protected, or spared.

This is the hidden gift in the downfall of every “villain”: an invitation to stop watching the spectacle long enough to turn our gaze inward, to the places where we hand our power away.

It’s not about avoiding vulnerability or interdependence; it’s about learning to be connected without collapsing. It’s about the slow, day-to-day work of grounding into the wisdom of our bodies, coming home to our instincts, our limits, and our inner yes and no.

These are the times for allowing ourselves to be jolted awake, learning to recognize coercive charisma, dominance-based systems, and trauma-bonding dynamics; seeing how much of our relationship to power is shaped by internalised parent–child patterns (‘someone up there will fix it,’ ‘we just need ethical leaders’)…and daring to imagine that another world is possible.

But imagining a new world isn’t a fantasy exercise; it’s a discipline. It asks us to stay present with discomfort, to interrupt the reflex to abandon ourselves, to choose integrity over proximity to power. It asks us to grow up - individually and collectively.

Perhaps this is the real initiation of our time: not the downfall of the villain, but the maturation of the rest of us.

It is a strange thing, to write from the place of descent.

We tend to express ourselves to the world once we’re out the other side: triumphant, clutching our hard-earned gold, stronger and wiser. Here we are, having lived to tell the tale.

There are reasons for this: the descent is by definition a place where we are guided to turn within. Despite us all going through descents at some point or various points in our life - whether creative fallow periods, illness, transformation, menopause or PMS - we live in a culture of Yin-blindness, which neither understands nor values the cyclical aspect of life, often seeing it as weakness, or at the very least, as unfortunate.

For all these reasons, we rarely speak from the place of descent.

It does feel tender to show myself to you in this moment. Part of me would rather stay safe and hide.

But writing is my activism, and also helps me create beauty from my menopausal descent I have found myself traversing over the past two years.

I’m also tired of the fact that the vast majority of voices we hear who speak about menopause are on HRT (and have the energy to do so!) *

But anyways, when we speak about descent from the safe difference of the other side, the temptation is greater to polish and tidy it up. The fact is that it’s a messy, gritty, stubborn and deeply humbling process.

My own descent has involved a brutal daily confrontation with tiredness and low capacity, with the parts of me that are terrified of stillness and the parts that want to self-soothe away any uncomfortable feeling. It has led me into a reckoning with choices I have made in my life and now question. Rendered dysfunctional coping strategies impossible to continue. I have felt more awkward, more self-doubting, and less confident than ever before. Despair at the state of the world, amplified by the sense that I am not strong enough to play a part in changing it. All against a backdrop of poor sleep, hot flushes, and a worsening chronic health condition.

And yet. And yet there is a part of me that trusts the greater cyclical holding of it all, that sometimes catches glimpses of light shining through the cracks.

There is a gift in being asked to strip away everything built on illusion or shaky foundations: the belief that self-worth comes from productivity. Attractiveness based on outer looks. Thinking you have to be strong to be loved. Illusions that you can change the world on your own. All are being uprooted, like weeds that don’t belong in my garden anymore.

Descent requires upgrades to self-care in a multitude of ways:

For me personally this has involved daily rituals and rhythms that give me a sense of continuity amidst stretches of unknown. Strengthening my physical vessel through exercise and breathwork. Deepening friendships and moving away from connections that don’t feel reciprocal or as nourishing. Seeking out elders and wisdom-carriers who understand the archetype of descent. Connecting to moon and seasonal cycles. Noticing beauty. Prioritising pleasure. Giving expression to emotion. Noticing negative thoughts and coming back into the presence of the physical body. And moment by moment choosing trust. That this is going somewhere.

It’s not lost on me as I describe my personal experience, that we are living through a great unravelling, a collective descent - a time when the structures and paradigms that once held us are cracking at the seams.

We can all feel it, each of us carrying our own stories of how it’s impacting our lives: environmental chaos, unstable economies, health crises, mental and emotional turbulence. Never before has the cracking of our collective Yang trance been so clear: the Boomer-era promise of endless progress never felt more hollow. We feel the fear of an ending without the new yet formed. The “space between stories,” as Charles Eisenstein calls it.

In this way, menopause becomes a strangely accurate lens for our cultural moment.

The world, like us women in midlife, is being stripped down to essence - forced to confront shadow, to let illusions fall away, to feel what has been avoided. And just as many of us try to outrun the discomfort of our own initiatory descent, society too reaches for numbing, distraction, or quick fixes that promise a return to the old normal.

Descent is not a collapse or a malfunction; it is an invitation. It demands we reach deep within to discover new strengths so that evolution can take place.

To meet descent we need a different set of skills than the ones we were taught in the upward-striving Yang competencies of productivity culture.

The ability to pause and feel without being consumed, to listen and respond to the body’s guidance, to stay with the unknown long after the mind demands resolution. It asks for a trust in the body’s intelligence and in the organic unfolding of life rather than looking outside of ourselves for guidance or blame.

I believe that those of us who are moving through personal descent processes carry a rare and vital gift for the world.

Our journeys attune us to nuance and to what is unspoken and unseen. In our slowing down, there is the potential to respond with care and clarity where others might miss or misstep.

There is a strengthened ability to be with, without needing to fix, judge or control, and an embodied understanding of how discomfort can become generative rather than destructive. Through sitting with shadow, grief, and fear without fleeing or numbing, we cultivate presence: medicine for the world.

Ultimately, the gift of descent is love itself: capable of holding our and the world’s shadow and light alike with open arms.

I remember being in Bali once, many years ago at a river, which was badly polluted: discoloured and foul-smelling. I noticed myself recoiling and looking away but then decided to pause and connect to the water and ask what it needed.

“Love me” was the clear and instant answer. And so I sat next to it, taking time to feel it, take it in, see beyond the disfunction and wish it well… and I felt it gratefully receiving my love.

Don’t look away - the crumbling worlds within and without need our love.

Speaking to certain post-menopausal women, I notice a powerful ability to look life in the face, to feel the pain, the dysfunction, and not shy away, sugar-coat or catastrophize. There is a depth, a solidity, a heart that is more able to hold nuance and complexity, that gives me hope.

I let myself wonder what might be possible if more of us shared how life is initiating us, and of the skills and the tenderness required to navigate our descents. Like the approaching Solstice - winter in the Northern hemisphere and summer in the Southern - which highlights the truth of duality, some of us are being called into outward action while others are called into rest and deep inner work. Of course, it’s an illusion that we can ever fully separate the two; each contains the other. But imagine if those of us on a personal path of descent recognised that we are offering something essential - a quiet, foundational contribution to our collective evolution.

What a thought! That this transition is not just ours to survive but it is ours to lead with.

That how we meet descent becomes a beacon for others, and a blueprint for a more dignified, humane and cyclical culture that is truly life-honouring.

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If you’d like support navigating a time of transition, transformation or descent, you can find out about my one-to-one sessions here. And for any women aged 40+, I’m offering two Solstice-inspired, gentle reflection & renewal sessions online on December 14th and January 11th. Find out more here.

*It struck me yesterday as I spoke with a friend about this piece of writing - I don’t know anyone else who is mid natural menopause and who is speaking or writing about it. Let me know if you know of someone! (I am aware that for some women HRT is a wise and necessary choice - there is no universal ‘right’ path).

I may have a ḍākinī soul, but in this life time, I fear I’m far from mastery in the art of initiating men.

I’ve accumulated my fair share of conditioning, trauma and wounding in this life - growing up in a Christian purity culture, being conditioned to keep the peace, letting men guide. And yet following my life’s personal and professional bread crumb trail and taking the steps to claim my sexuality - fifteen years ago, I found myself guiding men into their bodies, claiming hidden and shamed aspects of their sexuality. I didn’t look for their shadows, they simply came into contact when offering them a space of open-heartedness and permission. What started as an adventure into my own sexual liberation, offering erotic massage, evolved into stepping into the role of the modern day temple priestess.

I think about how it might have been in other cultures, in others times, and the concept of the ḍākinī, ‘initiatrix,’ the sacred prostitute or erotic temple priestess.

The author and Jungian analyst Nancy Qualls-Corbett has written about how across many ancient civilisations, there is evidence of women who embodied a sacred union of sexuality and spirituality. In early matriarchal and goddess-centered cultures of the Middle East, India, and Crete, sexual union was considered a form of worship and renewal. In Mesopotamia, temple priestesses of Inanna enacted the hieros gamos - the sacred marriage rite - with kings, embodying the goddess and legitimizing his rule. Similar traditions appeared in Babylon with devotees of Ishtar, in Minoan Crete where sexuality and fertility were woven into ritual art, and later in Greece and Rome with temple attendants of Hestia and Vesta. These women were often educated, respected, and viewed as channels of healing and divine blessing.

It’s not surprising that these lineages were buried beneath centuries of patriarchal conditioning. Cultures built on dominance and control fear the woman whose erotic power is anchored in consciousness - a woman who cannot be manipulated by shame or possessed by desire. Her freedom exposes the fragility of systems that depend on female compliance. So the initiatory arts were suppressed, recast as dangerous, immoral, or obscene, until the memory of them lived only in the bones of us who still, somehow, remembered.

Stepping into mid-life and being mid-menopause initiation, witnessing my body and sexuality transforming, meanwhile starting to date again - this topic is circling back to me, and I can’t help but wonder:

Is there something about menopause that allows us to step into the archetype of the initiatrix more fully?

The culture we live in around menopause and sexuality is the exact opposite of what I know to be true. We’ve been conditioned to believe that post-menopausal women are past their prime - that they’ve lost their sparkle and allure, their libido diminished, their interest in sex fading away.

Our sexuality mid-life can be very much present - it just changes in a way that is barely spoken of.

After the procreative potential of sex is removed and the desire to be fertilized that is unconsciously steering our sexuality as younger women is no longer present, our connection to the erotic takes on a different flavour. My friend Ellie Wilde talks about Yin sexuality, an erotic current that is receptive, slow, inward, cyclical and discerning. It’s less about fire and release, and more about depth, feeling, and sustained contact. This kind of desire doesn’t surge from hormones or fantasy, but emerges from presence, trust, and the longing to merge, not just physically, but energetically and spiritually.

The archetypal initiatory work of menopause is a kind of grand and holy reclaiming of the lost and abandoned parts of ourselves, and as a result - we become more whole. The estrogen-inspired drive to care for and create harmony begins to quiet. Sexuality has the potential to move away from being a currency: no longer traded for belonging, affection, or validation. The old patterns of pleasing, over-giving, chasing connection through availability can begin to burn off. We sharpen the power of discernment. We deepen our capacity to claim what we need, so that our relationships and choices reflect this newfound wholeness.

This matured stage our erotic evolution requires deep sensitivity and attunement in being met - and it cannot not be an initiatory path for the men we come into contact with. The potential is a refined erotic truth-telling, an energy that says:

“If you come close to me, you will meet yourself.”

This is the archetype of the initiatrix - not because she sets out to teach or help men evolve, but because her presence becomes catalytic, through what is primarily a self-initiation:

“I will no longer split from myself in order to be loved.”
“I will not abandon my timing for another’s urgency.”
“I will not sedate my knowing to keep the peace.”

My experience is that men who are open to this feel both awe and discomfort. Any surface identity connected to wishing to conquer, please, or perform doesn’t know what to do. But their deeper knowing recognises this honesty as truth calling truth forth.

The need for the initiatrix is unmistakable in a culture where the pendulum has swung from repression to a distorted idea of liberation: a landscape of casual, often shadow-driven encounters, thin on boundaries and depth, where sexuality has been stripped of its sacredness.

I imagine it’s a necessary stage in a larger arc, but it’s no coincidence that in our ‘collective adolescence’ where we’ve lost reverence for the erotic, we’ve also lost reverence for life itself.

My own experience on dating apps is that many men seem to have grown accustomed to women with blurred boundaries and (I imagine as a result) a good deal of drama. In that atmosphere, genuine effort and emotional investment have plummeted - and women, in turn, are becoming increasingly jaded and disheartened.

The General Social Survey reports that the share of Americans aged 18 to 29 who went a year without sex doubled between 2010 and 2024. The Institute for Family Studies found that sexlessness among young women rose by about half during that same period. Many of these women say they’re turning away from hookup culture because intimacy feels transactional.

I believe that as women, our collective movement towards liberation combined with poor self-esteem and boundaries created the very mess we’re lamenting. And now, as a result, we must both transform our own shadows and get creative, learning how to invite men into what we long for, initiating both ourselves and each other in the process.

In my personal explorations, I’ve been exploring how to invite men to meet me exactly where I am at, to relax inside their desire: to feel it, breathe it, inhabit it, rather than be ruled by it. When desire is less of a surge that demands action and becomes a current we can stay present within, something profound shifts. I can feel it so clearly in my body - the difference between a lover who is grasping and one who is relaxed and grounded in the eros between us. The first makes me feel like prey and my energy and body often contracts; the second supports my opening and feels deeply healing.

I imagine this consciousness of relationality applied to politics, to business, to resource use and how the need to ‘win’ or ‘own’ diminishes when a person can feel alive simply by being in connection.

Oh, but it is a humbling process. Coming into contact with all my old patterns and shadows that make this difficult. Honouring that while I may have the soul of a ḍākinī, I’ve still got a lot to learn on my journey of dismantling my conditioning, finding ways to guide that are invitations rather than control, looking at the parts of me that are full of mistrust and scared of intimacy, drawn to people who are clearly unavailable. Getting knocks like this:

I woke up a few mornings ago to two messages, one from a man I have been on several dates with, and one from a man I was meant to meet that day for the first time. Both bowing out saying that they don’t think it’s ‘aligned’ for us to date. Upon further investigation, it’s not that there’s no attraction - it’s the discomfort that can arise when intimacy asks to unfold more slowly. It’s our collective learning edge of staying present with the tender edge of letting sexual energy breathe before it rushes to express itself.

It’s truly a Wild West in the Berliner dating scene, requiring thick skin - and yet another opportunity to take a breath, pick myself up and dust myself off. And remember this:

When we begin to inhabit this level of erotic presence that the midlife initiatrix calls for, something shifts beyond the personal.

I envision how it can’t help but support the Feminine to deepen her integration into public life - helping leadership become responsive, regenerative, echoing the intelligence of living systems rather than machines. Slowly healing the split between body and spirit, as erotic presence is reclaimed as sacred, not shameful. Desire, no longer a tool of distraction but a pulse of awareness that anchors us in what’s real.

My self-initiation in meeting myself more deeply and honestly is reminding me that the erotic is so much more than pleasure - it’s life force itself, guiding towards a civilisation that values connection over conquest, reverence over consumption.

Seeing these explorations as research and writing about them gives me the strength to continue being curious and carry on…

Thank you for being my witness.

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The first was a beautiful young Egyptian, wise beyond his years. He wouldn’t stop talking about shadow work - both personal and collective. After a while, I felt there must be something in the shadows that wanted to be met between us, and so I invited him to sit down on a bench with me, look into my eyes, and see what might want to emerge.

Later, I found out that he was some kind of young mystic with a huge following in the Arab world. I don’t think he ever found out who I was, or about my past identity of taking so many men down the rabbit hole of lovingly integrating their sexual shadows! Sweet, in retrospect, that we were drawn to each other.

In the days afterwards, however, I had a very humbling experience of some deeper layers of my own shadow material emerging, coming into contact with a particular dynamic I know well between myself and men: my tendency to lose myself in being devotional. I can become very lunar, as though orbiting around the sun - overextending and over-giving without realising it, losing my centre somewhat in the process. In my meeting with him, I realised I had once again fallen into familiar patterns of holding space for a man and making it about him - his process or his pleasure.

Sensing into the deeper layers, I came to a confronting discovery: underneath my tendency to be devotional to men is a longing to be nourished, and my backhanded way of receiving.

Being devotional is actually about me, not them.

How have I developed a habit of giving when, in truth, I want to receive?

This female body of mine - in her very architecture - is designed to receive.

Cocks, compliments, kisses, kindness, presence, mirroring, offerings of support, sun on my skin, nature’s beauty and abundance… Something deep within me uncoils, softens, blossoms and radiates when I get to receive. I am able to offer myself to the world in an entirely different way, allowing my cup to generously spill over, rather than extract my energy from a chronically empty one.

Through actively receiving the goodness and nourishment in the world around me, my essence is fortified and begins to expand. I move towards an embodied knowing that my presence can be my offering to the world, rather than be narrowly defined by what I do or achieve.

I believe there’s something inherent in the female body, a cellular memory in us that knows how to open, soften, take in, and be changed by what enters.

I know that receiving is a human need, but I want to honour how as a woman, I have a distinct relationship to receiving (think about receiving sperm and transforming into new life!). And there is a sense of tragedy that there is so much that comes between us and getting this need to receive met.

In our culture, the Yin act of receiving is seen as passivity and dependent and weak (Feminine). Yang is seen as giving-out, producing, conquering, owning and more powerful. To be ‘penetrated’ has been made weak or shameful - the penetrator holds the power.

We’ve been living in a linear story: take → use → discard. And receiving, which is cyclical, relational, regenerative, doesn’t fit in that narrative.

In our polarising of giving and receiving, we’ve also blinded ourselves to how receiving is not actually passive (think of how an egg ‘chooses’ a sperm). Receiving is less about lying back and more about holding the sacred Feminine stance of an openness that chooses, discerns, and dignifies what’s allowed in.

But receiving is still vulnerable.

It requires spaciousness and being unguarded, and the reality is, it can often feel unsafe. To survive in our yang-dominant culture, we harden. We tense our muscles, clench our jaws, armour our wombs. We’re guided to betray our bodies and natural rhythms in order to be on eye level with men, to be independent and make it on our own. And yet, I don’t think I know one woman who isn’t conflicted about her desire for independence, contrasted with how transformative it can be to be supported by a man. I have come across so many men who won’t open the door, carry things, or pay for your drink - because they are “feminists.”

We live in a culture of scarcity where receiving feels like a luxury, a special treat, something we have to earn - not the foundation on which we live on, grateful and aware of the daily reciprocity and deep receiving of abundance from mama earth.

When I think of what’s possible to receive, and how undernourished most women I know are, I wonder about the impact of our collective trance of unworthiness - settling for so little and so often chronically neglecting our needs.

There is something comforting to me about this larger, systemic perspective. I can loosen the grip of shame and self-judgment around my personal struggles. Something in me can breathe a little more.

From this perspective, receiving becomes a political act because it resists extraction and honours reciprocity. Because it challenges our ideas about what is powerful. Because it reminds us of the transformative power of radical softness in a hardened world.

My impetus for starting to date again was realising a need for my sexual energy to flow as nourishment for my menopause process. And I wanted to experience a very particular dynamic: to feel the Feminine in me worshipped and honoured. Personal, yet transpersonal. To create experiences of deep receiving, where my pleasure was at the centre.

So onto the apps I went, writing a very specific focus in my profile and explicitly stating that I’m not looking for a kinky dynamic of submission or subservience.

A month and several dates later, suffice it to say I’m not sure I’m going to find what I’m looking for where I’ve been looking! There is no shortage of young men who are attracted to me, which, of course, is nice, and helps dismantle the internalised belief that at 46 I’m “past it.” I have been impressed and heartened by some of the young men I’ve encountered, who clearly see the beauty and wisdom in a seasoned woman.

But I didn’t find what I was looking for.

I found plenty of men wanting the excitement of being subservient to a strong woman, seeking balance after being in charge all the time in life, or wanting to play with the arousing taboo of submission. I came across countless men describing themselves as “pleasure doms,” who I fear are more interested in gratifying their egos with how many orgasms they can provide. It always seems to be about them.

Where are the men who recognise that to serve a woman is to serve life? Who understand that when the Feminine is nourished, she blossoms - and her blossoming pours medicine into the world? The men who see that honouring the Feminine is not indulgence, and who understand this doesn’t mean men are smaller or less valuable. It is restoration, reciprocity, a remembering of how to live in right relationship with Earth herself.

Perhaps it’s not about looking for these men.

Perhaps it’s about tending to my own nourishment, pleasure, softness, and openness in the ways that I can, and simply being receptive to the world. Allowing unmet desires to crack me further open and water the parts of me that are parched.